Shock Troops

by hilzoy

Two weeks ago, TNR published a piece by their 'Baghdad Diarist', who writes under the pseudonym "Scott Thomas". It contains three stories about soldiers doing vile things in Iraq; in one, the person who does the vile thing is the writer. The point of the piece, as best I could tell, was that war does strange things to your sense of what's appropriate, and to try to describe these changes. Thus, "Scott Thomas" writes this, about the incident in which he figures:

"AM I A MONSTER? I have never thought of myself as a cruel person. Indeed, I have always had compassion for those with disabilities. I once worked at a summer camp for developmentally disabled children, and, in college, I devoted hours every week to helping a student with cerebral palsy perform basic tasks like typing, eating, and going to the bathroom. Even as I was reveling in the laughter my words had provoked, I was simultaneously horrified and ashamed at what I had just said. In a strange way, though, I found the shame comforting. I was relieved to still be shocked by my own cruelty--to still be able to recognize that the things we soldiers found funny were not, in fact, funny."

The piece launched a furor on the right, with bloggers falling all over themselves to try to find holes in it. Some of their attempts were pretty lame. For instance, one part of "Thomas"' piece involves finding part of a child's skull while constructing a command outpost. "Thomas" says:

"And, eventually, we reached the bones. All children's bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades. We found pieces of hands and fingers. We found skull fragments. No one cared to speculate what, exactly, had happened here, but it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort."

A soldier at the same base wrote this:

"There was a children's cemetery unearthed while constructing a Combat Outpost (COP) in the farm land south of Baghdad International Airport. It was not a mass grave. It was not the result of some inhumane genocide. It was an unmarked cometary where the locals had buried children some years back."

This was cited as having falsified "Scott Thomas"' claim that he and his comrades had found a mass grave, when in fact he had made no such claim. Similarly, just try to figure out what the big deal is here. Other objections were more substantive, though not, I thought, decisive. In particular, one incident described in the piece involved "Thomas" and his buddies making fun of a disfigured woman; soldiers from the FOB at which this was supposed to have happened deny ever seeing such a woman.

In general, though, the consensus on the right-wing blogs seems to be that this entire piece is an elaborate fantasy cooked up to slur the troops:

"Even if "Scott Thomas" actually exists, and is a soldier serving in Iraq (which most veterans highly doubt) the anti-war cadre of the New Republic intentionally turns off its minimal journalistic standards on this story simply because it hates America, and hates her sons and daughters who go in harm's way."

Now, "Scott Thomas" has come forward:

"I am Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a member of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.

My pieces were always intended to provide my discrete view of the war; they were never intended as a reflection of the entire U.S. Military. I wanted Americans to have one soldier's view of events in Iraq.

It's been maddening, to say the least, to see the plausibility of events that I witnessed questioned by people who have never served in Iraq. I was initially reluctant to take the time out of my already insane schedule fighting an actual war in order to play some role in an ideological battle that I never wanted to join. That being said, my character, my experiences, and those of my comrades in arms have been called into question, and I believe that it is important to stand by my writing under my real name."

Discussion below the fold.

I have not written about this story before now (even when I wrote on part of an article prompted by it) because I had no idea whether or not it was true. On the one hand, some parts of it -- especially the ridiculing of the disfigured woman -- seemed to me implausible, not because it's implausible to think that soldiers might be cruel, but because this woman was on base, and was either a soldier or a contractor, and I would have imagined that making fun of people who are, or seem to be, their comrades, and making fun of a disfigurement they probably received in the line of duty, would be Just. Plain. Out. Though, of course, I really don't know that this is true; I have absolutely no idea what unwritten rules exist on a military base, and so my sense that this is implausible relies solely on my own imagination.

Which is, of course, the whole problem in a nutshell.

On the other hand, I did not find the rest of the article at all implausible. This is not because I think that "Our troops are mentally-disturbed, torturing, baby-killing psychopaths too stupid for college and unable to get work as a janitor, so they had to enlist in the military". It's because some people react this way to stress, especially to stress that involves having to make yourself callous in order to steamroll across what feel like moral norms and do things that you would never do in other situations. A few examples from non-military settings:

First case: in medical school, first-year anatomy students generally have to dissect a cadaver. People who donate their bodies for dissection are doing a wonderful thing that not many people would do, and if it weren't for them, doctors would have to chose between not doing dissections and relying on grave robbers, as they used to. According to my friends who have been to medical school, most people recognize this, and treat their cadavers with respect. But they also tell me that there is generally a group of students who don't: who make fun of their cadavers, make their dead hands and bodies do silly things, and in extreme cases desecrate them, if they think they can get away with it.

I have always assumed that this is a completely comprehensible, though vile, response to the fact that cutting up a human body is a profoundly uncomfortable thing to be doing. Your head might tell you that it's a fine thing to be doing in medical school, and that whatever your normal reasons for resisting the idea of cutting up a human body, they do not apply here; but we're not all head. And one of the things you might do with the rest of your emotions is to deny them by making fun of the thing that provokes them.

(Note: to their credit, medical schools generally go to considerable lengths to impress on their students that they should not do this, and to supervise their dissections.)

Second case: in 1984, the Animal Liberation Front stole some film from a UPenn lab that was doing head injury experiments, and used it to make the film 'Unnecessary Fuss'. From the Wikipedia entry on the film:

"After the injury is sustained, the baboon's head is dislodged from the helmet using a hammer and screwdriver. One sequence shows part of the baboon's ear being torn off along with the helmet. After pulling the baboon's head from the helmet, the researcher is heard to laugh, saying: "It's a boy," then, "Looks like I left a little ear behind."

