The truth about men who kill

The truth about men who kill

...Next month will also see the release of a powerful film called Battle for Haditha by Nick Broomfield, the director of hard-hitting docudramas such as Ghosts, about the Chinese immigrants who drowned while collecting cockles at Morecambe Bay.

...“They have already let half the guys off,” he said. “They have discredited all the Iraqi witnesses as being prejudiced. They have discredited the two marines who came up with evidence implicating the others. They have done all they can to negate anything that pushes it towards murder.”

...From the conversations he has had, Broomfield thinks that by the time Kilo Company got to Haditha they had seen so much carnage that killing did not mean much to them any more: “On that day they were chasing each other round with body parts and they thought it was very funny. It was their way of surviving it.” The hard truth is that the US marines are good at killing and rejoice in it. Their training instils a terrible indifference to killing. Their whole spirit reinforces each other’s willingness to kill. They boast about their kills and if you have not killed you are not held in high regard. To those who have never been in combat this may seem disgusting. But as a young reporter in Vietnam I learnt that the more soldiers see of death the more it becomes normal.

Everything I have seen in war – from Vietnam to Iraq over 30 years – reinforces that view. There are always soldiers who exult in the kill. I saw it myself all too frequently in Vietnam, where American troops revelled in posing for photographs with their buddies among heaps of mutilated corpses of Vietcong and cut off their enemies’ ears as souvenirs. There is, as soldier friends admit, something heady and powerful about the proximity of death and the power to kill and be killed. And it takes a singularly strong-minded soldier to be able to hang on to acceptable standards of behaviour in the horror.

...
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3215288.ece


Wars are always like this. One doesn't need a soldier father or brother, confessing the truth with self disgust and horror long after coming home to know this, and to know the terrible harm done to decent young people as they are trained to be killers. It isn't only the soldiers who are war criminals though - it's the leaders who choose to go to war and the people who vote for and support these leaders knowing what they will do.