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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: ToxicMan]
    #1414834 -

Thank you for those links!

I never would have thought I could have respected you anymore than I already do.

This post proved me wrong.

Thank you for protecting me and serving our country.

Cheers,

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Angry Mycologist]
    #1414918 -

Thanks for your response. I'm glad to see I didn't offend you in the process of getting that off my chest.

There will always be people who say they're going in to kill the (fill in offensive stereotype name). Fortunately, people are more complicated than that - nobody I know is that one dimensional.

Around the time I was getting out, I was told that training included more ethics. The idea was to wash out the psychopathic types before they got into a situation where something really bad happened. The people doing the training are extensively trained themselves on how to do it. Part of their job is watching for signs that somebody has something wrong with them like that. There was supposed to be some sort of testing done to help wash those sorts out, but I don't know what it was or how well it worked.

The last thing we (the US) need right now is for a lot of Iraqi civilians to die. The more they die, the more they will blame us for those deaths and grow to hate us. And the more they will resist so more die. Just a few nutcases pulling the trigger at the wrong time at the wrong people can make things much worse. And the Iraqi strategy seems geared towards putting our people in a position to make precisely that mistake.

Let's hope those Iraqis trying to do that sort of thing fail miserably. Let's also hope that the outcome of this war is the best possible for everyone concerned.


--------------------
Happy mushrooming!

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Ripple]
    #1420282 -

My ex-boyfriend is one of those men/boys...he graduated in 2001, and is a machine gun specialist with the marines. Amen to that post!

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: ToxicMan]
    #1420317 -

Quote:
Fortunately, people are more complicated than that - nobody I know is that one dimensional. 


I'm not doubting that the people I have spoken of are more complicated than that.  It may be that they are too afraid to show internal conflict, or they may be blinded by a rage not only due to Iraq.  As humans we are constantly at war within ourselves.  This is a battle that some of the people that I've met aren't fighting, nor really thinking about.  I'm glad that you've told me differently, as now I've questioned my own ideas about war and the types of people that fight them.

Quote:
Let's also hope that the outcome of this war is the best possible for everyone concerned. 


Definitely agreed  :grin:

Peace
 


--------------------
The proper penalty of ignorance, which is of course that those who don't know should learn from those who do... - Plato

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Ripple]
    #1420583 -

What hero's they are



My Lai Massacre
On March 16, 1968 the angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division entered the village of My Lai. "This is what you've been waiting for -- search and destroy -- and you've got it," said their superior officers. A short time later the killing began. When news of the atrocities surfaced, it sent shockwaves through the US political establishment, the military's chain of command, and an already divided American public.

My Lai lay in the South Vietnamese district of Son My, a heavily mined area of Vietcong entrenchment. Numerous members of Charlie Company had been maimed or killed in the area during the preceding weeks. The agitated troops, under the command of Lt. William Calley, entered the village poised for engagement with the elusive Vietcong.

As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped, and then killed. For his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire.

Word of the massacre did not reach the American public until November of 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh published a story detailing his conversations with ex-GI and Vietnam veteran, Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour learned of the events at My Lai from members of Charlie Company who had been there. Before speaking with Hersh, he had appealed to Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon to investigate the matter. The military investigation resulted in Calley's being charged with murder in September 1969 -- a full two months before the Hersh story hit the streets.

As the gruesome details of the massacre reached the American public serious questions arose concerning the conduct of American soldiers in Vietnam. A military commission investigating the My Lai massacre found widespread failures of leadership, discipline, and morale among the Army's fighting units. As the war progressed, many "career" soldiers had either been rotated out or retired. Many more had died. In their place were scores of draftees whose fitness for leadership in the field of battle was questionable at best. Military officials blamed inequities in the draft policy for the often slim talent pool from which they were forced to choose leaders. Many maintained that if the educated middle class ("the Harvards," as they were called) had joined in the fight, a man of Lt. William Calley's emotional and intellectual stature would never have been issuing orders.



--------------------
"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned." -Buddha
www.impeach-bush-now.org

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: RadioActiveSlug]
    #1420604 -

Sorry Slug.  There is only the thinnest connection between that massacre and a missle gone awry.

