picture perfect

This story from NPR (every outlet is covering it) focuses on the shock! shock! of generals, diplomats and the Secretary of Defense over this story in the LA Times, where they find that soldiers take pictures of themselves with their "kills." The photos are a couple of years old and were given to the paper by an unnamed soldier in the 82nd Airborne to blow the whistle on what he said was a breakdown in the military which endangered the troops.  Pardon my sangfroid, but my only surprise is that I thought it was considered bad form to pose with "kills" which aren't your own, as appears to be the case here.

Panetta apparently asked the LA Times not to publish the photos and expressed "disappointment" that they  did it anyway.  The problem, of course, is that Afghans will see the photos, not that the killing is celebrated in this way, right?  But that's probably accurate, since U.S. soldiers (and most likely their Afghan adversaries) have been taking photos like this throughout the hostilities there and in Iraq.  See reports from the Winter Solider hearings held in March 2008, not too far from the Pentagon, but roundly ignored by politicians and vastly underreported by the mainstream U.S. press.

double consciousness?

A good piece about the most recent atrocity, rogue soldier, "bad apple" in The Guardian by veteran and student, Ross Caputi.

the baddest apple

It's hard to fathom this horror: a U.S. Army staff sergeant leaves his base in the middle of the night and goes door-to-door murdering 16 people in Afghanistan, including 9 children.  (He set fire to some of the bodies -- because? so no one would notice?)  Dave Grossman begins On Killing, his book about training soldiers to kill, with the assumption that people have an innate resistance to killing other people.  He estimates that only about 2% of soldiers are "natural killers" -- those who kill willingly and without remorse or regret --  which he says is about the same as in the general population.  I'm assuming this guy went nuts because this is nuts, aberrant, bad apple to the max.  I don't believe he's representative of soldiers in Afghanistan, except perhaps in seeing Afghans as less than human, which is one of the factors Grossman cites in getting soldiers over their reluctance to pull the trigger.  Wars dehumanize -- the killers, as well as the killed -- which brings me back to where I always begin: What is this sergeant and all the other soldiers who obey rules of engagement doing in Afghanistan in the first place?

Haditha, My Lai, and off the hook

Good historical review, putting the minimal punishment for Sgt. Frank Wuterich and other marines who massacred 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 in context of other atrocities.