War! Good God Y’all!
My wife’s dog recently threw-up several bits and pieces of something rotten he apparently found and ate while roaming around our farm. Before my wife could clean up the mess, the dog had eaten up everything he had regurgitated. It’s a disgusting thing for us humans to witness, but in the dog’s world, it is normal behavior.
War, like eating your own vomit, is a disgusting thing for us humans to contemplate, whether watching it live on cable news or reading stories about it in the international newspapers.
But just as watching a dog eating his own regurgitation is disgustingly normal, so too is America’s propensity to send its youngest adult boys and girls, many of them dirt poor, into battle against adult men who have one purpose in this world–kill as many Americans as humanly possible before they die.
I was nineteen-years-old when I was drafted during the Vietnam War. Like most of my fellow soldiers, I was born into poverty and accustomed to having to defend myself against street tough teens in the housing projects. But that doesn’t mean I was ready, willing and able to go to Vietnam and kill a fellow human being. In my case, I had no choice but to accept that possibility, or go straight to jail for refusing to report for duty as ordered.
When it comes to matters of war in America, our country has a sick way of eating our own young. We did it to the American veterans who returned from a violent war in Vietnam, back in the 60′s and 70′s, only to find that they were themselves the victims of an unpopular war.
Many of our fighting men and women are young teenagers born into poverty. They suffer from emotional issues caused by poor parenting, loss of human dignity, association with dysfunctional families, victims of generational poverty, and some of them have been subjected to years of abuse by their desperate family financial circumstances.
It seems to me that our mainstream media, and many of our Washington political leaders, are quick to exploit American soldiers for their own financial and political gain, for the predictable consequences of the horrors of war itself, such as they have done in Abu Gharib, and in Guantánamo.
As a parent, ask yourself which would upset you the most? A Taliban soldier ruthlessly mutilating your child, or your child pissing on a dead Taliban soldier? Bear in mind that only moments earlier the Taliban soldier had tried and failed to kill your son or daughter.
Please folks, let us accept some truths about war. In the heat of battle the emotions are at their peak. Fellow soldiers, the friends of your sons and daughters, are in danger. If your son or daughter is an angry soldier, who only moments before was involved in an intense fire fight, who can blame them if they want to piss on the scumbag who just tried to kill them?
The Taliban are not model citizens to start with, and they have no mercy with regard to obeying the rules of war, or respecting human rights for that matter. So, please let’s cut our soldiers some slack. Give them a break. Put yourself in their shoes and see how you would react. Besides, how would a dead Taliban soldier know they are being pissed upon in the first place?
All over the news this week have been discussions of the images of young American soldiers urinating on the corpses of enemy combatants in Afghanistan. We all remember the horrific death of Daniel Pearl, broadcast worldwide on the Internet by Islamic fundamentalist with the same hatred toward Americans that the Taliban have against our young soldiers today.
There is no reasonable rationale for any human being to cut off the head of a young journalist, while taping it for Internet broadcast. Nor is there a reasonable rationale for a young soldier to piss on the corpse of a dead enemy soldier while taping it on video. But, let’s at least be honest. It makes no sense, nor does it serve any purpose, to prosecute war crimes against members of only one side of the battle.
Starting wars is what our politicians do, but it is our young men and women who must engage in the heat of battle. It is such an irony that those same politicians are the first to get into a pissing contest over which person can occupy the high moral ground in a war in which the objective is to kill.
