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 . 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.
“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.”
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.”
The child died.
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
I guess ClintonWar, where you just drop bombs from 30,000 feet, is morally preferable.
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.
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.
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.”
Found guilty today…
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.
Of course, from a European perspective, it is entirely possible that both Clinton and Bush could be a fault, albeit in different ways.
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.
“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…
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review