On March 12 of last year four young American soldiers -- Steven Green, James Barker, Jesse Spielman and Paul Cortez -- raped 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza in a village southeast of Baghdad. While they took turns on the girl, one of them shot and killed her parents and younger sister in the next room. When they were done, they killed the teen with shots to the head and then tried to burn her body.
In wartime, horrible things happen every day. Many are part of the accepted rituals of fighting and killing, but some are so far beyond anyone's idea of what is justifiable that soldiers are court-martialed, imprisoned and sometimes executed. When someone does what these four guys did, they must be held responsible and they must be punished.
But there is a bigger picture here and it is this: When you train people to become killers and when you put them in a place where they see so much violence that it desensitizes them, then they become desensitized killers. For some, it is impossible to recalibrate from one day or one setting to the next, even after they come home. You can't put toothpaste back in the tube.
Today I saw In the Valley of Elah at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge. Tommy Lee Jones gives a masterful performance as the father of a soldier who comes back from the Iraq War a different person and then goes missing. The film is partly a meditation on how cruelty and violence are planted in people and how they spread and grow.
Atrocities have always occurred in wartime and they always will. Soldiers get messed up mentally as well as physically in war zones, and some return to take out their fears and frustrations on their spouses and children. Because of such consequences, the civilian leadership of the military must be extremely careful about sending troops into battle and we, as voters, have to be extremely careful about who we install in the White House and hand the levers of power to.
In 2000 and 2004 -- collectively -- we failed.
4 comments:
Amen
Hi, Jim. Thanks for writing about the war. It's true, old men send young men off to war, and it's the young who suffer the most. The rapes and killings were horrific, no one can dispute that and no one should. Other psychological and behavioral changes faced by military men and women, since time began, need to be addressed. We need to tell those old men and women in Washington to fund fully healthcare needs of our service personnel. We need to stop telling our veterans that they will have a long wait before receiving counseling and other services.
I have a relative now serving in Iraq and another returned from a ten month tour of duty there. I display the single star flag on my door, not just in recognition of a relative's being in Iraq, but to remind me every day that there is a war going on, even while the rest of us go about our daily routines. Yesterday, I attended a reception for a friend's son, a Marine who came back this month from a tour in Fallujah. He has to go back in six months for another tour. Thank God he returned safely. So many have not.
Again, Jim, thank you for posting your comments. It was a much-needed dose of reality.
Sincerely,
Mary Berninger
I was against invading Iraq from the start, and I was furious when Thomas Friedman -- the influential conservative NY Times columnist -- said on one of the talk shows last Sunday that, "Iraq is full of surprises."
No, it's not. What is happening is exactly what many people said would happen. To act as if we had no way of knowing that this disaster was possible and that the US would be mired there for years is to cover up the fact that those who supported the invasion didn't want to listen to any contradictory points of view.
Having said that, it is a disgrace the way our nation sings the praises of fighting for the country in order to convince young people to join the military and their families to consent, only to offer less than the best medical care when they return home. It is a hypocrisy of the Republican Party and this president that should be pointed out and examined publicly more often.
I agree Jimbo.
But, I also think we should report the atrocities that our troops face daily.
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