Candidly, the story of a handful of Marines videotaping themselves urinating on dead Taliban fighters is a subject I’ve feared to broach because it is heart-breaking to think those men so lost their sense of shared humanity — if only for those minutes — as to do what they did. Rep. Allen West has given me a way to write about it, though, by saying it all better than I ever could. In an e-mail to The Weekly Standard, West wrote:
I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.
All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?
The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.
As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.
Without excusing the vulgar, distasteful, disgraceful (insert your adjective here) desecration committed by the Marines themselves, West reminds us that civilians can never fully understand the magnitude of the sacrifices they ask men and women to make on their behalf.
Agree with the above. Ever been shot? Ever been hunters by two VC sniper teams and two russian sniper teams? Lost a partner but killed four. Walked 65 kilometers before an advanced recon. team picked us up. If they would have caught us, we would have been skinned alive, disemboweled and then had our head hacked off while sill alive. War is hell. Smile America, you have been conned again by the yellow press and media..must have been a slow day for the feds if they were trying to hide some activity they were successful.
Alan West has certainly ”been there, done that.”
I am shocked by the reaction among Muslims.
But I know I shouldn’t be.
There is a pecking order in Islam.
Muslim male 100%
Muslim female 25%
Person-of-the-book male 25%
Person-of-the-book female 12.5%
Infidel male worthless
Infidel female less than worthless.
(This is based on the way testimony is rated under Sharia.)
Thus, we see Muslims beat the life nearly out of a girl sold to be a man’s wife only to be ordered to prostitute herself (and refusing).
After she gets away the Afghan Sharia court orders her back to her torturers.
We saw happy Muslim men and children celebrating while the charred bodies of US contractors (Infidels) hung from the Fallujah bridge right behind them. http://www.amfirstbooks.com/IntroPages/ToolBarTopics/Articles/Featured_Authors/chittum-thomas_w/Chittum_Works/ChittumArticles_Art/Chittum_20040427_Fallujah_Bridge.jpg
We learned that in 2010 all of the rapes in all of Norway for the entire year were perpetrated by Muslims onto ethnic Norwegian women.
I’m not going to say what these American soldiers did was right.
But they in no way dehumanized their dead enemies more than Muslims dehumanize living people every day!
Agree with Curt for a change. Uh, it’s war. People get their heads blown off, get burned to death by Hellfire missiles, come back as near-vegetables after being hit by IEDs. Sometimes innocent civilians get killed. Now some already-dead guys get pissed on? And that’s what some people want to get worked up about? Epic perspective fail.
Bravo to Allen West for having the courage to open his mouth unlike those who kept their mouths shut when DICK Durbin, Ted Kennedy, and John Kerry compared us to terrorists and mass murdering dictators. He went to bat for his troops on OIF 1 and continues to support those in harms’ way. I wonder what all of these arm chair general, damn the military types would have done in WWII. There were cases where our troops in the Pacific Theater would put the skulls of Japanese troops on their jeeps etc. Has anyone ever heard these self righteous know it alls complaining about what happened to the Matt Maupins of our military?
The RNC needs to camp outside this man’s door and beg him to enter the race before it’s too late.
@JustAl: It’s too late.
Why can’t this man be MY congressman?
It’s the most rational and reasoned assessment of the incident in question that I’ve yet read. West is the real deal.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
This is why I wanted Allen to run for President. He’s realistic and pragmatic. He’s also not PC in any way shape or form.
General Giap used the same strategy to defeat us in Viet Nam. According tohis book, he was consulting with the leaders of the north on how to end a war they could not win. Then, Jane Fonda and her liberal buddies showed him how to use propoganda and the US media. He learned and was successful. The Muslims are doing the same thing with this and any incident. They are relying on our reaction as they laugh at us. Our efforts at being PC is the same as shooting us in the foot time and time again.
Hi Randy, I don’t support your view of why the USA lost the Vietnam War (Jane Fonda and liberal buddies).
It is the job of the Commander in Chief to be certain that a war is worth fighting in the first place and to be not only honest but accurate in presenting the case for the war to the country. The problem in both Vietnam and Iraq was the disconnect between the justification for war and portrayal of the conditions on the ground and the the reality of these justifications and conditions.
The Pentagon Papers did 100 fold more damage to support for the Vietnam War effort than did the sum total of all the street theatrics and Fonda-ization. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the nation’s leaders were misrepresenting almost everything about the war, from the very beginning, to the American people. The people lost confidence in both civilian and military leadership, with respect to rationale, strategy, tactics, and basic trust and there was simply no support for continuing to sustain 200 American deaths per week.
The Vietnam War was a failure of leadership and not a failure of patriotism on the part of any segment of the American political spectrum. To the extent that the Iraq War did not enjoy durable support, the reasons were of a similar nature, although the magnitude of sacrifice demanded of Americans was vastly less (i.e. no military draft; tax cuts, as opposed to tax increases to support the respective wars, vastly lower casualty rate, etc.).
