Fw: We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy

["Don Greenlaw" <dgreenlaw@cox.net>]

Forwarded.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Gerald Pothier
To: Pothier, Gerald T.
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2012 2:15 PM
Subject: We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy


From: JJS

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





We’re 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 America’s 
warriors — for that matter, why would anyone — 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 — 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, I’m 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 didn’t 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 weren’t 
cheering the enemy’s 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 “the behavior depicted in the video is wholly inconsistent with 
the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated 
throughout our history.”


Yet, I can’t 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 Hector’s 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 — 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 
fighters’ 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 — 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 haven’t just committed their first murder — 
that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.


It doesn’t 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 
it’s 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 — and political leaders — 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 — achieved 
through torture — 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 doesn’t 
surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad — 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 don’t 
have the faintest idea.


outlook@washpost.com


Sebastian Junger , a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of 
“War” and the director of the 2010 film “Restrepo,” 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