The Iraqi conflict is neither WW II nor Vietnam.

Innocent life was lost.  That is always a tragedy. :frown:

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: RadioActiveSlug]
    #1420827 -

RadioActiveSlug - Good - I don't know how old you are, but it's good to see that there are people who remember things like My Lai.

Incidentally, here is a link to a much more detailed account than that one you got from the PBS site. It includes transcripts of the actual testimony from the court martial of Lt. Calley. Note (down near the bottom) that this convicted murderer in the end received a punishment that amounted to 3 years of house arrest in his apartment and a dishonorable discharge. The Army sentenced him to life at hard labor, but politicians decided to intervene. The position of Secretary of the Army (the guy who announced Calley's parole) is a political one, and, of course, so are all of his superiors. The current Secretary of the Army was a senior executive of Enron Corporation before his current appointment.


Your post could easily be taken as an attempt to paint all those who serve and have served their country in military service with a broad and very nasty brush. You would be making an ignorant and foolish mistake if that were your purpose.

There will soon be about 250,000 representatives of our country in Iraq, being told to perform the most terrible things a person can be asked to do under conditions we cannot truly imagine. The vast majority of those people will do a good job. Out of a quarter million people there will be a few whose work will be more reminiscent of Lt. Calley.

But out of My Lai we should also remember CWO Hugh Thompson, who isn't even mentioned at the PBS site. He was the pilot of a helicopter gunship at My Lai. He rescued several civilians from the massacre, placing himself bodily between Lt. Calley and his potential victims and ordering his gunship crew to shoot the Americans if they fired on the civilians.

Another person we should remember is Ronald Ridenhour, who was the person who finally successfully brought My Lai to the attention of the people who would actually do something appropriate about it.

Regrettably, a Hugh Thompson and a Ronald Ridenhour are not nearly enough to balance out a William Calley. As with My Lai, the people of Iraq and its neighbors will remember the Calleys of this conflict far better than they will remember the Thompsons. And our nation and we will be judged based on them.

If, as with Lt. Calley, these criminals are allowed to continue their lives relatively unpunished, it will provide strong evidence that their negative judgement is justified. In the end it will come down to our politicians. I have far less confidence in the integrity of our current political leaders than I do in our military people.


Incidentally, your post is the first usage of the word "hero" in this thread. I never used the word because true heroism is a rare thing. In the current conflict there will certainly be a few acts of real herosim. But almost all of it will just be people doing the most awful tasks imaginable under terrible conditions. And I respect the people who do those tasks honorably, which the vast majority of them will do.


--------------------
Happy mushrooming!

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: ToxicMan]
    #1420844 -

That was among one of the best posts I've ever read here. Kudos.


--------------------
Re-Defeat Bush in '04

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: ToxicMan]
    #1420875 -

My purpose was to put an end to the glorification of war.
not only that, but those who claim that this war is being faught for freedom when in reality its purpose it to surpress it.

this war plays perfectly into the screw heads plans. Plans that are laid out in precise scary detail at the screw head homepage:

SCREW HEAD HOMEPAGE


Quote:
In the current conflict there will certainly be a few acts of real herosim.



in my eyes the true acts of herosim will be done away from the front lines, ones who have the balls to stand up against the goverment hate machine. I see no honor in attacking poor people, outnumbering them 5 to 1, soon to be 10 to 1, not to mention much more intense technology on our side. that's not honor, that's genocide.



--------------------
"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned." -Buddha
www.impeach-bush-now.org

Edited by RadioActiveSlug (04/01/03 03:13 AM)

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: ]
    #1421034 -

Quote:
The Iraqi conflict is neither WW II nor Vietnam.
Innocent life was lost.  That is always a tragedy. :frown:

You mean no innocent life is lost in Iraq??  :shocked:

Has anyone seen the G.I. on CNN, who commented on why he had just shot an Iraqi woman on the road? He simply said: "The chick ran in the way." I haven't seen it, just read loads of comments on it.

No doubt that soldiers are taught ethics, but ethics is theoretical, just a textbook thing, and only the noblest of men can uphold it on the battlefield.
But in my book, the noblest of men refuse to go to the battlefield in the first place, which gets you into more trouble sometimes than simply going and 'trying' to uphold an ethical stance.
And writing this, I notice that the words 'ethics' and 'battlefield' simply don't fit together... but many will disagree. 

