Urination at War: Don't Be Mad at the Peeing; Be Mad at the Killing
CORD JEFFERSON
Senior Editor
In 1971, six years after the United States sent combat units into Vietnam, the nonprofit group Vietnam Veterans Against the War sponsored the Winter Soldier Investigation. More a three-day press conference than an actual "investigation," Winter Soldier offered a platform to veterans and civilians who had seen the horrors of Vietnam firsthand and wanted to share their stories with the public.
On the first day, former Marine Joe Bangert was called on to talk about "the slaughter of civilians, the skinning of a Vietnamese woman... and the crucifixion of Vietnamese either suspects or civilians in Vietnam." Before dozens of other soldiers, civilians, and members of the press, Bangert testified that it was common practice for soldiers to not only kill scores of Vietnamese people at a time—some of whom were civilians—but to mutilate the dead. Bangert said sometimes they would disembowel corpses, then explode the bodies with C-4 to destroy the evidence of their sadism. "You don't even think of them as human beings; they're 'gooks,'" Bangert told reporters. "And they're objects; they're not human, they're objects."
Forty years after Bangert's brutal admissions, America and the Middle East are in an uproar about a video that appears to depict four Marines urinating onto the dead, bloodied bodies of Taliban fighters. The video emerged on Wednesday, and in the hours since, many have come forward to express their displeasure: The Taliban spoke up immediately to say it was outraged—though luckily not enough to walk away from Afghan peace talks; Senator John McCain, a Navy man who fought in Vietnam, said the incident "makes me so sad"; and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Thursday called the video "utterly deplorable," adding that he'd ordered a full investigation by the Marine Corps. If the footage is proved to be authentic, the Marines could be brought up on charges of breaking rules of war, some of which prohibit photographing corpses.
What a world we live in, a world in which it's perfectly acceptable to shoot your enemy in the brain so long as you don't take a picture of his exploded head afterward.
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http://www.good.is/post/urination-at-war-don-t-be-mad-at-the-peeing-be-mad-at-the-killing/
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