NEWSFLASH: Ordinary Men Trained to Kill Occasionally Behave in Ways We Consider Inappropriate

When I read Scott Thomas' "Shock Troops," it didn't ring inauthentic.  I've taught the memoirs and novels of Vietnam veterans and what Thomas described was tame in comparison.  So imagine my surprise when I learned that the right had gone apoplectic over Thomas' comparatively sedate column.  He hadn't document the violation of fundamental human rights, nor had he spoken of atrocities committed by American troops.  All he'd communicated was the lengths some soldiers will go to remain sane in the heat of war. 

From our perspective, the private who wore part of a human skull under his helmet is almost inhuman.  From his perspective—i.e. from the perspective of someone who wakes up every morning knowing the odds of him ending someone else's life are comparable to those someone else will end his—his disrespect for the dead commingles with the profound disrespect for Death instilled in those who kill in our name.  Their reluctance to revere our monuments to life is what makes them effective killers; moreover, it is what allows them to return home thoroughly disconnected from the monsters they had to become to kill. 

If they went to war strong Christian men, they'd be horrified by what they did on a minute-by-minute basis.  Who among them could imagine sitting on their porch, spotting movement along a fence and, without thinking, firing indiscriminately?  One-in-a-million?  One-in-ten-million?  Point being, the vast majority of our troops are not sociopaths: they are trained killers, and they kill within a context, and they laugh at death, and they are irreverent.  They laugh at what would sicken us because they do what would sicken us. 

They are not horrible people.  They are who we have made them.  They are who we need them to be. 

So please, Mrs. Malkin, stop with the sanctimonious bullshit.  You've been to Iraq.  You know these men suffer.  Spare them your feigned outrage.  They're trying to cope.  Permit them their poor taste.  Permit them to thumb their nose at the mean deaths they bring by flipping their finger at the mean death they fear.

Dan, stop tarring The New Republic for allowing a soldier to tell what happens in a combat zone.  Whatever you say about him, grant him the courage of his convictions—he is no armchair liberal, and even if he were, deployed as he is, he has learned quickly and rudely the lessons of war.  His humor belongs to the soldier, to the gallows; respect it for being won hard, and at a price well beyond the means of our outrage.

Jeff, he may be an "antiwar opportunist," but that doesn't mean he's not a soldier.  That doesn't mean he wouldn't lay down his life for the men he fights beside.  Say what you will about the intentions of men who go to war—I've known more I care to count at this point—who they become when they get there changes them forever.  They don't become flag-waving patriots, nor do they embrace the casus bellum unthinkingly; but they do feel the bond only felt by those who, together, violated the code of the very society they kill to defend. 

The life of a grunt is difficult enough.  Stop piling it on.

UPDATE: As per the usual, Jon Swift nails it.

Comments

[timb]

Show us, please, omniscient military expert (with communications that is...hey, don't be ashamed Napoleon was just an artilleryist before he saw his chance) where it's been shown the Private lied?

He unit did find a burial ground, he has been in a Bradley.

And, since we can link to the youtube video of Haji girl, or Marines throwing rocks at injured dogs, explain to us how these stories are so out of character. Soldiers behave differently than other people. It's why you wouldn't an Iraqi battalion in Texas patrolling your street.

[timb]

For RTO

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/56761/

I'm sure all 50 are lying

[marc page]

... given you can make completely absurd statements about "docile province of the United States" without so much as an apparent rueful grimace.

Posted by: RTO Trainer | Friday, 27 July 2007 at 11:18 AM

That "rueful grimace" belongs on yourface. The sooner you accept that you have been lied to about what you're fighting for, and accept that you are pawns in a game you seem to refuse to understand, the sooner (I hope) you will refuse to play.

[Rich Puchalsky]

RTO Trainer: "had there not been subsequent fact checking that has determined that the stores are, in fact, false"

Allright, "RTO Trainer", I'll call your bluff. Exactly where is this fact checking that has determined that the stories are, in fact, false?