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Aldous]
    #1421043 -

While I'm at it, I just stumbled across an article with some quotes from some of those honorable soldiers defending American freedom and safety in Iraq.

"The Iraqi's are sick people, and we're their chemotherapy. I'm beginning to hate this country." (from an officer)
"It was a nice day today, we killed many people." (a sgt. Schrumpf, he's the one who shot the chick that ran in the way)

Note that those quoted were written down by embedded journalists, who I don't suspect of any subversion.

Be as 'ethical' as you will, the horrors of real war will make you an animal anyway.

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: RadioActiveSlug]
    #1421544 -

Quote:
My purpose was to put an end to the glorification of war.



I'll go along with that. Anybody who glorifies war needs to be sent to the front lines so they can bask in the glory of it all and maybe even be glorified themselves into a cemetary. Of all the people I have known who have actually been in combat, none of them has anything remotely glorious to say about it. It's interesting that those who now want it more than anybody are the same ones who didn't want anything to do with it when they were going to have to do the bad parts themselves.

I certainly hope I never gave the impression that I thought heroism has anything to do with killing people. Heroism in my eyes always involves saving lives and involves extreme personal risk. An unarmed medic risking everything to pull a wounded soldier under cover is heroic. A helicopter pilot landing in the middle of a firefight to evacuate people is heroic. Acts such as these will occur, and the people who do them deserve our highest esteem.


Aldous, it's easy to make somebody sound like a psychopath by taking quotes out of context. Here is an article which puts his quotes into context. The version I find is that he said, "I'm sorry, but the chick was in the way." Sgt Schrumpf has one of the very nastiest jobs there is in a war - his job is killing people. People who, in this case, are often using the tactic of hiding among groups of noncombatants, especially women and children. His comments sound to me like a person coping with what he's done. I would be astonished if he doesn't find himself with problems later dealing with those things. But, for now, tomorrow he has to get up and do it again. And again the day after. Note that he refers to those he kills as people, not "the enemy" or some similar vague term. He understands very well what he's done.

If you throw in that his job includes protecting his unit from suicide bombers who might charge at them you get a really great set of circumstances. You see a person running towards one of your people. You have maybe 3 seconds to decide if they're a suicide bomber or not and whether you should shoot or not. If you're wrong (on either one), somebody dies who shouldn't have.

Note also that Sgt Schrumpf mentions that there are times when he does not pull the trigger. That tells me that he is keenly aware of the consequences of his actions. He is clearly a person doing his best to apply ethics in the most difficult situation imaginable. It's obvious that he is not some sort of sicko out there killing civilians randomly.


Quote:
Be as 'ethical' as you will, the horrors of real war will make you an animal anyway.



There is one main difference. An animal doesn't regret what they've done later. Many of our service people will have serious problems dealing with things they saw or did. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the people I know who are most strongly opposed to war are those who have participated in one themselves.

It makes a big difference when you have time to think about the fact that you will soon be in the position of actually killing people and maybe being killed yourself. People who have had to go through thinking those thoughts are changed by them. The people I know have come to value life (theirs and others) more .



I'm sure that Mr_Mushrooms didn't mean to imply that innocent lives weren't being lost in Iraq. We are all aware that too many innocent lives are being lost there.



One final thought. I'm going to guess that some of the more recent anti-war posts in this thread may be a response to a perception that I support the war in Iraq. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I feel that our justifications for this war are far from sufficient.

But the people serving in our military don't have any say about whether there will be a war or not or whether they will participate or not. They gave up that right when they volunteered to join the military. They're the ones who are stuck with the nasty part - actually doing it when the decision was made to invade. They're people just like you, me, and everyone else you know, who've been put into some of the worst possible situations. I can't treat them like they've done something wrong for that. I respect the people who take the dirty jobs, the ones nobody wants to think about but have to be done.

If one of them (or 10, or 100) turns into a Lt Calley, I want to see them receive the sentence Calley originally got at his court martial - life in prison at hard labor. I would hope that the politicians would stay out of it this time, but I have my doubts about that.


