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Fw: Fw: Weâre all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy

Forwarded. MODELHAWK is a retired
LtCol USAF. Bill served a tour in RVN
as a Marine Sgt in 1stReconBn.

Semper fi,
Don Greenlaw
----- Original Message ----- From: MODELHAWK@aol.com 
To: dgreenlaw@cox.net
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Weâre all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy
Of course we are. We are taught from the first day of combat training that our enemies are worthless POS's worth nothing but fertilizer. We have to be taught that. How else can a human being put another human being in his sights and pull the trigger time and again.
Our Corps taught us that, Now they want to push the reset button and tell our Marines not to be mean to or demean the enemy. What a crock. If anyone should be held responsible for pee-gate, it's the "machine" that sent these Marines back and forth to there combat zone over and over again. 

Semper fi; Bill
In a message dated 1/15/2012 6:57:04 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, dgreenlaw@cox.net writes: 
 Forwarded.
----- Original Message ----- From: Gerald Pothier 
 To: Pothier, Gerald T.
 Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2012 2:15 PM
 Subject: Weâre all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy


 From: JJS

 Date: Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 12:50 PM
 Subject: Fw: Weâre all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy





 Weâre all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-all-guilty-of-dehumanizing-the-enemy/2012/01/13/gIQAtRduwP_story.html
 By Sebastian Junger, Published: January 13


 The video that emerged in recent days appearing to show four U.S. Marines
urinating on several dead Taliban fighters has outraged many people in this 
 country. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary
 Leon Panetta have condemned the act, the military has promised an inquiry,
 and some experts are even suggesting that the act could qualify as a war
 crime.
Mainly, however, people seem simply to not understand it. Why would Americaâs 
 warriors â for that matter, why would anyone â urinate on a dead body?


 The White House said Thursday that President Obama joins Defense Secretary
 Leon Panetta in condemning an internet video that purports to depict U.S.
 Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. (Jan. 12)
I spent a year, off and on, with a platoon of U.S. soldiers in the Korengal 
 Valley of eastern Afghanistan. There was a lot of fighting, a lot of
 casualties and an enormous amount of stress on the men I was with. I never
 saw anyone do anything like this, but then again, I never saw any dead
 Taliban fighters â the enemy always recovered their casualties before we
 could get there.


 Nevertheless, the things the soldiers shouted during combat were very
revealing of the state of mind that war produces. (For the record, Iâm sure 
 the Taliban was screaming pretty much the same things about us.) At one
 point a Taliban fighter had his leg shot off during a firefight and was
 crawling around on the hillside, dying, and the men I was with cheered at
the sight. That cheer deflated me. I liked these guys tremendously, but that 
 celebration was just so ugly. I didnât want them to be like that.


 Later, I asked one of them about it, and he explained that they had been
happy because they were that much closer to all going home alive. They werenât 
 cheering the enemyâs death; they were cheering their own lives. That
 particular fighter would never again be able to kill an American soldier.
In a statement issued Thursday, Gen. Jim Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, 
 said that âthe behavior depicted in the video is wholly inconsistent with
 the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated
 throughout our history.â
Yet, I canât imagine that there was a time in human history when enemy dead 
 were not desecrated. Achilles dragged Hector around the walls of Troy from
 the back of a chariot because he was so enraged by Hectorâs killing of his
 best friend. Three millennia later, Somali fighters dragged a U.S. soldier
through the streets of Mogadishu after shooting down a Black Hawk helicopter 
 and killing 17other Americans. During the frontier wars in this country,
white Americans routinely scalped Indian fighters, and vice versa, well into 
 the 1870s.
The U.S. military should be held to a higher standard, certainly, but it is 
 important to understand the context of the behavior in the video. Clearly,
 the impulse to desecrate the enemy comes from a very dark and primal place
 in the human psyche. Once in a while, those impulses are going to break
 through.


 There is another context for that behavior, though â a more contemporary
 one. As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing U.S. Marines urinating on
 dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that,
 presumably, those same Marines just put high-caliber rounds through the
fightersâ chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very 
 clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill
 and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy
 they have killed.
But of course they have dehumanized the enemy â otherwise they would have to 
 face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather
 than demonstrate a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident
 might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to
 convince themselves that they havenât just committed their first murder â
 that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.


 It doesnât work, of course, but it gets them through the moment; it gets
 them through the rest of the patrol.


 There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all
guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that itâs okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a 
 dead one.
When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 
 10 years old. As children they heard adults â and political leaders â talk
about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media 
 are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as
animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy 
 fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very
 regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and
 torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then
 locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions â achieved
 through torture â will not stand up in court.


 For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral
 contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesnât
 surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad â not just for them, but also
 for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while
 maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.
I hope someone else knows how to explain that to our soldiers, because I donât 
 have the faintest idea.


 outlook@washpost.com


 Sebastian Junger , a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of
âWarâ and the director of the 2010 film âRestrepo,â both of which chronicle 
 the experiences of U.S. troops fighting the war in Afghanistan.
-- Being a Marine isn't everything...it's the ONLY thing. 

 Semper Fidelis,
 Gerald T. Pothier
 Capt. USMC (Ret)
 1951-1988
 Mustang

 "Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they have made a
 difference in the world. Marines don't have that problem."
 President Ronald Reagan , 1985