Did you even serve in ANY military at all ? I'm willing to bet the answer is no.

Posting crap on an internet forum is worth the paper its printed on. So your lack of "campaign" is just more talk without substance or anything to back it up with.

In sum, your just some dude on the internet with an opinion, talking out of his ass, and posting garbage that is worth the paper its' printed on... . muppet.

Im not even gonna bother examining the rest of your post. If you have an opinion, thats all well and good, but don't come off like your not talking out of your ass. If you haven 't walked the walk, don't talk the talk.

Its true what you say but this sort of behavior should not be encouraged.
In particular uploading this stuff on YouTube.
Look at pissing game it caused....actually its silly.

To put it simply...because of vast range of characters that serve in the army and nature of the job lines need to drown for the sake of the cause.

Im not condoning or encouraging that behavior, though i DO understand where it comes from and how it manifests. What i take issue with, is the moral crusaders who seem to think that they'd never do anything similar; when in all actuality, they really don't know what they're capable of, because they haven't lived in the same world, dealing with the same realities.

While it's just as possible that the guys who do things like these are morons, and unfortunately wearing an uniform hasn't made them immune to being the morons and doing the moronic things they would do without the uniform too.

I have spoken for the conditions causing things earlier in this thread and in a way agree with you, but I still don't see how they are above criticism, when their fellow servicemen don't seem to do stuff like this all the time.

The moral crusaders is my anger with it. I come from a military family, had it not been for a badly treated broken pelvis when I was 14, I would have been a Marine myself.

You truly do not know the horrors of warfare until you see it, it is so easy to sit outside and throw moral rocks, and play Monday morning quarterback to situations that would make most moralists curl up in a fetal position and cry.

I bet it even served as a morale booster for those men. As well it should have. Why should we have respect for a faceless, un-uniformed, hiding amongst civilians like cowards.

Set off an IED then run away and hide in your house with your wife and kids as morality shields, using our own "hearts and minds" bullcrap against us.

I never see no mentions of Arab sniper films killing Brits and Americans, I suppose that is hunky dory?

I feel no pity. I would have decapitated them, filmed it, and put it on liveleak like they do to our journalists, and other civilians they catch over there.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

I will admit there is a bit of personal resentment behind my opinions, like a personal loss kinda thing.
They fight like cowards, using our own Rules of Engagement, and bleeding heart press against us.
I am not saying my thinking is right (and make no argument that it is right). I am just a fight fire with with a nuke kinda guy.

I know I am flawed.

But your quote is relevant, and made me feel slightly guilty for my thinking.

Heee...! :stare:

I am the guy quoting Nietzsche on this board...! :shifty:


:O:

I understand everything that you and Ducimus are saying. Our troops are doing a very difficult job under great amounts of stress and at great risk to personal life. However, this action is resulting in the opposite of what we want.

We, as a nation, want these people to leave us alone. We want them to police themselves in what ultimately amounts to our best interest. I, personally, want these troops home. I want to be rid of our involvement in this region and I want our nation safe. I bet that a large number of the people on this forum want the same thing. These marines may be blowing off steam. They may be symbolically showing disdain for an enemy that is responsible for a litany of egregious acts. At the same time, the act works contrary to the above stated goals.

By inflaming the populace, we only ensure our continued involvement in this region. The only two things that this guarantees is the continued threat to the American homeland and the certainty of deaths of American servicemen (and women). It is akin to (and please forgive the analogy) a football player doing a crazy and excessive touchdown dance after scoring. You already have your points; just walk away and keep the game in your favor.

This isn't about winning hearts and minds. I do not care if the Afghani people like us. I want two things--our homeland safe and our troops home. Urinating on the enemy in front of the cameras only provides the opposite. And yes, it is my right to complain about it. Our constituion states that the military arm is answerable to the civilian populace. I know that many on this forum find this distasteful, but I thank the heavens that we live in such a society.

To add a different but parallel perspective to that: these guys are volunteers and professionals, trained and commanded ultimately by elected officials, whose ultimate bosses are the electorate; they are paid by taxpayer money, and their presence in the combat theater is on behalf of international treaties.

