I originally thought to add this post under the last entry, but decided to make this its own item.  I don’t know the taste of the battle field, but I imagine that it cannot be good for the human psyche.  A wall needs to be built between the duty and the reality of things.  Sometimes this wall loses its strength when the mission deviates from the job.

“In one 48-hour period, we killed over 30 civilians in vehicles that got past our roadblocks. We just lit ‘em up with gunfire. But when we went to pull the charred corpses out of the cars we never found any weapons. They were just civilians. I could start feeling the depression come back. I knew what it was from.”

In a meeting one day, his lieutenant asked him if he was feeling OK. Massey replied no, and told the lieutenant that “we’re committing genocide and leaving enough depleted uranium around to continue genocidal activity for a long time.”

“Do you really believe that?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes,” replied Massey, “or I wouldn’t have said it.”

“I knew my career in the Marine Corps was over at that point,” he added.

War is hell, yes, but it seems as though we, the standard-bearers for justice, are breaking the rules of engagement in response to unconventional warfare tactics.  How does America straddle the line?  In addition, how can we justify the evilness of a tactic employed once, long ago, in the very liberation of our own country?  What of the soldiers stretched so thin that their walls have crumbled so much that the death and maiming possess their minds with a grip of iron?  War is hell, indeed.

We Just Lit ‘Em Up

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