Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations." Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.

Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.

...

"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.

"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"

                                       By Chris Hedges
                                        (via Tomdispatch)

* * *

I've never seen actual combat, never served in a live war zone, never pointed a weapon at another human being and pulled the trigger.  And thank whatever gods there may be that it is so.  But in spring of 1985, I went through 13 weeks of Army Infantry Basic Training at Fort Benning, GA.  The biggest joke in the universe may well be the piece of paper I have in a drawer somewhere that claims I am a fully trained and qualified infantry soldier -- I may well have been the worst 'soldier' ever to actually graduate Basic -- but it's not a funny joke, because there's nothing funny about the military.  It is an evil institution, and while it may well be a necessary evil, it seems to me that as a culture we generally place far too much emphasis on the first word in that phrase when we find ourselves using it.  We should always remember the second word as well.  In fact, we should stress it to ourselves.

However necessary something may be, evil is still evil.

I've never shot at a real human being.  But for 13 weeks in 1985 at Fort Benning, GA, I was taught that it was okay to do so, if my commanding officer told me to.  'Taught' is an understatement bordering on an  irony as a description for military training; the exact word is 'brainwashed'.  Military training is systematic, it is precise, it is purposeful.  For 13 weeks I was forcibly exercised into utter exhaustion, humiliated, abused, denied sleep, placed in stress positions, exposed to extremes of heat and cold, punished for infractions as minor as not using the correct words in the correct sequence when speaking with a fellow trainee, and threatened that, should I commit graver offenses, I would receive worse punishments, ranging from fines to imprisonment to having the living crap beaten out of me. 

One of my drill sergeants advised me, in a rare unguarded moment, that "We have a reason for everything we do".  And the reason is a simple one -- they need to turn civilized, socialized civilians into brutal but disciplined killers.   And they need to turn individuals into faceless, nameless cogs in their killing machine.

From my own experiences with military training, I can understand and empathize with the '18 year old kid' from the excerpt I've quoted, who ended up murdering an entire family of Iraqis with a rooftop mounted 50 cal.  I can't imagine the personal hell he has gone through since he discovered the actual nature of his weapon's targets, but I can imagine what would be even worse -- not shooting at a vehicle that really was a suicide bomber, and having to live with the fact that by failing in his duty, he killed 30 or 40 of his fellow soldiers.

The military is an evil, ugly institution, and war is an evil, ugly thing.  If we justify the existence of our military to ourselves with the phrase 'necessary evil', how, then, do we justify to ourselves the ongoing horrors of an entirely unnecessary war?

What is a necessary evil that isn't necessary?

Even the most foolish and ignorant among us should be able to work that semantic equation.