Written by Carl Hitchens   

Sebastian Junger in his article "We're All Guilty of Dehumanizing the Enemy" doesn't really get it.

Dehumanizing the enemy in war as a means of psychologically distancing oneself from otherwise unacceptable acts of "murder" is not what caused certain U.S. Marines to desecrate enemy dead in Afghanistan. It's a nice, pat psychological supposition that misses the real point.

The military is a culture predicated on the precept of necessary killing at times for the "greater good." Within that framework, there are specific rules of engagement set forth differentiating accepted and unaccepted behavior. We can argue about the virtues or non-virtues of war, the morality or immorality of it, but troops, if properly trained and supervised, know the non-gray area, standard operational right from wrong under which they are to carry out their duties. The spiritual-philosophical arguments concerning war notwithstanding, the direct causal trigger for the Marines urinating on the bodies of dead enemy combatants is a breakdown in discipline.

The broad, philosophical brush of conditioned human barbarity in which Junger paints this incident, while not unrelated, is too obliquely connected to understand the immediate problem and cause. These Marines chose to disobey the rules defining their cause and behavior. They disregarded command injunctions, because of undisciplined combat detachment. Somewhere there was a breakdown of intervening self-discipline in the chain of command. And, therein, lies the immediate cause and correction in advancement of combat-stress diagnosis and waited human evolution.

Carl Hitchens
Author, Vietnam combat Marine veteran
http://www.drumtalk-hitch.com/Sitting_with_Warrior/Sitting_with_Warrior.html