Maybe I'm wrong, and it's self-evidently absurd that soldiers in a war zone would kill dogs, or play with bodyparts, or make fun of other injured soldiers. . But none of those things sound absurd

I think you could probably drop "soldiers" and "war zone" and still be safely in the realm of "Oh yeah, I remember that guy."

guy s/b commenter

I'm with SCMT. It would be shocking if you couldn't find such people in a war zone. If the U.S. Army has really been able to prevent all of its thousands of soldiers from engaging in macabre or vicious conduct, then it is an instrument of social control superior to Maoist China.

I don't have a cite, but I believe it's fairly common for people dealing with death and body parts to adopt a macabre sense of humor as a coping mechanism. Med students doing their first dissections aren't always reverent.

Well, yeah. None of this sounds all that weird to me. Killing dogs is bad, as is making fun of injured people -- playing with body parts, if the relevant family isn't ever going to know and be horrified, really isn't worse than gross. But none of it sounds unlikely, or all that wildly terrible.

So the heated reaction of how awful Beauchamp is to even suggest that such things happen, much less admit to having participated in them, seems awfully hard on anyone who may have done that sort of thing.

awfully hard on anyone who may have done that sort of thing

It's meant to be hard on anyone who dares talk about it. Which is different.

And regardless of the truth or lack thereof in his statements, it serves as a good illustration of the Right simply choosing to disbelieve what they don't want to hear. They've no more idea than you or I or anyone who wasn't there whether what Beauchamp said is true.

More relevant to your point, isn't this one of the things discussed fairly quietly but fairly widely after the initial AG photos came out, that soldiers often document the inevitable brutalities of war and that the only sin in such is sharing that documentation outside of those who know first-hand the pressures such situations create? If that's the case then isn't there a built-in disincentive to try to express and confront and deal with any of the effects of war after the fact? Let's say the story about the soldier running over the dogs is true; it then gets recanted and he's left in a state where he clearly has some sort of urge to at least comment on the callousness of it or he wouldn't have made such a comment in the first place but he would almost certainly feel some pressure not to do so. Fucked up, eh? Thanks for fighting our war, kid, but don't tell anyone about it.

Apparently some on the right think that shooting people, being shot at, and having bombs blow up people you know wouldn't drive you to harm animals, but being a super-rich NFL star quarterback will.

If that's the case then isn't there a built-in disincentive to try to express and confront and deal with any of the effects of war after the fact? Let's say the story about the soldier running over the dogs is true; it then gets recanted and he's left in a state where he clearly has some sort of urge to at least comment on the callousness of it or he wouldn't have made such a comment in the first place but he would almost certainly feel some pressure not to do so. Fucked up, eh? Thanks for fighting our war, kid, but don't tell anyone about it.

Yeah, exactly. I have a friend who's a historian specializing in oral history from veterans, Vietnam and Iraq, and these are the sorts of things he talks about. I should ask him what he thinks about the Beauchamp thing.

LB, I agree completely, if a bit prematurely. I got into this with some online conservative folk, saying that as someone who 1) taught war memoirs, 2) knows seven people in Afghanistan and Iraq and 3) lived with a history Ph.D. writing a dissertation on the oral history of the Vietnam War (and who was, himself, a vet of Gulf War I), not a single thing Beauchamp wrote shocked me, nor should it have. War coarsens character. Has to happen. For the guys I played little league with to shoot another human being dead, some change has to occur. Denying this is, well, part of the reason the rates of depression are so high among vets: there's no way to acclimate yourself back into society if that society believes the war didn't change you. "What's there to acclimate to," they'll say, "you're a war hero!" As if.

Shit, two of the three things in the story are pretty common among jerky guys outside the military (though not the corpse desecration). There never really was much of a story there. The wingers just howl all the time about everything.

[cough] John Kerry [cough] Winter Soldier hearings [cough] risible Swift Boat accusations [cough] add offense of lèse majesté vs. the embattled W, etc., etc., etc.

10: I was pwned indeed.

The fantastic, in the hard-to-believe sense, is that not even counting Abu Ghraib, the Scott Thomas nastiness is like entry thirty-five million on the list of "the worst things to happen in Iraq". Seriously, we've had soldiers court-martialed for raping and murdering a 14-year-old in her house; people have pled guilty to lying to their commanders about marching prisoners in handcuffs off bridges. And running over some dogs is supposed to cause those Iraqis who still liked us to burst out in a chorus of "Rah Rah Jihad"? It's insane. That stuff really is the stuff of fraternity hazing.

