Unless you’ve been living under a rock I suppose you’ve seen this NSFW video about Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters.  For the person under that rock, here’s the video:

Now, the expected social split has come down from this.  People are either looking at this with disgust and as an example of the evil deeds of our troops, or they’re taking a, “but they cut our heads off!” approach.

The Learned Sergeant is taking a somewhat different approach.  Friends, our enemies are bad.  If you can take a man’s head with a smile, you qualify in my book as evil.  If you can dig the hearts from our Delta snipers, you’re evil.  Killing these people and killing them often is a noble cause and it betters us as a species.  But just because our enemies are evil, it is no justification for desecrating the dead.  Here’s the bottom line:  We’re the good guys.

There’s a price that comes with being one of the good guys.  One of those is that we must operate with the greatest of restraint.  This goes double if you’re a UNITED STATES MARINE.  This is unacceptable behavior for even the lowliest soldier, but the standards expected of a Marine is higher still.  These Marines are not evil.  In some ways they’re simply the product of a society that takes joy in dropping a pair of testicles on a dead enemy during a rousing inning of Call of Duty.  But war isn’t a game.  We fight to advance the species, not to degrade it.  War is hell.  I’ve known what it feels like to want nothing more than the bury a tomahawk in another man’s head.  But we are the good guys.  We must fight with honor, discipline, and dignity at all times.

In With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge mentions watching Marines dig gold teeth from the mouths of Japanese soldiers.  He talks about the disgust he felt before finding himself doing the same, prior to coming to his senses.  What those Marines did was unacceptable then, and that wasn’t a fully volunteer force.  They also on the whole endured much more brutality than today’s Corps.

Not only is it degrading toward our enemies, our species, and ourselves, but this behavior is also the type that ends with PTSD.  The first recorded cases of PTSD came from the Romans upon the razing of Carthage.  Why?  Because what you do in the heat of combat will visit you in your quiet hours.  This is why we must maintain our dignity.  When you dehumanize the enemy you treat him as such.  It makes it easier to kill him, but it makes it harder to deal with the killing later.

We’re the good guys.  Treat the enemy with dignity — especially when he doesn’t deserve it.  Kill them all, but do it with honor.  Those Marines shouldn’t get a dishonorable discharge or brig time, but they should see a general or other than honorable discharge.

Now that you’ve heard it from me, I’ll give it to you from my favorite G.I. Joe : Beachhead (though that’s a strange code name for a Ranger)