The Roots of Haditha

Few of us are rational creatures, though we always like to pretend that we are. Did you really buy that car you are now driving based strictly on its appearance, horsepower, and fuel consumption? Chances are that the advertising agency, which knows how to pull your emotional strings, was able to bypass these rational considerations,and appealed directly to your "feelings", your unconcious mind.

I can tell you from my personal experiences in Vietnam, that combat pulls a lot of very complex strings in your psyche, which is at least the sum total of everything that you have ever experienced in your lifetime: Your joys and sorrows, your fears and hopes, your irrational prejudices. Get the picture?

In many cases, you survive because your adrenalin helps to facilitate those split-second decisions, which your conscious mind would weigh in the balance just long enough to get you killed. Unfortunately, that same "unconscious" mind which has just saved your life, also has a dark side: It will sometimes encourage you to make decisions to make judgments, that Abe Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" would soundly condemn.

I believe that, which caused the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, is the same disease, which overpowered the rational judgment of those Marines in Iraq. You can certainly blame the commander. Our Armed Forces doctrine states that he is responsible for "everything his unit does or fails to do", BUT:

Having met my own dark side in Vietnam, I know how hard this is to make a rational and compassionate judgment, when you have just been through a firefight. Therefore, I prefer to transfer the required accountability to the President, who sent these men into harms way. After all, as President Truman acknowledged: "The Buck Stops Here!"