'Mass Arrest' of US Marines on Camp Pendleton

You want to set the bar low and compare American soldiers to those commies? Do tell.

 

And yet you have zero proof/evidence they were libs. Fake news.

 

Not any more. The Commies still have a few outposts left in Cuba, North Korea and Albania but are of little concern to anyone anymore. Of course the people forced to live in these countries deserve our sympathy.

 

It is a shame that some of our Marines allegedly were involved in criminal activity. However I do not think it is an indication that liberals are responsible nor do I think that Trump being president has anything to do with it. I also do not think that it is an indication that the Marine Corp has suddenly lost its way. Just some young kids getting in with a bad crowd and trying to make a buck.

 

Oh? Listening to the righties on this forum, one would think they have invaded the US.

 

Not at all. I said My Lai was 'terrible'. Did you not notice that?

 

Really? Where did you read that?

We can see daily evidence of some very goofy leftists but they're not necessarily communists.

 

Except you didn't stop there. Why even bother to bring that up. I know very well about communism and communists.

 

You mentioned My Lai for some obscure reason so I mentioned who the forces of the day were fighting. Where's the problem?

 

A very insightful post, Thanks, and I tend to agree with your summation.

 

Trump is sending the message that no one needs to follow the rules... some commander in chief... sad!

 

There was an even worse case at Camp Pendleton in '99 or '00 when several Marines, including a couple field grade officers if memory serves, were arrested on similar charges.

 

They weren't Marines at My Lai, they were soldiers.

Every war that has ever been fought has had examples of atrocities committed by both sides. In some cases the atrocities were part of official policy and the committers were praised, in others they were against official policy and the committers were punished, or at least their crimes were covered up in embarrassment.

This includes our 'Good War', WWII.

If your world view has been created by Hollywood, with shining perfect Good Guys and evil Bad Guys, you won't be able to make sense of events. When you uncover some of the unpleasant realities of 'your side', you may be tempted to do an inversion, and give us the role of pure Bad Guys.

But that's not the way to think. You've got to do an overall assessment, a sum of positives and negatives, and above all see things in context, most importantly, in historical context.

 

You are very quick in guessing at motivation and the political position of the people who did it. Information suggests the motivation was personal gain

OP link.

 

To jail you say. Really? Care to point out who among those responsible was sent to jail & for how long?

Here, I'll help. of the 26 men charged in relation to My Lai ONE was convicted - Lieutenant Calley. The closest he got to jail was 3 months in a disciplinary barracks at Ft Leavenworth.

The concerning thing here isn't that you couldn't be bothered spending a minute looking up the details, it is that you somehow convinced yourself of something that wasn't even close to being true. A wise man might take a moment to reflect on how he got something so spectacularly wrong.

 

Those trying to make some political point out of this might want to consult their history books - or in the case of those who served in Vietnam their memories & those of their comrades. In an Army & Marine Corps run by veterans of WW2 & Korea there were over 800 recorded 'fraggings' (attempts to murder superiors) and hundreds of deaths from drug overdoses. Both figures represent the tip of an iceberg. Nothing that goes on in today's military is remotely comparable.

Of course, our conservative warriors will splutteringly assert that this too was all the work of evil liberals. As predictable as the sun riding.

 

We did not lose the war militarily; we lost the battle ideologically— we weren’t selfish enough to destroy North Vietnam and its communist allies, but we were altruistic enough to sacrifice our men to political cowardice in the name of humanity.

Me. I’d have nuked the monsters, big time.

 

I believe Ayn Rand's general approach to foreign wars was sounder. The US is, as we know, quite capable of "nuking the monsters" as we did in 1945 -- here's an example of a monster who survived -- but the monsters after 1950 could nuke us back.

 

It wasn't taught in school because it's not true. Your reeducation camp knowledge is lacking in facts.

 

or high school asthma.

 

Never heard of Vietnam, huh? Nah, it's not true. It was my re-education camp knowledge that is lacking facts. The U.S. probably won the war in Vietnam, right?

 

I'm sure I'm more familiar with Vietnam than you are. We didn't run with our tails between our legs and we didn't lose, but anti-American's will keep regurgitate that garbage.

 

Same atrocities happened in wars since 1968 which are only uncovered when a soldier tells all resulting in that soldier being attacked as UnAmerican and I have seen many say that the ROE should be removed

 

My Lai is something that most Americans who know about it are deeply ashamed of -- it was so shocking because it was carried out by a whole unit, systematically and over an extended period, and unlike, say, Haditha, could not be put down to over-reacting in hot blood in immediate response to the death of a comrade. (What Haditha and My Lai have in common is that the men involved were told they were going to a foreign country to liberate it from evil and would find grateful civilians there -- when they found that many of the civilians wanted to kill them, it was a shock, at least to the more naive.)

The attempt to cover it up, the initial shunning of the three brave helicopter crew there who tried to protect the civilians -- honored by the Army decades later, by the way -- and then the effective slap on the wrist given to Lieutenant Calley -- was traumatic for Americans. It's just totally counter to the way we were brought up after WWII to think of ourselves -- as the good guys, as the ones who took prisoners and did not shoot them, as the liberators of grateful civilians. Those men in the helicopter -- those were Americans. We just couldn't process that the men on the ground were Americans as well.

Unfortunately, this sort of behavior occurs more often than a lot of people expect, including in our Good War, WWII. The Vietnam War was fought on the ground by young men who couldn't get a college exemption, many of whom came from a rougher background than middle class Americans. Bad behavior is supposed to be kept in check by the officer corps: I recall serving soldiers at the time blaming the officers for what happened.

There's another consideration, one that is common to every country in the world and its military. Males who have not served feel, if they have any conscience, a certain guilt about the fact that they don't face danger in defense of the community. (Nearly three centuries ago Dr Johnson noted that “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.”)

And everyone except the most native pacifist chowder-head knows that it's a nasty world out there, and the military are our ultimate defense against some pretty horrible people. So we are very reluctant to criticize men who risk their lives, from our vantage point of comfort and safety. This doens't justify anything, but it helps explain what would otherwise be a discreditable attitude.

But Americans have been taught that we don't do things like that, that we are the Good Guys. And, over time and all things considered, on balance we have been.

And that's why Frank Dobbs just assumed that the criminals were punished. It's what he, and most Americans, expect would happen. It's what our democratic ethos assumes. It's what "should" happen in America, although not anywhere else. It's actually an honorable mistake to make. What would not be honorable would be the nationalist response: "Yeah, we wasted some slopes, so what?" You can find people with that attitude -- it's the standard tribalist response in many parts of the world -- but it's not the American response.

 

Yes, a throwback to the Chuck Connors show "branded".