What I see is a whole lot of wingnuts making up slurs about a "whiny" U.S. soldier, based on no facts whatsoever.

[Karl Steel]

No one is decrying bad news.

I'm going to take a wild stab at what I think you mean here. Can I paraphrase this as "No one is saying there's no bad news coming out of Iraq"? If that's what you mean, then horseshit. The Right spent years complaining at the absence of stories on schoolpainting in Iraq (or, for that matter, I suppose, stories of slave labor to build the US embassy in Iraq), Malkin went, purportedly, to Iraq to investigate a mosque to prove that it had no quite been completely destroyed and that, uh, therefore things were fine (?), &c, &c.

While he might not have gotten every detail right, he nailed the overall theme.

Don't be a jackass, Squid. My point, obviously, is that the Righties are focusing on Beauchamp to confuse the point that: a) going to war means committing atrocities (e.g., Seymour Hersh's report on Barry McCaffrey's slaughter of helpless Iraqis in 1991); b) that the US has committed atrocities in Iraq. The point here was never the particular truth of Beauchamp, anymore than the debates about Rigoberta Manchu's book were about the truth of her particular account. For further discussion, I refer you to this.

[marc page]

Maybe someone should go look for RTO. I think he may have got lost on his way back with all that "fact checking" he promised.

[RTO Trainer]

Rich,

You are correct and I appologize.

I could offer an excuse for overstating the case, but that would look like an attempt at justification. I am simply wrong in the assertion.

So, presuming permission to revise and extend my remarks:
had there not been sufficient question raised by knowledgable persons that strongly indicate that the stories are likely false

I will be very surprised if any basis in fact is indeed found. However, yo can be assured that if that should turn out to be the case, as my yet be determined, I shall return here to appologize further.

[marc page]

Rich:

If you don't play poker, maybe you should take it up. I suspect you would turn a profit.

[RTO Trainer]

Karl,
Can I paraphrase this as "No one is saying there's no bad news coming out of Iraq"?

No. You cannot.

If that's what you mean, then horseshit.

If that was what I said or meant, then yeah, it would be.

Marc, appologies to you for not being so engaged here as to forego other obligations and opportunities that I have.

[marc page]

Marc, appologies to you for not being so engaged here as to forego other obligations and opportunities that I have.

Posted by: RTO Trainer | Friday, 27 July 2007 at 01:25 PM

I have no doubt that you were quite busy. All that desperate 'Googling' can sure eat up the time.

[Karl Steel]

I just want to second what TimB said above. I just got my copy of The Nation in the mail, and the prowar jackasses above? They should read it and revel in the war they want and love.

[Ahistoricality]

Karl Steel wrote: highly suspicious that the Right should cue up another whingefest just when it comes out that Pat Tillman,...

Actually, I suspect that there's no specific intent to cover up Tillman's death revelations with this brouhaha, just a happy coincidence. As a general rule, the more heat and less light shed on the subject, the better off the Administration and its supporters are. Just as the "Rathergate" case gave the Right more or less free rein to beat on TV journalists (at least in their own minds), this case is going to be the leverage they use to discount all reports of atrocities or other bad acts by soldiers in the field.

It's classic denialism -- Holocaust denialist, anti-vaccination nuts, etc. -- Pick at details and ignore the massive quantities of supporting evidence; claim that any error invalidates the whole; cast aspersions on your critics' motives while casting yourself as "interested in the truth"; retreat where necessary, but always redirect the question away from your weak spots (this often results in interminably circular arguments, the intent of which is to exhaust the reality-based interlocutor and create an "event" which can be cited as a victory).

[Kennie Rose]

SEK,

Very impressive writing. Loved your post. Agree completely.

Kennie Rose

[Karl Steel]

Ahistoricality: very well said, thanks. And apologies above if I came off as a conspiracy nut: I was heated.

