Another grovel, not a
rebuke
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Where’s a Porta-Potty when a few good men need one?
This is the question Leon Panetta, the secretary of
defense, ought to concern himself with, instead of
trying to top Hillary Clinton, the secretary of
state, with over-the-top “outrage” over a Marine
patrol taking a leak on the bodies of several
freshly killed terrorists in Afghanistan.
If Mr. Panetta had been doing his job, he might have
found enough Porta-Potties to spell battlefield
relief for the Marines. This should teach him a
needed lesson. Battlefield rest rooms are important,
and will become even more important when women are
dispatched to the battlefield. Lady grunts
will expect something more than toilet-seat
etiquette or an inconvenient bush or tree stump to
protect their modesty.
The defense secretary and the secretary of state
were each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and
out-bewail the other, playing for the cameras a
ferocious game of “can you top this?” Mr. Panetta
said what the Marines did was “utterly deplorable.”
It’s hard to get beyond “utterly,” but Mrs. Clinton
called in her crack linguistics team at the State
Department—where plain speech is utterly frowned
on—and she soon pronounced herself in “total dismay”
on hearing the news, and was sure that the “vast,
vast” majority of “American military personnel”
would never, ever do what those awful Marines did.
Mrs. Clinton’s description of that “vast, vast”
majority, and not merely a “vast” majority, was
taken to be an indication that she thought the
Marines’ offense must have been twice as bad as the
offense of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”
tormenting Bubba for indulging in inappropriate
merriment with a regiment of big-haired ladies at
the White House. A secretary of state should use
language precisely, and carefully ration her vasts.
Nevertheless, urine is rarely a proper salute even
to dead terrorists, and the four Marines who
relieved themselves on Taliban corpses should be
properly disciplined. Americans, instructed by a
culture informed by the certitudes of Jewish and
Christian faith, are better than that. Still,
sending two senior Cabinet officers do what a second
lieutenant could have done was just short of a full
grovel. The Obama administration stopped just short
of sending the president himself to deliver a deep
bow and a fulsome apology to the Taliban terrorists.
Mr. Panetta, who served two years as an Army
intelligence officer several decades ago, knows
better. Mrs. Clinton, whose hands-on knowledge of
warfare and weaponry is limited to the lamps she
threw at Bubba in the White House, has no knowledge
of what Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the infamous
Civil War firebug, was talking about when he
famously said “war is hell.”
Dehumanizing the enemy is the first task of the men
who send boys to war, men who never have to learn
that war is more than merely a policy option. “But
of course [these Marines] have dehumanized the
enemy,” Sebastian Junger, a documentary filmmaker
who spent a year with an Army platoon in the
Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, observes in
The Washington Post. “Otherwise they would have to
face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other
human beings. Rather than demonstrate a callous
disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might
reveal something else: a desperate attempt by
confused young men to convince themselves that they
haven’t just committed their first murder—that they
have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.”
Rick Perry got it right when he said the Obama
administration’s rhetoric showed “a disdain for the
military.” The incontinent Marines should be
reprimanded, but filing criminal charges against
them is unreasonable. “Kids, 18- and 19-year old
kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s
what occurred here. To call it a criminal act is
over the top.”
An anonymous veteran of the Vietnam war makes a
similar point in an Internet blog. “I was on the
line in the A Shau Valley with the 101st Airborne
Division. At Camp Sally, not a Club Med place to be.
Nor for the faint of heart. You must understand that
those who live war are a different breed. Perhaps
later, much later, maturity rearranges one’s focus.”
What we need now is the rearrangement of the focus
of the old men who send young men to war. They don’t
have youth and inexperience to excuse their sins,
miscalculations and misjudgments. These old men
should keep this in mind when deciding how to
discipline the Marines sent across the seas to
defend and, if need be die, for their country.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.