War ? and Warriors ? Are about Killing

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/c....1570263327321

03-23-2005

War ? and Warriors ? Are about Killing



By Nathaniel R. Helms



Somewhere along the way to the vicious conflict in Iraq, it seems a lot of people forgot that war is about killing. They forgot that warfare, by its very nature, is about the absolute, resolute application of death-dealing power against an enemy until that opponent either submits or is destroyed. For thousands of years war was understood to be about ?kill or be killed? and the ?law of the jungle? and the ?survival of the fittest.? Tarzan beating on his chest and yowling until the jackals fled their supper is what it was all about.



Recently Marine Corps First Sgt. Brad Kasal was lionized by the public for surviving a personal duel with a battle-crazed insurgent in a no-quarter, man-to-man contest that ended when Kasal put the muzzle of his M-16 to the terrorist?s head and used two high-velocity, low drag copper-jacketed bullets to blow out his enemy?s brains. In warrior parlance it was a ?good kill.? Yet First Sgt. Kasal was the first guy to admit he would rather have been doing anything else than having a gun battle with a crazed Muslim extremist looking for the fast lane to Virgin City. He did it because that is what warriors do (see ?From an Iowa Town to Marine Corps Legend,? DefenseWatch, Feb. 3, 2005).



Soldiers are trained to be warriors. They are carefully forged and tempered in hot coals and cold steel burnished with tales of valor and glory in an atmosphere where raw power is king and the application of brute force is a virtue. Until lately soldiers started talking about killing the first day of basic training and boot camp when the greatly feared and even more respected drill instructors - D.Is - told the recruits they were next to discover the drawbacks of sudden death if they didn?t listen to the evil-eyed instructors looking at them with malevolent gazes framed in lop-sided grins.



The grizzled, earthy sergeants told their charges in simple terms that a warrior is someone who killed people. The officers were the ones who explained a warrior is ?engaged or experienced in war, or in the military life; a soldier; a champion [1913 Websters],? or ?someone engaged in or experienced in warfare?, according to 2004 WordReference.com, but it really didn?t compute. Only mean did.



My favorite description of a warrior was somebody who is ?a lean, green killing machine, a paid assassin in the employ of his country.? Drill Sergeant Villa called me that when I was seventeen and weighed about 130 pounds with my boots on. I was ready to go out and do a back-take-down-strangle-hold ?guaranteed to snap a man?s neck like a twig? on the first S.O.B. that crossed my path. He made me a tiger!



In different guises and vernaculars training soldiers for war have used variations of that same theme for at least 100 years. Even before then men were taught to mindlessly move at their officer?s barked commands under a hail of arrows and spears and shot from slings, against galloping walls of crazed war horses carrying armored knights, and into massed musket fire. Anthropologists can probably point back 50,000 years and identify fellows willing to share the same notion in grunts and squawks. In those days warriors probably just picked up a big, ugly rock and smacked the crap out of anybody that annoyed them!



?What is the spirit of the bayonet,? the drill sergeants demanded insanely with eyes bulging and spittle flying from their contorted faces while we young recruits stabbed bayoneted rifles into straw-stuffed dummies and screamed in return, ?The spirit of the bayonet is to kill, Drill Sergeant,? we roared, ?kill, kill, kill!? It didn?t take too long to get the point across that way.



Perhaps somebody important needs to do it again. The other day, a major cable news network began the morning with a breathless warning that what the audience was about to see was Florida Army National Guardsmen killing and maiming and posing with their dead enemies in Iraq. All three anchors were appropriately alarmed. Looks of concerned, yet proscribed horror shot back and forth across the plush set. Tension crackled in the controlled atmosphere of the sound stage.



Finally, their images dissolved into the contentious video. It was soldiers mugging for the camera in Ramadi in late 2003 and early 2004 while they kicked in doors, searched for terrorists, and generally risked their lives in a death duel with insurgents fighting back without any rules. The news team failed to mention their enemies were absolutely prepared to sacrifice any man, woman or child available to kill the infidels.



The Palm Beach Post, the newspaper that broke the story, called it the ?Ramadi Madness? video. Granted, it has a nice ring to it in a freakish, tabloid sort of way that suggests combat-crazed soldiers rampaging across Iraq slaughtering the innocents. For the few carefully sanitized minutes of the 26-minute videotape stunned anchors witnessed what they insisted was the agonizing brutality of war firsthand. They declined to reveal the parts that purportedly showed a soldier kicking a wounded, moaning Iraqi, and another manhandling a dead man after a firefight. It was simply too graphic for the good folks of America to digest along with their eggs and ham, the producers apparently decided.



(By the way, an Army investigation that ended in December determined that the footage illustrated ?inappropriate rather than criminal behavior,? according to the Associated Press.)



One time in Vietnam, I watched a Navy corpsman patching up one side of a North Vietnamese prisoner?s head after a comrade had cut his ear off. Meanwhile the same 19-year-old Marine cut the dying prisoner?s other ear off with his K-bar knife. Now that was some seriously inappropriate behavior. It is a good thing that didn?t make the nightly news! The young rifleman collected them on a string necklace he wore around his neck. The dried ears looked like a row of peanuts. Behind the gruesome setting other fellows were enjoying lunch.



Later, I discovered a famous picture of a French ?Poilu? in World War I sitting on a rotting German corpse in a fortress at Verdun eating his lunch. Some things just never change.



Gross? Yes. Disgusting? Indisputably! Depraved? Without a doubt! That is what war is and that is what warriors do. It isn?t right, it isn?t condoned and competent authorities don?t encourage it, but degenerate behavior, vicious stupidity, and remorseless cruelty are as much a part of war as bravery, honor and glory. Perhaps even more so! Just ask Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He knows a lot about terror and cruelty.



Perhaps if there was more rather than less cold, hard reality on the primetime news, folks might be a hell of a lot less inclined to send their sons and daughters into harm?s way over a bunch of flag-waving nonsense that passes for cool reflection in the heat of crisis. The ugly side of war is a lot longer and meaner trail than the mile of bad road that America?s children walk down on the way to the battlefield.



Real war is hard to take, tough to watch, and impossible to understand until you have been there and stood toe-to-toe with the certain reality of life or death tugging at your sleeve. War does bad things to good people. Yet, as long as we are going to send our sons and daughters into harm?s way, we had better teach them how to be cold, cruel, and calculating killers or a lot more of them will be coming home in hermetically sealed aluminum boxes stamped ?Remains Unviewable.?



The news people claim they want reality. Well, war is reality, and until the news media is prepared to accept war for what it is, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines remain at risk from forces they can?t see coming and can?t protect themselves from.



It isn?t fair, it isn?t right, and it certainly has nothing to with truth, justice and the American way, but nothing about war ever does ? except victory.



DefenseWatch Contributing Editor Nathaniel R. ?Nat? Helms is a Vietnam veteran, former police officer, long-time journalist and war correspondent living in Missouri. He is the author of two books, Numba One ? Numba Ten and Journey Into Madness: A Hitchhiker?s Account of the Bosnian Civil War, both available at www.ebooks-online.com. He can be reached at natshouse1@charter.net. Send Feedback responses to? dwfeedback@yahoo.com.