I have a friend who is serving attached to a Marine unit (he's a Navy medic), and I suspect that if I asked him, "So, is nasty humor and running over some stray dogs the worst thing you saw?" when he gets back, he'd punch me.

Honestly, this story, which was breaking just as I started reading blogs after a week or so away, has been a large part of why I can't get enthused about blogging right now. Watching people go nuts about this when it clearly doesn't matter* has been really disgusting, and I mean that in the close-to-literal sense, not the comment-box hyperbole sense.

*It matters to TNR, and so on, but no sane person would (a) deny that being in a war leads one to do creepy and weird things or (b) think that the truth-value of STB's claims should affect any large-scale thinking about the important Iraq issues.

13: Didn't mean to pwn you, merely acknowledge your perfect rightness in this matter.

14: I have a friend who is serving attached to a Marine unit (he's a Navy medic), and I suspect that if I asked him, "So, is nasty humor and running over some stray dogs the worst thing you saw?" when he gets back, he'd punch me.

Talking to my friend who served in Afghanistan was a revelation -- he was one of those patriotic nice guys growing up, but when last I saw him, if I'd closed my eyes, I could've been talking to Vonnegut. The black humor of the combat veteran is blacker and more toxic than any other sort I've come across.

In high school, for a history assignment, I interviewed a WWII vet who'd served in the South Pacific. He told me some useful stuff that made for a quality report. Then he said, "I'll tell you something else, but you can't put it in your paper." And went on to talk about some of the atrocities he and members of his unit had committed with respect to POWs. I believe the interviewee is now long since deceased. And my memory of the crimes is limited to vague remembrances of maybe leaving POWs to die. The more powerful memory is the sense that this man had lived with this memory for years, afraid to talk about it, wanting to tell someone that he knew what they'd done was wrong and wanting someone to understand the circumstances that lead to that kind of thing.

Which I offer as but one concrete(-ish) example of what McManly's talking about in 7.

17: I have an uncle who was in WWII who has always refused to discuss it. In a mixed-age performance project my last semester at college I was in an ensemble that was going to perform a piece about the Battle of the Bulge. About two minutes into the first read-through one of the performers - in his early 80's - piped up and said, "I was in the Battle of the Bulge and would prefer we not do this piece." We didn't, of course. Anecdotal all the way around, I know, but I grow more and more convinced that the perceived sin is in telling.

Many of my father's friends were WWII vets, and I don't think that I ever heard one of them talk about it. (My father served in Panama, away from the action, and he talked very occasionally about Panama.)

I've also talked to a WWII vet who say that during the Pacific campaign it was often impossible to take prisoners. And I've met many crazy drunken guys who talked about their war stories from Korea and WWII.

18: I think it's a bit more complicated than just the code of the schoolyard, though conservatives and bloggers tend to find some persuasive advantage in reminding people of what the schoolyard demands (e.g., all those "he better watch out" blog posts and comments about Beauchamp's pieces).

This whole thing illustrates just how far over the edge much of what calls itself the Right has gone. Remembering when conservatives used to tell liberals that they were naïve for discounting human nature, for believing in perfectability, for failure to anticipate unintended consequences -- all points with a kernel of validity, although poorly deployed in service of self-interest -- I find it well nigh useless to have much interaction (including passive) with more than a very small few of them. Maybe my strategy of ignoring the ravings of the Right will prove unwise -- maybe I'll get swept unawares into the McManusian Apocolypse -- but in the short run, I'll take ignorant bliss.

My father was a WWII veteran. He spent several months in a PoW hospital in Italy, having been shot by a German officer, in the back of the neck, at something like ten yards. Clearly the Wehrmacht company that took him prisoner at first meant to kill him, and when that didn't work out, they felt obliged to take him away in a stretcher.

Apart from a brief factual narrative, told exactly twice, we (his children) never got to hear anything more about it.

I don't remember his having a black sense of humour, exactly, although he did have a sense of humour.

20: As do I. I think there's a lot wrapped up in it about people worrying that individual truths will undermine a collective narrative of heroism, the fraternity of veterans feeling that those without that experience will never really understand so they have no right to know/shouldn't be burdened with it/shouldn't be given another reason to treat vets badly on return - those are just a few reasons I can come up with off the top of my head that I understand and sympathize with them as strong motivators of silence without agreeing with them. I didn't mean to boil it down to the simple schoolyard mechanic, though I'm sure that's active for some people as well.