Therefore, all of this moral posturing of "you have to be there" is an excuse - and an understandable one - but is neither a true justification nor an acceptable absolution of guilt. I'll say it again: all of this "you haven't served, you don't know anything" is crap - it takes a level of understanding and common experience to sympathise, but lack of this common experience does not remove the right to critique. Saying that it does is rhetorical baloney. You bet any Joe and Mary can question and criticize these guys, because they are there voluntarily and on behalf of everybody, accountable to democratic leadership, paid by taxpayer dollars, and responsible to international organizations which have set rules and goals for this mission, i.e. pretty much everybody in the whole darn civilized world.

As a US soldier in Afghanistan, you are not some lost soul in a dark place, no matter how you feel about it when you're there. You are a volunteer who signed up and who is there on a stabilization mission on behalf of several international organizations that represent hundreds of millions of people, including both US citizens, Europeans, and of course Afghans. You are responsible to these people in the end. They have a right to be displeased with the job you do. End of story.

Thats true and i'm pretty sure there is a lot of political crap behind this criticism-shaping public opinion stuff.
People with all kind of agendas being horrified and outraged.
At the end of the day those solders pissed on DEAD Taliban scumbags. It is stupid as disgraceful(including the part of uploading this)but it can be hardly called atrocity...just politics

But when you are told you are coming home from Iraq for good ( after getting a purple heart), to your families, great service, good job, Oh, Obama wants to step up Afghanistan troop counts, guess what?

Funerals at Arlington are quite majestic and full of honor and patriotism, but just as sad. No medals for dying... Just a folded up flag, and the unsincere (bullcrap died as a hero) letter from some stuffy high officer.

I am thinking about the welfare of my own people. They can go fiddle with themselves as far as I am concerned.

Americans are sleeping in thier cars, or under boardwalks, and eating out of garbage cans.

America first.

Like everything else, of course it's not free from politics, no question about that. On the other hand, you constantly have to ask on whose behalf and why they are doing this. Last I checked, none of the mandates in international law or mission statements by US military officials state anything about humiliating the Taliban or abusing corpses. The issue has not been discussed and put up on vote, but by the same token you can't take that as a sign of approval. If someone is personally offended that soldiers working on his/her behalf (and the troops here inevitably are working on behalf of both US and international public) are urinating on corpses, then they are right and the soldiers are wrong. The soldiers aren't there for themselves.

A (banal and horrible, I know) comparison might be: if you're working at a store and a shoplifter grabs something, punches you and runs away - you chase him down, beat him up, swear and spit on him in full view of your customers, you might not be morally wrong in someone's understanding because the shoplifter (like the Taliban) is a scumbag. But when the store's customers are horrified and the boss thinks that you've done something that damages the store's reputation and deters customers, the boss and the customers are right, you are wrong, and yes - you get fired, rightly and justly. It doesn't matter if you stood to lose more than your customers, and it doesn't matter whether your boss wasn't even there. Because ultimately that wasn't in your job description, was not what the customers came to the store for, and was not what you were hired for. The right thing to do would've been to restrain the shoplifter calmly and call police.

This is not about scumbags, and this is not about you. This is about a job that you were trusted with by the public. If the public explicitly gave you approval to go and pee on the Taliban, fine. If they didn't, you don't. That's how a military is supposed to work for a democratic state and the rule of international law. Else what you're advocating is neither democratic nor respective of international law and human rights, and may as well be baloney. Which is where, by the way, we come to my usual issue with some arguments on this forum - some people have an awfully easy time advocating selective use of democracy and human rights when convenient for them, and their disposal when inconvenient. Which is about the same as discrediting the very basis of their life and liberty altogether.

CCIP sir.

I am not condoning nor condemning.
I understand what that was about.

No it is not right, especially when we (as a nation) is trying to take the moral high ground.

I was simply trying to convey the feelings of a minority of grunts who have become disheartened by this cause.

I see your points, and know deep down inside we should always try to better than them. But something inside me says these wars would have been shorter had it not been for morals and feelings to take precedence over strategy and then end goal.
I am not a savage, I am just war weary.

Yeah...and its all about magnifying this stuff totally out proportions.
(i don't need lectures about role of military in democratic state since i did my years including yearly reserve service for past years and i'm very liberal and democratic kind of guy-when i want to:03:)

By sending so many 18 years old kids to fight war like the one in Afghanistan you can expect some dumb stuff to take place for sure-lets hope its worst of it....
I don't think that crucifying the solders and putting morality of US military into question over this due to partisan politics is right thing to do.
While criticism and drawing lines is in place.