American Soldiers -- Losing Their Morality

This is what happens to the young men and women we send to fight wars.  Killing becomes ordinary to them.  And then they come home....

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/03/the-kill-team-photographs.html#ixzz1HUmaGQz1

The "Kill Team"
by Seymour Hersh,
the New Yorker Magazine

EXCERPT: As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us. The G.I.s in Afghanistan were responsible for their actions, of course. But it must be said that, in some cases, surely, as in Vietnam, the soldiers can also be victims.

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