Urination and War

Four marines were videoed urinating on the bodies of three dead Taliban and civilized people everywhere are outraged at this act of desecration. It was a senseless and stupid act and shows a very disturbing aspect of our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. A Pentagon official said it turned his stomach. I'm sure the question is being asked in halls and conference rooms throughout Washington: What the hell were they thinking, recording that on video?

We want our wars sanitized. We want our American boys and girls to kill the enemy, kill them all, bomb them, shoot them, turn the living into the dead and then come home to us and be the same All-American kids we sent off to war. Desecrating the dead disturbs us; we don't want to be disturbed. We're okay with the fact that, when the Taliban were alive and presumably trying to kill our boys there, their live bodies were desecrated with bullets. But after they stopped breathing and they went up to Paradise looking for their promised rewards, their carcasses somehow became sacred and more important.

We don't want our children to become barbarians. We don't want to know what war is really like and our leaders, especially, don't want us to know either. I am amazed at the non-coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “news” is truly censored and manipulated and controlled to an extraordinary extent. We should be shown what our troops deal with day in and day out. If we don't want to see the carnage at dinner time, maybe we should rethink what's happening, though that's a non-starter-- look at the trouble that caused during the Vietnam War. We nearly won the war in Afghanistan a long time ago and then we invaded Iraq. Afghanistan and Bin Laden were nearly forgotten. War has become continuous and we still expect our troops to be unaffected, to kill when we push their buttons and come home and be normal again when we turn them off.

Some wars are necessary but all wars are barbaric. We might have fewer of them if the civilians saw what really goes into the production of a war, but our leaders don't want us poking our noses into their business. Peeing on dead bodies? Disgusting. At least they weren't cutting off ears. Slap them firmly on their wrists. Killing non-combatants? Sometimes it can't be helped; sometimes it's murder; now that's something to get outraged about. So why do four peeing marines raise a bigger uproar than killing civilians?

War, it's a confusing, terrible business.