[Rich Puchalsky]

What Marc characterizes as my poker-playing skills indicate that no one will actually be back here to apologize. After all, the best they're willing to do is go to "very likely false" based on no evidence whatsoever rather than "proven to be false". It's a lot easier to turn up no evidence than actual evidence, especially of essentially minor events (running over dogs, skull-taking, lunch hall insults -- we're not talking atrocities here). I mean, there's a video of soldiers throwing rocks at a crippled dog, but that isn't good enough to illustrate the obvious fact that soldiers in war do things like that.

And meanwhile, of course, soldiers have been committing well-documented actual atrocities, which we know of because they took pictures of them. Somehow that never comes up when people insist that nothing is going on.

[Rich Puchalsky]

But let's get back to Jeff Goldstein here -- part of my continuing attempt to get Scott to see that Duncan Black really was right in his characterization of him.

From a post here:

"Be that as it may. Perhaps had Henley bothered to read the entire thing, he would have found that I was actually questioning Dr. Barnes’s reading of “Scott Thomas” as a likely anti-war fraud — and, in so dong, positing that another equally plausible reading was that we were witnessing a kind of rogue false flag op aimed at discrediting Franklin Foer and the anti-war New Republic."

TNR is not, of course, anti-war. Let's put that aside for the moment, since Jeff immediately disavows this reading, only saying that he was bringing up this (nonsensical) possiblity as part of his Princess Bride Sicilian critical style:

"Now, I didn’t believe that to be the case, as I made clear — just as I didn’t believe, as some on the left continue to argue, that the incredibly shoddy TANG memos were released by Karl Rove with the plan that they eventually make their way to Mr Burkett, and then on to some overzealous producer and anchor in the national media. Instead, I was pointing out that the kind of structuralist reading Barnes engaged in required of its analyst a positing of intent in order to complete the profile of the historical author responsible for creating the “Scott Miller” who acted as the (autodiegetic) narrator."

In other words, in order to hypothesize about *what kind of person the author was* -- which was what Barnes was doing -- *he had to guess the author's intent*. Thank you, Mr. Obvious.

Now, there are any number of very heavily trodden paths you can take in this connection, in literary analysis. Most of them have to do with the inadviseability of trying to what Barnes tried to do -- analyze an author from a text, rather than a text. And that is one reason why people have generally de-emphasized authorial intent, rather than as Goldstein does emphasizing it. But let's continue on:

"Or, to put it less “ornately”, I was suggesting that we shouldn’t be too quick to posit that “Scott Thomas” was some anti-war fraud simply because of the few verbal tics and other indicators that, statistically speaking, tend to be found in the works of MFA students with macho complexes. And that’s because tendencies, once established, are easily imitated."

Yes, they are; in fact, "horrors of war" writing forms a distinct style which actual soldiers have written, and which later soldiers and their imitators are influenced by. In fact, the style influences even someone like the actual writer of the article: a young person who wants to be a writer, who has been to college, and is now serving as a soldier, not being a macho fake as Barnes suggested. Strangely enough, this default hypothesis wasn't one that Jeff Goldstein brought up.

"The post had nothing really to do with a pro-war (or even an anti-war) position. Instead, it had to do with a critique of structuralism divorced from intent."

And this is just Jeff Goldstein getting on his odd hobbyhorse. If there was one thing that Barnes' article was not, it was not "divorced from intent". Barnes didn't just analyze a text. He made up a very specific author for that text, a student in an elite MFA program who wrote in a fake, macho style, with the intent of getting approval as a bad boy.

If Goldstein had confined himself to writing that Barnes was overreaching his evidence, that would've been fine. But that wasn't what he did -- perhaps because that wouldn't offer any scope for hermanuetic hogwash.

