When soldiers of any nation are trained, they are trained to kill.
To kill.
That's not exactly something that comes naturally (or is it?).
Even in my very Basic Training in South Carolina a while back, the Drill Sergeants expected me to be fairly unthinking in my ability to open fire on people with an M-16 or grenade ( and I wasn't even going into The Infantry).
Now comes the story of U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of some Taliban terrorists who they had killed, and the Pentagon is in an uproar and high level government officials are demanding their heads.
So let's see. These are men--U.S. Marines no less---trained to kill in whatever vicious manner we've selected, trained to hate the enemy so much that a blade to their throat or a bullet to the head at close range is more than they deserve. But once the children-killing, puppy-gutting, WMD-making bastards are dispatched to wherever it is they are going, our military is supposed to treat them like saints or little children and give them a reverential funeral and wire flowers from FTD?
If it had been the other way around, I'd be calling for the heads of every Afghan alive, but I would also understand that war is a crappy institution in which people are trained to act against the best instincts of humanity.
We're supposed to be angry enough to kill 'em, but not to disrespect 'em?
The Marines didn't help the peace process, or U.S./Afghan relations. But in the killing part of armed diplomacy, that's not their job.
To kill.
That's not exactly something that comes naturally (or is it?).
Even in my very Basic Training in South Carolina a while back, the Drill Sergeants expected me to be fairly unthinking in my ability to open fire on people with an M-16 or grenade ( and I wasn't even going into The Infantry).
Now comes the story of U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of some Taliban terrorists who they had killed, and the Pentagon is in an uproar and high level government officials are demanding their heads.
If it had been the other way around, I'd be calling for the heads of every Afghan alive, but I would also understand that war is a crappy institution in which people are trained to act against the best instincts of humanity.
We're supposed to be angry enough to kill 'em, but not to disrespect 'em?
The Marines didn't help the peace process, or U.S./Afghan relations. But in the killing part of armed diplomacy, that's not their job.
our military is supposed to treat them like saints or little children and give them a reverential funeral and wire flowers from FTD?
ReplyDeleteWell, no, but it seems like "not peeing on the dead" is a baseline our military personnel should strive to meet and exceed. The thing about this story that bothers me is as you say, "high level government officials are demanding their heads." I'm not saying nothing should happen to the guys who got caught marking their territory, but there are innumerable larger systemic issues within the Pentagon (cf. likely PTSD sufferers given diagnosis of a "pre-existing" personality disorder so as to not be responsible for mental health care of soldiers) that high level officials should be worrying about instead of the acts of a few individual soldiers on the front. The disrespect of the dead is not defensible, but it would be better to get these guys through some cultural sensitivity training + a six month tour exclusively working with, say, Afghani kids with missing limbs or something. Their commanders should kick their ass a little, and then force them to do some good for a while.
U.S. soldiers, sailors, air personnel and marines are expected to conduct "civilized" warfare,a dichotomy to some of us.
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