Neocon, giving every conceivable benefit of the doubt to those who might have been responsible for atrocities and viewing everything in its best light may well allow us to feel better about the ugliness of men at war. That's an approach that I believe you and the then-military commanders had in common but sometimes in real life we have to make tough choices on what to believe because reality doesn't change when we choose to believe something else.
I do believe, however, that you are sincere. That separates you from commanders in the field who close their ears and say to the reporting soldier, "that didn't happen and I don't want to hear about it again."
I've always believed we ought to puncture the John Wayne myths of war and battle so that we can make more rational choices and understand what it is that we send our young into. Maybe I'm wrong. In the end maybe both you and the military commanders who bury such incidents find the right balance; we should not ask what's in the hot dog as long as it tastes good and fills our stomachs, and an argument can be made that we ought to forget about the realities of excesses of brutality in war as long as they don't interfere with the winning of it.
Re: Actually, I didn't quite say one shouldn't speculate, I said one should not pass off speculation as fact. I do not consider deaths arising from mistake automatically to be atrocities. Therefore, I am sure that the confusion about who was VC lead to a number of unfortunate deaths, but not necessarily atrocities. Similarly, I do not think that all burning of villages constitutes atrocity, although it may. Thus, for me, it is a matter of whether a reasonable effort, under the circumstances, was made to abide by the humanitarian rules of war, also known as the Geneva Conventions. That seems to me to be a highly disputed matter, and one that may best be resolved in the consciences of the men actually under fire, absent adequate information to bring to trial........ |
