You would have had to have lived under a huge rock to not have heard about the controversy stirring all over the world over the video footage that has surfaced of the small group of United States Marines who were recorded on video urinating on the dead corpses of enemy opposition recently in Afghanistan.
And while I am not really too much up on the details of this particular story and I will really let the news programs do the honors in that category but when I saw the little that I did of the footage and heard a few comments on this Shakespearean style tragedy, I couldn’t help but to manifest a few private thoughts of my own that I am about to share with you in the preceding paragraphs.
This situation can be viewed pro and con in so many different ways, that is why it will rage on for a time much longer in the news because it has the ingredients within to have a much longer “shelf life” than the typical here today and gone tomorrow type of story.
The masses of those who call themselves Americans in the so called mainstream are so blindly patriotic. At times they have been so patriotic it borders in some cases being almost idiotic. You have extreme cases out there of folks believing that the crazy things that they do is in the spirit of nationalism yet they are the only one acting like a fool actually demeaning the overall cause because of their foolish deeds.
I don’t really understand this blind passion that binds so many Americans together in a spirit of temporary unity because I have never been included in it until it was time to have been the victim of an intense coercion to join the armed forces during the time of the uncertainties of a pending war.
But where do we draw the line as to what is proper professional behavior with the men and women of the military as to what is proper and improper behavior? I mean, not to make any excuses for them because in my book they were dead wrong for pissing on those dead bodies even though those same deceased men would have probably done the equivalent or even worse in some bizarre way back to them.
But on the con side of the equation, they truly were not thinking of the consequences of their actions because while they may have thought that they were enjoying some sort of male bonding victory celebration while the natural tide of testosterone flowed high,they actually tore down and literally destroyed what little good of am image they possessed to those in the middle east who may have had a lukewarm feeling toward a military presence in their region of the world. If they were riding the fence of personal opinion with the door left slightly ajar to consider the option that maybe the American military might be a great idea being there then it went right out of the window with that display of buffoonery!
What type of damage control do you utilize to “undo” what that video recording put into motion worldwide with its release?
How do the Marines change their image when that visual will stick in the minds of the people worldwide and never go away thanks to the internet?
Imagine the jokes?
On the pro side of trying to understand what made them commit these image damaging acts, I have to “possibly” sympathize with them because could you imagine going somewhere and not knowing if you are going to come back alive after being trained to kill or be killed? (But then again, there are some ‘hoods in America where one would feel the same way when embarking on a short walk to the neighborhood supermarket, you just don’t know if you are going to return alive or in one piece! So much for war induced stress! We have it right here in the good old U.S. of A!)
But imagine the need for some type of relief, even after pretty much knowing that you made it through where does the tension go after the war or battle is over?
Surely the act of war will put normal sane human beings in a state of mind that is not anything that you or I as civilians could ever understand. If in fact these young men were the victims of some type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, then surely they would need some type of intensive mental counseling in order to acclimate themselves for reentry into society because we wouldn’t want anyone who was capable of committing such an act lurking around us as a potential time bomb.
Maybe I will never know what it is like to be put into such an inhuman situation not only for a few moments, but for months or years on end. Maybe these individuals who did this were truly sick but as history dictates, there have been plenty of incidents where the scalps and heads of the enemy were saved for the ceremonious victory celebration at the conclusion of battle.
Maybe those historic atrocities would have been just as ugly to us now if we could have seen a video recording from those brutal days back in history where these acts were just as commonplace and the ugliness of it was reduced due to not having the technology that we have today.
But to pull back the scope of this issue I ask is there any benefit to war anyway? What will these images spawn in the near future as I am quite sure that the so called terrorists were just salivating at such a perfect propaganda weapon that would be used as a recruiting tool to get even more young men and women “gung-ho” in the fight against the western world.
The bottom line is that the video of the U.S. Marines didn’t do anyone any good at all.
Were they justified? I’m quite sure that many will think so. Will it come back to haunt us? I think so, but while we raise our arms in victory we really can’t drop our guard because we don’t seem to understand that with the people in the Middle East, a war is not something that begins and ends with the command of an elected official, it’s a way of life.
Can we handle the constant threat as a lifestyle as they do? Heck, if we can’t even keep our heads on straight after a few years of deployment where we react to the stress by pissing on corpses, then we have shown that we just do not have what it takes to fight on in the long haul.
…….and THAT’S where the true victories are claimed.
Get ready for the “next one” people, ’cause the stakes have just been raised a whole lot higher. Pissing on dead people just pissed a lot of people off who want to do a whole lot more than piss on us in life!
