Hullabaloo

Thursday, April 12, 2012

 
"This is where I come to do fucked up things"

by digby

I doubt many of you will enjoy this piece. But you should read it anyway. It's about war:

So I grabbed the chain and dragged it out and shot it again with the shotgun and, uhhhh, brains all over me …

Shut up, faggot. You never did that …

Man, even if you actually got to see some Afghan chick and she was hot, I still wouldn’t fuck her cause she’d still be from here, which means she’d still be covered with shit.

My last deployment, my platoon sergeant, he’d say, “Make sure nothing lives. Cows: Taliban food. Sheep: Taliban food. Donkeys: Taliban transportation. Kill everything.”

You know what? Fuck these people.

Spend time around soldiers and you realize a lot of this is part of the game, part of being a young man in war. Still, I sensed more anger and hatred than I had encountered before. Givens spun at its center like a black hole. He was in his mid-20s, charismatic and quick, a combat veteran. He threw down declarations like a hip-hop star—respect yourself and no one else; fuck bitches, get money—and the younger infantrymen revered him. Even officers appeared to defer to his humor, efficiency, and rage.

Platoons are often structured like high school cliques, and Givens stood at the apex of his, setting the tone and example. A list of characteristics scrolled through my mind as I listened to the men, traits I probably learned from episodes of Law & Order, or Lord of the Flies. Pop-culture sociopathy. Sexualized aggression. The displays of wolves.

“This is where I come to do fucked-up things,” Givens said. “So I don’t do them at home.”

This article isn't an indictment of war criminals. It's just observations of the every day way in which war permits the ugly underbelly of humanity to emerge -- and dehumanize almost everything it touches. No matter how "good" you are or how righteous the cause, war itself is a form of psychosis.

As I write, furor is waning in the United States over a YouTube video showing four Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I don’t consider it too surprising, though some writers suggest it is a war crime. It was probably born in a hot moment, without much reflection. Beginner’s foolishness. The men of Destroyer did nothing like that in front of me. They shoved prisoners around, looted cigarettes, wrecked property—things we routinely dismiss in war. But I had seen and sensed enough, and they spoke of past deeds and future desires that leapt beyond the normal bluster of young soldiers.

In speech we give ideas life. I felt I was watching some of the men unravel toward serious crimes, if, in fact, they had not already committed them elsewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq. Evil or atrocity often explodes from a furnace built by the steady accretion of small, unchallenged wrongs. Some men in Destroyer platoon had been drifting that way for a long time.

I think it happens to countries too.

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digby 4/12/2012 05:30:00 PM