U.S. Soldiers have a Kodak moment

With the corpses of Afghan civilian corpses.

Cute...

Oh hi situationism

Seriously though, in that situation, after being a solder killing Afghans for a while, you or I would have eventually done the same sort of thing.

It's wrong, but that's how humans are and have always been.

edited 23rd Mar '11 4:38:07 PM by annebeeche

My taxes are paying for these pansies? These fucks are proud of civilian prize kills? Seriously?!

It's nothing really new. There was Abu Ghraib, there's a brief depiction of it in Full Metal Jacket, and the Celts (as well as many other cultures around the world) used to carry home the heads of slain foes as trophies to show off to their friends and to bring back onto the battlefield to intimidate future enemies.

It's wrong and one of the reasons why I'm opposed to war, but it happens.

edited 23rd Mar '11 4:51:22 PM by annebeeche

Dude, calm down. Situations like this have happened in every conflict in human history. It's nothing new. Same thing happened in Vietnam, Korea, WW 2, etc. You're just mad about this one because there's a picture.

edited 23rd Mar '11 4:50:50 PM by SoberIrishman

Its the principle of the thing. LOOK at the smile on those bastards' faces! Getting caught up in the spur of the moment, yeah, ok I get it. It happens. Its war.

But he's smiling. Posing next to it, a civilian of all things, and smiling. I mean, whoa. Seriously, dude?

edited 23rd Mar '11 4:56:04 PM by Schitzo

But you're right. This is nothing new, and there's really nothing more to say.

Sorry for posting this up. Do with this thread what you will, Mods.

"... a lot of it being compared to what happened at Abu Grahib back in Iraq..."

Abu Grahib nothing, at least that was supposedly just done to prisoners. This is clearly being done to innocent civilians, so they don't even have the Pay Evil unto Evil excuse to fall back on.

edited 23rd Mar '11 5:04:54 PM by neoYTPism

Right, because it's not as bad to string prisoners up and pile them on top of each other and force them to commit sodomy and whatever else they did, than to do the same thing to innocent civilians.

I mean, it's not like they have human rights, right?

Sarcasm is so fun.

While it's true that this sort of thing has gone on for quite some time there is still no reason we can't expect soldiers to show basic human dignity to other human beings.

.

Not surprising. Not the first time US soldiers did that in afghanistan, and won't be the last, but what truly stands out is....

So does that mean the civilian survived a rifle shot and was considered big enough a threat to warrant a grenade to finish off?

I guess the worse thing about this incident was the fact that other soldiers tried to cover it up.

The qualifications of the US army is far far too easy to meet. If they don't want stuff like this to happen, stop allowing gun happy rednecks to enlist and set a standard for who can and can not join.

Also, did they pose in those photographs not knowing they'd get in trouble?

edited 23rd Mar '11 5:47:04 PM by Signed

I never said it was justified to do this to prisoners, I was just saying it was not as heinous as doing it to civilians, sort of like how we have the death penalty for some criminals but not for civilians.

^^The US Military didn't do this. A handful of soliders did it.

But look at the bright side: These assholes are being prosecuted for this. I'd like to see the Taliban prosecute somebody for violating one of the important tenants of Islam in service of their cause.

edited 23rd Mar '11 5:50:09 PM by HungryJoe

^Good luck with that.

The Taliban doesn't exactly follow their own country's laws to begin with...they're more akin to guerilla fighters with a religious bent.

As for the handful of soldiers. They're a handful of soldiers IN the military trained by the military and accepted by the military.

The fact that they aren't even being executed shows a serious problem with the system.

What's with the lenient sentence(for the crime)?

edit: or was it guerilla? One is the big black monkies, and the other is an irregular military force facing off against a larger military force via harassment.

edited 25th Mar '11 1:58:55 AM by Signed

Guerrilla. From the Spanish word "guerra" for war. In the most simplistic literal translation of the term to English "guerrilla" means warrior.

bah crap, I just called the Taliban a bunch of religious apes.

Fixed.

That's an insult to apes. Keep it up.

I have to admit, that made me laugh, Tom.

