Can Military Atrocities Be Prevented?

Atrocities have been a part of every war ever fought by the United States and every other country that has ever fought a war

. Unfortunately they are common and sometimes frequent depending on the policies in place by the countries that fight the war, the circumstances surrounding the action, and certain social and ethnic considerations.

As the USA fights a war in Afghanistan which has been ongoing for over ten years at the time of this writing we are getting more and more news of atrocities being committed by our troops.

Some of the incidents that have been caught on camera are: A US Marine throwing a puppy off of a cliff, Airmen cheering while a goat is beaten to death with a metal pipe, the recently released video footage of US Marines as they urinated on the bodies of dead insurgents, and the US troop who viciously attacked and killed about sixteen innocent civilians.

The thing that needs to be considered is; what are the factors that transform ordinary men and women into cruel and vicious killers? What happens to remove the barriers of right and wrong? What can we do to stop the process which turns our young troops into cold blooded vicious killers?

My personal belief is that war itself is the culprit that causes our troops to turn and begin to perform actions that they would never consider doing otherwise. Our society socializes us to look upon the taking of life and particularly innocent life as being a basic evil (and it is). What happens in wartime is that killing becomes not only acceptable but preferred and rewarded. The human psyche struggles to cope with this new condition and basic mental mores have to be altered in a struggle to maintain sanity.

I believe that in order to cope with the situation of warfare the mind must somehow make it right. Once this happens the soldier has to embrace the thing that he or she once abhorred. Take into account also that the human mind is desensitized to warfare by being exposed to the carnage that it creates every day. In this sense the thing that is abnormal becomes normal. In order to cope and maintain mental balance the concept of right and wrong is altered in the mind and what was not acceptable at one time becomes acceptable. I believe that this is what eventually leads the troop to commit atrocities without any feelings of remorse.

In many cases the troops are frustrated by the situation that they find themselves in and seemingly have no way to fight back. One similarity that I have noticed between the war in Afghanistan and the Vietnam War is that the troops fought with an enemy that used hit and run tactics. In both cases they fight with an enemy that tries to win the war by attrition. In Vietnam the enemy used booby traps to inflict many casualties along with many snipers. Our troops fought an enemy that many times they couldnt even see. They were frustrated by the fact that so many of their comrades were killed or otherwise maimed or injured with no way to retaliate. Innocent civilians represented the enemy that they fought because the enemy could hide out within the local population and there was no way to tell. I believe that this may be the reason that innocent civilians became the primary victims of our troops who committed atrocities.

I believe that this same type of situation certainly may be part of the reason that the one US troop left his compound at night and murdered so many innocent civilians, and maybe the cause of some of the other incidents as well. In the case of the troop that killed the Afghan civilians he had seen many of his comrades killed or wounded by IEDs. Even though they knew that the civilian population had probably seen who did it or that the attackers were probably hidden in among the civilian population there was nothing that they could do to find them and punish them.

Rules of engagement prevented him from killing or torturing the people that he felt knew the answers to what happened (and rightly so) he probably felt that he had to do something to bend the rules and avenge the deaths of his comrades. His solution was not the right one but I believe that this could have been the progression which led to his actions.

I dont condone these actions by any means but at the same time as a combat veteran I understand that there is nothing normal about the situation that this troop found himself in. I believe that the biggest obstacle to preventing atrocities in this war is the fact that our troops have been in a continual conflict for over ten years. Some of them have served five or six different combat tours. I believe that as the war continues we will see more and more atrocities. I also believe that many atrocities can be prevented with proper command and control and steps to limit the carnage that our troops are exposed to. I believe that counseling and situational management may help but atrocities can never be wiped out completely. Military Ring Express

by: tishbite

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