> Before their morality and honour
> can be examined you have to look at the forces driving and creating them and
> look at RW examples for help.
>
> Here's an example: I was talking to a soldier who served in Bosnia and he told
> me about a group of the SAS (Specal Air Service, 1st grade elite British Special
> Forces) in a pub in Bosnia. He tried to talk to them. They took his beers but
> replied in a monosylabic fashion. He said, and this is a veteran soldier who'd
> been under fire speaking, that these men scared him. His closest movie analogy
> for them was the "Terminator".
>
Yes, but he wasn't one of them. The example you give sounds much more
like a couple of people being as minimally polite to an intrusive
outsider as possible.
I worked with a couple of special forces/LRRP types at various times and that was not the feeling I got. (My tac sgt was part of SOG and participated in Carter's fiasco in Iran as part of Delta. Others I ran into as infantry officers while I was a company and battalion FSO.) As a generality, they were self confident, very competent and unforgiving of stupidity. They were also all individuals.
I was dealing with people who made the transition to peace. Not all do. The historical problem with dealing with the "natural fighters" who are the guys who tend to be the best combat soldiers and leaders is that they have a tendency to find fairly destructive ways to spend their energies when there isn't a war on.
More back on topic . . .
The basic problem with the Humakti is that there are no real limits as to what they can do. It's all cultural. A group of humakti can be bloody handed butchers who can't be told from ZZ without a score card, skilled duelists for money, or honorable disciplined warriors. Humakt doesn't care. The basic requirement is that they must be willing to kill and willing to die. As long as the senior Sword belives he is following humakt properly, it's OK.
So why don't we abandon the "true humakti" discussion and try defining how Humakt is worshiped in different ways.
Regarding the slaying of healers: Look at the lead cross heroquest. It is banned in Sartar due to the tendency of the humakti to go on a killing frenzy against chalana arroy, who pervert death by resurecting people.
Kevin Rose
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