The footage shows the researchers laughing at injured baboons, performing electrocautery on an apparently conscious baboon, smoking cigarettes and pipes during surgery, and playing loud music as the animals are injured. A researcher is seen holding a seriously injured baboon up to the camera, while others speak to the animal: "Don't be shy now, sir, nothing to be afraid of," followed by laughter, and "He says, 'you're gonna rescue me from this, aren't you? Aren't you?'," followed by more laughter.

While one baboon was being injured on the operating table by the hydraulic device, the camera panned to a brain-damaged, drooling monkey strapped into a high chair in a corner of the room, with the words "Cheerleading in the corner, we have B-10. B-10 wishes his counterpart well. As you can see, B-10 is still alive. B-10 is hoping for a good result," followed by laughter. In another sequence, one researcher is heard to say: "You better hope the ... anti-vivisection people don't get ahold of this film.""

When I saw this for the first time, I was furious for a number of reasons, foremost among them, obviously, the treatment of the animals. (In what follows, I'm not going to focus on the treatment of the baboons; please don't take that to indicate that I don't think it's just abhorrent.) But I was also furious because most of the people the Wikipedia entry describes as 'researchers' are, as best I can tell, students; and I was furious at their professors. The students seem to be of age, so it's not that I don't hold them responsible for what they did. But I think that the researchers not only completely failed to do right by the animals under their care; they also failed in their duty to do right by their students.

When you hire someone to strap baboons onto an operating table, snap their necks, and then do whatever experiments need to be done on them afterwards, you are putting them in a position in which, as with dissecting cadavers, they have to do things that would, under any normal circumstances, be abhorrent and cruel. (I think that what's shown in this video was abhorrent and cruel and wrong, but presumably the researchers themselves did not agree.) When you hire people to do that, especially people who are considerably younger than you are, and who would normally look up to you, you have (it seems to me) an obligation to help them find a way of dealing with what they are doing, precisely because you're not just asking them to grow cell cultures, or fill test tubes, but to traverse very dangerous moral terrain, in which it would be very, very easy to get lost.

Perhaps because I am a professor, when I saw these students making fun of the baboons, holding their hands in the air, zooming in on their stitched-up scalps, saying in baboon voices: "You're going to rescue me from this, aren't you? Aren't you?" I saw not only cruelty to animals, but also a profound failure on the part of the professors who should have been there to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Again: it's not that I didn't hold the students responsible; I did. But this reaction -- mocking and minimizing something you find profoundly disturbing -- is so completely comprehensible that I thought: anyone who puts a student in a morally dangerous situation like this has an obligation to try to see that they get out of it without moral injury. But no one did that for these students. They were left to find their way on their own. And that's just wrong.

***

Since I think that it's comprehensible and normal, though wrong, for people who have to do things that would normally be wrong to react by ridiculing the things or people they are asked to do those things to, I have no problem believing that things like this happen in the military, not necessarily often, but sometimes. I do not believe that "our troops are mentally-disturbed, torturing, baby-killing psychopaths too stupid for college and unable to get work as a janitor." But I also don't believe that they are all saints to whom the baser human reactions are absolutely alien. And that is what I'd have to believe in order to assume that nothing like this ever happens.

(Note: one reason why I think it's really important not to confuse supporting the troops with thinking that they are all saints and heroes is that if one thought this, one would not see any need for the kinds of training and leadership that would help to keep them from reacting in this way. I said above that anyone who puts someone, especially someone they're in some sense responsible for, into a morally dangerous situation has an obligation to help them get through it without moral injury. If our soldiers were all saints, we wouldn't have to worry about that: saints all do the right thing no matter how morally dangerous the situation, and so we could safely drop them into any situation without having to worry about anything other than their physical safety.

It's precisely because they are not all saints, but normal human beings, that we need to provide them with the kind of leadership and training that will allow them to get through military service with not just their bodies but their souls intact. Failing to recognize the need for this is no more "supportive" of them than thinking that they are such total superheroes that they don't ever need to eat, and therefore neglecting to supply them with food.)

Still, as I said, I never thought I had any idea whether this story was true or not. I thought it was perfectly conceivable that it might happen, and not just because people do generic bad things in wartime, but because, for the reasons I tried to explain, some of the things in "Scott Thomas"' piece struck me as just the sort of things I'd expect that some soldiers might do in response to being asked to be constantly prepared to do things that people just don't do in normal life. On the other hand, as I said, some of the details struck me as off.

Fundamentally, I thought: I have no idea, really. Even my judgments about plausibility are based on extrapolating from situations like cadaver dissection and head injury research to the quite different circumstances of being in combat, with which I am (luckily) unfamiliar. So I took a pass on this one.

What I never really understood was why the various right-wing blogs, with the possible exception of military bloggers who had some knowledge of e.g. the actual bases in question, didn't take a pass as well. It seemed to me just obvious that the veracity of this story was just not the sort of thing that bloggers sitting in our studies were going to make a lot of progress on. (This was especially striking given some of those same bloggers' uncritical acceptance of Michael Yon's story about al Qaeda serving baked children to their parents. Michael Yon himself said only that he had heard this story, but that didn't prevent some bloggers from immediately assuming that it was true.)

