People, this is a very emotive subject that is being discussed here.
Everyone obviously has an opinion, but lets not let it deteriorate into personal insults and nastiness.
Please keep it civil.
There is a vast range of experience here from people who have "been there" to those who haven't.
If a subject like this is being discussed, it will cause extremes of views and opinions but keep it calm, please.

Originally Posted by lolwhassup

You are indeed correct I have not shown you where you are wrong. The people who experienced war already have. Why don't you scroll back and look at what brinktk and 42RM have said? Their words carry more weight then mine seeing as they have seen it.

Their words don't overule the Geneva Conventions nor common human decency. So in fact in this debate they carry no more weight than any one else.

Your problem is that you think "Might makes right", whereas in fact, "Right makes Might".

Originally Posted by senojekips

I think that most of us on this site have volunteered to fight for our countries. But nowhere in my sign up paperwork was there a clause that stated it was OK to deliberately murder civilians in cold blood.

In your sign up paperwork there's also nowhere a clause that says you'll be an IED target.

If you sign up you do as you are told that is a given, but you don't have the right to take the law into your own hands, and if you want to start calling people sh!tbags for obeying and upholding the International conventions on warfare. You want to take a long look in the mirror.

They did what they were told. Clear the houses because there was incoming fire from there. Others cared for the wounded.

The persons responsible for this don't deserve respect like the remaining 99%+ of troops who can do their jobs and not resort to murder of innocent women and children. It's the 99% who need the support.

Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq. It's not all black and white you know.

You talk about supporting your service personel, well,... it people like you who destroy their credibility. This was not a single man who snapped, it was a cold blooded deliberate atrocity. I"ll bet the Fort Hood murderer will get more than 3 months. Short memories eh?

Haditha was manslaughter.
Fort Hood was murder.

Originally Posted by VDKMS

In your sign up paperwork there's also nowhere a clause that says you'll be an IED target.

I dunno what sevice you were in, from your answers here I'd hazard a guess at, The Salvation Army? In most countries other than where you signed up, you sign up to "Serve" that means you do what your country expects of you, and if you are sent to a war zone, the enemy are often found to be quite grumpy about it all and are often somewhat antisocial in their behaviour towards you. It goes with the Job description. If you expected the enemy to throw cream cakes at you, you were in the wrong job.

Originally Posted by VDKMS

They did what they were told. Clear the houses because there was incoming fire from there. Others cared for the wounded.

I'll believe you if you can provide a credible source that shows they were ordered to execute innocent women and children. Until then, No! they did not do as they were told. I think that you might find their own UCMJ has something to say about this behaviour.

Originally Posted by VDKMS

. It's not all black and white you know.

It never is, but the fact remains these murderers executed innocent women and children in cold blood. And there is not a single mitigating circumstance in the information found, in fact it is virtually all condemnatory right down to the facts that the info itself was supposed to have been destroyed, and never seen the light of day, the atrocity was lied about (caused by grenades) and the admission the the command structure has become far too off hand regarding civilian casualties.

Originally Posted by VDKMS

Haditha was manslaughter.
Fort Hood was murder.

Not at all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Perhaps it was not premeditated in this case, we'll never really know, but that does not make it manslaughter, it was deliberate murder, and the perpetrators knew that it was a crime against the UCMJ and Geneva Conventions,... they just didn't think that they'd be caught.

Originally Posted by VDKMS

Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq. It's not all black and white you know.

Not sure that link is helping your argument as it makes it look like a cover up on top of mass murder.

Originally Posted by Trooper1854

People, this is a very emotive subject that is being discussed here.
Everyone obviously has an opinion, but lets not let it deteriorate into personal insults and nastiness.
Please keep it civil.
There is a vast range of experience here from people who have "been there" to those who haven't.
If a subject like this is being discussed, it will cause extremes of views and opinions but keep it calm, please.

The majority of us kept it civil until Seno here decided to personally attack VDKMS and I.

