From Pine View Farm

Peeing in the Wind 5

At the Guardian, ex-Marine and veteran of the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq Ross Caputi considers war crimes and war crimes:

The video of US marines urinating on Afghan corpses does not shock me. Though their behavior is disgusting and unacceptable, I find the public’s reaction to this video far more troubling. People are not outraged that there are dead Afghans; they are outraged at the manner in which the dead are treated. This is indicative of our culture’s tolerance for war and war crimes – as long as they are done in a gentlemanly fashion.

Follow the link for his story of some of the things he witnessed and participated in.

At the Denver Post, Alan Breed and Julie Watson research the history of battlefield misconduct, from Achilles’s dragging Paris around Troy through the Middle Ages up to our most recent wars. Two nuggets:

Reserve Marine Lt. Col. Paul Hackett, who teaches the law of war to Marines before they are sent off to Afghanistan, made it clear Friday that he was not condoning the Marines’ actions. But he warned against judging them too harshly, saying: “When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in.”

(big snip)

But Maynard Sinclair, a Marine veteran of Vietnam and the peacekeeping mission in Beirut, said the outrage shows the public’s naiveté about war.

“I did a hell of a lot worse in Vietnam than urinate on some dead bodies,” he said. “We cut left ears off and wore them around our necks to show we were warriors, and we knew how to get revenge.”

Thoreau summarizes the dissonance.

Despite the rhetoric of those who monger war, there is not now, nor has there ever been any such thing as a “neat surgical strike” in the killing fields.

If you click on only one of the three links, click on Thoreau’s.

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5 comments

  1. Bill

    January 14, 2012 at 6:24 pm

    Unfortunately, war is hell.

     
  2. Frank

    January 14, 2012 at 6:42 pm

    Yeah, and these poor soldiers are going to be the scapegoats.  Not that I find their actions laudable (unlike some wingnuts)–and I’m certainly not going to be pious about what I would or wouldn’t have done in the same circumstances–but because they are going to get the book thrown at them to assuage the public’s and politicians’ unwillingness to face up to war’s not being some John Wayne movie.

     
  3. George

    January 14, 2012 at 7:34 pm

    One could suggest making high school students read E B Sledge’s With the Old Breed about combat in the Pacific as opposed to whatever crap they have to read now. Or almost any account that gets down to describing how groups of soldiers acted toward dead foes on both sides. And before they were dead. I’m just being fanciful. The war has gone on too long for many reasons, one of which is because it has been convenient for the natsec/defense establishment to have a fighting force not pulled from everyone eligible in the general populace. Which everyone has gone along with because it was equally convenient on the other side. Everybody got what they wanted but the result has been very bad for the country and its moral character. This is just another symptom of that disease.  

     
  4. Frank

    January 14, 2012 at 11:47 pm

    For some reason, this makes me think what I consider the best war movie I have ever seen:  Beach Red.
    Somewhere a long the line, I also read the poem on which it was based.
    There was no romance there.  The romance is the minds of those who stay home.
    We are part of deeply corrupt–morally corrupt–society.

     
  5. Bill

    January 15, 2012 at 9:53 pm

    “I never moved into combat without having the feeling of a cold hand reaching into my guts and twisting them both into knots.” — Audie Murphy
    People think war is nothing more than a video game.  They see the images of our high-tech weapons and think all you have to do is push a button.  They have forgotten (or never knew) what infantry fighting is like.  I don’t know firsthand but I can’t imagine the sheer terror of trying to kill your enemy before he kills you.  That’s especially true now where the enemy doesn’t wear uniforms and blends in with their surroundings.  That would make even the sanest among us a little insane.  It’s too easy to sit on the sidelines and condemn those who do the fighting for us.