You’re nineteen years old.
And you’re a US Marine.
You’ve been trained to kill the enemy. Not to be a wanton slaughterer, naturally – we do shoot for better than that. But if the word comes down the chain from the President to the Commandant to the Brigade commander to your Battalion CO to your Platoon Sergeant that Achmad Taliban is the enemy, subject to the rules of engagement, your job is to shoot him. To kill him, not injure or scare him.
And Achmad Taliban is trying to kill you. He’s killed plenty of your buddies, and other nineteen year old guys in your unit, going back to when you were ten years old He wants you dead, and it was a roll of the tactical dice – a roll loaded by your training, you and your squad-mates’ tactics, and maybe a little luck – that left Achmad lying in the dirt with a bunch of holes in him, rather than you with a hole in your head or a couple of missing legs.
But you (and your buddies) got him first. Before he could get you. And you know that if the situation had been reversed, and Achmad had gotten ahold of your corpse, there’d be no liberal weenies in Pakistan wetting their pants over the ghastliness that’d ensue. Because there are no liberal weenies in the Wahhabi world.
So, hyped on adrenaline and the same 19-year-old hormones that the USMC carefully cultivated to teach you unnatural things like running toward machine gun fire and shooting other humans (but only the right ones, heaven forfend), you and your buddies relieved yourself on the remains of a guy who’d just been trying to off you.
And the usual suspects here in the US are caterwauling about it.
Was it right to whiz on a corpse? To someone sitting in a warm, tasteful, fluorescent-lit office in the US, of course not. And even your chain of command would probably frown on it; time you spent whizzing on a corpse was probably time that a sniper could have been lining you up for a shot of his own. I dunno – I’ve never served, much less as a combat infantryman.
Which is why I’m not going to join the crowd second-guessing you.
Because I have a hunch that if someone came barging through my front door with a gun, and tried to kill me, and I got him first, and he were lying on the floor, whizzing on him would be, um, impossible.
That’s the scandel? I haven’t been paying attention, except to read the headlines. I thought this was something really bad. But that’s it? They took a leak on the dead body of the terrorist who tried to kill them?
Rep. Allen West has some comments that sound (to me) like a proper way of handling the situation such as it is:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/allen-west-marines-incident-shut-your-mouth-war-hell_616699.html
Mitch, you need to remember how sensitive Muslims are. First, we let some Marines pee all over dead Taliban, next thing somebody might hijack some planes and try to crash them into buildings over here in America.
Wait, that already happened.
Never mind.
Can it be a war crime if we didn’t declare war?
Do Taliban in civilian clothes get protection under the Geneva Conventions, or are they spies we can shoot (and piss on)?
Is there any serious risk Taliban will now treat our dead worse? Could they?
Do we seriously intend that rules of conduct suitable for the parade ground should prevail on killing ground, does that aid the mission?
In ww2 it was the American pilots, not the Germans, who had a reputation for shooting enemy pilots as they hung from their shroud. America awarded pilots kills for shooting down unarmed training aircraft. The Germans didn’t. The Brits didn’t.
Whether you let this sort of thing bother you or not depends on who you think is the enemy.
I don’t care about this, this isn’t a big deal. The question is who videotaped this and uploaded it to Youtube? Those are the people we should go after. I bet this happens regularly
Remember that the Left, especially media figures on the Left (Ezra Klein, Matthew Eglesias, Josh Marshall, etc) do not identify with the soldiers in the video at all. They see them as, at best, uneducated pawns of American war mongerers and at worst as mercenary thugs and killers. While they don’t identify with the dead Taliban, they see them as morally blameless victims reacting as well as can be hoped for to an invasion of colonialists who want to destroy their way of life. They are not moral free agents; any evil they do is “our” fault, meaning the fault of non-progressive Americans like Dick Cheney, the Koch brothers, or the soldiers in the video.
A great example of what I wrote about above, a tweet Breitbart received retweeted from a lefty:
Riggs believes that Breitbart needs to be taught to feel sympathy for the dead Taliban who
-burn down schools because they educate girls
-flog people for listening to music
-stone adulteresses
-kill gay people
-kill American soldiers.
There are a number of Americans who pay women to pee on them. This will soon be called a civil right.
A FB Friend posted this as his status yesterday:
“Urinate on a Crucifix, You’re an “artist”, Urinate on The American Flag, You’re a “Constitutionalist”, Urinate on a Police Car and You’re a “Freedom Loving Patriot”. Urinate on the Taliban Fighters That Just Tried To Kill You & Your Fellow Marines, You’re the Villain??? WTF!!!”
I wholeheartedly agreed and liked it.
Terry, you left out fucking goats and genital mutilation and general pedophilia
Terry;
Japanese pilots took the cake for shooting Allied pilots hanging in helplessly in their parachutes. Further, not many people know what scumbags the supposedly neutral Swiss were. They shot down several Allied planes when they strayed into their airspace, yet sold arms, ammo and supplies to the Germans, allowed them to freely move Jewish death trains and troops through their country.
The pissing thing; we saw what the related ilk did to the bodies of our guys in Somalia and Gulf I. I won’t even share what the NVA did to our guys in Vietnam, which caused some of us to retaliate in kind – I could share stories. The fact that our rules of engagement have been for shit ever since LBJ’s regime, caused many unnecessary deaths of US servicemen! Too many of my buddies had the “Kill ’em all; Let God sort ’em out” mentality, which is common in all wars. I say let every libturd elitist that judges the military by this incident, volunteer for combat and see what they do!