June is Here: Haditha May Have Gone as an Issue?

Fear and behaviour in combat is I am sure a strange thing.

I am 60. I have never been in real combat. I have been fired upon accidentally while working as a teacher in Sierra Leone. This was by spent bullets fired randomly in the air dring a riot not shots aimed deliberatly at me.

I choose to play a computer game called Battlefield II. I do so to learn a little of what all the young men and some young women I see in Internet cafes all around the world are doing and why.

I am banned from two sites for team killing. This was never ever deliberate just that in the simulated fear of close combat and in a firefight I fired too quickly, too often, and killed soldiers on my own side. Such carelessness deserves the punishemnet I received. It has also taught me how easy it is to do the wrong thing in the excitement and simulated fear of the intensity of the moment. I can imagine just a little what it must be like when in addition I would be fearing for my own life and that of my colleagues with no chance of pressing a button to come alive and start in combat again.

Soldiers do the wrong thing in the pressure of a moment but of course that is not really a strange thing and is ot the same as in the aftermath of a fierce firefight deliberately with revenge in your heart coldly and deliberately killing other soldiers never mind civilians in Haditha.

i have just seen a US military spokesman saying there was not truth in the allocation in the sam bulletin where I saw an interview with a US Marin eCorps deserter who said his sergeant had told him that they would cover for him if he accidentally killed a civilian and who had talked toa colleague who had lit a cigarette of the burning body of a an Iragi "combatent?" just killled in a firefight. I do not find it difficult to believe both therwsse stories.

I remember such macabre humour when I worked with mountain rescue teams in my youth. They would stick cigarettes in the mouth of corpses on the mountain ledge with them before starting to carry it down the mountain in the blizzard surrounding us.

To those who have never been faced with the intensity of real fear and the actuality of death in the moment such behaviour is difficult to comprehend but it is simply a way for heavily traumatised individuals to cope with their own fear and sustain a degreee if sanity in what is a horrendous and fearful situation.

It is also comprenhesible that after the immediate fear and trauma has subsided one might entertain thoughts of revenge for what one has been through and what your mates have just died from but such thoughts are not actions nor is it defensible that they become so.

In the midst of a firefight when you or your best buddy could die in the moment acting on such thoughts while wrong is comprehsible and so for me excusable but as deliberate acts after things have calmed down never. They may be thought about but ought never acted upon other than by the crazy and over traumatized who at the very least need hospitalized and maybe be desrving of execution.

However please remeber ones enemy always sees and believes things differently. We all use tales of attrocity as justification for our own attrocity. they never can or should be if we hope in the end to be human.