-clears throat-

These are the same guys who we were all talking about on this board a while back, the ones who got caught for organizing a kill squad amongst eachother and threatening to kill several people not involved if they told, and coercing other people to participate by force as a means of implicating them so they wouldn't tell. Several soldiers turned them in when they got home, and these guys are rotting in leavenworth and will probably be executed. Yeah right, we don't have the testicular fortitude to hang Hasan, god damnit, we're such pussies in this day and age.

So yeah, not two separate issues. I'm not shocked that people capable of organizing a death squad and smoking/raping civilians would hesitate to take pictures with their war-dead.

Noooow for the negative parts for shits and giggles, I don't have a problem with soldiers snapping photos of legitimate kills. You perforate the brain bucket of an insurgent, go ahead and have a Kodak moment. Thumbs up for schwacking him, one less guy trying to kill the lot of us.

Oh, and my other inappropriate moment: A photo of a friend of mine during a deployment.◊

<Insert company line about how my opinions are not the opinions of the Department of the Defense or any branch of the United States military, and that there is not a regulation or a any references to this subject matter, because there ain't.>

@Signed: It's usually not the gun happy retarded as bricks rednecks who do this sort of thing, it's those guys who slip through the radar, or people who USED to be good and normal soldiers, and after one too many deployments develop an extreme hatred for the local populace.

I don't expect you to like it or fully empathize, but you need to at least understand, your opinion of the locals isn't very good after people have tried to kill you who dress up just like them, and suicide bombers kill friends of yours while dressed just like them. And when you raid a house and there's a family sitting down for dinner, all the males of the family could have quite possibly been shooting at you about 5 minutes ago, ran inside, and suddenly want to act like a scared family that did nothing wrong. Massacres like this happen because of the frustration in the ranks that this sort of warfare causes to a professional army. We're warriors, and it's not a warriors death to get killed by some coward with a suicide vest, that really pisses us off. I'm not saying it's justified or good, but there are lots of elements in reality that are not, that's just what it is.

And please don't give out the "Well then don't go to Afghanistan durr hurr" line I've heard when I've explained that before, we didn't make that call. I'm not saying you're that type of obnoxious prick, I'm just saying that it's easy for someone who feels a certain way about this to say that without actually thinking it through with any modicum of effort.

edited 23rd Mar '11 11:22:49 PM by Barkey

As for these guys being accepted um they were accepted up to the point we found out what they were doing. Despite what the lot of you think we don't like guys like this in our military.

Good job enlisting people you don't like to have in your side...and doing a bang up job giving them a sentence proportionate to their crime*

Think real carefully about these 5 words...this isn't suicide to avoid paying a debt or a misguided attempt to cope with the loss of a girlfriend.

And if you lose your cool that easily, you shouldn't have enlisted, just stick with being a janitor or waiter, or something else anyone can easily get into with only a high school education.

"Serve your country"...by keeping it litter clean and making sure drinks get to the customers on time.

edited 25th Mar '11 2:11:48 AM by Signed

Hey Signed take your obvious bias somewhere else then. We have been reasonable you are not.

As was pointed out and you blatantly ignored shit happens good people go bad. You don't like that fact of life tough shit.

Oh and stop being rude.

edited 25th Mar '11 2:34:10 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Yeah, good job acting like I somehow have any power over who joins, I'm not a recruiter.

You're really in no position to make judgements on how things like combat and deployment affect the human mind. You would be surprised what extreme conditions can do to even the most stable of people. Please take that into consideration, this isn't common, we don't support or condone it, which is why when these guys got punished they were sent to prison post-haste.

Signed, I don't have a problem with you as a poster overall, but you're making some rather broad and uninformed statements that you know nothing about here. It's not as simple and clear cut as you are acting like it is. I'd like you to be a bit more open minded to actually learning about the psychological cause of things like this instead of just saying "Hurr durr those guys suck they should never have been soldiers. It's the systems fault they got let in in the first place." You're being an armchair general, and that's not productive at all from someone who has absolutely dick when it comes to knowledge of the subject matter they are armchairing.

Not. That. Simple.

edited 25th Mar '11 10:22:29 AM by Barkey