With respect to General Giap, you need to be more critical in your sourcing:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_general_giap.htm
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
@openid.aol.com/runnswim: Read Giap’s book. Don’t take my word for it! He is the one who changed strategy while Fonda and others committed treason.
Hi Randy, the alleged General Giap claims are urban legend. If you didn’t read (or like) my earlier link (end of comment #11), try this one:
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/giap.asp
– Larry W/HB
@openid.aol.com/runnswim: I have the book Larry, should I copy and send it to you? What reason did he have to lie? He won!
Hi Randy, Why don’t you give the title of the book and the date published and then provide what you feel is the smoking gun quote that all the scholars in the links I provided were unable to locate?
I stand 100% behind everything I’ve written in #11,13, and the present.
In addition to the dubiousness of the claim that American anti-war demonstrators were central to the loss of the war, is the issue of what caused the collapse of public support of the war in the USA. General Giap has no expertise whatsoever in gauging the relative importance of the anti-war protest movement and the publication of the Pentagon Papers. This doesn’t even consider the impact of the Tet offensive, which was the initial trigger in the erosion of public opinion, to which the Pentagon Papers were the coup de grace.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
@openid.aol.com/runnswim: “How We Won the War” by General Vo Nguyen Giap, August 1, 2001 9th printing. Page 18, Paragraph 1. “Politically, the Vietnamese always believed in the anti-war movement, small and as unimportant as it appeared to some of its supporters. They encouraged it as best they could knowing that creating a climate of opinion hostile to the war would be one important way of ending it.”
Hi Randy (#16). Thanks for taking the time to locate the quotation in question, which is nothing more than a brief statement of the obvious. The number one strategy in war is to get the other side to give up. That’s why Mexican drug cartels cut off the heads of their victims. So Giap simply says that the Vietnamese strategy was to get the Americans to give up.
Giap was overly impressed with the impact of the protest movement, which was not responsible for moving the war approval needle down below the sustainable range. What moved this needle was the body count (200 – 300 per week), the Tet offensive, and, in the coup de grace, learning that civilian leaders had been systematically lying to the American people, since the beginning of the war.
The war was lost because of a failure of leadership (the war should never have been fought, but that’s a separate discussion), not because of a rag tag protest movement led by Barbarella. Citizens of a free democracy won’t support a war waged under false pretenses, with false assertions of strategic success. That’s the lesson of Vietnam and, like all history, if we don’t learn and understand it, we are condemned to repeat it.
I don’t want to put words into your mouth, Randy, but you seem to be suggesting that putting anti-war protestors on trial for treason is the way to keep the citizens behind a war effort. I think that the history of this country proves that Americans will willingly make great sacrifices to support a war in which they believe, but no amount of coercion will force them to support a war in which they have come not to believe.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
Reality check. Thanks Allen West.
We live in an incredible country. Vaccinations, clean water, sewer systems, grocery stores, etc., but very few of us see the ugly parts of life. We are protected.
We’ve forgotten or never experienced the ugly parts of life.
Go West!
@openid.aol.com/runnswim:
hanoi janes actions were out right acts of treason not kissey ass protest
My man crush remains. Col. West is the most bad a$$ congressman in the last ?? years. Maybe Davey Crockett is in his league.
He has said he is open to a VP slot. I’m with Just Al. Someone from the RNC needs to be camping outside his door. Perry/West 2012. Joe Biden would call in sick for every debate.
Hi Suds (#19): I happen to agree with you about Jane Fonda’s actions. There’s no controversy about that. My point was that this had absolutely no impact on American public opinion about the war or on political opposition to the war, and it certainly did not contribute in any way to the loss of the war.
This is the public image of Fonda at the time: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062711/ She was hardly a credible spokesperson. Fonda’s actions on her trip to North Vietnam were universally condemned and, to the extent that she was recognized as being connected to the anti-war protest movement, she undermined the credibility of these protests.
– Larry W/HB
@mos 8541: totally agree with you and Curt and Col. West. Civilians and especially politicians have no idea. And by the way….both Hilary and Panetta along with Obumbler are contemplating releasing a group of Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo to appease the active Taliban and hopefully persuade them to negotiate peace with Karzi. The prisoners were caught on the battlefield and were known to have killed 100-1000+ Afghans and Marines. and they are piously upset about a couple of 19 yr old’s acting out after surviving a firefight…..with govt. folks like these who needs enemies? God save us all.
Hi Larry U(#22), If they were “caught on the battlefield,” then they are POWs. The Taliban were not involved in terror strikes against the USA; they are not part of the war on terror; they are part of the Afghan War. Our involvement in the Afghan War is coming to an end and, under international law, I believe that we are required to release POWs following conclusion of our hostilities.
