thedrifter
08-10-06, 02:33 PM
Another voice / Iraq war
Marines at Haditha deserve benefit of the doubt
By RONALD A. ARNOLD
8/10/2006
I strongly disagree with much of a recent Another Voice column titled, "Tragedy of Haditha is sadly predictable." Haditha is the Iraqi city where eight Marines and a Navy corpsman are accused of killing 24 Iraqi men, women and children. For the record, I'm a combat-disabled Marine veteran of the Korean War.
As of now, the nine men are charged with the crime, which they have denied, but there has been no trial yet and the matter remains under investigation. They deserve the benefit of the doubt, not an assumption of guilt. Can anyone seriously doubt that insurgents might have killed those people, and then pinned it on a Marine unit in that area?
Such an act is so foreign to the Marines I have known that it is inconceivable that they would murder women and children asleep in their beds, no matter what their combat experiences might have been.
The writer, Stephen Banko, says, "The Marines are probably the best-trained warriors in the world." Yet he claims "overtraining and overdeployment," not a lack of training, "causes the moral erosion that finds outlet in the mass murder of civilians."
How then do we explain the massacre in the Vietnamese village of My Lai that was subsequently blamed on the lack of training and poor leadership by officers and NCOs of the responsible Army unit led by Lt. William L. Calley? Which is it? Overtraining and strict discipline, or under-training and laxity?
The ongoing analysis of Marine training and the type of man who leaves Parris Island or the San Diego Recruit Depot is terribly flawed. The writer mentions the Stanley Kubrick movie "Full Metal Jacket" as providing a "realistic" look at the training. Most of the Marines I know who saw the movie thought it was very much overdone.
What is true is that Marine training will take you to the limits of your physical and psychological endurance. And that is its very purpose, for if you cannot deal with the extreme challenges of boot camp, you will never survive the realities of war. Those who can't deal with the training are sent home.
Of Marine training the writer says, "strength and ruthlessness are virtues to be cultivated." Ruthlessness? I know Marines who fought at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, the Frozen Chosin and the horrendous outpost battles of Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and have met a few who have returned from Iraq. They're from the same mold, and I would not characterize any of them as "ruthless," either from training or their lengthy and intense war experiences.
Marines are also trained to understand that there are such things as illegal orders, and they are not to be obeyed even if they come from the commandant of the Marine Corps or the president of the United States. The killing of prisoners or civilians was among the examples that I recall from that lecture given 54 years ago. If I had committed an atrocity against civilians, it would have been my failure, not that of the corps or my country.
Ronald A. Arnold lives in Buffalo.
Ellie
Marines at Haditha deserve benefit of the doubt
By RONALD A. ARNOLD
8/10/2006
I strongly disagree with much of a recent Another Voice column titled, "Tragedy of Haditha is sadly predictable." Haditha is the Iraqi city where eight Marines and a Navy corpsman are accused of killing 24 Iraqi men, women and children. For the record, I'm a combat-disabled Marine veteran of the Korean War.
As of now, the nine men are charged with the crime, which they have denied, but there has been no trial yet and the matter remains under investigation. They deserve the benefit of the doubt, not an assumption of guilt. Can anyone seriously doubt that insurgents might have killed those people, and then pinned it on a Marine unit in that area?
Such an act is so foreign to the Marines I have known that it is inconceivable that they would murder women and children asleep in their beds, no matter what their combat experiences might have been.
The writer, Stephen Banko, says, "The Marines are probably the best-trained warriors in the world." Yet he claims "overtraining and overdeployment," not a lack of training, "causes the moral erosion that finds outlet in the mass murder of civilians."
How then do we explain the massacre in the Vietnamese village of My Lai that was subsequently blamed on the lack of training and poor leadership by officers and NCOs of the responsible Army unit led by Lt. William L. Calley? Which is it? Overtraining and strict discipline, or under-training and laxity?
The ongoing analysis of Marine training and the type of man who leaves Parris Island or the San Diego Recruit Depot is terribly flawed. The writer mentions the Stanley Kubrick movie "Full Metal Jacket" as providing a "realistic" look at the training. Most of the Marines I know who saw the movie thought it was very much overdone.
What is true is that Marine training will take you to the limits of your physical and psychological endurance. And that is its very purpose, for if you cannot deal with the extreme challenges of boot camp, you will never survive the realities of war. Those who can't deal with the training are sent home.
Of Marine training the writer says, "strength and ruthlessness are virtues to be cultivated." Ruthlessness? I know Marines who fought at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, the Frozen Chosin and the horrendous outpost battles of Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and have met a few who have returned from Iraq. They're from the same mold, and I would not characterize any of them as "ruthless," either from training or their lengthy and intense war experiences.
Marines are also trained to understand that there are such things as illegal orders, and they are not to be obeyed even if they come from the commandant of the Marine Corps or the president of the United States. The killing of prisoners or civilians was among the examples that I recall from that lecture given 54 years ago. If I had committed an atrocity against civilians, it would have been my failure, not that of the corps or my country.
Ronald A. Arnold lives in Buffalo.
Ellie