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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (135491)	6/3/2004 4:21:44 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

In the case of Tillman and co, if they had tried communication first, rather than firepower, some people would still be alive. Of course, sometimes, there isn't a lot of time for a pow-wow or hui. But there seems to be an issue with the USA in terms of trigger-happiness. The culture is shoot 'em up John Wayne [now Terminator] style. In reality, when your survival is significantly threatened by sudden, unpredictable and deadly force for a long enough time, you instinctively react in kind when you perceive that threat. Some men in combat sometimes kill men before they're even aware they've seen them. Sometimes you've started to kill something and stopped before you knew what you saw or why you stopped. The thinking part of the mind moves too slowly in such instances and it's relegated to the role of an observer that belatedly sees the pictures unfold. The instinctive human mind, on the other hand, has an amazing ability to do what it needs to do in order to assure your survival. So sometimes being "trigger happy" is a good thing and "shooting them up" is what saves our soldier's lives. And sometimes hesitating because of empathy, trying to think it through, or in an attempt to communicate, is a bad thing. I don't know what happened in Tillman's case, but I would be surprised if the casualties didn't result from reasonable actions on the parts of both of the squads involved in the incident. Simply put, when you put groups of men at risk of sudden and violent death from the actions of an enemy, you'd better be sure to keep them away from each other because if you don't they'll do what they're supposed to do and "kill" any perceived threat. The real issue is whether those who weren't at risk, those who had time to think, those who had time to communicate and those who should have had empathy for those soldiers were "trigger happy" when they sent them. In the case of Afghanistan, I don't think they were. I think we did what needed to be done there and that we should be doing more there now. Iraq, of course, is a far different issue. The second real issue is why the lines of communication failed and the two patrols crossed each other. Sometimes in the middle of firefight it is nearly impossible to keep track of what is going on, but it appears from all the current reports that there was no firefight preceding their incident, just the boom of an explosion. The tragedy may have been the result of a training problem, a failure to follow protocols or simply a screwup by someone on the ground that should have known better. That will continue to happen to soldiers at war; if you play in the street you'll eventually get run over.