You’re nineteen years old.<\/p>\n
And you’re a US Marine.<\/p>\n
You’ve been trained to kill the enemy. \u00a0Not to be a wanton slaughterer, naturally – we do shoot for better than that. \u00a0But 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. \u00a0To kill him, not injure or scare him.<\/p>\n
And Achmad Taliban is trying to kill you. \u00a0He’s killed plenty of your buddies, and other nineteen year old guys in your unit, going back to when you were ten years old \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But you (and your buddies) got him first. \u00a0Before he could get you. \u00a0And you know that if the situation had been reversed, and <\/em>Achmad had gotten ahold of your <\/em>corpse, there’d be no liberal weenies in Pakistan wetting their pants over the ghastliness that’d ensue. \u00a0Because there are no liberal weenies in the Wahhabi world.<\/p>\n So, hyped on adrenaline and the same 19-year-old hormones that the USMC carefully cultivated to teach you unnatural things like running toward<\/em>\u00a0machine 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.<\/p>\n And the usual suspects here in the US are caterwauling about it.<\/p>\n Was it right to whiz on a corpse? \u00a0To someone sitting in a warm, tasteful,\u00a0fluorescent-lit office in the US, of course not. \u00a0And 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. \u00a0I dunno – I’ve never served, much less as a combat infantryman.<\/p>\n Which is why I’m not <\/em>going to join the crowd second-guessing you.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You’re nineteen years old. And you’re a US Marine. You’ve been trained to kill the enemy. \u00a0Not to be a wanton slaughterer, naturally – we do shoot for better than that. \u00a0But if the word comes down the chain from the President to the Commandant to the Brigade commander to your Battalion CO to your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25559"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25561,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25559\/revisions\/25561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}