Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia is facing a court martial for refusing to go back to Iraq. His case is described in “Bob Herbert’s column in the NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/opinion/21HERB.html?hp . His testimony about the morally corrosive circumstances in which soldiers find themselves in wars of this kind is eloquent. The situation is underdescribed, but it sounds as if his friend was legally justified in shooting the child he shot. That doesn’t seem to have made things any easier.
bq. “Imagine being in the infantry in Ramadi, like we were,” he said, “where you get shot at every day and you get mortared where you live, [and attacked] with R.P.G.’s [rocket-propelled grenades], and people are dying and getting wounded and maimed every day. A lot of horrible things become acceptable.”
bq. He spoke about a friend of his, a sniper, who he said had shot a child about 10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. “He realized it was a kid,” said Sergeant Mejia. “The kid tried to get up. He shot him again.”
bq. The child died.
bq. All you really want to do in such an environment, said Sergeant Mejia, is “get out of there alive.” So soldiers will do things under that kind of extreme stress that they wouldn’t do otherwise.
bq. “You just sort of try to block out the fact that they’re human beings and see them as enemies,” he said. “You call them hajis, you know? You do all the things that make it easier to deal with killing them and mistreating them.”
bq. When there is time later to reflect on what has happened, said Sergeant Mejia, “you come face to face with your emotions and your feelings and you try to tell yourself that you did it for a good reason. And if you don’t find it, if you don’t believe you did it for a good reason, then, you know, it becomes pretty tough to accept it — to willingly be a part of the war.”
{ 10 comments }
Conrad Barwa 05.21.04 at 10:04 am
All you really want to do in such an environment, said Sergeant Mejia, is “get out of there alive.†So soldiers will do things under that kind of extreme stress that they wouldn’t do otherwise.
Very true, which is why I find arguments such as ‘I know such soldiers, etc. they are good boys, they would never do this kind of thing’ so tedious. This kind of assumption rests heavily on observations based only in a selected environment; when you move towards one where bullets start flying around things change quite rapidly and people have never ceased to surprise me in this regard – the oddest things happen, as those who you wouldn’t credit seriously turn out to demonstrate hidden reserves of courage and those whose training and record would lead you to expect more of them, crack under pressure. At the level of the individual and personal experience, war really isn’t just a continuation of politics; it has a real tendency to fuck you up.
mm 05.21.04 at 1:55 pm
I guess ClintonWar, where you just drop bombs from 30,000 feet, is morally preferable.
a lesser mongbat 05.21.04 at 2:02 pm
This sort of mental situation has been repeatedly documented in stories of war. To a modern American, what comes to mind first is the Vietnam experience, with individuals who went to a war overseas coming back as fundamentally changed creatures who could not reintegrate into normal life. Many people can relate a story of a relative or friend who was in a war and spent the rest of their life recovering.
On the milder end of such things, my grandfather was a WW2 vet who saw action in many of the larger battles in the Pacific, and he slept with a .45 and a knife close at hand for the remainder of his life after the war. You sure didn’t want to get close to him when he was asleep. On more than one occasion, he nearly killed his cat, thinking in the half-awareness of dreams that it was a Japanese soldier when it jumped on his chest as he was sleeping.
This mental cost of war is very real, and for those affected it is the end of a peaceful life and the beginning of perpetual paranoia. Sadly, it is a cost all too rarely accounted for in the calculations of war.
Barry 05.21.04 at 3:13 pm
Awwwwwwwwwwwww, mm, you *know* that you are supposed to wait until at least comment #5 before you start blaming Clinton. Excuse me, the Evul Librul Klintooooon.
Bob 05.21.04 at 3:39 pm
Recent news from the Financial Times posted on Friday:
“Crispin Blunt, a British opposition MP who has just returned from Iraq, however, described the preparations for the handover on July 1 as a ‘complete shambles’.
“The former soldier and Conservative MP described the US approach to occupation as little more than ‘a campaign to intimidate the Iraqi people’.
“He said that UK troops in Iraq did not yet know what their status would be once the new interim government took over on July 1.
“‘We are seeing the collapse of American policy,’ he told BBC radio’s Today programme.”
theophylact 05.21.04 at 10:18 pm
Found guilty today…
mm 05.21.04 at 10:20 pm
Actually, Barry, I voted for Clinton. And he wasn’t that liberal. But I do think that the method of waging war where you just fire off cruise missiles or drop bombs, and never see or fear your enemy, is immoral. Stephen Carter has written on this at much more length than I can here, so I will simply refer to him.
Bob 05.21.04 at 10:55 pm
Of course, from a European perspective, it is entirely possible that both Clinton and Bush could be a fault, albeit in different ways.
Andrew Reeves 05.22.04 at 1:23 am
To a modern American, what comes to mind first is the Vietnam experience, with individuals who went to a war overseas coming back as fundamentally changed creatures who could not reintegrate into normal life.
The Taxi Driver/First Blood image of the half-mad Vietnam Vet, never able to re-integrate into society because of his hellish experiences in Vietnam has a large component of myth to it. In his book Stolen Valor, B.G. Burkett, himself a Vietnam veteran has done a great deal of research to debunk the idea that the average Vietnam Vet hovers on the verge of psychosis.
This is not to deny that horrible things happen in combat; they do. People who have experienced these things, though, usually manage to get on with their lives. The main sign that someone has experienced some fairly traumatic combat is not in the person being a complete wreck, but rather that they do not really like to talk about it. Indeed, someone’s tendency to tell stories of whatever war he participated in is usually directly proportional to his distance from the actual shooting.
Ken 05.24.04 at 6:16 pm
“But I do think that the method of waging war where you just fire off cruise missiles or drop bombs, and never see or fear your enemy, is immoral.”
Well, hell, killing them in the first place is immoral. Sometimes you have to do it anyway. I don’t see how you get a lot of extra immorality just because you’re protecting yourself from them while you’re shooting them.
What would have been really immoral is throwing away our ground troops on a ground invasion of Serbia. It’s a good thing those troops were still around when we actually needed them a couple of years later…
Comments on this entry are closed.