(Scene from Kandahar. Photo Gulf news.)

“… and the last thing I’ll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from 1918…, fraternity, equality, freedo, beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook ’em. And then, you’re right in the middle of a parley and they say: Hands up! You’re disarmed…, you republican voting swine! — No, let ’em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish…. I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture…, I release the safety on my Browning!”

SCHLAGETER: “What a thing to say!”
THIEMANN: “It hits the mark! You can be sure of that.”

SCHLAGETER: “You’ve got a hair trigger.”

—Hans Johst’s Nazi Drama “Schlageter.” Translated by Dr. Hans-Dieter Heinz, Stuttgart, 1984.

So, just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. The American staff sergeant who calmly executed sixteen Afghan men, women and children is coming out of the mists of the rage that permitted him to slip the mental safety-catch that has been instilled in us by the strict social compact of our society.

Living and fighting in a society that is wired differently than ours, the 38-year-old married father-of-two sniper- think about that for a minute- went rogue.  They tell us he is from Washington State, or at least was assigned there, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

I have been sampling the reaction around the world via the BBC and my network of personal informants. From the professionals, the horrid story comes with a hint of the salacious- perhaps I am too sensitive to it, but I can hear the unstated message of prim superiority from the talking heads who never, ever would find themselves in such a place where such evil could happen.

The sergeant reportedly had three deployments to Iraq prior to arriving in Kandahar. Reportedly he suffered a brain trauma due to an roadside IED blast. The talking heads are back and forth about that.

In the Sergeant’s time in country before he transitioned from warrior to murderer, host Afghan nationals have turned weapons on ISAF troops and killed them. An American squad orchestrated a string of murders against civilians completely unrelated to the fight with the Taliban.

It is savagery unrelated to the causes of the war. It is Afghanistan. It is killing because that is what happens there, where the safety-catch of society has been abraded away by what is now the rule for everyone now of fighting age- more than a full generations of constant war. Every young man is wired to full auto.

Commentators all agree that more must be done to train soldiers; and that deployment of troops must be carefully thought out.

General S.L.A. Marshall made a turn on one of the commentaries. SLAM, as he was known, was the father of a really cute red-head classmate in high school. He was an icon of the people who tried to figure out how citizens who were sent to war actually behaved- a sort of bridge to the Greatest Generation whose work was being re-examined in the context of the increasingly unpopular conflict in South East Asia.

In his book “Men Against Fire,” he claimed that 75 percent of troops in the Second World War weren’t able to fire at the enemy. His money quote reverberates this way:

“The American (comes) from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable….The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervasively — practically with his mother’s milk — that it is part of the normal man’s emotional make-up. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him.”

SLAM was able to dine out for years on the perception that some sort of training was necessary to enable maximum Army lethality. The reality on the ground in Asia, though, did not bear out the conclusions of the WW II study: according to research in the field, everyone who had a weapon seemed perfectly capable of using it without compunction.

SLAM’s views are back with this slaughter, as we try to sort out the implications of one of the good guys going rogue.

They will try the Staff Sergeantfor murder. The Secretary of Defense has already said so. This is going to be much worse than the rampage of Major Hassan down at Fort Hood, though in the end the charges will be the same, and could result in the death penalty.

I was done with the spin. I turned back to clear off the email queue before going to the day job. I clicked on one from the Philippines, and more precisely, the Club Level of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manila:

“Am sitting here with about a dozen G.I.’s talking about the impacts of the recent killings, the Marines pissing on the corpses and the Koran burning…we all know it is bad…but this is the team that is carrying the load. They are Great Americans…who absolutely LIVE for our collective national security…interesting with these Army types…they all have served multiple tours in CENTCOM.”

I wrote back immediately. The real implication of these killings has yet to emerge. The consequences of continuous war are repeated deployments. My friend said that the current deployments of our Carrier Strike Groups are averaging 8-9 months now, and when they return to home port they are expected to deploy again in as little as six months.

“This is nothing compared to what the ground pounders are enduring,” he wrote, and I checked. In the era of perpetual war, Army combat brigades have spent as few as 18 months in the States between deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Many soldiers doubt civilians can understand the pressures they face, and they see a widening gap between life in the Army and what they call “the outside world.”

The wars have been consuming the tiny portion of the nation’s youth who wear the uniform for a decade. And yet horrors like this have been mercifully few.

“This is not the force for perpetual war,” I pecked. “But course, it may that only a force like the one we have will shoulder the Nation’s burden without complaint.”

They are the latest Greatest Generation, and I am very proud of them. But God, what have we ordered them to do?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com <http://www.vicsocotra.com>