Originally Posted by lolwhassup

The majority of us kept it civil until Seno here decided to personally attack VDKMS and I.

You and he are both old enough to know better, but I guess age doesn't necessarily bring acceptable moral values.

I never said a word to you until you stuck your bib in at Post#82.

You are like the subjects of this discussion, you think that you can say or do as you wish and not have to answer for it,.... it may work in your country, but not with me. If you want to "poke the monkey", don't whine when you get bitten.

Originally Posted by lolwhassup

The majority of us kept it civil until Seno here decided to personally attack VDKMS and I.

To be honest you got what you deserved on this one, to argue what they did was wrong but nothing should be done about it because you want to look after your own is a position that deserves the kick in the nuts it got.

To date I have only read one post that makes sense, this one...

Originally Posted by brinktk

I think what he is trying to point out is that the example you provided and the situation these Marines were in are not that same thing. It's not a matter of being "stressed out". It's a matter of exhaustion, misery, danger, frequent adrenaline dumps and fight or flight responses, anger, fear, and lack of supervision. All this added up over time and these guys are a prime example of what happens when things like this go unsupervised or an intervention is not made to give these men time to decompress.

Soldiers deal with stress all the time. One thing you DO learn in combat is that everyone has their limit. Once that limit is reached they can become a danger to themselves and others. A leader reaching this point can contaminate the rest of his men if left in that environment. I believe this is what happened. A leader in the military exerts much more influence over the lives and actions of his subordinates than does that of his peer in the civilian sector. So simply using your office example is seemingly undermining and minimizing the risks we take on a regular basis while we are deployed.

Don't contort this into a justification for the incident. I want to clarify that it is not. I understand it though. I know what it is to feel hate and anger toward people that I know are complicit in trying to kill me or my soldiers and then not be able to do a thing about it. It's very tempting to take matters into your own hands and administer "justice". The fact is, in 99% of cases this urge is resisted and we move out and continue our mission. These guys messed up and should be spending a long time in jail at the least. It IS a shame that this case was bungled to the point where these guys got what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Just please don't pretend to understand where we are coming from when we say that we can see how this happens.

The rest are just hand wringing weak arsed justifications that really arent worth the bandwidth taken to post them.

In past wars (WWll and before) some soldiers were reluctant to kill even armed opposition except in the most desperate situations, so after that era military training included a 'de-humanising' phase to remove the natural inclination not to kill the enemy. However, most soldiers still rarely go to the extreme of massacring civilians point blank. The only defence I can conceive of is that the system trained him to be a psychopath. How you can change that without reducing the effectiveness of combat soldiers I have no idea.

"The singular lack of enthusiasm for killing one's fellow man has existed throughout military history," Grossman asserts.

The reluctance of ordinary men to kill can be overcome by intensified training, direct commands from officers, long-range weapons and propaganda that glorifies the soldier's cause and dehumanises the enemy. "With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill," Grossman writes.

Many soldiers who kill enemies in battle are initially exhilarated, Grossman says, but later they often feel profound revulsion and remorse, which may transmute into post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments. Indeed, Grossman believes that the troubles experienced by many combat veterans are evidence of a "powerful, innate human resistance toward killing one's own species."

In other words, the Schrumpf effect is usually a product less of nature than of nurture—although "nurture" is an odd term for training that turns ordinary young men into enthusiastic killers.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/...ick-out-of-kill-2010-04-23

Originally Posted by MontyB

Not sure that link is helping your argument as it makes it look like a cover up on top of mass murder.

What happend was wrong, but they did not go there just to kill innocent civilians. The papers also show under what conditions they had to operate and that's something some people will not understand.
That they tried to cover it up is normal human behaviour (although it is wrong). That the General issued an investigation is proof that the brass takes such things serious and that justice in the US forces works (there were more cases like that).
But I'm still waiting for a terrorist, freedom fighter, rebel or whatever to be punished by his superiors for killing innocent civilians. Most civilians were not killed by coalition forces.