George Paine at Warblogging finds a good reason to long for the days of Victory Gardens and Private Ryan:
- An in-depth study recently released into the public domain shows that in World War II — this nation’s “good war” or “best war” — only about 15% of American combat soldiers actually tried to kill someone. Those thousands upon thousands of Americans under combat arms, they could not bring themselves to kill other human beings — even Nazis, even Imperial Japanese soldiers willing to kill themselves to kill Americans.
Chris Floyd has written in the Moscow Times that this has changed. When the Pentagon learned that so many of its soldiers failed to fire at the enemy it saw this as a problem to be solved… and solved it. Now the mantra “Kill, kill, kill, kill…” is ingrained in young Americans in Basic Training. Eighteen and nineteen year olds are taught rhymes like “This is my weapon, this is my gun…” Now 95% of soldiers fire at the enemy.
Floyd writes:
“Today, in the quagmire of occupied Iraq, the brutalizing beat goes on. ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it’s like it pounds in my brain,’ a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times last week. Another shrugged at the sight of freshly killed bodies. ‘It doesn’t bother me at all,’ he said. ‘I’m a warrior.’ Said a third: ‘We talk about killing all the time. I never used to be this way … but it’s like I can’t stop. I’m worried what I’ll be like when I get home.’ A few military officials are beginning to worry, too, noting the high rates of suicide, mental damage and emotional torment among combat veterans.”
Back here on the Home Front we hear of Iraqi families being eviscerated at checkpoints. We hear stories from people like Lamea Hassan, a 36-year-old pregnant mother. “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off… My girls – I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Read it. It’s enough to make a cynical young punk like me indulge in Greatest Generation nostalgia.
