Sn3aKyGuY
.30-06
This is an article I was reading today on Military.com. Here's the link, but I'll post it for you non-clickers. http://www.military.com/news/article/ar ... SRC=dod.nl
Bryant Jordan @ Military.com said:
The images capture the darker side of a decade of war: A smiling Marine hurls a puppy off a cliff. Airmen cheer as a goat is beaten to death with a metal pipe. Scout snipers pose before a flag bearing the symbol of the Nazi SS runes. Marines urinate on bodies of dead insurgents.
Each time such images appear, they raise questions about how they happened. How are American troops capable of such acts? How did leadership tolerate an environment that allowed them?
“You don’t get a pass for acting stupidly because you’ve been in a war,” said retired Army colonel and Medal of Honor recipient Jack Jacobs, today an NBC News consultant and author of the memoir, “If Not Now, When?”. Jacobs recalls that he saw 90 consecutive days of combat during one tour in Vietnam and saw many Americans die. But he says he never crossed the line.
“Anytime someone does something illegal or immoral, he knows it’s the wrong thing to do,” he told Military.com. “Urinating on corpses cannot be ascribed to having too many tours downrange.”
But the bigger issue is the lack of leadership, according to Jacobs. Where, he asked, are the noncommissioned officers, the lieutenants, the company commanders, and the battalion commanders?
“It’s difficult to envision how somebody can have an organization where this kind of behavior can occur without having, either by commission or omission, fostered that kind of environment,” he said. “Where leadership is poor, you’ll have otherwise decent people do reprehensible things. Where leadership is good, you might have people who might otherwise do reprehensible things not do them.”
Sebastian Junger, author of “War” and co-director -- with the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington of the documentary film “Restrepo,” – said the national response to the controversial photos and videos is “morally hypocritical.”
“If we’re going to be upset at urinating on corpses, we’ve got to have a serious conversation with ourselves about what’s been going on for the last 10 years,” he said. Junger, whose book and film were based on time he spent with an Army platoon at a remote outpost in Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley in 2008 and 2009, chronicled not only the combat but also the sometimes bizarre behavior of the soldiers, which included almost ritual-like beatings of each other.
Over a decade, a great many people have died from American weapons, but the country doesn’t want to face that “on a spiritual level,” Junger said. “But the soldiers have to face it because they’re the ones doing it. And sometimes it makes them act out in all kinds of troubled ways.”
What’s more, the past decade has taught troops that the old rules don’t apply or can be ignored, starting with the sanctioning of so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques such as waterboarding during the Bush administration, says Junger.
“At any other time, we’d call this torture,” he said. “There’s hypocrisy in telling young people to go off and kill -- that doesn’t bother us, we don’t want to have a conversation about that. But if you do anything ‘unseemly’ we come down on you like a ton of bricks.”
The investigations into the goat beating and the urinating on Taliban dead are still ongoing.
The Marine who tossed the puppy over the cliff, along with the Marine who filmed it, were booted from the Corps. The Marines who adopted the Nazi SS runes have been reassigned, according to the Corps, though officials did not say if any were disciplined. Since the photo came to light last month, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered a new investigation.
The Vietnam War came into American living rooms nightly via television in the 1960s and 1970s, and the public was exposed to the grisly impulses of some troops, including the killings of innocent civilians.
Newsman Eric Sevareid revealed that, as a war correspondent during World War II, he witnessed American troops routinely killing captured Germans and even Italian civilians, according to Bing West, a Vietnam veteran and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who cited Sevareid in his book, “The Wrong War.”
Author Eugene Slege, in his memoir “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa,” wrote of Marines -- himself among them -- pulling gold fillings from teeth of dead Japanese soldiers. Edward L. Jones, who covered the Pacific war for Atlantic Monthly, provided an unflinching picture of Americans at war.
“What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway?” Jones wrote in a lengthy magazine piece in 1946. “We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, and carved their bones into letter openers.”
Matt Gallagher, former Army captain, Iraq veteran and author of “Kaboom, Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War,” and Karl Marlantes, a Marine Vietnam combat veteran and Navy Cross recipient, both said that a great deal of the controversy around the recent incidents rests with the fact they are visual.
“Things that are on a video or a photo will feed the outrage,” said Gallagher. He noted that within a week of the SS flag image hitting the Internet, the military was hit with another public relations disaster with a Nazi flavor: Reports about a combat outpost in Afghanistan named “Aryan.”
The Army claimed it was a misspelling of an Afghan word “Arian.” Still, that flap ended almost as quickly as it began, says Gallagher, who suggests the reason is because there was no photo of a sign reading “Combat Outpost Aryan.”
“[That] pretty much went away fast because it lacked the imagery of the SS flag, but it’s worse when you consider all the people that went through that camp and never thought it was a problem,” Gallagher said.
But the flip side of the outrage “is this kind of weird rush to judgment” by those who see the images and believe they know what war is about. “People took war trophies in previous wars. Is it right? No. Is it a byproduct of war? Battle history would suggest so,” Gallagher said.
Marlantes, a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam in 1968-1969, said he was familiar with the kind of crude and stupid behavior shown by the troops in the controversial videos and photos. There but for the grace of older technology would probably have gone some of his own Marines.
“There was a time when all information was filtered,” said Marlantes, whose Vietnam experience is recalled in “What It’s Like to Go to War.”“People would self-filter. … They’d come home and look at the photos and say, ‘I’m not going to show that to anyone.’ ”
Troops in earlier wars couldn’t move information or images so quickly and there was a little more time to pull out of that frame of mind troops develop and maintain for combat. With camera phones in every grunt’s pack and instantaneous access to the internet, a guy just out of a fight or in almost daily combat won’t be thinking all that clearly, he said.
“[T]he very fact that the pictures were taken and put up on the Internet speaks to the maturity of the people involved,” Marlantes said.”Soldiers are generally very young -- 18 to 21 for a combat soldier. The frontal cortex hasn’t even developed enough so they know to take raincoat to go out in the rain! … And the fact is that’s who you want to go into traditional warfare.”
The 19-year-old is the best warrior, said Marlantes. They will get the job done, partly because they have the best weapons but also because they’re immature. And unless someone is watching them, their immaturity and a built-up, unleashed warrior mind-set is a recipe for them to act out in rough ways.
“What they did was sophomoric,” he said, referring to the video of the Marines urinating on the corpses. “But they don’t deserve to be vilified. We the people ask them to go kill those Taliban anyway. Being outraged because they pissed on them rather than having them kill them in the first place -- that’s a perspective issue.”
After a firefight in Vietnam in 1969, Marlantes found some of his Marines had stuck the freshly cut ears of dead enemy soldiers into their helmet bands. He told them to get rid of the ears, and then he had them dig graves for the enemy. And as they buried them, some of the Marines began to cry.
“That’s because they’d moved out of that place [in their heads] where they saw these people as animals,” he said. The act of burying the dead made them realize they were burying human beings. A little time and distance from the combat and killing would have done the same thing, he said.
He also recalled collecting the personal possessions of a Marine killed in action. He took from the man’s pocket a photo taken with two other Marines posing with an enemy corpse. Those kinds of pictures were not uncommon, he said, but when Marine commanders found them they destroyed them. They’d never send them home to wives, mothers or fathers.
Marlantes said commanders should police stupid, sophomore acts -- bust culprits down to private if necessary -- but should not vilify them. When it comes time to punish troops for stupid or crude behavior, Marlantes said, officials “need to consider, are they doing this for the image of the military or actually to carry out justice?”
