Thanks to Jack Wakeland for his clarifications. They were eminantly logical and very helpful.
“What is the evidence for saying that two of Senator Kerry’s purple heart awards were claimed fraudulently?”
Got to www.swiftvets.com.
“I notice that you leave the door open to claims of atrocity by saying “nearly every single war-crime claim” and “most of the ‘perpetrators’” (emphasis added).”
Yeah, of course. All wars contain violations of the conventions of war. They always have and always will. In war, laws against wanton cruelty and killing are observed – by the best of nations – about as well as the laws against speeding are observed on America’s roads.
Throughout history up to the present, all Asian armies have fought wars without rules. Every form of human depravity, degredation and outrage is premitted --even encouraged.
In a conflict where civilized restraints on the treatment of the enemy provide no incentive for the enemy to restrain itself, why have rules and why follow them?
The answer is that the rules are intended to slow the normal breakdown of the individual human mind when exposed to continuous combat. The individual can function in the malevolent universe of the battlefield only if he believes it is limited in time and scope.
As a soldier witnessess more and more of his comrades die, he will become more and more convinced that he cannot control his own survival; that his own actions are irrelevent to his chances of making it. Long enough continuous exposure to sudden death on the battlefield will convince the soldier that survival is impossible. Insanity follows. (Experience indicates that the threshold for widespread ‘shell-shock’ or ‘battle fatigue’ is about 25% killed 50% wounded…In WWII this took about 120 days of combat in the European Theatre, 40 to 60 days in the Pacific.)
The laws of war reduce the rate of killing on the battlefield and offer the soldier, committed to combat for the duration of a long campaign, two ways off the field alive – being wounded or surrendering (most conventions are about protection of medical presonnel and the treatment of prisoners and of the wounded).
When the enemy abides no conventions, American solidiers will violate the rules more often. The degree to which the American armed forces stayed within the laws of war in Vietnam was extraordinary. As a group, one could not have expected more of them.
In Vietnam, for every Lt. Calley who committed a war crime, there was an American who stopped one. At My Lai, the massacre was stopped short of its completion by two helicopter pilots who interposed their aircraft between unarmed women and children who were fleeing a group of maurading American infantrymen. At the command of a righteous officer piloting one of the craft, the door gunner leveled his 7.62mm machine gun on the marauders…stopping their action.
We should be PROUD of how well America’s young men held up and held onto their humanity on the battlefields of Vietnam.
(If I recall correctly, it was under the John Kerry mindset – the view that the whole Vietnam War as a ‘crime’ – that war criminals like Lt. Calley were seen as victims of American anti-communism, rather than the prepetrators of mass murder. And Lt. Calley was pardoned before serving a siginficant term in prison as a blind rebellion by conservatives against the John Kerry war crime mentality.)
By contrast, in the island campaign against the Empire of Japan – the most brutalizing war American men have ever been subjected to – essentially every law of war was laid flat by American troops, out of retaliation for the barbarous nature of the Jap.
American prisoners were bayonetted, starved, beheaded, shot, and deprived of medical care by their Japanese captors – only 1/3 of prisoners survived Japanese internment. And on the battlefield, most occaisions when Japanese troops surrendered, it was a ruse…a way of killing Yankees.
In the insanity of their mental breakdown – which was hastened by the lack of rules – Japanese soldiers chopped American bodies up and threw the pieces down hills into American rifle pits, mutillated American dead, cutting off genitals and stuffing them in mouths, and – in a number of cases – butchered and ate the internal organs of their adversaries in a homoerrotic celebrations of dominance.
Banzi charges were as much an orgy of mass suicide as they were a last attempt to kill American adversaries. Behind the frontal wave of screeming combatants standing, screeming and charging straight into American machine guns…there was often of field filled with Japanese comrades-in-arms killing each other and crying. They would shoot each other, cut off each other’s heads, and lie close together to share a grenade.
The American response was predictable and shocking. All Japanese solidiers who attempted to surrender were systematically shot dead. Infantrymen made trophies of enemy bones. And – in one instance – when American forces reached a major Japanese field hospital, all were massacred. First the commandant of the hospital sent the female staff out to surrender. They ran out of the hospital barracks with their hands up, stripped to the waist to show they were women. American riflemen methodically shot each dead. The commandant attempted to rally the wounded to defend the hospital, but they were quickly overwhelmed. When American soldiers entered wards filled with incompacitated Japanese men, the G.I.s bayonetted each and every one of them where they lay.
So, no, war crimes were not a major issue in Vietnam. They were an issue in the Pacific campaign in WW II.
If this is a predictable response to the physical and psychological affects of war, then out of respect to the lives of American soldiers, the norm of war should be massive air campaigns and very large bombs. Really, why subject American boys to a living type of hell where atrocities are unavoidable? Dr. Binswanger once remarked that dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most moral acts of warfare in the 20th century. From Jack’s description of the horrors of infantry combat, I can see the truth of that statement.
Once again I have to thank Jack Wakeland for bringing such valuable information to the discussion. Many Libertarians and ersatz Objectivists (Sciabarra and Silber, etc) lambaste American troops for ‘atrocities’ both in Vietnam and Iraq. Now I see that they speak from total ignorance.
“…why subject American boys to a living type of hell where atrocities are unavoidable?”
Sorry about the very ugly post about war crimes, but there is no way to dress them up.
Ugly or not, close-in combat is an unavoidable necessity of our national security.
The best way to preserve the lives and limbs (and to prevent the temporary insanity of ‘battle fatigue’) is to provide American infantrymen with the best training, best weapons, best equipment, best communications, best artillery and air support, and the best organization to back them up from the rear areas.
That has been done in Iraq.
For example, night vision equipment issued to every single infantrymen allows them to accurately aim their rifles and light machine guns in the dark. Exploiting this advantage, most American infantry assaults last spring were conducted at night. This has the added advantage of allowing our young men to kill without being able to clearly see the brutality of their own actions. In one revealing interview in the Washington Post an American rifleman relayed how horrible he and all his comrades felt after a very successful daylight action against Sadr’s militia…even though they had been doing the same thing at night, every night, for over two weeks.
The difference in combat effectiveness between the two sides in the skrimishes with Iraqi militia pretty much guarantees that no American soldier or Marine will suffer ‘combat fatigue.’ None will be given to semi-suicidal fits of rage that can sometimes seize a soldier after he has seen too many of his comrades die.
The conditions in Iraq are not conductive to the commission of war crimes by American or Iraqi national troops. They are, however, good conditions for breeding crimes of brutallization and rage – above and beyond what Islamism already allows – among the anti-Western militiamen. This is the reason why the devout Muslim combatants of Iraq now consistently violate their relegion’s strictures against fouling the bodies of the dead – who are supposed to be washed clean and wearing fresh clothes so as to be presentable to Allah. If I were an Iraqi civilian, I’d stay well clear of them.
Was this fully or partially responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison incident? And, keeping the context, how bad a violation really was the prison abuse scandal?