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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Captain Jack who wrote (93365)	1/3/2005 8:31:33 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793738

I read that Sites explanation. His combat reporting days are over...I believe. I wish there was a way to explain to civilians The mindset required to fight to the death including: The level of raw emotion and moments when every nerve you own is producing lightening bolts of electricity; The fearlessness one sometimes feels and the total terror one may experience moments later. Our weapons systems are such that we do most of our war killing from a distance. Face-to-face encounters still happen...but are rarer than in most past conflicts. Yet it is in those close encounters where the nitty gritty of life and death are experienced by our troops. The sights and smells of death alone can be overwhelming emotionally. Picking up the pieces of your buddies and stuffing them into body bags after a firefight is more than difficult. Add to that a determined enemy hell-bent on killing you and the emotional factors really tighten a man up. There is nothing gentlemanly about close quarter conflict. Sites attempt to paint it so is pure CYA for himself. The mission of the US Infantry is to kill the enemy. No American soldier is taught to shoot to wound. Our training is all about killing and personal survival. And yes, sorry mom, shooting enemy wounded to complete the mission is common. All armies do it. Hell to be honest about it, in a hot firefight, we often shoot enemy dead, one more time, just to be sure. I have never heard of anyone being court-martialed for pumping another round into a dead enemy. Critiquing the combat behavior of a war weary soldier (who has been in combat for months and just killed enemy) from an armchair 10,000 miles from the action is an atrocity imo. Simply put, we cannot and will never perceive the threat that unit and that soldier felt. Let's look at what we know. That soldier had just been in a firefight. He entered a death room. There were a dozen enemy dead strewn about...others lay bleeding. The Marine in question held his fire initially...then uttered numerous cuss words and warned his buddies that one enemy he thought to be dead was moving. Clearly, he sensed and expressed the threat to himself and his buddies. His training took over and he did what he was taught and charged to do. He killed the threat. The mere fact that the man he shot was already wounded is totally irrelevant. If that soldier perceived a threat and failed to shoot and one of his buddies was killed or injured by that enemy soldier, I would punish him. But we cannot court-martial individual soldiers who shoot at perceived threats in hostile fire situations. Because, that is what they do, and the difference between life and death in close combat is measured in fractions of seconds. There is no time to think things out, or discuss them with the company or battalion commander over the radio. A trigger pull is the appropriate response to any perceived threat in close combat. uw