Post by Moses on Nov 15, 2004 1:08:18 GMT -5
Humanism on the Front Line
Douglas Gearhart calls on philosophers to develop practical moral guidance for soldiers in war zones.
The rifle shot tore through the car window and possibly into the man’s arm; I couldn’t tell from my vantage point. He took off quickly, abandoning the car and scurried back across the road, clutching his arm. The bottom line that morning on the highway south of Baghdad was absolutely no one comes through. We instructed them, pleaded with them, but they kept coming by the hundreds and the Marines were growing annoyed, and perhaps a little slighted – you see our weapons, we have asked you nicely, now what’s it going to take? But as our Iraqi interpreter, ‘Fred’, explained to me, Iraqis do not fear the barrel of a weapon as instinctively as we might believe.
Since the specter of car-bombs had already reared its head, through second-hand accounts and rumors from elsewhere, there was no way the man could drive that close to the Marine perimeter without risking his life.
A Marine squad leader yelled out, “Who fired that shot?” No response came; “OK, then nothing happened here.” What he meant, I suppose, was something along the lines of: The shot did not come from my squad, therefore it’s not my problem; no harm no foul. But ‘Fred’ took it as a sign of indifference towards the lives of the people he had volunteered to help save; he went a little mad in that afternoon heat and launched a tirade against the Marine. “What the f**k you mean ‘nothing f**king happened’?” I pulled him aside quickly before something stupid really did happen. The war was only a few weeks old and nerves were tense.
Nobody came here to shoot unarmed civilians, and that is what my Army PSYOP team was employed to prevent. That is why our loudspeaker vehicle kept imploring the civilian crowd that was massing to turn around and stop trying to move north along the road, where elements were still fighting. This was a pretty typical scenario for three-man teams like ours, operating on the front lines during the opening weeks of the Iraq invasion. On the first night we broadcasted surrender instructions to Iraqi troops guarding the border. Now we were trying to help the Marines by keeping civilians away from the battlefield. PSYOP teams had the unique task in war of trying to save lives. Some days were better than others.
Guarding the road all around us were young Marines, and they faced situations like this daily. After trucking with these guys in Iraq I am convinced there is no such thing as a typical enlisted Marine; they come from so many different backgrounds. Their common trait is they have all been filtered through the intense training regimen of the Marine Corps, and they responded to situations accordingly. I met college graduates and those who had barely made it through high school; for different reasons each had volunteered to be a ‘Grunt.’ I was hardly the warrior type, being an Army reservist who had left behind a law clerk job back home. I was in good hands among these professional warriors, who brought to the table their own brand of expertise and style of erudition to share. One of the wisest things ever said to me in my life came from a Marine Sergeant; something to the tune of, “Hey dumb ass! You hear that sound? Those are bullets going over your head: Duck!”<br>
Sometimes a warning shot does the trick. But the crowd soon masses again; another round of loudspeaker broadcasts begins, and nervous young men with rifles face the same dilemma: Is that a civilian or a terrorist? I witnessed some unfortunate acts on the job; sometimes the wrong people got killed. But these young Marines, who in the opening weeks of the invasion had the power to kill almost indiscriminately, did not. They exercised restraint even in the face of the disturbing fact that another dead body, soldier or civilian, along our line of advance would be rather mundane and quickly forgotten, at least by us. Within the rules of the morally questionable enterprise into which they had been thrust, within an absurd universe of values called war, where killing is the norm, these men behaved decently and, if I may, ethically.
In my analysis, the justification for the invasion and the extension of national policy that brought us to Iraq is not at issue. Some may begrudge this methodology. Can there be behavior that is untainted, ethical, and decent, in the furtherance of an unjust war? Do all soldiers fighting a morally dubious cause carry the taint of the ‘original sin’? I don’t want to address the rightness or wrongness of our cause in Iraq; opinion seems to run the gamut from heroic to moral abomination, and all points in between. I can only discuss Iraq from the inside out, from the bottom up, because that is where my own knowledge and experience lie. Like every other enlisted soldier and Marine on the ground, my power over events in Iraq was limited to each day’s ethically challenging moments happening in front of me. While the enlisted soldier on the ground does not make policy, the soldiers operating in Iraq carry a heavy responsibility; along with the dangerous missions they are tasked to carry out, they also act as diplomats and representatives of their nation.
