So the Afghan government says "your bombs killed 70 civilians when you bombed one of our villages" and the U.S. Army says "no, we only killed seven civilians, everybody else was a terrorist." Only problem is, this is the 21st century. Everybody has a cell phone. And almost all of these cell phones have the ability to make movies. There's video of the bodies of 11 dead children laid out in the village square in the aftermath of the bombing. I guess four of those dead children were actually terrorists, whoa, beware the baby rattles of mass destruction!
Actually, the problem is that you have soldiers doing the job of policemen in the first place. The job of a soldier is to kill people, and to kill them with as little loss to his own side as possible. Overwhelming force is, and always has been, the way to do that. That's a soldier's job -- making people die. Asking a soldier to be a policeman is like asking a pit bull to be a babysitter. The results are simply tragic.
Think about that in the context of having soldiers do jobs like, e.g., border enforcement. The inevitable result of that would be a lot of dead civilians. I simply do not understand why it is that people think a soldier is a policeman and can do a policeman's job. I suppose it's a steady diet of war movies growing up where soldiers are honorable and only kill the enemy, not civilians. But those are movies. Fiction. Lies. Not real. Sadly, today nobody knows the difference between their delusions and reality, because they're buried in lies so much...
- Badtux the Fictional Penguin
Put some lipstick on that Pit Bull and you get the RepugliMILF that can run Corporate America even further into the ground.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is a tragic and terrible truth of war. Children and other innocent civilians get injured, mammed and killed for absoloutley no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own. I can tell you now that not one single soldier goes on a mission with the intentions of killing children and innocent civilians. War is hell. I must say though that you are dead ass wrong when you printed that a soldiers job is to make people die. When you say that, it sounds as if soldiers run around freely shooting whatever moves. We are taught to defend ourselves and others against death. Sometimes that comes from a man on a roof with an RPG. Sometimes that comes from an teenager planting a roadside IED filled with rotten animal corpses and sometimes it comes from a child pointing an AK-47 at a soldiers head. I HAVE SEEN IT WITH MY OWN EYES. We have to defend our own lives. Not only are we taught to do so, but it is an innate human response. To say we are trained to kill is wrong. My friend is trained to fix vehicles that carry supplies such as food and water to Iraq citizens. My sister is trained to repair medical equipment used to help detect devistating diseses in Korean citizens. I am trained to give money to needy Afghan families whose lives have been devistated by this war. However, our first and foremost job is to keep ourselves alive. We as soldiers don't just take and take, we also give back the amount that our government allows us to. 99% of us wish to and want to do more. Saying it is our job to "make people die" is so far off from a desription of an American soldier. I know you disagree with this war as most of the world does, but get it right before you call soldiers killers. That is not our purpose and that is not our job.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, but killing people is the job of a soldier, in the end. A soldier's job is not to die for his country. A soldier's job is to make the other bastard die for his. (Yeah, a bad paraphrase of Patton, but just as true today as now). You talk about the job of support troops. But support troops exist to allow those at the pointy end of the stick to poke that stick into people who need to be dead -- bad guys, enemies, whatever.
ReplyDeleteFundamentally, if it wasn't for the fact that there are some bad actors out there who need to be dead, we wouldn't need soldiers. And because the whole point of having a military is to take out bad actors out there who need to be dead, soldiers must be trained to kill (or at least be trained in how to bring supplies and repair equipment for those who are trained to kill). Otherwise their job is pointless and could be done by anybody.
I'm sorry if you're offended by the reality of what a soldier's job boils down to, in the end -- i.e., killing the nation's enemies dead, dead, dead -- but that's reality. All the other stuff you talk about could be done by any joe blow hired off the streets, if it wasn't for the fact that there's folks out there who need a'killin', and your job is to make sure he dies for his country rather than that you die for yours. And if there is collateral damage... that is a pity, but it is not a soldier's job to die for sake of the enemy's civilian population.
The problem comes when you put soldiers into a situation where there is not an enemy civilian population... that is why the U.S. military is not allowed to perform law enforcement duties within the borders of the United States. Because it's been done before. And the result was dead civilians. Dead American civilians. Because that is what always happens, when you put people who've been trained to kill enemies dead, and put them into that kind of scenario...
- Badtux the Realist Penguin