Photos show U.S. GIs posing with dead Afghans[W:1146]

Thrilla · Apr 21, 2012

Crosscheck said:
That is a very honest and open look at your past experience. It is interesting how it changed you in as you say a very short period of time.
More than one of my friends who fought in Vietnam say the shocking thing for them was how young the enemy looked to them.
Am certain they have all those mental videos in their memories banks stored away. Majority just don't talk about that and that is very understandable.

That is a heavy burden to be put on guys of many who were just out of high school.

well, after quite a few years of drug and alcohol abuse, I underwent a few years of therapy....being honest about things is the result and ,still to this day,what helps me the most.
internalizing the burdens did a ton of harm to me... and now, I do whatever I can not to get caught in that **** again... internalizing stuff is simply not good for me.
upon my death, my full "memoirs" will be released to my family...while i still can't really share everything with them ( I don't want to put them into a position to judge me), I like knowing everything will be brought forth at some point.

obviously I have many vet friends who've seen the elephant, we all deal differently.... some could shrug this stuff off, others couldn't.... some talked, others didn't.

most of my "bad" experiences were in conflicts after 'Nam... but Nam started it all for me ( I consider myself less than a "real" Nam vet, even though i served my tour... we had our contacts with the VC, but i wasn't a ground pounder then)... and yeah, it did bother me that the VC/NVA looked like children... at first.
it doesn't take long to figure out that they are fierce lil' sunsabiches.

I read a book quite a few years back , about a guys experiences in Korea... he said pretty much the same thing I felt.... the first few firefights , you are too scared to do ****.... then comes a fight where you just get angry and everything changes.
you might get angry at simply being made to hit the dirt again .. or you just might be angry that someone is trying to hurt your bros... or you might be angry at having to hump the bush for days.... whatever you are angry about, it replaces the fear and you come to the " ok, i've had enough of this bull****, it's on" mentality... it's an interesting shift, to say he least.

Wake · Apr 21, 2012

Imho, I think a lot of the more-sensitive people on this issue need to step back and realize the reality of war. **** happens.

My brother-in-law has killed 23 insurgents.

He has no respect for those loudmouths sitting on their biscuit in the sidelines, assuming exactly how soldiers should behave during the hell of war.

ric27 · Apr 21, 2012

Crosscheck said:
Then please share with us your reaction to your first kill. How did you react to it?

NP - It was like a broken record. Kinda went something like this.. "Breathe, breathe, breathe, calm, the **** down!!.....breathe, breathe...look for targets...Holy ****, I can't believe this is really happening....breathe, breathe....Holy ****, I can't believe this is really happening....look for target.....Holy ****, I can't believe this is really happening" ...over and over, again

Wake · Apr 21, 2012

ric27 said:
NP - It was like a broken record. Kinda went something like this.. "Breathe, breathe, breathe, calm, the **** down!!.....breathe, breathe...look for targets...Holy ****, I can't believe this is really happening....breathe, breathe....Holy ****, I can't believe this is really happening....look for target.....Holy ****, I can't believe this is really happening" ...over and over, again

A person with ADD may actually love that. So exciting. :mrgreen: J/k

d0gbreath · Apr 21, 2012

mac said:
Well, the pictures we are talking about now certainly have value to those that love to bash soldiers.

Some folks are bashing the situation, not the troops. If anything, the pictures only serve to make me feel sorry for the troops. Don't forget, many of our warriors are still under the legal drinking age.

They might as well snap some shots to show us what will be popping up in their dreams for the rest of their lives.

Fubar · Apr 21, 2012

Mickey Shane said:
Some folks are bashing the situation, not the troops. If anything, the pictures only serve to make me feel sorry for the troops. Don't forget, many of our warriors are still under the legal drinking age.

They might as well snap some shots to show us what will be popping up in their dreams for the rest of their lives.

Right u are.they just don't know it yet.for now....it's all fun and games.and the video gaming industry it's the big winner.

