No support for general who said it's fun to kill Afghans

The Misanthrope by ETHAN CHATAGNIER / The Collegian

Lieutenant General James Mattis’ comments last week were reportedly greeted with laughter and applause. His commentary was on the thrill of combat — more specifically, how fun it is to shoot Afghans.

Among this talk, he issued a generalization of Afghan men as wife-beaters as a key element in what made shooting them such a “hoot.”

There’s no need to declaim the general’s callousness. It would be redundant. Besides, I have no desire to make him a figurehead of desensitization.

Having a villain certainly makes things easier. Lynndie England, remembered now for giving an infamous thumbs up in the Abu Ghraib prison photos, knows this.

The scapegoat effect makes things easier than the scarier truth which, surprisingly enough, came in the military’s apology.

The Marine commandant, General Michael Hagee, said Mattis’ comments “were intended to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war.”

A scary truth, if this is the reality that awaits everyone we send to war.

Culture and pop culture have been more willing over the past decades to contradict the old image of the glories of war.

It’s become more common to read literary accounts of war that drain the heroism from it. Books like Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, all portray war as more bleak than heroic. All were also in my high school curriculum.

These accounts, all those of actual soldiers, or more popularized ones like “Saving Private Ryan,” show both the heroic and the unthinkable actions the stresses of combat draw out of people.

Lately, we’ve seen no shortage of the more unthinkable. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay. James Mattis.

Take a trip a few decades back to the My Lai massacre, to how many other Vietnamese villages the press never found out about.

There is no denying that soldiers, of other nations and of our own, have committed heinous acts.

And yet we hide behind a platitude: “Support our troops.” A yellow ribbon on the back of SUVs that long ago ceased to be meaningful. Support our troops is the cry that’s been sounded against those who don’t support the war.

All the while, the troops remain in hostile territory, and a select few, held under the same blanket of hero worship, begin to find the fun in shooting the enemy.

This article, naturally, is not a call for a return to the 1970s, when Vietnam veterans returned home to the label of baby-killer. It’s important both to appreciate the sacrifices being made, and to recognize the twists that war works on some soldiers’ psyches.

It’s rare for people to talk about the human cost of war, and when they do, it’s always about death tolls.

Nobody wants to count the hidden costs. Nobody wants to talk about how many war veterans end up with mental problems or alcohol addictions.

It’s more convenient to single out bad apples like Mattis and England. No one wants to place the blame on the everyday foot soldier.

But that’s our mistake in the first place. There’s no reason to place blame on the troops: neither the vast majority of good ones, nor the few who go bad. It is a sad truth of war, after all, and we’re the ones who sent them there.