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By Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
June 24, 2006 All sides are throwing blame around as freely as if it were money being thrown by politicians for the deaths of soldiers in Iraq, especially the two who were captured and tortured to death. Some in the media are blaming Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush for starting the war in the first place, though in fact it was the Muslim extremists who started the war. How quickly people forget the embassies and the Cole and the barracks in Lebanon and 9/11, etc. Bill O'Reilly puts the possibility of some blame upon the news media and Democratic politicians who have created such a climate that the soldiers, their officers, and the CinC have forced them to obey stringent rules of engagement which almost guarantee that some will be killed or captured because of hesitation. One arguments is, and it holds a kernel of truth, that it is necessary to win the hearts and minds of the people to win a war. Seems to me, however, that we won WW2 without worrying about whether we were making the Japanese and Germans angry. Another argument is that we don’t want to become as brutal as those we are opposing. Well, of course not, but making an occasional mistake in combat is not condoning deliberately vile and inhuman tactics and we shouldn’t tolerate politicians and media types who pretend it is. I've had some experience in this area, having served in and out of uniform from 1960 to 2003, a year of that time in Vietnam with infantry and artillery units, and more recently engaged in the training of young troops. It can be fairly said that soldiers die in war from many different reasons. One of those reasons is that the politicos impose such stringent rules of engagement that the soldiers hold fire too long when threatened and thus become killed or captured. In this I agree with O'Reilly. I’ve seen it happen. I complained about such to Lyndon Johnson when I was in Vietnam, and I have complained about it more recently during training of a field hospital when I was its commander. One training scenario used was that a fellow, speaking no English, comes up to your hospital's gate with a large package, and the gate guard's response is to ask him to put it down and step back. The man continues to hold the package and advance, and when the unknown man reached into the top of the open box, my gate guard, fearing it was a bomb, shot him. The "correct" response--some might say the politically correct response--was to "realize" that this was just a local vendor trying to sell some goods to make money to support his family. Ah, yes, the gate guard was expected to be a mind reader! Afterward, when the evaluator was through with his discussion and his chastisement of the gate guard who fired the shot (it isn't politically correct to call them "evaluators" now, either, by the way), I took the gate guard aside and commended him for action which might have, had it actually been a bomb, saved his and the other guards' lives. One simply cannot expect every young soldier to be a psychic and to make the correct decisions in split seconds every time. So maybe it is the politicians and the news media who have caused many soldiers' deaths and injuries by making them too hesitatant to act in situations where uncertainty is ALWAYS going to exist. But I would not hold my breath until the media admits their complicity in causing soldiers to die. And I really doubt that John Murtha, who knows better, will ever issue an apology either. ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: Physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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