“A few weeks ago we were talking to one of the ships that was accompanying us, a Chinese vessel ... (We) picked up the phone and just talked to him like, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing this Saturday? Oh, we got pizza and wings. What are you guys eating? Oh, we’re doing this. Hey, we’re planning for Halloween as well’.” The intent, Francis said, is “to show them ... that we’re normal sailors, just like them, have families, just like them.”
The thing is, we value our sailors and to lose a ship would be a big psychological and emotion blow to us.
OTOH, the Chinese sailors are expendable “units of labor” that the ChiCom leaders would sacrifice in a millisecond without thought to the moral implications of feeding those lives to the meat grinder.
They simply do not value human life the way we do.
Jeff Head taught me that.