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Can We Handle the Truth?

Article about: I found this article a few years back, and kept it for some reason. But honestly, was it right or wrong? Ok it's a bit long, but bear with it. I think it's worth it Can We Handle the Truth?

  1. #1

    Default Can We Handle the Truth?

    I found this article a few years back, and kept it for some reason. But honestly, was it right or wrong? Ok it's a bit long, but bear with it. I think it's worth it

    Can We Handle the Truth?
    Weighing the ethics of war is not easy
    By David Wood
    New Orleans Times Picayune, May 27, 2001 - Newhouse News Service

    In the waning days of World War II, Army Pfc. John Lee and a few other GIs assembled about 60 German soldiers, lined them up against a wall and shot them down in cold blood as the Germans stood surrendering with their hands in the air.
    The executions clash sharply with the cherished notion of World War II as the last clean, clearly "moral" war, where good was on our side and evil on the other, a war crime by any standard, committed by American boys of the "greatest generation."

    How should we think about such incidents?

    "It was wrong," Lee said recently, "But you had to have been there."
    Can civilians, normally sheltered from war's grim reality, understand what soldiers experience under stress? Should civilians judge the actions of those who fight on their behalf, and if so, by what standards?
    Who should be held accountable? Who punished?
    Many combat veterans and others say the questions and the probing should go as far as possible. Suppressing or denying the truth can turn soldiers into psychological casualties and stain the nation's honour.

    If there are no investigations, how can civilians understand and truly welcome soldiers home? How else to fully measure the physical and ethical costs of waging future conflicts? But weighing ethical behaviour is not so easy.
    Seeking to understand
    Those were not ordinary German soldiers executed by John Lee's unit. They were fanatical SS Nazi troops. The GIs had just liberated the notorious death camp at Dachau, where the SS had tortured, beaten, starved, mutilated and exterminated tens of thousands of Jews and others and, among other horrors, made lampshades and slippers from the skin of their victims.

    Does that excuse the executions?

    If the United States holds itself out to the world as a moral beacon, then not only its policymakers and ultimately its citizens must be held to a high standard, say those who have wrestled with these issues.

    Sorting out morality and culpability in war "are questions we have to address," said Gary Solis, who teaches the law of war at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. A Marine veteran of two tours in Vietnam, Solis has written two books on war crimes in that conflict.
    "There are no clear-cut answers in life, and surely not in combat," he said. "And as we go on, its going to become more murky."
    Jonathan Shay, a Boston psychiatrist who has worked with severely traumatized Vietnam combat veterans for 13 years, agreed. To understand what happens in war "is our moral duty toward those we ask to serve on our behalf," Shay said.

    John Lee, 75, recalls with horror his first glimpses of the notorious Nazi death camp at Dachau as his unit liberated it in the closing weeks of World War II. "Nothing prepares you for that," he said. He and his fellow GIs "were shocked and enraged."
    Kerrey's dark secret

    Last month (April 2001), former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., acknowledged that in 1969, he and his team of Navy commandos killed unarmed women and children during a night time raid in South Vietnam. Kerrey, who later lost a leg in combat and was awarded the Medal of Honour, said the incident has been burning into his soul ever since.

    "Don't presume that because I'm wearing a medal that I'm a perfect hero," Kerrey said during an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes." In war, he said, American soldiers are "trained to do horrible things."

    Kerrey's team was on a mission that itself might have qualified as a War crime: the kidnapping or assassination of civilian political leaders in the Mekong Delta, taking no prisoners.

    Where, then, does responsibility lie? Does it stop with Kerrey, as the unit commander? With the men who issued his orders? Or with the government in Washington that authorized or acceded to that strategy?
    Truth submerged

    "The whole Kerrey story made me want so much for a complete truth-telling at every level about what went on during this war," said Randy Kehler, a Vietnam war resister who was imprisoned for two years for his refusal to be drafted.

    "There are levels of culpability amongst all of us, myself included, from soldier to civilian to general to political officials," Kehler said. "We have to come to terms with why we allowed this to happen."

    But it is dffficult to look at what retired Marine Col. John Greenwood, who led Marines in Vietnam, called "a darker side of human nature" - one that can emerge under stress.

    "Most people, for good reasons, don't want to hear the truth about the battlefield," said Shay, the psychiatrist. "You see good kids doing terrible things. Who wants to hear that stuff."

    And so, Shay said, "The truth of war is constantly being submerged."
    Taking no prisoners

    John Lee's comrades, the men of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry (45th Div.), had seen hard combat. They had fought from North Africa through Italy, France and on into Germany, in 511 days of continuous and exhausting combat.

    Ordered on April 29, 1945, to secure a local prison camp, they scaled a masonry wall to find 36 railroad boxcars of rotting corpses, inmates who had been sent to Dachau from other death camps and allowed to starve.

    It was overcast and chilly as Lee, 19, and the others cautiously advanced beneath tall pines, finding more stacks of bodies and atrocities of which some still cannot speak.

    By the time they began rounding up the prison guards, amid the roaring of 32,000 gaunt and sickly inmates still living, the men of I Company were "boiling mad, half out of our minds," one soldier said later.

