American Soldiers Posing With Bodies

Here we go again. The Los Angeles Times ran a story about members of the 82nd Airborne who's job it was to get iris scans and fingerprints of the mangled remains of Afghan insurgents. The story is they didn't stop there. On more than one occasion they apparently posed with the bodies, grinning for the photos. In one, they are holding up the middle finger of the dead man. In another, someone placed a patch reading "Zombie hunter" next to the remains. The military is outraged.

"It is a violation of Army standards to pose with corpses for photographs outside of officially sanctioned purposes," said George Wright, an Army spokesman. "Such actions fall short of what we expect of our uniformed service members in deployed areas."

So let me get this moral high ground straight. Turning men INTO corpses is not only okay, it is often worthy of a medal. But appearing in a photo with one is reprehensible? I'm tired of the hypocrisy and Tired of the political correctness. We try to break our men's spirit in basic training, psychologically prepare them to become killers, have them eat larvae for survival training, turn them into something that doesn't even feel human as we know it in civilian life, then we send them off to the horrors of war. Then expect them to be such consummate professionals on the battle fields in the midst of near apocalyptic chaos as to be almost above human? Has it been acknowledged by any of the genius military brass that perhaps this gallows humor, shared by police officers and emergency room trauma workers all over the world, is the very emotional suit of armor that allows them to get through it all without snapping?

To the two faced men who sit behind desks and cast aspersions on the men in the field as they claim the moral high ground to the cameras and microphones, I would simply remind you of the words of Col. Jessep in A Few Good Men..."I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way."