What's interesting is that the right-wing blogs that just assumed that this was some sort of leftist smear job were doing exactly the same thing that they accused "Scott Thomas" and TNR of doing: namely, adopting a story because it fit their preconceptions, and despite having no good reason to think that it was true. There is no standard that I can think of that would imply that TNR was wrong to publish "Shock Troops" in the first place that would not also imply that it was wrong of those bloggers to impugn "Scott Thomas"' honesty and TNR's journalistic integrity based on the facts they had. None at all.

Now "Scott Thomas" has revealed himself. All sorts of people are psychoanalyzing his old blog; Blackfive has already figured out exactly what motivates him (hint: it's not good); Michael Goldberg at the Weekly Standard has plainly been Googling him, and is posting links to stories from his old college newspaper. Ace is investigating, well, everything. Jonah Goldberg thinks he's whiny, as does Baldilocks, and Mark Steyn wonders:

"Is this reportage? Or was he just doing a bit of imaginative fiction like the creative-writing classes teach? And into which category do his New Republic pieces fall?"

Dear right-wing bloggers: Stop. Think. Reread the original piece. It's not about how our soldiers are murderers and scumbags. It's not a vicious left-wing assault on them. It's trying to make some sense of how war makes you do things you wouldn't ordinarily do, and it's pretty obvious that what sparked it was that "Scott Thomas" saw himself doing these things. (As I said before: the anecdote that starts the piece off features Thomas himself, not someone else, doing something he knows is wrong.)

You have been impugning his honesty and TNR's integrity on the basis of very little evidence, and demanding that they prove to your satisfaction, as if that were possible, that he is who he says he is. Now he has come forward, and it turns out that despite some people's confident assertions that "most veterans highly doubt" that he's actually a soldier, he is. But he and TNR haven't yet done enough, according to Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard:

"We still want to know:

1) Dates. When did he mock the woman at the mess hall? When was the soldier wearing and playing with the child's skull? With dates, these incidents can be verified.

2) Names. He can argue that he would get the dog-killer in trouble by naming him, but how about the names of soldiers who witnessed the event at the mess hall and those who saw the guy with the kid's skull? Real live witnesses can verify the incidents. "

To which I can only respond: Michael Goldfarb, the world does not revolve around you and your demands. TNR has spent a lot of time responding to charges against it that were made on the basis of very little evidence. "Scott Thomas" has come forward; I cannot imagine that this will have no consequences for him in the military, or for that matter that it will not harm other people, like his commanders. It's Jamal Hussein all over again: people move from the fact that they cannot verify something that is in its nature hard to verify, especially at a distance, to demands that news organizations drop everything to satisfy them, and that people who might have good reasons for wanting to be anonymous come forward, whatever the cost to themselves, simply because some bloggers think his story is not credible, and despite the fact that they don't have any real evidence for thinking so.

It's not that I have any particular brief for Scott Thomas Beauchamp (and I certainly don't have one for TNR.) I read Beauchamp's old blog, and I didn't find any reason to think I'd seek him out to be friends. But I completely agree with Matt Yglesias on this one:

"That's just crazy. All these people need to stop. They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who've wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense. And they need to think a bit about the epistemic situation they're creating where information about Iraq that they don't want to hear -- even when published in a pro-war publication -- can just be immediately dismissed as fraudulent even though the misconduct it described was far, far less severe than all sorts of other well-document misconduct in Iraq."

***

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan is interesting:

"So why the craziness?

Partly, I think, new media hatred of TNR. Partly that Thomas is obviously a liberal Democrat who's also a soldier. But mainly, it seems to me, the conservative blogosphere has taken such an almighty empirical beating this last year that they have an overwhelming psychic need to lash out at those still clinging to sanity on the war. This Scott Thomas story is a godsend for these people, a beautiful distraction from the reality they refuse to face.

It combines all the usual Weimar themes out there: treasonous MSM journalists, treasonous soldiers, stories of atrocities that undermine morale (regardless of whether they're true or not), and blanket ideological denial. We have to understand that some people still do not believe that the U.S. is torturing or has tortured detainees, still do not believe that torture or murder or rape occurred at Abu Ghraib, still believe that everyone at Gitmo is a dangerous terrorist captured by US forces, and still believe we're winning in Iraq. If you believe all this and face the mountains of evidence against you, you have to act ever more decisively and emphatically to refute any evidence that might undermine this worldview."

Hugh Hewitt, on the other hand, is currently in the lead in my "ridiculous grasping at straws" contest:

"I note that the second post on a blog believed to be Beauchamp's, the soldier notes "I'm reading On The Road again." Amazon.com notes that this book "is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers.""

OMG he read a thinly fictionalized autobiography over a year ago! STOP THE PRESSES!!!

Just to let you all know: I read Harry Potter over the weekend. That doesn't mean that whatever I write here is fiction. Nor does the fact that I once read Paradise Lost mean that my blog posts are actually an epic in very, very well-disguised blank verse.

Just in case anyone was wondering.

Comments

[Hartmut]

Just a bit of historic trivia: In WW2 it was observed that drivers had a predilection to drive over roadkill etc. (and trying to run over geese/ducks trying to escape from narrow roads). This behaviour was considered so common that Britain invested a few pounds in developing explosive dung to get some German vehicles with it (preferably cars with high officers in them). Plans to disperse the explosive s##t by air was, eh, dropped because someone could get suspicious, if he found cowdung on the roof.

I doubt that drivers now are that different from then or that an officer present would do more than reprove the behaviour personally without any consequences (and if it was after a stressful day maybe not even that).