    "I looked at the bodies as we went past - their open eyes seemed to say, 'What took you so long?'" said Lee, now a frail 75 and living in West Lake, Ohio,.a Cleveland suburb.

    "There was a deathly silence. Somebody blurted out, 'No prisoners' We lined up the SS guards. One of the guys cocked the machine gun. The Germans started moving and somebody shouted'Fire!'

    "To this day I do not know who that was," Lee said.

    Army investigators later summoned Lee and others to gather statements and other evidence of that day, including photographs taken by an Army photographer showing the bodies of the SS guards piled up against the wall.

    Their secret report, quietly declassified in 1991, details several similar incidents at Dachau. A lieutenant ordered four German soldiers into an empty boxcar and personally shot them. Another American soldier clubbed and shot those still moaning. Several GIs turned their backs on two inmates beating a German guard to death with a shovel. One of the inmates had been castrated by the German they were murdering.

    Their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, said, "It was one of those situations I was unable to control for a short time."
    "Nobody's really proud"

    The report was sent to Gen. George Patton, commanding the 3rd Army. No action was taken. Among veterans of the 157th regiment, legend has it that Patton threw the report in his wastebasket, tossed in a match and barked at the investigators: "Get the hell out of here!" But a copy made its way to the National Archives.

    "Nobody's really proud of doing something like that," Lee says today. "The Army trained you to fight. It did not train you for the psychological shock."

    To be sure, many veterans say that no one who hasn't experienced combat can pass judgment.

    On a larger scale, the moral behaviour of its soldiers matters to the nation, said David Skaggs, a former congressman and Vietnam veteran.

    "It's important for us to try to apply our beliefs about civilized behaviour and the rule of law even in the most uncivilized activity human beings engage in", Skaggs said. "Just kind of suspending the rules would make it that much worse."

    But Kehler said that weighing the actions of men in combat, and their consequences, should be done gingerly.

    "I look at a guy like Kerrey, he is a decent and honourable man - yet look what he did...

    "That says to me, if I am honest with myself: In the same circumstances, I could have done the same thing myself."

    Food for thought?

  2. #2

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    I remember speaking to an American infantry vet a few years back about his experiences in Europe. In one particular story he described shooting SS soldiers who wanted to surrender. He said that they never took prisoners from the SS. I don't think he experienced liberating any of the camps (he did not mention it at least) but he certainly met the SS in combat. He did not express any remorse.

  3. #3

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    well, no one will really know what its like unless your there at the time fighting alongside these soldiers.

    Thanks

    Danny

  4. #4

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    As historians, which is really what we (should) aspire to be, we ought be objective enough to realise that there are only shades of grey in any conflict. Nothing is "black and white".

    Cheers, Ade.

  5. #5

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    good thread john and i aint passing comment.

  6. #6
    ?

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    Hi John , i`m reading a book called The Scars of War by Hugh Mcmanners , it`s written in the same vein as your thread , looking at the psychological side of war on individuals . It doesn,t just cover WW1 and WW2 but Viet Nam , The Falklands and The Gulf War . I don`t know if you have read it but it was published in 1993 and is well worth a read if you can find a copy
    REGARDS AL

    We are the Pilgrims , master, we shall go
    Always a little further : it may be
    Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
    Across that angry or that glimmering sea...

  7. #7

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    Quote by Alan M View Post
    Hi John , i`m reading a book called The Scars of War by Hugh Mcmanners , it`s written in the same vein as your thread , looking at the psychological side of war on individuals . It doesn,t just cover WW1 and WW2 but Viet Nam , The Falklands and The Gulf War . I don`t know if you have read it but it was published in 1993 and is well worth a read if you can find a copy
    I have to add a comment, although nothing as bad as that happened when I was in Iraq. I certainly saw things that I shouldn't have, and I know my fellow soldiers took things to the limit on a number of occasions

    Of course if the media ever really knew what went on, it would be splashed on the tabloids front page, and they would brand them as criminals................... Believe me, when your Sh** scared, you don't think straight

    Best forgotten

  8. #8

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    Quote by John Brandon View Post
    I have to add a comment, although nothing as bad as that happened when I was in Iraq. I certainly saw things that I shouldn't have, and I know my fellow soldiers took things to the limit on a number of occasions

    Of course if the media ever really knew what went on, it would be splashed on the tabloids front page, and they would brand them as criminals................... Believe me, when your Sh** scared, you don't think straight

    Best forgotten
    I have to agree with you on that one John, I've seen people and myself do some stuff that i never knew they or myself were capable of, guess no-one really knows until they are in that kind of situation. Something that I shouldnt have been in to be honest

    Thanks

    Danny

  9. #9
    ?

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    point taken
    REGARDS AL

    We are the Pilgrims , master, we shall go
    Always a little further : it may be
    Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
    Across that angry or that glimmering sea...

  10. #10

    Default Re: Can We Handle the Truth?

    Guys the problem with wars are some ,are justified and some are not.men who fought in ww2 are heroes and saved the world from tyranny.some wars are started by corrupt politicians, and backed by big buisness ,and then i have a problem with wars like that.I read recently that most wars nowadays are to keep the poor in their place for ,and on behalf of rich capitolists countries.

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