Dittohead not! · Apr 21, 2012

Rapunzel52 said:
This is what you get when you lower the standards as to who gets in. I have a huge respect for most of our men and women in the military, but when standards are lowered and you have people entering that are not doing it for patriotic reasons and God has been basically driven out of our society, this is what you get. A lot of these young men and women have been raised and schooled in our God void liberal society which transcends all barriers including the military. A lot of them are void of any morals, ethics or values. Not all, most a lot of these men and women are not our parents military.

The only thing more brutal and bloody than a political war is a religious war.

ric27 · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
The only thing more brutal and bloody than a political war is a religious war.

Everyone considers their war to be a just war and can present the reasons why, from their perspective, war is justified and they are on the right side.

Be it political or religious

Dittohead not! · Apr 21, 2012

ric27 said:
Everyone considers their war to be a just war and can present the reasons why, from their perspective, war is justified and they are on the right side.

Be it political or religious

Of course they can, and do. If it is a religious war, though, then god is on their side and so they can't lose. Anything that they do is good, glorious, and godly, while the enemy is the devil incarnate and therefore less than human.

apdst · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
The only thing more brutal and bloody than a political war is a religious war.

That's necessarily true. WW1 and were purdy bloody. So was The Civil War. None of those were religious wars.

apdst · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
Of course they can, and do. If it is a religious war, though, then god is on their side and so they can't lose. Anything that they do is good, glorious, and godly, while the enemy is the devil incarnate and therefore less than human.

That's any war.

Vendablebow · Apr 21, 2012

This is not, and has never been good. It creates the Image of us as being savage killers. When that is not our mission in Afghanistan.

Dittohead not! · Apr 21, 2012

Vendablebow said:
This is not, and has never been good. It creates the Image of us as being savage killers. When that is not our mission in Afghanistan.

What is our mission in Afganistan?

We already got Bin Laden, didn't we?

And he wasn't even in Afganistan. He was in a nation that is an "ally"

cpwill · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
The only thing more brutal and bloody than a political war is a religious war.

Yeah? I think you may want to ask a few Cambodians about that. Or, perhaps, a few Russian survivors of WWII - almost a seventh of their populace was killed in that conflict. Or perhaps you could ask some Middle Eastern historians about the Mongol Invasions - they killed so many people that the Middle East didnt' regain it's pre-invasion population until the 20th Century.

ric27 · Apr 21, 2012

Vendablebow said:
This is not, and has never been good. It creates the Image of us as being savage killers. When that is not our mission in Afghanistan.

What is our mission in A-stan? Is it not to kill, the enemy by any means necessary?..Then how can, the actions displayed in those pics be more offensive than war already is?

Dittohead not! · Apr 21, 2012

Seems I stand corrected. Any war is a bloody mess, not just a religious one.

It makes me wonder just why human beings love war so much, glorify it, and engage in it at the least excuse?

Vendablebow · Apr 21, 2012

ric27 said:
What is our mission in A-stan? Is it not to kill, the enemy by any means necessary?..Then how can, the actions displayed in those pics be more offensive than war already is?

Yes it is, but the point I am making, is it is ok to kill in self defense, and defense of the country. It is not OK, to take pictures with the bodies as if they were trophies. War is not a sport, it is a hell that most of us posting do not understand. But, it shouldn't be glorified. The dead are still people, not animals.

cpwill · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
Seems I stand corrected. Any war is a bloody mess, not just a religious one.

war is war. the guys at the fronts tend to care alot less about the Grand Meta Narrative Behind It.

If you really want, you may find CS Lewis (who served on the front lines of WWI) writings on war, and his experience, interesting.

It makes me wonder just why human beings love war so much, glorify it, and engage in it at the least excuse?

myriad reasons. It's actually easier to simply kill someone and take his stuff than it is to try to develop a skill set and trade him for it.