At the end of major combat operations my team went to work in the city of Samawa, south of Baghdad, where we assisted in the mighty task of returning the city to stable functioning and normal life. As PSYOP, we operated fairly autonomously and had almost unlimited access to the people. I talked to and shook hands with hundreds of Iraqi citizens. As I discharged my responsibilities I believed I was doing my part to spread the virus of human decency and goodwill across cultures. It was my own private hearts-and-minds campaign and for the most part goodwill reached back to greet us in return. I am proud of the work my team did in Iraq, both as soldiers and also as messengers of humanistic fellowship.
Over a year ago I came back home and assured family and friends that the U.S. was doing good things in Iraq. I knew this from the evidence of my own eyes. But the news reports got worse: mounting casualties, the vituperative hatred that I categorically did not experience or witness, and finally, the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. This was a tremendous blow to our credibility as a nation and to hopes for creating a sense of unity and fellowship with the Iraqi people. From a PSYOP perspective, the photographs from Abu Ghraib are made-to-order for anti-American propaganda.
Like me, those enlisted soldiers who now stand accused in the wake of the scandal are U.S. Army Reservists. These soldiers left behind their normal civilian jobs and family lives to come to Iraq. I wager they never contemplated coming to Iraq with the intent to commit atrocities. So what happened? The Army’s investigation of the matter places much of the blame on the officers in charge. But the incidents of abuse cannot be written off solely as the result of poor leadership. The individuals who administered the abuse must be accountable. How could presumably decent people commit such acts? It’s an old story, of course, and one relevant for political leaders, commanders, and philosophers. Chris Hedges, in an extraordinary book everyone should read, writes about war’s perversion of decency:
“It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy and all feel the heavy weight of pressure.” Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives us Meaning, p.87, Anchor Books 2002.
A man far from home has no neighbors. This is one of the more chilling realities of human behavior during war. For a soldier far from home, war quickly distills and separates the core ‘Self’ from the biographical self of their normal civilian identity. In Iraq, hordes of young troops unmoored from their normal worlds, well armed, and in a position of awesome power, perhaps more power over human life than they could ever have previously imagined, are thrust into a land of chaos and confusion. Normal life, the adornments and habits of everyday life that define one’s civilian identity, are packed away along with civilian clothes. When you strip away the layers of this everyday-life ‘self’, the core had better be sound. Training the core of a person is what we might call instilling a sense of ethics, morals or values. We are all ethically fuzzy and the core shows its face on war’s vast moral playing field.
(continued next)
Douglas Gearhart calls on philosophers to develop practical moral guidance for soldiers in war zones.
The rifle shot tore through the car window and possibly into the man’s arm; I couldn’t tell from my vantage point. He took off quickly, abandoning the car and scurried back across the road, clutching his arm. The bottom line that morning on the highway south of Baghdad was absolutely no one comes through. We instructed them, pleaded with them, but they kept coming by the hundreds and the Marines were growing annoyed, and perhaps a little slighted – you see our weapons, we have asked you nicely, now what’s it going to take? But as our Iraqi interpreter, ‘Fred’, explained to me, Iraqis do not fear the barrel of a weapon as instinctively as we might believe.
Since the specter of car-bombs had already reared its head, through second-hand accounts and rumors from elsewhere, there was no way the man could drive that close to the Marine perimeter without risking his life.
A Marine squad leader yelled out, “Who fired that shot?” No response came; “OK, then nothing happened here.” What he meant, I suppose, was something along the lines of: The shot did not come from my squad, therefore it’s not my problem; no harm no foul. But ‘Fred’ took it as a sign of indifference towards the lives of the people he had volunteered to help save; he went a little mad in that afternoon heat and launched a tirade against the Marine. “What the f**k you mean ‘nothing f**king happened’?” I pulled him aside quickly before something stupid really did happen. The war was only a few weeks old and nerves were tense.
Nobody came here to shoot unarmed civilians, and that is what my Army PSYOP team was employed to prevent. That is why our loudspeaker vehicle kept imploring the civilian crowd that was massing to turn around and stop trying to move north along the road, where elements were still fighting. This was a pretty typical scenario for three-man teams like ours, operating on the front lines during the opening weeks of the Iraq invasion. On the first night we broadcasted surrender instructions to Iraqi troops guarding the border. Now we were trying to help the Marines by keeping civilians away from the battlefield. PSYOP teams had the unique task in war of trying to save lives. Some days were better than others.
