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jlf1961 -> RE: "America's Medicated Army" (6/12/2008 11:09:26 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DomAviator
Why Celtic? This is EXACTLY the reason that the antidepressants are available. Nobody should have to live with recurring nightmares over things they did in the service. Its the very point of WHY the drugs are given and are available. Shit happens in war and there is no need to let it haunt you. Thats why the VA offers counselling and medication to eliminate the nightmares and to help you cope with whatever happens and there is no shame in it.
If he shot a kid, that kid made a fatal mistake by surprising a combat unit. It could have just as easily have been an insurgent. Hesitation is what gets people killed. OUR people. He did the right thing as far as Im concerned. I assume this was Vietnam and a lot of good men died from kids with grenades and rigged shoe shine boxes. A kid will kill ya as dead as anyone else. If he was in the wrong place, doing something he shouldnt have, the right call is to fire. What if he was getting ready to toss a grenade in the chow hall instead of scavenging for food????
The incident was in 1983, the Green Line through Beirut Lebanon. In case your are not famaliar with that little Peacekeeping mission Ronnie got us into, the forces deployed, both a large contingent of Marines and a smaller force of Army personnel.
Let me discribe a bit of what you are so lucky NOT to have experienced.
To begin with, due to the heavy fighting between the Christian and Muslim militias prior to our deployment, the area around the UN base camp was pretty well blasted by both air to ground and ground to ground ordinance. Now, while this may sound all well and good to you, I would like to add, that this particular area was a REFUGEE CAMP.
The first thing you noticed was the sickening smell of decaying flesh, animal and human, I mean it is kinda hard to dig graves when people are dropping heavy ordinance on you. The second thing you notice is the people, women, children, old men, all with various types of injuries, and some of them clearly with advanced cases of gangrene, which itself has a distinctive stomach turning smell.
Your first priorities are to get your medics working on the wounded, and then deploy personnel to TRY and provide security for the people trying to dig mass graves.
Next, you get on the radio and start getting the navy boys to start bringing in all the stuff that may, just may save a few people from starving to death or dieing from lack of proper medical care.
Now, by this time, half your squad has puked so much they are basically useless, so you take what men you have that can walk, proceed to a point three klicks from the base camp and set up a checkpoint. Now, the nice thing is that the UN has put up a nice little building with a whole bunch of sandbags, the bad thing is that you can still smell dead bodies.
Now, let me tell you what was involved in scavanging for food.
Kids or adults, who ever was able to attempt to get anything to eat, would make their way out into areas possibly mined in order to fight rats over the remains of a five day dead goat. Inside the city of Beirut, things were a bit better, they just needed to look through garbage cans, wrecked shops, what ever the peace keepers threw away, and pray that the opposing side did not decide to drop morters on them, or get some Syrian jet jocky to come in and lay a few bombs on them.
Of course, the Marines got their barracks blown by a truck bomb driven by a hamas soldier.
And, you know the worst of it all? Those marines, and the few men we lost, did not die for a damn thing. When we were pulled out for the op in Grenada, nothing changed. The two sides kept killing each other in the name of religion and god, Syrian and Israeli jets still bombed the refugee camps, and all the while the US was supply Israel, and Russia was supplying Syria.
During that time, my squad got the following body count, (your all fired important body count) of two kids under the age of ten, a Muslim militia soldier about age 13, six militiamen age 17, some old guy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time trying to retrieve the body of his wife, and about six other militiamen from either the christian or muslim side, I aint sure which.
Now, I can tell you exactly how many I killed, including the kid, I had a total of 6... and another 12 on Grenada. You see, except for the kid, which was a reflex action, all my shots were specifically targeted, through a scope.
Now, while you sat nice and secure at altitude, the rest of us were eating dirt, trying not to screw up, hoping like hell that the rounds we just fired hits a combatant and not some baby, kid, woman or old man.
In Lebanon, we were the first on the seen after the two militias exchanged rounds, so we got to treat the wounded, mostly kids and women caught in the crossfire.
You want to have a real good day, how bout you trying to patch up a toddler that caught the brunt of a grenade?
Yeah, you are right, in war shit happens.
The problems arise because somewhere deep inside every last one of us on the ground, we seem to have this stupid notion that what we are doing will do some good, give someone a better chance at a good life. Get rid of the people that kick in doors at night and take family members off to be tortured and murdered.
We happen to believe that we are fighting for something more than just a damn body count. We actually want to win the hearts and minds of the people we are dealing with, why else do you think we give up our rations to some starving family? Call in a medivac when we find some kid that stepped on a mine, or a pregnant woman with a bullet in her.
Try it on the ground sometime, and see how long you can laugh at the carnage left behind. Try and forget the smell of a rotting corpse.
In the meantime, I would point out that many such as yourself, with your attitude ended up hung some years ago.... right after world war two. Not all the Nazis executed were connected with the death camps, some were connected to the execution of prisoners, the bombing of Rotterdam, and a few other places.
Oh, there were a few allied pilots who were executed for doing exactly what you discribe. The UCMJ is pretty clear on what constitutes conduct unbecoming and murder. And the intentional bombing of a target that is clearly on the international forbidden list, regardless of what may or may not have been put there can be grounds for a trial under those very articles.
What people fail to realize, is that during WW2, Korea, Vietnam, there were a number of trials dealing with murder of civilians. Mi Lai was just one, the one that hit the news.
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