21 gets it right.

Remember when the rightwingers thought their trump card on Iraq was "Bush said something brilliant today, about how SOME PEOPLE think Arabs can't go from brutal tribal autocracy to secular democracy with no transition period. SOME PEOPLE think Iraqis are less patriotic than Americans and that Iraqis will let other countries like Iran influence their politics. It's tragic that liberals have let this one issue make them so jaded and stop believing in the perfectibility of human nature thanks to state action." WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Hilarious.

I agree with 20, disagree with 21. The key thing about this narrative is the competence and efficacy of the right, not its lunacy. They figured out a long time ago that the key to public policy is iron control of the public narrative. Whether or not they buy their own bullshit is secondary - the fact is, the media has largely bought into the right-wing narrative on this, and that's all that matters.

Isn't this just generalisable to any person who for either stress and pressure related reasons, or toxic group enviorment reasons, does bad things, feels guilt about it after the fact (and so wants to confess), but doesn't want people to think that their a monster. Which they probably arn't, people commit bad or violent acts all the time that they wouldn't of if external factors were not in place.
Combat vets have the advantage that the fraternity of them is large enough in any medium size war, that they have an in-group that can share these feelings, and act as a sort of confessional without judgement, but I think the desire is one of people who do bad things (for whatever reason) in general.

26: I don't think that's all that matters and I disagree that media buy-in is a creature distinct from audience buy-in. A controversial position in the bloglands, I know, but it doesn't take a Fox News or a Washington Times to come up with and take advantage of a simpler, more pleasing tale than the one that your adversaries are peddling: Our soldiers are trustworthy, brave, thrifty, clean, loyal and reverent is a story that people like.

Oh, absolutely. It's just a story that's kind of cruel to those soldiers who are less than perfect Boy Scouts, and you'd think a little reflection would lead people to be cautious about it.

I have a bad feeling about this. It is going to be like the Dan Rather kerning thing. Which is to say, we will find out that Beauchamp has behaved badly, or worse than we already know him to behave, and this will somehow constitute in the mind of point-scoring halfwits an important proof that The War is Good. And the fact that Beauchamp fibbed is for the moment more important than the obviously correct substance of what he's said, just as the fact that CBS aired forged documents is more important than the obviously correct substance of the story, that the President's Vietnam record was a lot sketchier than John Kerry's.

Would all you dishonest careerists stop opposing the President? and, would all you credulous media barons stop jumping carelessly on their stories?

At this point, the truth of any of the specifics of Beauchamp's story has become pretty much undeterminable, with TNR saying they've got confirmation of the stories, and anonymous Army spokesmen saying he's signed a recantation of them all to the Weekly Standard, but the Army won't say that publicly. I can't see anything that's at all likely to happen solidly convincing me one way or the other of the truth or falsity of the specifics.

29: There is no relief from that kind of cruelty for any of us. If I were nimbler with the old keyboard, I might draw an illustrative comparison between the heroic standards that most soldiers cannot meet and the ethereal, white-necked, slim-waisted and high-breasted standards that most women cannot meet.

Yeah, see, I think those suck really hard too.

33: And? I don't approve of those standards any more than the next man who knows that he can't admit that he'd rather watch bad American television shows about beautiful people than "good" British television shows about lanky, balding women and pale, pear-shaped men, but I'm not sentimental enough to think that "Cowards Unite" is much of a vote-getter.

Whose motivations are you talking about here? I'm getting confused.

Re 26, I'll note that both the inexhaustible font of gormless rightwing regurgitation that is Howie Kurtz and the theoretically less annoying hard news pages of the Times have run stories on this, while any number of unquestionably untrue statements and abject acts of horribleness go unremarked on.

Sorry if someone has linked this already and I've missed it, but just to note that Beauchamp is far from the only soldier to describe horrible atrocities in Iraq. There are too many such stories for the Keyboard Kommandoes to stand any chance of discrediting the general phenomenon, Beauchamp or no.

FWIW, while on active duty in the Navy I spent time in Philippines. It was common (this was the late 1970's) for many, many sailors leaving the Subic Bay Naval Station to throw money into what was essential an open sewage ditch to entice young kids to jump in to retrieve said money. (And, I should add, this was occurring during peacetime.) Trust me, thousands of military personnel, Navy and Marine Corps, observered and participated in this. There's no doubt in my mind that young males in third world (or worse) environments, in wartime, are capable of pretty much anything.