--------------------
Happy mushrooming!

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: ToxicMan]
    #1421729 -

GOd bless america!




Our home



SWEET!



HOOOOOME!!!!!

special hand for "OUR BOYS"




More liberation


--------------------
"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned." -Buddha
www.impeach-bush-now.org

Edited by RadioActiveSlug (04/01/03 06:25 PM)

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: ToxicMan]
    #1421800 -

Quote:
But the people serving in our military don't have any say about whether there will be a war or not or whether they will participate or not. They gave up that right when they volunteered to join the military.

That's precisely why I ended my post the way I did: to me, the real heroes are those who refuse to go. In the case of the US soldiers, this doesn't even apply, since they volunteered: they gave away to others the right to decide about their own lives and actions. To me, this is simply unforgivable. I hope for them they realised from the beginning that signing up for the army could very well result in being sent to war (I was going to write 'dirty war', but there's no such thing as a clean war). They signed, goddammit, and they lost my understanding by doing so.

As for the "dirty jobs nobody wants to think about but have to be done", I don't agree with you on this one. This job doesn't have to be done. This "job" is taking people's lives and maybe giving one's own for the interests of Washington oil junkies. The only protection America really needs is one from the reactions to the policies it's been inflicting upon the rest of the world since WWII. I think America is powerful enough to really impose peace and disarmament everywhere (including the US) without a shot being fired. But that serves no-one's interests, peace is no business (it could be, but they don't understand that and it's not as sexy as war). And it would imply fair trade worldwide and other unacceptable ideas. So, let's forget it. But I'm the last one who would die for their wallets.

I don't doubt what you say about people who come back from the battlefield completely changed, but luckily it doesn't take a battlefield to be able to value life, there are other ways. Don't misunderstand me, I don't mean to be offensive to the people we're talking about here, because they were conditioned to be patriotic and give up their freedom, so maybe it takes them a battlefield to open their eyes. It's the conditioning and the brainwashing I'm so angry at, and which leaves no good word in my mouth for the people who bought into it.

I just hope one day things will become just too obvious (I thought they were already, but it seems I was wrong  :shocked:) and break through the veil of brainwashing and media lies with a loud crack. 

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: RadioActiveSlug]
    #1422525 -

were those pics supposed to make people who support this war feel guilty?...i pray for them people but don't feel guilty. nice try.

I have an idea, place some of the pics from the saddam era, you know the ones....the ones where he gassed the Kurds, tortured civilians and hung people for agreeing with the oppositions point of view. That would be a hoot.



--------------------

America....FUCK YEAH!!!

Words of Wisdom: Individual Rights BEFORE Collective Rights

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson

Edited by Innvertigo (04/02/03 08:01 PM)

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Innvertigo]
    #1423529 -

Quote:
I have an idea, place some of the pics from the saddam era, you know the ones....the ones where he gassed the Kurds, tortured civilians and hung people for agreeing with the oppositions point of view. That would be a hoot.



Yes it would but you won't see them. Those who post these pics are far too hypocritical to post stuff like that.


--------------------
You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for that my dear friend is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. ~ Adrian Rogers

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: luvdemshrooms]
    #1423986 -

what's funny is that when you bring up their contradictions and "claims" to support the rights of the human race, they clam up.


--------------------

America....FUCK YEAH!!!

Words of Wisdom: Individual Rights BEFORE Collective Rights

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Angry Mycologist]
    #1424100 -

On the other hand, what if we had a war and nobody showed up?


--------------------
"Once a nation bases its security on an absolute weapon, such as the atom bomb, it becomes psychologically necessary to believe in an absolute enemy." - P.M.S. Blackett

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Dim]
    #1424126 -

Dude, that has to be the most random post I have seen in this forum. What in the hell are you referring to? Learn to use the quote function, its a life saver.


--------------------
Re-Defeat Bush in '04

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Re: The Average U. S. Military Man [Re: Skikid16]
    #1424161 -

i was thinking the same thing..


--------------------

America....FUCK YEAH!!!

Words of Wisdom: Individual Rights BEFORE Collective Rights

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson

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