[Ahistoricality]

Karl: Thanks. Believe me, this administration has turned me into more of a conspiracy nut than I ever imagined I'd be. You didn't come off as nutty: it was a perfectly plausible first-order hypothesis. But the larger context makes more sense, to me, and is, if anything, nuttier and more conspiratorial. You were arguing for a distraction; I'm arguing that they're targetting the entire information infrastructure of civilization!

[JPool]

Scott,

I'm coming late to this and have no desire to go back and read all of arguments on both sides, but I have to say that it seems like you're on pretty thin ice here. I'm a big Tim O'Brien fan too, but I think that his point about the value of a true fiction works best when applied to fiction. I would think that practioners of literary journalism would feel the same and would want composite or second hand accounts marked as such and not passed off as personal experience.

I think there may be some confusing of macro and micro here. You and Karl Steel are surely right that the possiblity of distortion or fabrication in Thomas's account does nothing to change the larger realities of attrocity and taboo violation in the course of war (though I think you miss the fact that many soldiers make it a point not to slide into this, so that they will be able to say that they came through war without losing themselves). But larger truths do not change or remove more more specific fabrications or distortions.

If I were wandering in here from the virtual street, I would be struck by the fact that the critics of Thomas showing up here (Darlene aside) are much more direct and reasonable in their arguments than those responding to them are and less likely to come off as partisan hacks (Marc Page, I'm looking in your direction). At best it's evasive to respond to specific charges of distortion or fabrication by saying, that hasn't been proven, or that's peripheral, or even if he's lying that doesn't mean that he's not right. When the right makes these kind of arguments, that facts shouldn't get in the way of the truth, we rightly call bullshit on them. We should do the same in cases where we are in sympathy with those who are doing the distorting, or else we risk becoming so much noise.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"At best it's evasive to respond to specific charges of distortion or fabrication [...]"

What specific charges do you mean? If someone would supply one, then I could evaluate it. But the only charges that I've seen are: 1) that the writer isn't a soldier (disproved), 2) that he wasn't in position to have had these experiences (disproved: his movements have been tracked to the point where they're even shown where his unit could have picked up the skull mentioned). All the rest of the charges are that he's whiny, he's a fabulist, that soldiers never do things like that, etc.

Do you have any specific reason to claim that he's lying? Or are you just reflectively thinking that there's so much noise that there must be something to it? But that's what wingnuts do: they make noise.

[marc page]

JPool:

... it's evasive to respond to specific charges of distortion or fabrication by saying, that hasn't been proven, or that's peripheral, or even if he's lying that doesn't mean that he's not right.

Perhaps so. However, if that is how you read my position, I may not have been entirely clear. Please forgive me, and allow me to try to lay it out a bit more bluntly for you:

I have no reason to think that 'Scott Thomas' has, with intent and with malice, fabricated or distorted anything in his series of articles for the (execrable) TNR. And allegations to the contrary that have sprung from pure and desperate partisanship are without merit.

When "partisan hacks" like RTOTrainer turn up, with their Reasonable Masks firmly in place, and offer nothing of substance to support their allegations, while insisting they have "the facts," (all the while covering themselves with adverbial escape-clauses: 'strongly indicate' ... 'may likely prove ...'} that's when I will (as you so elegantly put it) "rightly call bullshit."

And if those of us -- the majority of your fellow citizens -- who oppose the brutal, illegal invasion and occupation of the Middle East are judged by you to be nothing but "partisan hacks," I guess we'll just have to learn to live with your disapproval. For myself, I just don't see how the murder, torture, and displacement of millions of people can be characterized as a merely partisan political issue.

I'm coming late to this and have no desire to go back and read all of arguments on both sides, ...

The next time you decide to drop down from your lofty non-partisan perch to wag your finger at people who have taken the time to consider "all of [ ]arguments on both sides," you might at least consider actually knowing a little more than next to nothing about the issue you're commenting on. You will look much more "reasonable" if you do."

[To be fair, you got one thing right: the reasonable man always leaves "(Darlene aside)".