[Mr. Grouchypants]

I would guess OCSteve picked the cemetery example because it seems to be a pretty obvious case of embellishment.

[hilzoy]

OCSteve: see, when I read it, I took the 'Saddam-era dumping ground' to be a guess on his part, and not a nutty one, when you find a bunch of children's bones in Iraq. But he doesn't present it as fact, just as what he figures is the case. Likewise, when I read about the dogs, I didn't think: they are going out joy-riding for the exclusive purpose of killing dogs; it was more like: when this guy is driving a Bradley for other reasons, he tries to kill dogs en route. That would be a lot harder to check for: I mean, if he were taking the Bradley out specially, it would be obvious that he shouldn't do it, and easy to nail him, but if the commander/NCO/whoever instead has to ask something like: did you make every effort to avoid that dog? Are you killing those dogs on purpose, or are dog just unlucky around you? etc., I was thinking that would be harder to nail down, and a commander might just not bother, if the guy was getting where he needed to go.

As I said, the bit about insulting the woman struck me as dodgier.

[Jesurgislac]

I would guess OCSteve picked the cemetery example because it seems to be a pretty obvious case of embellishment.

But it's not who buried the children's bodies there that's the point of the story (and, what Hilzoy said): it's - did one of the soldiers take part of a child's skull as a trophy/souvenir?

[J Thomas]

Actually, I tend to think the uproar about Beauchamp is more because of his tone than anything else.

Iraq is full of stray dogs that are kind of feral. At various times and places it's been official US policy to kill them. Individual soldiers have had problems when they adopted dogs and then hoped to take them home rather than see them abandoned and shot.

The issue isn't shooting dogs. The issue is talking like you think it's wrong but you do it anyway.

Beauchamp writes like there's something wrong with some of the soldiers. Like they're teenagers or something, people who do stupid things for the fun of it. So we get a whole lot of outrage. They talk about having him tried under UCMJ. For joshing with a woman? For killing dogs? For playing with bones? Hardly. His big crime is visibly having a bad attitude.

[Mr. Grouchypants]

But the issue at hand is the veracity of Beauchamp's claims. So critics are naturally going to focus on a discrepancy like that, particularly since Beauchamp stated in the article that it was "clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort".

[Jesurgislac]

But the issue at hand is the veracity of Beauchamp's claims.

So, as that's the issue at hand, why pick on a part of the story that would be very difficult to prove false, and that is inherently plausible? No one has tried to show that the soldiers digging up the bones didn't assume spontaneously that this was "clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort", and the only soldiers who could say that it's definitely true or untrue would be the ones who were there at the time doing the digging. None have come forward. So it's not a useful point to focus on if you're trying to prove that any part of his story is untrue.

[cleek]

discrepancy?

"it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort".

what has caused people to lose the ability to understand simple English ?

given that he didn't know what it was at the time, what is inaccurate about that sentence ?

[G'Kar]

The part about running over the dog struck me as a little dodgy...armored vehicles are not very agile, and it's tough to see anything that gets really close. It probably could be done, and it may well have been done (although certainly were I that driver's commander I would have been quite annoyed by him swerving about the road, let alone the idea he was doing so to kill animals).

[Steve]

So that is what got things going IMO. That if these accounts were true it represented a grave failure in leadership that had to be set right. That is a perfectly fair position IMO.

Surely you don't believe Michelle Malkin and her ilk got all exercised over this story because they wanted to get to the bottom of whether some Bradley commander might be guilty of negligent supervision.

[Mr. Grouchypants]

Beauchamp probably didn't know exactly what the grave site was at the time. But I'm assuming that his article was written more recently. The issue is what he should have known about the site at the time he wrote the article.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Graeme has a post which is the closest approximation to my view of this whole thing: this particular account has some odd characteristics which make it seem unreliable. That doesn't say anything about the fact that war deadens morals and can produce some nasty characters who very well might not have been as nasty without their exposure to the war.

[Jesurgislac]

Beauchamp probably didn't know exactly what the grave site was at the time. But I'm assuming that his article was written more recently. The issue is what he should have known about the site at the time he wrote the article.

"Should have known" and "definitely knew": and also, what he should have put into the article.

In order to claim that this detail shows he's not truthful, you have to show: (1) that Scott knew, or at least that it's extremely likely that he knew, when he wrote the article, that the site they'd speculated was a Saddam-era dumping ground was in fact a species of local graveyard; and (2) that it constitutes a deliberate untruth that Scott did not add, after noting their original speculations, that "Later, we found it was a local unofficial graveyard".

Supposing for the sake of argument that (1) has been proven (which it hasn't) so that we can discuss (2): why do you feel it's ultra-important that a soldier, writing about what was done that day, should clarify that unimportant detail with later information not connected or relevant to what he was writing about?

If you consider that whether the bones they found were a dumping ground or a graveyard to be important in a story about US atrocities in Iraq, please explain why, showing your reasoning. If you agree it's not relevant, odds are your thinking mirrors Scott's.

[Populuxe]

That if these accounts were true it represented a grave failure in leadership that had to be set right.

I am amazed at how Abu Ghraib was dismissed at the time by so many opinion-mongers on right as nothing more than pranks and hijinks, the razing of Fallujah was actually cheered on by some of the same, but that now, rather ordinary examples of the every day coarseness of war are suddenly regarded as a "grave failure in leadership."