Dittohead not! · Apr 21, 2012

cpwill said:
war is war. the guys at the fronts tend to care alot less about the Grand Meta Narrative Behind It.

If you really want, you may find CS Lewis (who served on the front lines of WWI) writings on war, and his experience, interesting.

myriad reasons. It's actually easier to simply kill someone and take his stuff than it is to try to develop a skill set and trade him for it.

One would think that humanity would have evolved beyond conking the other guy on the head and taking over his cave, but it seems we have not.

apdst · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
Seems I stand corrected. Any war is a bloody mess, not just a religious one.

It makes me wonder just why human beings love war so much, glorify it, and engage in it at the least excuse?

It's very rare to find anyone that, "glorifies", war.

"It's good that war is so terrible, or else men would grow to fond of it" --Robert E. Lee

cpwill · Apr 21, 2012

apdst said:
It's very rare to find anyone that, "glorifies", war.

You find them. Early to mid 20th Century Progressives considered war morally beneficent for the nation, especially as it encouraged the public coordination of efforts towards a single goal, a tendency they hoped to transplant to other social issues.

The Moral Equivalent of War

...The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper. H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the centre of the situation. "In many ways," he says, "military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They are fed a drilled and training for better services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research by commercialism, its little shortsighted snatches at profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house-appliances of today, for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of today is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we now possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a use now for such superannuated things."

Wells adds that he thinks that the conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acquisition when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace. I believe as he does. It would be simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley's party on the Congo with their cannibal war-cry of "Meat! Meat!" and that of the "general-staff" of any civilized nation. History has seen the latter interval bridged over; the former one can be bridged over much more easily.

Cephus · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
Of course they can, and do. If it is a religious war, though, then god is on their side and so they can't lose. Anything that they do is good, glorious, and godly, while the enemy is the devil incarnate and therefore less than human.

Funny how many religious wars don't go that way though. Both sides think god is on their side and when one side loses, they don't admit they were wrong, they make up excuses why god abandoned them.

ric27 · Apr 21, 2012

Dittohead not! said:
Seems I stand corrected. Any war is a bloody mess, not just a religious one.

It makes me wonder just why human beings love war so much, glorify it, and engage in it at the least excuse?

The best description of man......from Pressfield

Enjoy

"Mankind as it is constituted," Polynikes said, "is as a boil and a canker. Observe the specimens in any nation other than Lakedaemon. Man is weak, greedy, craven, lustful, prey to every species of vice and depravity. He will lie, steal, cheat, murder, melt down the very statues of the gods and coin their gold as money for whores. This is man. This is his nature, as all the poets attest.

Fortunately God in his mercy has provided a counterpoise to our specoes' innate depravity. That gift, my young friend is war.

War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable in a man. It unites him with his brothers and binds them in selfless love, eradicating in the crucible of necessity all which is base and ignoble. There in the holy mill of murder the meanest of men may seek and find that part of himself, concealed beneath the corrupt, which shines forth brilliant and virtuous, worthy of honor before the gods. Do not despise war, my young friend, nor delude yourself that mercy and compassion are virtuessuperior to andreia, to manly valor.

Misterveritis · Apr 21, 2012

Wake said:
I have no idea who Dick Durbin is but I think that's another malicious comparison on his part, imho.

That would be "Little Dick" Durban (D)

Misterveritis · Apr 21, 2012

ric27 said:
Nope. That doesn't work that way. First, you answer then you get a cookie

Counter my point....

Take out the uniforms, the German language and the genocide (for now) and you get the American left. Control of industry, schools, indoctrination of the youth, class warfare, confiscation of the property of the targeted class, etc. And do it all for the people.

There is a wonderful quote attributed to Adolph "Hope and Change" Hitler, "Give me five years and you won't recognize your cities". circa 1939. I doubt that is is real but I like it.

Photos show U.S. GIs posing with dead Afghans[W:1146]

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