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Soldiers’ alleged actions in Iraq harmful

4 min read

It’s disturbing enough, frightfully so, that former Army private Steven D. Green has been charged with raping a 14-year-old Iraqi teen-ager and shooting to death her and three members of her family, including a 5-year-old girl. If he’s found guilty, we can perhaps chalk up his subhuman behavior to Green’s so-called “anti-social personality disorder,” the malady that resulted in his dismissal from the 101st Airborne before U.S. Army officials learned of and began investigating the alleged March 12 incident.

But what trips me up, and bothers me more, is that five other soldiers were involved in this sickening plot. Four of them have been charged with rape and murder and other charges, while the fifth is charged only with failing to report the attack. Are we to believe that all five of them also suffered from “anti-social personality disorders”? That’s a bit far-fetched, even for the most ardent social apologists.

If the Army is correct in its accusations, we have six well-trained soldiers engaged in a vile plot, one that involved changing into regular clothes, abandoning a checkpoint, and burning a body in an attempted cover-up. Wasn’t there a sane one, a human one, in the bunch who could have short-circuited this apparent madness?

All of these guys had training, access to weapons, knowledge of how to take out an enemy on the field of battle. But they could do nothing to stop Green, the apparent ringleader and chief perpetrator? Not one of them had the courage to grab a rifle, point it in his direction and say, “Over my dead body will you do this.”

Call me old-fashioned, but that’s what I would have done had I gotten a whiff of such a plan. I’ve never served in the military, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong, as do the vast majority of members of the 101st Airborne and the rest of the military service. “Anti-social personality disorder” or not, I would have had no problem pulling the trigger on a fellow soldier who insisted on doing such a thing. (Maybe that’s my version of “anti-social personality disorder.”)

It’s simply called courage. The father of one of my best childhood friends was a World War II paratrooper. Toward the end of that war, his unit captured a couple German army prisoners, an old man and, if my memory serves me correct, a young boy. Someone in the unit talked about shooting them. A stern warning was given – it was a threat, actually – and that didn’t happen.

That’s the kind of behavior that makes you proud to be an American, not the stuff with which these guys are charged.

And what were the unforeseen ramifications of this reported action? An al-Qaida-linked group, the Mujahedeen Shura Council, killed one U.S. soldier, kidnapped two others from the 101st and mutilated and apparently killed them in retaliation. Those deaths will hang over the heads of Green & Co. if they are found guilty as charged.

None of this makes the U.S. military’s job in Iraq any easier. It riles up the citizenry, fuels the opposition and puts remaining soldiers even more in harm’s way. Think about how you’d react if soldiers from another country, having overtaken us for whatever hypothetical reason, did this to your family. Chances are pretty good that you’d be out looking for revenge, too.

I’d like to know what these six soldiers were thinking. That is, if they were thinking. And before you rush to defend them just on the basis of being in the military, ask yourself how you’d feel if the same alleged crimes had been perpetrated by a civilian gang in your local community. From the standpoint of committing a crime, there really is no difference.

Maybe this type of behavior has always gone on with a small percentage of the military, but in today’s information age we hear about it faster and more frequently. But somehow I doubt that.

Green and the four others facing serious charges are staring at the death penalty. If they’re convicted, they should get it.

Paul Sunyak is editorial page editor of the Herald-Standard. He can be reached at (724) 439-7577 or psunyak@heraldstandard.com

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