Guarding the road all around us were young Marines, and they faced situations like this daily. After trucking with these guys in Iraq I am convinced there is no such thing as a typical enlisted Marine; they come from so many different backgrounds. Their common trait is they have all been filtered through the intense training regimen of the Marine Corps, and they responded to situations accordingly. I met college graduates and those who had barely made it through high school; for different reasons each had volunteered to be a ‘Grunt.’ I was hardly the warrior type, being an Army reservist who had left behind a law clerk job back home. I was in good hands among these professional warriors, who brought to the table their own brand of expertise and style of erudition to share. One of the wisest things ever said to me in my life came from a Marine Sergeant; something to the tune of, “Hey dumb ass! You hear that sound? Those are bullets going over your head: Duck!”<br>
Sometimes a warning shot does the trick. But the crowd soon masses again; another round of loudspeaker broadcasts begins, and nervous young men with rifles face the same dilemma: Is that a civilian or a terrorist? I witnessed some unfortunate acts on the job; sometimes the wrong people got killed. But these young Marines, who in the opening weeks of the invasion had the power to kill almost indiscriminately, did not. They exercised restraint even in the face of the disturbing fact that another dead body, soldier or civilian, along our line of advance would be rather mundane and quickly forgotten, at least by us. Within the rules of the morally questionable enterprise into which they had been thrust, within an absurd universe of values called war, where killing is the norm, these men behaved decently and, if I may, ethically.
In my analysis, the justification for the invasion and the extension of national policy that brought us to Iraq is not at issue. Some may begrudge this methodology. Can there be behavior that is untainted, ethical, and decent, in the furtherance of an unjust war? Do all soldiers fighting a morally dubious cause carry the taint of the ‘original sin’? I don’t want to address the rightness or wrongness of our cause in Iraq; opinion seems to run the gamut from heroic to moral abomination, and all points in between. I can only discuss Iraq from the inside out, from the bottom up, because that is where my own knowledge and experience lie. Like every other enlisted soldier and Marine on the ground, my power over events in Iraq was limited to each day’s ethically challenging moments happening in front of me. While the enlisted soldier on the ground does not make policy, the soldiers operating in Iraq carry a heavy responsibility; along with the dangerous missions they are tasked to carry out, they also act as diplomats and representatives of their nation.
At the end of major combat operations my team went to work in the city of Samawa, south of Baghdad, where we assisted in the mighty task of returning the city to stable functioning and normal life. As PSYOP, we operated fairly autonomously and had almost unlimited access to the people. I talked to and shook hands with hundreds of Iraqi citizens. As I discharged my responsibilities I believed I was doing my part to spread the virus of human decency and goodwill across cultures. It was my own private hearts-and-minds campaign and for the most part goodwill reached back to greet us in return. I am proud of the work my team did in Iraq, both as soldiers and also as messengers of humanistic fellowship.
Over a year ago I came back home and assured family and friends that the U.S. was doing good things in Iraq. I knew this from the evidence of my own eyes. But the news reports got worse: mounting casualties, the vituperative hatred that I categorically did not experience or witness, and finally, the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. This was a tremendous blow to our credibility as a nation and to hopes for creating a sense of unity and fellowship with the Iraqi people. From a PSYOP perspective, the photographs from Abu Ghraib are made-to-order for anti-American propaganda.
Like me, those enlisted soldiers who now stand accused in the wake of the scandal are U.S. Army Reservists. These soldiers left behind their normal civilian jobs and family lives to come to Iraq. I wager they never contemplated coming to Iraq with the intent to commit atrocities. So what happened? The Army’s investigation of the matter places much of the blame on the officers in charge. But the incidents of abuse cannot be written off solely as the result of poor leadership. The individuals who administered the abuse must be accountable. How could presumably decent people commit such acts? It’s an old story, of course, and one relevant for political leaders, commanders, and philosophers. Chris Hedges, in an extraordinary book everyone should read, writes about war’s perversion of decency:
“It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy and all feel the heavy weight of pressure.” Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives us Meaning, p.87, Anchor Books 2002.
A man far from home has no neighbors. This is one of the more chilling realities of human behavior during war. For a soldier far from home, war quickly distills and separates the core ‘Self’ from the biographical self of their normal civilian identity. In Iraq, hordes of young troops unmoored from their normal worlds, well armed, and in a position of awesome power, perhaps more power over human life than they could ever have previously imagined, are thrust into a land of chaos and confusion. Normal life, the adornments and habits of everyday life that define one’s civilian identity, are packed away along with civilian clothes. When you strip away the layers of this everyday-life ‘self’, the core had better be sound. Training the core of a person is what we might call instilling a sense of ethics, morals or values. We are all ethically fuzzy and the core shows its face on war’s vast moral playing field.
(continued next)