Afghanistan Sport Killing and the True Cost of War
An explosive report in the Washington Post reveals that some US soldiers in Afghanistan killed random civilians for sport. The grim details are here.
The story reminded me of another, different military story I read the other day. Via Thomas Ricks, an Marine Iraqi veteran in North Carolina killed himself, unable to shake off the scars of the war upon his return to civilian life.
These two stories both underscore a theme that I've thought about lately- calculating the total casualties of war. Typically we define casualties as those men and women in uniform killed in action while fighting, in this case in Afghanistan and Iraq. But you could also argue quite easily that the man who killed himself back home was also a casualty, as is the wife and small child he left behind. They too are victims of a war whose effects are far more diffuse than the battlefields in some far away countries.
As with the disgusting killings in Afghanistan, my sympathies mainly lie of course with the poor locals caught in the soldiers' murderous game. Yet one could also argue convincingly that the soldiers too are victims- victims of an atmosphere of indiscriminate killing and senseless violence. To cite this is not to excuse them for their crime, but merely to point out that you cannot divorce the murders from their context.
I can remember as a child going to supermarkets or outdoor fairs and seeing forlorn, bearded men, often disabled, begging for money outside- Vietnam War veterans. I remember my parents telling me that these men went over to Vietnam, came back, and were not The Same. The ones I saw survived Vietnam, but they were certainly casualties too.
These are the stories one should keep in mind the next time someone appears on cable TV advocating an attack on Iran, or Venezuela, or whatever. Or when someone blithely says that more people are killed in car accidents each year than the total number of war dead overseas. The cost of war far exceeds the number of dollars spent and soldiers killed and injured, and is truly unquantifiable. I'd like to say that this sort of thing would give pause to our leaders, but I'm not that naive.
