Tantingco: Wages of War

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

HAVE you ever seen a more offensive sight than the video of the four US Marines urinating on Taliban corpses in Afghanistan?

I’ve seen footage and photographs of soldiers desecrating their dead enemies in the heat of battle -- torching them, dragging and parading them in streets, hanging them from bridges, or displaying them in malls.

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But urinating on them? That makes those Marines even worse than dogs, because dogs at least have the decency to do it only on tires of parked vehicles. This is the kind of behavior that turns moderate Muslims into radicals, radicals into terrorists, and terrorists into raving mad suicide bombers. If and when America is attacked again like 9/11, you can blame it on those four Marines.

And don’t try to absolve them by citing their youth and immaturity, or their years of distinguished service in the military, or all the honorable things they’ve done for love of country. A lifetime of honor can never excuse a single moment of depravity, nor can a record of heroism exonerate one act of barbarism.

But, then again, those Marines wouldn’t have done what they did had their government not sent them to war in the first place. If they were back in New Jersey, for example, do you think they’d shoot a pesky neighbor and piss on his cadaver? I doubt if they’d even dare to piss on their mom’s flower garden.

Government leaders and politicians who make all the decisions to declare, sustain and prolong wars will, I'm sure, try their best to justify going to war as a necessary evil to protect our freedom and preserve our way of life.

And yet if they feel so strongly about going to war, why don’t they go to war themselves? After all, we pay their salaries with our taxes. Why do these cowards and hypocrites mouth all these platitudes about heroism and patriotism and then push those who voted them into office to do the fighting for them?

They put in harm's way the very people they have vowed to protect, and watch them die on TV as they sit in their chilly conference rooms snacking on hamburgers and French fries.

Then they go out and give press conferences where they shed crocodile tears, then leave in their limousines to have lunch with business associates. That's the kind of freedom and way of life that they make our young soldiers sacrifice their lives for.

Come to think of it, why does it have to be the young men and women, whose lives have barely begun, who must be sent to war, and not the grown-ups who can think more clearly under stress and are mature enough to not urinate on their enemies' corpses?

Do our government leaders and politicians consider themselves indispensable and our young soldiers dispensable? Are some lives more important than other lives?

Is there anything sadder and more tragic than to see these boys and girls, hardly recovering from the ravages of first love, being forced to face the unspeakable horrors of war?

If innocence is the first casualty of war, the second casualty is happiness. When these boys and girls return home after the war to restart their lives as adults, their body would be too broken to be useful to society and their mind too messed up to enable them to relate meaningfully again to loved ones.

There's one other thing bothering me, and that's the way I reacted to that video. Of course I was shocked, but why should I be shocked by the sight of soldiers urinating on Taliban corpses and not by the sight of the dead Talibans? If those Marines had not urinated on those corpses, would I still be as shocked? Would it have even made the news?
Has killing become so frequent and common that unless someone pisses on corpses, no one would even pay attention?

Which is the worse desecration, pissing on a lifeless body or prematurely ending a person's life?

Or do we consider those poor Talibans lower life forms who deserved to die and to be humiliated afterwards? Weren’t they also soldiers of their own nation who were, like those Marines, also only defending their own freedom and way of life?

Why does war make us hate other people who are different from us, make us treat other cultures with contempt and disdain, and other nations like they have no right to share this planet with us? Who's to say which ideology and religion and set of principles are better than the others?
Is there a way other than war to resolve conflicts between nations?
The difference between quarreling nations and quarreling neighbors is that neighbors only take a change of heart and enough willpower to mend fences, while nations take much more than that to settle disputes.
But can it be done? Can governments actually take the high road and decide to use a peaceful alternative?

All of mankind has always longed for and imagined and dreamed of a world without wars. Even our government leaders and politicians and military officers were once upon a time little schoolchildren who held flowers as they sang "Let There be Peace on Earth."

What happened to them?