[Tom S]

Two things:

Everyone hear should rush out and read Goodbye To All That, The poet and writer Robert Graves' autobiography of his life through World War I and after. He served as an officer in some of the worst battles that the British fought on the Western Front. Some of his memories were definitely embellished, but no one who reads it will doubt its general veracity; or treat it as anything other than a masterpiece of reportage of combat and its psychological aftermath.

Second. Does anyone think that in a country where feral dogs are routinely killed, an NCO is going to give a rat's ass over whether or not someone under his supervision is trying to run over dogs?

[Mr. Grouchypants]

"If you consider that whether the bones they found were a dumping ground or a graveyard to be important in a story about US atrocities in Iraq, please explain why, showing your reasoning."

The writer described it as a dumping ground. If you have reason to think that he should have known that it was not a dumping ground, then you have reason to think he is making stuff up.

[OCSteve]

Hilzoy: see, when I read it, I took the 'Saddam-era dumping ground' to be a guess on his part, and not a nutty one, when you find a bunch of children's bones in Iraq. But he doesn't present it as fact, just as what he figures is the case.

But if he was there he knows it was a children’s cemetery because the troops involved relocated it. It got reported up the chain as a cemetery. The troops involved would certainly know at that point that it was a cemetery.

Jes: did one of the soldiers take part of a child's skull as a trophy/souvenir

Quite possible. Did he put a part of a skull, even a small piece, between his head and his helmet for any length of time? No way. That brain-bucket is already one of the most uncomfortable contraptions to have to wear around. A piece of strap or webbing out of place gets painful fast. So I can see a soldier taking a piece of a child’s skull as a trophy, as sick as that is. But the rest is clear embellishment. And anyone who has ever worn one of those things for any length of time instantly says BS upon reading that.

Steve: Surely you don't believe Michelle Malkin and her ilk got all exercised over this story because they wanted to get to the bottom of whether some Bradley commander might be guilty of negligent supervision.

I was talking about what I had been reading on the milblogs specifically. MM falls into the category Hilzoy is discussing here.

Jes: In order to claim that this detail shows he's not truthful, you have to show: (1) that Scott knew, or at least that it's extremely likely that he knew, when he wrote the article, that the site they'd speculated was a Saddam-era dumping ground was in fact a species of local graveyard;

Again, you would not be involved in this and not fully understand it was a cemetery by the end of that same day.

There was a children's cemetery unearthed while constructing a Combat Outpost (COP) in the farm land south of Baghdad International Airport. It was not a mass grave. It was not the result of some inhumane genocide. It was an unmarked cometary where the locals had buried children some years back. There are many such unmarked cemeteries in and around Baghdad. The remains unearthed that day were transported to another location and reburied.

[double-plus-ungood]

Good heavens, the effort and speculation that continue to be expended on this story.

Look, everyone agrees that there are likely incidents like this going on. No matter how well soldiers are trained, there are going to be some that that respond to the stress by doing exactly the kind of odd and nasty things described in the article, which is actually the point of the article. There are probably much worse things going on than the three relatively minor incidents discussed.

So why the fuss and bother about this?

[cleek]

The troops involved would certainly know at that point that it was a cemetery.

a) would everyone there know that?

b) would they know it's a "cemetery" in the sense that it's some kind of sacred ground; or could they assume it's a "cemetery" in the sense of "mass grave" ? in other words: did they know the children were buried there for normal reasons, or could they assume "cemetery" was a euphemism for something more sinister ?

c) maybe it didn't look like any kind of cemetery a young kid from America had ever seen. if your boss said "clear that cemetery" and you came across a pile of children's bones in a vacant lot - no markers that you could see or understand - would you assume you were in a "cemetery" or "human dumping ground" ?

[cleek]

d) if you were told it really was an 'official' cemetery but were a little disgusted at the fact that children's bones were just scattered around this place, might you not refer to it in less-than-respectful terms? might you even call it a "dumping ground" in disgust at what you perceive is a lack of respect for the dead by the living ?

[Mr. Grouchypants]

"d) if you were told it really was an 'official' cemetery but were a little disgusted at the fact that children's bones were just scattered around this place, might you not refer to it in less-than-respectful terms? might you even call it a "dumping ground" in disgust at what you perceive is a lack of respect for the dead by the living ?"

Maybe, but probably not if you aren't disgusted by someone wearing the remains like a crown.

[Hartmut]

From photographies and documentaries I know that Arabian cemeteries can look more like a disorderly "dumping ground" than what we would consider a graveyard (orderly headstones and the like). It being an unmarked unofficial one in our case would make it even more likely to make that mistake. Not having seen this one I can of course not comment with authority.

[cleek]

Maybe, but probably not if you aren't disgusted by someone wearing the remains like a crown.

i could imagine being disgusted at both.

there's also the possibility that this guy's just not a great writer, and that trying to parse him like this simply isn't going to work out.

[Mr. Grouchypants]

You're probably right about the parsing issue. However in his article he explicitly states that he wasn't disgusted by the soldier wearing the skull, so I really doubt the grave disgusted him.

I think hilzoy is right about the IED victim story though. If anything in the article turns out to be a deal breaker, it will be probably be that story.

[J Thomas]

There are probably much worse things going on than the three relatively minor incidents discussed.

So why the fuss and bother about this?

I think it's that they didn't like his tone. The guy writes like a liberal. He writes like people were doing things they shouldn't.

If he'd written that an insurgent was running up to the Bradley with a satchel charge and the driver couldn't think of anything better to do than swerve and run over him before he could trigger it, and they both felt kind of sick about it but there wasn't any choice, that would have been fine.

Say he'd written about how they absolutely had to swerve to avoid an IED and he had to speed up so the guys with the RPGs would miss him, and the result was he ran over a station wagon with a woman and her 4 beautiful children in it, and they all felt *horrible* about it but there was nothing else he could do. That would have been excellent. It's war. Tragedy, that civilians get in the way and there's nothing you can do. If they'd run over the IED that would likely have killed the civilians anyway.

But when it's a peaceful area and there aren't any IEDs and the driver is just practicing his evasive maneuvers by running over dogs, and the narrator thinks he ought to think it's horrible but he doesn't really care -- that isn't the kind of soldiers we have in iraq. All of our soldiers are superior moral people, they are faced with tragic moral choices sometimes where doing the right thing gets civilians killed, and they feel just as bad about it as they ought to, and they do the right thing regardless. Our soldiers all know that they are doing the most important work in theworld and they will persevere as long as it takes, until the final victory, because it's what matters most in the world. Everything they do in iraq is directed toward victory, they never do any horsing around and they never pick on anybody who doesn't deserve it. So if this guy writes that some of them are kind of morally burned out, that they spend some of their time playing games that don't help the victory, if they do something mean that isn't necessary, then he must be a fake soldier. And if it turns out that he's a real soldier, still he's really a fake soldier or he wouldn't think that way. If he was a real soldier he'd be completely a good guy like all the others.

He has a bad attitude and they can't stand that.

[OCSteve]

[email protected]:04: I can see your (d) best. But there really is structure and organization for almost everything you encounter. If there is any suspicion it is a mass grave, there are procedures, and likely the first one at the line level is “back off and leave it alone”. There are still tens of thousands of Iraqi’s who don’t know what happened to certain family members. I’m guessing here, but I would say that the ranking individual on site spoke to the locals. Once it was ascertained that it had been used as a cemetery they made the decision to relocate it. That in itself may have been offensive. Did the locals agree to that? What does Islam say about it? I don’t know.
But the NCOs share as much information as they can within mission limits with the troops. It is only natural that people want to know why they are doing what they are doing. If it is not “need to know” the NCO is going to keep their troops informed of what is what. No NCO is going to let his troops think they are defiling an uninvestigated mass grave vs. moving a cemetery. It just does not work that way.
Again – something like that will trigger the BS radar of anyone who knows this stuff firsthand (not saying me – the milbloggers).

[OCSteve]

All – maybe to rephrase a little – If you have been there for a tour or two (not me, the milbloggers), if you have worn one of those damned brain-buckets for days in 100+ heat, if you have ever been under the command of a few officers and a bunch of NCOs, if you have ever eaten in a field mess hall… Many of these things trigger your BS radar.

Not in a minor way – in a major way. When so many minor points don’t mesh you think that it is all BS, at least it is all suspect.

[hilzoy]

OCSteve: and that I can fully respect. It's why I held off on it: what do I know about helmets, or how tight the supervision is when you're doing something like digging, or how likely it is that the supervision is not what it's supposed to be? Way outside my comfort zone.

I'm just, as I said, baffled that the likes of Jonah Goldberg, who seems to know even less than I do which is saying a lot, didn't draw the same conclusion.

[Jesurgislac]

Mr. Grouchypants: The writer described it as a dumping ground. If you have reason to think that he should have known that it was not a dumping ground, then you have reason to think he is making stuff up.

No, you don't. As I have just explained. But if you're not going to pay attention, why bother?

[Jesurgislac]

OCSteve: Not in a minor way – in a major way. When so many minor points don’t mesh you think that it is all BS, at least it is all suspect.

The problem I have with that line of argument is that a few years ago, a female Reservist wrote a detailed account of a period of time she'd spent under fire in Iraq. She wrote it on her journal, really just venting about an experience she'd had.

That account got picked to pieces, too, by people who certainly seemed to know what they were talking about, and they came to the conclusion that this woman probably wasn't even in Iraq, let alone had any military experience, she was just making the whole thing up.

The only problem with that line of argument was: she wasn't. (Well, obviously, I wasn't there at the time: but I'd known her online for quite a while, I knew she was in Iraq, and I knew she wasn't the kind of person who makes stuff up.) So, regardless of what holes could be picked in her story by the language she'd used and the way she'd described things, I knew it had happened.

And it's given me a healthy sense of skepticism towards people who claim they can tell that someone is BSing by picking apart the details of the story and saying that so many details sound improbable, so the whole story is probably not true.

From Aristotle onwards, critics have noted that reality frequently presents us with incidents that sound far too improbable to be believable. When writing fiction, "better a probable impossible than a possible improbable." But when considering a narrative presented as factual, trying to debunk it by pointing out that this and that detail sound improbable just doesn't work.

[Catsy]

Jes: was this Ginmar?

[Mr. Grouchypants]

I would be more willing to give Beauchamp the benefit of the doubt on the dumping ground issue had he said that it looked like a dumping ground rather than declaring that it was "clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground".

Of course the graveyard would not be a major issue if someone could identify the injured contractor he verbally abused.

[macca]

FWIW, I'd have sworn that "dumping ground" for human remains was a straightforward dictionary definition of "unmarked cemetery."

