Thursday, January 12, 2012

Better to be the doer than the doee

Mr. Pournelle says it pretty well, about the jarheads who pi*ssed all over dead enemy fighters . . .

... some things are pretty clear. First, they allowed a comrade to tape this, and he put it up on a social medium, and it got loose. Is anyone here astonished? Which says several things about these particular Marines.

First, they won their battle. It’s them that’s doing the urinating, not being urinated on. Urinating on the enemy is a practice of war from at least 3,000 years ago, and probably a lot longer. It’s better to be the guy letting fly than the recipient. When you send young men into combat and they win this is what happens.

Second, none of these guys is ready for promotion to any kind of command NCO level. They may be good as combat leaders and may not – they did win this fight, after all – but they don’t think through enough. This hands the Taliban a bit of a propaganda device, but then we have plenty of tapes the Taliban made about themselves.

Third, this is a Marine matter, and if it were left to me I’d leave it to the Company Commander. That’s what company grade officers are for. There will be howls from the media, of course. It’s a free country. Of course it’s free because we have troopers like these.

And fourth, if nobody else wants them, in the extremely unlikely event that they post me to a combat command over there, I’ll take them. They look like good troops to me.



But because it went viral and because of a lot of reasons it's going to go a lot higher than the company commander and I'll wager whoever is the highest ranking Marine in the group is going to get an other than honorable out of this sorry sad mess.

Sucks but there it is.



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