When men are trained to kill and go to war, who the "enemy" is can be ambiguous. "Shoot and ask questions later" often is a matter of personal survival.
In this blurred, frightening setting, war's inevitable uglinesses is born—atrocities involving killing as a blood sport, for revenge, out of hate for the enemy's ethnic or national characteristics, out of panic or for self-defense.
Like every war since mankind picked up weapons against each other, atrocities have occurred, some more ghastly than others. Even today, 65 years after V-J Day, acts of Japanese brutality involving executions, torture and medical experiments on prisoners occasionally come to light in newly discovered documents. The Nazi mass extermination of Jews, of course, is history's most unspeakable atrocity.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing their own pointless atrocities. Al-Qaida and the Taliban have beheaded religious apostates as well captured American GIs and civilians.
On the U.S. side, a few GIs and civilian contractors have been charged with gunning down civilians. In the latest incident, a handful of soldiers—including one from Boise—are charged with murder and keeping body parts as souvenirs.
Military courts martial will decide if they're guilty.
Yet, the finger of blame surely must be pointed back home at irresponsible declarations by people of standing whose inflaming messages about Islam and Muslims reach GIs far from home via e-mail, satellite TV news and phone calls from families.
When the Rev. Franklin Graham takes to the pulpit to call Islam "evil," do naïve, young and insufficiently read combat soldiers interpret their enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan—even unarmed civilians in the street—as worthy of indiscriminate killing?
Are troops being incited by rhetoric of U.S. politicians and hateful TV talk-show hosts who rail against mosques as defiling sacred 9/11 ground? If adult men and women cheer when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls on Congress to write a law prohibiting Islam's Shariah law from being used in U.S. courts (a concocted scenario bordering on clinical lunacy), what should troops on the front lines in Islamic countries conclude—that American courts are being infiltrated by Islamic law?
Hate always is a useful, if toxic, emotion in war. It makes killing easier, emotionless.
Hate inevitably also leads to atrocities, which in turn inevitably poison the peace that follows.
And it destroys young men who go into battle believing victory means killing anyone on the other side. They usually pay with prison or lifelong disgrace, while rabble-rousers at home are elected to Congress.