Looking at it another way, we can either care for and feed them at Gitmo in perpetuity or we can use them in some positive way to further negotiations. Afghan warriors are one of the world’s great renewable resources. Each of those men doubtless has 20 young male family members and friends who are out to avenge his incarceration. So it’s not clear to me whether continuing to hold them or releasing them in the furtherance of negotiations is the better course of action, in a strategic sense. I presume that those involved in formulating strategy feel that using them to further negotiation is in our national interest.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
I’ll probably end up in the middle on this one. Jane Fonda should have been tried, convicted, and either imprisoned, exiled, or executed for her actions. However, I do not believe the anti-war movement was THE reason for the outcome of the VN War. It certainly didn’t help matters and may have been a contributing factor, but when you look at U.S. military history, we have won wars in the face of stiff opposition on the homefront before. The Revolutionary War saw a number of people opposed to it (Tories), yet we still won because Washington had a better strategy than the British and there were enough colonists committed to victory. The War of 1812 was supported in the South and West and opposed in the Northeast but we emerged victorious because there were general(s ) (Jackson) who had a winning strategy along with enough Americans committed to victory. There was opposition to the Civil War in the North, but Grant and Sherman finally came up with a winning strategy and there were enough people in the North committed to victory. In more recent times, Iraq was won despite being unpopular because a winning strategy was adopted and put in place by a highly competent general (Petreaus). There were also enough who were committted to victory despite public opinion. On the other hand, WWII wouldn’t have been as successful had there been the anti-war protests and a lack of support back home. It does give aid to the enemy and increase their will to fight. Saying otherwise defies reality. VN had people (those who served there) who were committed to victory but there was a lack of a winning strategy. There was no equivelant of the Surge. Too many pols back home were also not committed to victory. They seemed to treat it as a sideshow. When Johnson made the decision to send troops into harm’s way it should have been the primary focus of his presidency but it wasn’t. The bottom line is, yes you need public support but you also need a winning strategy, competent generals and leaders on the war front, leaders back home who are determined to carry it out once started, and the will to win.
no matter what these men did, considering the circumstances I have to judge them with compasion tempered by the knowlege of the stress they live with 24/7 something the libs holler about all the time but selddom show to a warrior
I have asked myself several times, “Were those Marines drinking on duty?” Otherwise, I have no problem with the situation, but the fact that they all had to urinate a good stream at the same time is indicative of guys enjoying a case of contraband beer and can indicate a more serious lapse of discipline and morale. Being thoughtless enough to record the incident may also indicate alcohol use. Now we are left with the big headache.
CURT THE PAGE IS BLANK AT THE STANDARD, Written unavailable,
bye
I say, when you get the limit cross on WARRIORS, they give you a warning,
this one was a peaceful one,
the MARINES KNOW about the dealing with TALIBAN, AND they must have been so damn disgusted about it,
THEY ARE THE PROUD WARRIORS OF THIS UNITED STATES, AND DESERVE NO PUNISHMENTS AT ALL
THEY DON’T GET HUMILIATED BY NOBODY DEALING WITH THE ENEMY, THIS IS ONE OF IT,
THEY GAVE A MESSAGE TO LEADERS IN THE WHITE HOUSE, AND YOU BETTER TAKE IT,
SHAME ON those who are giving the ROE TO A FALSE WAR WITH NO CHANCE OF WINNING,
AND SENDING WARRIORS THE BEST OF AMERICA TO HAVE THEM PLAY YOUR GAME,
THEY WHERE NOT TRAIN FOR VIDEO GAMES, THEY ARE TRAINED TO WIN WARS,
AND YOU HAVE RESTRAINED THEM TO OVER THE LIMIT MENTAL ANGER,
YOU LET THEM DOWN,
NOW ENJOY THE VIDEO, AND FEEL WHAT THEY THINK OF THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF,
Putting aside my love for the Marine Corps. I will say I had several distinct thoughts to this.
First – what an stupid thing to do, putting it online for everyone to see.
Second – so much for your careers in the military or anywhere else if you get anything less than an honorable
Third – at least they didn’t strip them, drag their bodies through the streets (Somalia) or repeat all of the above , then set them on fire and proceed to hang them from a bridge (our contractors) OR…behead them ala Danny Pearl, Paul Johnson, Nick Berg and others. Or stuff their ears and genitalia in their mouths like was done to Menchaca and Tucker.
Fourth – I’d piss on them too if they tried to kill me
Fifth – what, we don’t have anything more important to get outraged about? Let’s see, recess appointments, trillions in debt, power grabs and a country circling the drain. Oh boy.
BEFORE one hair of those MARINES is touch,
EXECUTE the TRAITORS IN AMERICA, FROM THE TOP JOBS TO THE ONE
LIVING ON THE TAXPAYERS,
THEN YOU WILL GIVE YOUR OPINION ON THE BRAVEST OF AMERICA.
THEY HAVE SPILL THEIR BLOOD FOR AMERICA
BLOOD FOR BLOOD, GET THE TRAITORS FIRST
BESIDE; they had to find a secure place to piss on,
nobody want to piss on IEDS,
@ilovebeeswarzone: Good one!
BESIDE; It’s the best way to clean the dead bodies, when there is no water around,
who’s complaining for
BESIDE; It was a brilliant way to avoid being contaminated before picking up those bodies to hand them to the AFGHANS FAMILIES, TO BE BURIED.
@USMCdaughter1: My kind of girl!