War Is Hell (don't blame the soldier)

i wrote this article for my school (university of wisconsin-milwaukee) newspaper.

i know a lot of you will disagree with me, but thankfully we're liberals and we can think for ourselves. just thought i'd post it here.

War Is Hell
by Mark Sullivan

Much has been made recently of the video of a young Marine in Fallujah shooting what appeared to be a wounded, unarmed individual lying on the floor of a mosque.

Filmed by free lance NBC journalist Kevin Sites, the video has become, in his words, “a lightning rod for controversy” for both the pro-war and the anti-war crowd.

Many in the pro-war crowd have been quick to label Sites as an anti-war activist, accusing him of trying to film anything that makes America look bad. These critics are being unfair to Mr. Sites, who acknowledges the lengths he has gone to report straight down the middle. These critics are also wrong, as they seem to be implying that Americans have no right to know or see what their government and military is doing in their name.

Equally vocal, and in my eyes more wrong, is the anti-war crowd, using this video as proof of “war crimes” and comparing this event to the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, among other things.

Now before I go any further and piss off any anti-war folks, allow me to state my credentials.

Am I against this war? Have been since before it even started. Am I a liberal? I’m off the chart. Did I vote for George Bush? I’d rather vote for a sock puppet.

So now that that’s out of the way, let me continue.

What I’ve seen in the reaction to this event from the rest of the anti-war crowd troubles me. I’ve seen people react with emotion instead of logic and judgement. They’re so passionately against this war and so passionately against Bush that many will jump on anything they can in order to make George look bad.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for making Bush look bad, just not at the expense of a soldier.

You see, I don’t care if that soldier is a Democrat or a Republican, an Evangelical or an Atheist, a Red Stater or a Blue Stater; he is in my eyes first and foremost a soldier, and deserves our utmost respect and gratitude.

Most people, myself included, have not and will never see combat. That is why I cannot in good conscience sit here and allow people to demonize this young man. War is hell, and bad things happen in the heat of battle. The kid had just gotten shot the day before, and he had just recently seen one of his comrades die as a result of a booby-trapped body of an insurgent. He’s young. He could very well be sitting next to me in class. His emotions were high, his adrenaline was flowing, and he was probably scared as hell.

We don’t know the circumstances leading up to the event. We don’t know what he knew about the situation. We weren’t busy running through a city filled with people who wanted to kill us.

And so I ask those who cry foul to take a second and step back. Restrain yourself from a knee-jerk reaction and really think about what sort of situation this guy was in. I know it’s one that none of us would ever want to find ourselves in. War is hell, it can’t be said enough, and it’ll never be fully understood by those of us who have never been there. Reserve your ire and judgement for those who truly deserve it. Blame the ones who sent him there in the first place, because they’re the ones responsible for this mess. I will always be against this war, but I will never be against the troops fighting it.

On a side note, you can read the first hand account of the reporter who filmed the incident at www.kevinsites.net

and there are no Nuremberg precedents. We're the "good guys."

For illustrating that there are two sides to every story.

It is a shame that one side of the Abu Ghraib story won't be investigated and people held accountable, that is the administration's side. A true failure in leadership led these troops to where they are, not that they acted correctly, but the leadership sets the stage for these things to happen. I long for the days when we had a President who agreed with Teddy Roosevelt, the buck stops here. Kennedy had a true intelligence failure at the Bay of Pigs, but he accepted responsibility.

and maybe a little for my ego too, but whatever

Recently I was sent some stupid propaganda pix of happy children getting candy and crayons from soldiers and Iraqis holding signs in English thanking bush for somehting. I "reply-all"ed back that the pix were old did anybody have anything more recent, like Fallujah for example. I was unaware of the story you refer to and was just talking about the bombing and fighting in gerneral. Well, needless to say they thought I was refering to this. I read about it and said, that wasn't what I meant and that I don't feel qualified to judge individual soldiers in direct ground combat, but likely I might have done the same thing!

So what I am saying is I pretty much agree with you.

when a US Soldier raped then murdered an 11 year old girl in Kosovo.

After all we are supposed to:
Reserve your ire and judgment for those who truly deserve it. Blame the ones who sent him there in the first place, because they’re the ones responsible for this mess. I will always be against this war, but I will never be against the troops fighting it.

Yep, it was Clinton's fault because individual soldiers should never be held accountable for their actions particularly if they had had a bad day.

you're comparing apples to oranges

So the soldier holds no responsibility? Just like the Nazi soldiers who murdered millions of Jews or the Europoean conquistadores and later United States soldiers who slaughtered even more Native Americans, the soldier you mentioned should be held accountable for his actions.

War is hell, you are right. It is also wrong. It is especially wrong to kill people for no reason, much like this soldier did.

I am a Gulf War veteran. I ended up at the wrong end of a Scud missile. It missed, thank God. Point is, I served, and under hostile fire. That doesn't change the fact the I was strongly educated by the Army (as if I needed lessons in common human decency), that I had a moral obligation to disobey unlawful orders. Killing prisoners, killing unarmed civilians, targeting schools, hospitals, centers of faith, including mosques, all of these are wrong; and the individual soldier has a responsibility to act ethically and morally in the face of unlawful orders. We are supposed to be the good guys, here. We need to act like it.