You may have read about the Marine Staff Sergeant who caused a fuss by urinating on the corpses of fallen Taliban fighters.
A video showing four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters provoked anger and condemnation on Thursday in Afghanistan and around the world, raising fears in Washington that the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment in the decade-old Afghan war. New York Times
As a Marine combat veteran I understand why Staff Sergeant Joseph W. Chamblin did what he did. Some things we don't forget, even nearly a half century later. The mind set necessary to go out to kill or be killed isn't a pretty one. Our young men and women who go "outside the wire" aren't particularly nice people, at least not when they're out there. Most, nearly all, are able to compartmentalize it away when they come home. For many it will haunt their dreams for a lifetime.
I'm not justifying what Chamblin did, merely stating that I understand it. It was wrong, should never have happened, and he should be punished for it.
But there's so much more to this incident. Much of it the aftermath.
Chamblin committed an offense against the dead Taliban to be sure, although the aggrieved can hardly be heard to complain of it. They're dead. The desecration of their mortal remains didn't really hurt them, not in any way they could feel. Shooting and killing someone, even the enemy in the moral haze of war, is about as serious an affront to their dignity, to their humanity, as anyone can commit. Mistreating the corpse is kind of small stuff compared to that.
S/Sgt. Chamblin's grievous offense was not urinating on the corpses, the real offense was videotaping the atrocity and then allowing the video to become public. First, because now there is the real potential for the video to be seen by the deceased's families, doing real emotional harm to the living. It's not bad enough that they've lost a loved one, but now they're subjected to seeing that loved one being shamefully disrespected as less than human.
But of course in a country which cares so little for however much collateral damage we inflict on innocent civilians with drone strikes, so long as none of our boys and girls get hurt, it's hard to expect that emotional pain visited on Afghani non-combatants counts for much in the American scheme of things.
We have a national melt down over twenty dead school children in Connecticut. Twenty dead Pakistani school children lost to a drone strike not so much. It's who we are.
It's about us. Always about us. Little brown people on the other side of the world are beyond our awareness. I don't have to like it, but that's how it is.
S/Sgt. Chamblin's real offense, from our peculiarly parochial point of view, is that he "provoked anger and condemnation" which "rais(es) fears . . . that the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particulaly delicate moment in the decade old Afghan war." Other Afghanis, indeed other Muslims, cannot help but be provoked by the callousness of Chamblin's behavior. Their will to fight cannot help but be strengthened.
Within the narrow framework of American self interest, the war will be prolonged, and many more lives will be lost, combatant and non-combatants alike, because of S/Sgt. Chamblin's lapse of judgement. That is Staff Sergeant Joseph W. Chamblin's real crime.
As it must be when matters like this achieve widespread notoriety, Chamblin was duly charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and hailed before a court martial.
The Marine Corps said Chamblin pleaded guilty before the military judge at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He admitted to wrongful desecration, failure to properly supervise junior Marines and posing for photos with battlefield casualties.
The military trial judge wasn't aware that the General who had ordered the trial, in military parlance the
convening authority, Lt. Gen. Richard Mills,
had agreed to what the General considered an appropriate sentence.
The judge, who was not aware of the pre-trial agreement, announced a harsher sentence: 30 days' confinement, 60 days' restriction, forfeiture of $500 per month in pay for six months, a fine of $2,000 and a reduction in rank to lance corporal, which is two paygrades below sergeant.
Lt. Gen. Mills, on the other hand, had a different, lesser, notion of what constituted appropriate discipline.
A Marine spokesman, Col. Sean Gibson, said Lt. Gen. Richard Mills had agreed before the court-martial was held Wednesday that the maximum sentence he would approve in the case of Staff Sgt. Joseph W. Chamblin is the forfeiture of $500 in pay for one month and reduction in rank to sergeant.
Make no mistake, for a Marine the demotion from Staff Sergeant to Sergeant is a lot more than the loss of one pay grade. Promotion from E-5 to E-6 is a major step, the difference between being an NCO and a Staff NCO. Those promotions don't come at the local level, they come from Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington. But the trial court had demoted Chamblin even further, below the threshhold of Non Commissioned Officer, to the rank of Lance Corporal (E-3). That's the kind of blow a military career doesn't recover from.
Similarly the money. Trifling as the trial judge's sentence was in terms of money lost, five thousand dollars is a lot more than five hundred dollars. For an average E-5 five thousand dollars is a couple of months pay. They might as well have sentenced him to what we used to call "giving him a carton of cigarettes and a pat on the butt" and sent him on his way.
I understand that since Lt.Gen. Mills induced the guilty plea with the promise of the outrageously lenient, in view of the harm done, sentence he could do little else but impose that sentence upon review. My problem is with the offer in the first place. Lt.Gen. Mills apparently doesn't think that what Chamblin did is such a big deal.
And on that I respectfully disagree with the General.
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