We Must Condemn This. But Still . . .

The LA Times had today -- Memorial Day, of all days -- the first article I have seen that places some context around the Marine shooting in Haditha, Iraq (a city I suspect is likely to become as familiar to us all as My Lai): Bloody Scenes Haunt a Marine .

I reserve judgment on the facts. The marine interviewed in the story was not a witness to the killing of Iraqi civilians. He just helped clean up the mess. So, it is premature, perhaps, to say what exactly happened and why. There may yet (hope, hope) be a defensible explanation. But, the likelihood of that seems small. There is such an overwhelming incentive to keep this type of stuff "under wraps" that once a story like this hits the public media -- out of DOD's own mouth -- one has some justification to conclude that something truly horrible -- out of control -- probably happened.

I am sorry Truman Capote is dead. If this is as bad as it seems likely to be, the best outcome for the long term -- for the good of ourselves and our armed forces -- would be for a great journalist/documentarian to get behind the sorts of facts that are presented in investigations and trials and to get inside the minds and histories of the people and the effect of the circumstances of the event on those minds. If it happened, the only really important question is WHY? And we need something considerably more sophisticated than a trial transcript to answer than question.

You can get the barest hint of the context from the article linked above:

Shortly after 7 a.m. on Nov. 19, Briones, who received a Purple Heart during a previous tour in Iraq that included fierce fighting in Fallouja, said his team of five men was called to respond to a roadside bomb explosion about 300 yards outside Kilo Company's Firm Base Sparta, located in an abandoned school.

When they arrived about 10 minutes later at the smoky, chaotic scene in a residential neighborhood, he said he saw the remains of his best friend, Lance Cpl. Miguel "T.J." Terrazas, his body split in half, resting in the destroyed Humvee in which he had been riding.

"He had a giant hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back up in his skull," Briones recalled of the 20-year-old Texan. Briones said he draped a poncho over the body of his drinking buddy and workout partner and said a short prayer over his body: "Rest in peace. You are my brother by another mother. I love you, man."

The attachments that men-in-arms make with each other is the stuff of legend. Everyone who ever wrote on or thought about the subject will tell you that men fight not for country, not for the cause, not for such abstractions as freedom or democracy -- not for anything we thank them for on Memorial Day. They fight and are willing to risk death for only one thing: each other. The only thing that keeps a man in line in the face of terror none of us can even imagine is a sense that he is responsibile to and for of his "buddies." With very few exceptions, the ONLY thing soldiers are willing to risk dying for is the other men (and women) in their units.

So, when one of those buddies gets cleaved in half by something as random as a roadside bomb, after months and months of trying to fight so faceless an enemy, it is not hard to understand why they would go slightly or even totally insane. And, in that moment, the only thing they will want is revenge.

It is a real conundrum for the armed services. To make an effective fighting force, they need to instill a sense of "unit" that borders on family. Yet they have to also train them, when a member of their "family" is destroyed by a faceless enemy, to act with restraint and reason and something akin to a presumption of innocence.

That's a very, very hard thing to do, and the amazing, truly amazing thing, is how rarely that training beaks down in a big way.

In case anyone was wondering, I do not condone or excuse what happened (assuming it did). This is something we must condemn, and, if they did it, the perpetrators deserve little sympathy and no mercy. But, as the man said, "before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes."