Corps Values?

Like most Americans who aren’t idiots (more about Rick Perry shortly), I was appalled and saddened but hardly shocked when video recently emerged of four US Marines urinating on the bodies of several dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Or, as I prefer to de-sanitize this morally indefensible desecration, pissing on corpses.

The reaction among US military and civilian officials was swift and appropriate. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta immediately condemned the Marines’ actions, and the military promised an inquiry. Clinton called the incident “absolutely inconsistent with American values.”

But was it? As several commentaries I’ve read in the days since have pointed out, American values, particularly in the realm of war, don’t seem quite what they used to be. In cased you missed it, I’d like to quote a few paragraphs from an op-ed piece published in yesterday’s Washington Post that summarized better than I ever could have the disconnect between our collective outrage and the messages we’ve been imbuing in our fighting forces. The following words were written by Sebastian Junger, an author whose best-selling 2010 book War chronicled a year he’d spent embedded with US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, and a director whose film Restropo, released the same year, also focused on that conflict. The ensuing was excerpted from an essay to which the Post affixed the headline “We’re All Guilty of Dehumanizing the Enemy.”

“There is a context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.

“When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults—and political leaders—talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions—achieved through torture—will not stand up in court.

“For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad—not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.”

That doesn’t by any stretch absolve the responsible parties. But I do think it’s important and instructive to contextualize their actions, as Junger so concisely and powerfully did in the preceding paragraphs. I feel obliged, too, to add that I readily concede that it’s easy for me, never having served in the military, to say that even the hell of war would never compell me to unzip my pants and splash yellow contempt on a lifeless adversary. As Junger pointed out elsewhere in his essay, our soldiers in various ways are encouraged to regard the enemy in dehumanized terms, because “otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings.” Is it such a leap to go from satisfaction in a job well done, in that context, to taking a sort of sick pleasure in it?

But I do think “sick” is the key word there. I was ruminating on all this in the shower yesterday when the name of a movie I’d nervously but eagerly rented from a video store many years ago popped into my head. In those pre-Internet days the title alone had earned the film considerable infamy: I Spit on Your Grave. Released in 1978, it's a revenge fantasy in which a young female novelist seeking a quiet place to write in rural New York state is savagely raped by a group of young men and then proceeds to murder them in increasingly brutal fashion: hanging one, leaving another to bleed to death in a tub after slicing off his penis, dismembering yet another with the blades of a speedboat.

I still remember that I was as self-conscious about renting it as I would’ve been had I placed on the counter a porn flick. But then, of course, I Spit on Your Grave was simply a different kind of porn. I’d rented it for all the reasons adolescent and arrested-adolescent guys (I’d have been in my 20s then) did and still do a lot of things: for the promise of exposed breasts, the expectation of lots of blood and the titallation of glimpses at the forbidden.

The movie delivered on all those counts. It was very graphic for its time and fully merited its word-of-mouth infamy. But it also had an effect on me I hadn’t at all expected: It ultimately grossed me out and really made me think.

Most of all, it made me think about the cancer of retribution and vengeance, even when it’s arguably merited and is dispensed in response to the worst sorts of atrocities. For a low-budget movie that was populated with no-name actors portraying prototypes more than recognizable people, the film did an excellent job of pressing my buttons. Having squirmed through the brutalizations of the victim, I initially delighted in the unconflicted sadism with which she turned avenging heroine and Got Even. But then a funny thing happened. Regret and shame gradually overtook me, to the point that when I unceremoniously dumped the video in the store’s overnight slot early the next morning, I felt sullied by the entire experience and mad for having allowed myself to be so thoroughly manipulated.

What I thought about as I stood in the shower yesterday were the similarities between the cinematic I Spit on Your Grave and the military I Piss on Your Corpse. Sure, one could argue—as the drunk-with-revenge Marines in that now-infamous video surely did—that those murdered Taliban fighters Had It Coming. That they, or their cronies, had killed American soldiers. That, given a Taliban culture in which beheadings and all other manner of brutality toward one’s perceived enemies are not uncommon, the deceased, had they survived, might well have lifted their robes in a similar situation and Done the Same Thing to Us. But does that make it right? Does that make it moral?

Here’s where Texas Gov Rick Perry comes in. Rather than condemning the uniformed urinators, he reserved his umbrage for the Obama administration—accusing it of “over-the-top rhetoric” and “disdain for the military.” While being careful not to outright praise the soldiers for a Texas-sized arrogance one sensed he admired—Perry does still have a terminal but not yet dead presidential campaign to consider, after all—he took a break from the stump yesterday to tell CNN that the corpse desecration had been, in fact, nothing more than a “stupid mistake” made by a quartet of guys who are, after all, “just kids.” There certainly was nothing criminal about their actions, Perry added—the Geneva Conventions be damned.

Just as I wasn’t surprised that some US soldiers would take pride in relieving themselves on dead men, I wasn’t surprised that Rick Perry felt compelled to defend such behavior. In fact, given that he has vigorously defended waterboarding during the Republican presidential debates, his comments about the Marines’ actions are more or less what I might have scripted him to say. But I will add this: His words make me want to spit in his eye.

Unlike Rick Perry, however, I would stop there.