[wonkie]

Over the last year or so there have been a whole series of Youtubes sent in by soldiers on duty in Iraq. The YouTube clips have shown soldiers stoning a paralyzed dog, mocking children by offering them water and then snatching the water back, driving fast down the wrong side of the street and laughing as people scrambled to get out of the way, and laughing while Iraqi soldiers, under their supervision during a training mission, grabbed some young men off the street for the crime of existing while Sunni and arrested them for nothing.

All submitted to YouTube by soldiers who apparently saw nothing wrong with their acts.

Where were the NCo's? Dunno. Same place the NCO's in Beauchamp's articles, I suppose.

The question that intrigues me is why is it so important to some people to doubt his account? No normal person thinks that soldiers are perfect. Why the ego-projection?

Another question: what happens to soldiers when they comme home and the "troop supporters" who greet them make it clear that they don't want to know what the war experience was really like?

Implict in the behavior of the doubters is the message that troops are only supported if they say what the rightwing wants them to say. Otherwise they are going to be metaphorically spat upon.

If Beauchamp made this stuff up or grotesquely exaggerated, does anyone think we would revel his real name? All of this stuff happened in front of witnesses who can all be tracked down. If he was deliberately lying or exaggerating seems to me that the last thing he would do is go public with hhis real name.

[Ellen1910]

A tempest in a tea pot. If this generation were capable of producing A Rumor of War or another Dispatches, it wouldn't have even reached a simmer.

As an aside --- what's with all this anthropomorphizing baboons, Hilzoy? You can't mock a baboon.

[OCSteve]

Hilzoy: It's why I held off on it

And to your credit. I think you approached this thoughtfully, but maybe hammered on the MM types too much (they may deserve it) but discounted the milbloggers concerns a little too much. These are guys who have been here and done that.

I can only speak to my experience. I’ve worn a steel (Vietnam era) helmet in Georgia. It sucked. I’ve worn the Kevlar helmet in the Mohave Desert at 100 plus degrees. It sucked bad. Iraq gets 20 degrees beyond that. You can’t imagine how a pea would feel up there, much less a piece of bone, of any kind or shape. Not going to happen.

[OCSteve]

Jes: I think you have recounted this before, and I agree it is a powerful story in its own right. This woman was deeply wronged and I will make no single excuse for it. I won’t try to.

[OCSteve]

I’m a little surprised that folks don’t connect a possible breakdown in discipline like this with Abu Ghraib. These are not minor offenses you disregard because “war sucks”.

This is exactly how Abu Ghraib happens. This crap is the first step on the way to Abu Ghraib.

Once discipline collapses and these seemingly minor offensives are overlooked, it goes up a notch. And then another. Any officer or NCO that let this go unchallenged is complicit in the next Abu Ghraib, or worse.

Do you really think that is the case? At this time, with the current media scrutiny?

Exit question – Do you (anybody) really think that officers and NCOs would allow this crap to go on?

Again this is “you all”, and not Hilzoy in particular. (I love the hilzoy as always.)

[macca]

"Do you (anybody) really think that officers and NCOs would allow this crap to go on?"

At the risk of stating the obvious? Yes.

[Jeff]

Exit question – Do you (anybody) really think that officers and NCOs would allow this crap to go on?

Is that a trick question? Because I think the answer is "Yes".

[hilzoy]

OCSteve: I think that for most officers and NCOs, the answer is no. On the other hand, the people at Abu Ghraib and Haditha and wherever it was that they raped the girl and killed her and her family and so on presumably had officers and NCOs who apparently let some lousy things happen. (Though in the case of Abu Ghraib I think there's a real possibility that they were acting on orders in some ways, I would have thought that decent officers and NCOs would have kept people obeying orders to 'soften up' the detainees from doing a lot of the things they did.) So if the question means, 'do you think there are some officers and NCOs, presumably a small minority, who would?, then I would think the answer is probably: yes.

[Mike]

Yes, Wikipedia Brown was funny, but enough already with sending cleek mashie notes.

[Mike]

"Saddam-era dumping ground" also reads like a guess to me. I think a lot of us believe that Saddam was capable of murdering enough children to fill a graveyard, and that belief, if anything, supports the decision to overthrow him. This makes it an odd thing for Thomas's critics to attack, unless they're grasping at anything that looks like inaccuracy.

[m]

Exit question – Do you (anybody) really think that officers and NCOs would allow this crap to go on?

Being absolutely honest? The answer is "I'm not (thank God) there, and I don't know." That's really a question about the level of morale and discipline there, something of which there's no objective measure.

[Jesurgislac]

Catsy: yes.

OCSteve: Exit question – Do you (anybody) really think that officers and NCOs would allow this crap to go on?

Yes. We know already that officers and NCOs have allowed much worse crap to go on. We know the military has not reformed in any way since Abu Ghraib: perhaps the torture and murder of prisoners has stopped there, but there must be a lot of career officers and NCOs who were aware that prisoners were being tortured, or who took part in torture, and who did nothing. And have not been punished for it. (As noted before, an NCO who tortured a prisoner of war to death in Abu Graib was regarded as having committed so trivial a crime that he didn't even lose his pension over it.)

So, I ask you: what makes you think that the officers and NCOs wouldn't let this kind of crap go on, when you know that they let the torture and murder of prisoners go on and that they've been informally told that this wasn't a breach of discipline, or at least nothing deserving any great punishment?

[OCSteve]

Appears to be unanimous. OK, I give up.

[CharleyCarp]

OCS, I've no doubt that some NCOs and officers have let some things get out of hand. In any human system, you have to expect imperfection. That doesn't excuse anything. But a presumption of perfect discipline isn't usually warranted.

