Iraq and media footage

Wook

Been watching the news on several channels and what I have seen so far is what everyone else here on the board knows.What troubles me (except for the war itself and human suffering Etc) is that some footage of attacks led by coalition forces show that soldiers actually are having fun. If you have seen the footage with the two American soldier shooting a man held missile into a building which kept Iraq soldiers then you know what I am talking about. You see a scene of a fire fight and a row of US soldiers behind a ditch and those two aiming and shooting inside the building when the missile hit's it target and the building crumples into dust a loud cheering from the soldiers as the fight ends.

It's the loud cheering that disturbed me...
War is a serious business and casualties are made every day for that is the nature of the beast, but what worries me is the reaction of soldiers during this fight and most likely others.
somehow I understand they would have been happy to get this fight done and move on , but the cheering ?

It just looks too much of an attraction then a war.. a playground for the coalition forces.

small edit:The reason i mentioned this is to question the general attitude against war by the soldiers themselves placed under these situations.. would this reflect the general character of the US marine or just a one off ?

bonkey

Originally posted by Wook

somehow I understand they would have been happy to get this fight done and move on , but the cheering ?

The vast majority of soldiers are not altruistic saints who choose to accept the burden of potentially killing in the name of their country to keep everyone else safe and lift the requirement off others to do it.

The vast majority of them are somewhat regular Joe Soaps. As a somewhat average person, you would expect that killing someone would be highly traumatic. Even police snipers go through massive amounts of post-operations "talk-down" to make sure that the stress of taking a life doesnt get to them so much.

Not so in the army. The vast majority of soldiers in any modern army are trained, trained, and trained again into a mindset where they are no longer killing people, they are achieving objectives. They are to be proud of achieving objectives, and saddened by failure. The only lives they really care about in a fight are those of their immediate squad or platoon.

When these guys cheer, they're not cheering that they killed other humans. They're cheering because it was a successful objective, and because the only (hopefully) deaths which will have ensued were those of "enemy targets".

It is my personal belief that most of today's politically correct language actually filtered up out of the army....where it was used to make the taking of human life as irrelevant a concept to what was really happening as possible.

would this reflect the general character of the US marine or just a one off ?

General, in my opinion. I wouldnt hold a much different opinion of any other well-trained armed force, nor expect much else from them either.

jc

regi

I understand they would have been happy to get this fight done and move on , but the cheering ?

As far as I remember, the Iraqi troops in that building were firing on the US soldiers. Speaking personally, if I was being shot at by people in a building, and someone blew that building up, I'd probably cheer. People cheer when they know that the situation has suddenly gone from life-threatening to safe