Huge Backsplash: Have They No Shame?

The latest scandal is a group of Marines urinating on bodies of dead Afghanis. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/asia/video-said-to-show-marines-urinating-on-taliban-corpses.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
The US military and State department establishments are expressing outrage.  As well as scrounging for excuses: "After all, some of these young men are only 18 years old”; or “They have been on multiple tours,” or “They are battle scarred."  Nonetheless, our top echelon is saying "heads will roll" over this.  The real-life investigative version of the fabled TV program, NCIS, I am assuming with the real-life counterpart of Leroy Jethro Gibbs leading the investigation, to, well... investigate.

It doesn't take a genius or a TV hero to investigate this matter.  Or to see that the problem with all this shock and outrage is the same as it was during the worse excesses of the Iraq war.  

We created the environment for this type of behavior.  The military takes and trains young men for combat, though women are a growing percentage of the military they are not yet supposed to be in combat.  The frontal lobes of eighteen year olds, particularly males, are not fully developed.  Yet we give them dangerous weapons, point them in the direction of the "enemy" however ill-defined, and then put them in a totally foreign, life-threatening environment.   Then, when they kill the supposed or actual enemy, and survive being killed themselves, we act surprised when they behave like the adolescents they essentially are.

I’m not trying to excuse the disrespectful and poor behavior of soldiers who abuse corpses.  Nor is the fact that these soldiers behaved in a manner no worse than warriors probably have behaved from ancient times an excuse.

Their behavior is an outrage.  And there is no excuse.

But there are some other outrages occurring in this scenario.  Such as, arming with automatic weapons young men who are not yet mature.  And sending them to the other side of the world to fight battles with enemies who often are indistinguishable from peaceful civilians.  And bringing them home in body bags or on stretchers where they are patched together to try to live a vastly diminished life from what they might have known as a whole human being.  That is, if they had been allowed to develop a fully formed brain before it was rattled by bombs or damaged by the traumatic stress of battle.

It was an outrage during the Vietnam War.  It was an outrage during the Iraq war.  And it continues to be an outrage during this continuing struggle in Afghanistan.

Let’s save a little of our outrage for the living victims of this war, whether they are in Afghanistan or the US.  Osama bin Laden is dead.  So are most of his top leaders.  Surely the US has extracted enough to satisfy its bloodlust after 9-1-1.

Let's stop sending our young people into foreign lands to kill.  Let’s make it possible for more of them to join the Peace Corps, learn a useful trade, or otherwise finish their education as their brains finish developing.  Maybe then they and we can learn to build bridges between cultures, schools for the children and a better world for our next generation.