On a more general level, as recruiting standards have dropped, and the stress of a difficult and quite possibly pointless mission grows, you're going to have to expect there to be more disciplinary problems in the Army as time goes on. There was an excellent presentation at a House Armed Services hearing on recruiting and readiness yesterday.

On Abu G: in June 2005, I spent several hours with some mid-level Navy enlisted guys who were serving as guards etc at a different military prison. To a man, they insisted that the Army guys at AG had been following orders. Their certainty impressed me. They obviously weren't there, and may have an imperfect understanding about how the Army works (as opposed to the Navy). I did come away from this, though, concerned about the corrosive effect of what they saw as little guys taking the fall for the big guys' mistakes.

[CharleyCarp]

This is what is was.

Friday, July 27, 2007 – 9:30 am – 2118 Rayburn – Open

The full committee will meet to receive testimony on H.R. 3087, to require the President, in coordination with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior military leaders, to develop and transmit to Congress a comprehensive strategy for the redeployment of United States Armed Forces in Iraq, and H.R. 3159, the “Ensuring Military Readiness Through Stability and Predictability Deployment Policy Act of 2007.”

Witnesses:

General John M. Keane, USA (ret.)
Former Vice Chief of Staff
Department of the Army

Mr. Lawrence J. Korb
Senior Fellow
Center for American Progress

You might look for a transcript, or a copy of Korb's opening statement. The statistics are mindblowing.

[J Thomas]

This is exactly how Abu Ghraib happens. This crap is the first step on the way to Abu Ghraib.

Yes, of course. And abu ghraib did happen. And many others. As morale goes down we can expect discipline to go bad too.

Why don't we hear more stories about discipline breaking down and soldiers doing things their officers would prefer they didn't? Clearly it's a combination of the inherent decency of most of our troops, combined with the natural tendency of everybody involved to do cover-ups.

I'm continually amazed at this argument I keep hearing that goes:

It would be very very bad if X happened. Therefore X did not happen.

[nous]

OC Steve -- A bit more nuanced answer to your exit question: I think that the majority of officers and NCOs would challenge this sort of behavior, especially early in a (re)deployment or when they see it leading to a breakdown in discipline. I think that this same group might be more likely to let something like this go late in a deployment or after multiple tours have worn them down or if there were enough other big stresses on their troops that they thought being too heavy handed would damage discipline and morale worse than some abberant behavior.

I don't know what the conditions are where Beauchamp is stationed. I would imagine that most there would want to project a "can do" attitude if asked about morale and conditions.

As for the deeper issues of accuracy in reporting, I'm way too steeped in literary crtiticism to expect that any written account would be entirely factual and I think that something like The Things They Carried can fictionalize many details and still be "a true war story." But that's just me.

[nous]

Bad tag...no donut.

[Slartibartfast]

Don't be so sure, nous. The donut can still be yours.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"So, I ask you: what makes you think that the officers and NCOs wouldn't let this kind of crap go on, when you know that they let the torture and murder of prisoners go on and that they've been informally told that this wasn't a breach of discipline, or at least nothing deserving any great punishment?"

That is easy, it could put them in personal danger.

[Jesurgislac]

Sebastian: That is easy, it could put them in personal danger.

Stopping it could, or letting it go on could?

[Johnny Pez]

Shorter warbloggers: We know that things like this happen in wartime, but we categorically refuse to believe that these things in particular happened, and we will go to any lengths to try to prove that they didn't.

[ussabac1]

To me this is something that even if it is true shouldnt be put out for all to see without names other then just his own and soldiers. I am a soldier. If you havent been deployed, dont write about it or what you think you know about it, you have no idea and you cant even think about what its like. He is wrong.

[gwangung]

To me this is something that even if it is true shouldnt be put out for all to see without names other then just his own and soldiers. I am a soldier. If you havent been deployed, dont write about it or what you think you know about it, you have no idea and you cant even think about what its like. He is wrong.

Well, that may be, but I thought, like others, the interesting thing was the out of whack reaction of selected blogs. It reflected an ideological objection, not one based in reality, and a deep seated insecurity.

[wonkie]

BTW, TNR fact checked the stories and the stories are true. There are witnesses for the skull incident, the rudeness, and the dog killing. Beachamp's memory got one location wrong, but the incidents themselves have been verified.

[Daniel Loftin]

It amazes me that some commenters are so hysterical as to act like the events Beauchamp describes are "out of the norm" of human behavior and experience. I've known lots of people who would run over a dog just for fun. I didn't like them, but they went about in public just like you and me, and even had their admirers.
Ridiculing people with deformities is not uncommon, either.

Soldiers are human beings, and are quite capable of becoming desensitized to stress and cruelty and violence. It happens to good people all the time. It's a fact of life in war throughout history, and has nothing to do with ones political tilt.

[nimbus]

But he lied, y'all:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/08/beauchamp_recants.asp

[towerclimber37]

I will comment first on the original article.

there's a reason for the axiom "those who can't do, teach" You, sir show an astonishing (well perhaps not so much) lack of knowledge concerning the military forces, their discipline, and what actual combat stress does to a person.

now to those of you who believed that story.

the guy is a liar. he even said so. whats more, he better get his crap together because he might be a democrat and a liberal..but he's far short of being a soldier.
Get over it, we're going to win, Iraq will have it's own government and we'll all be better off without a bunch of al-queda scumbags walking around.