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US 'kill team' in Afghanistan posed for photos of murdered civili


Flashermac

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I'm glad that you know so much more about went on in South Vietnam than I do. But I only spent 13 months in a combat unit in the Central Highlands. WTF do I know.

 

@Unit731 - story from last year' date=' but now the photos are coming out and being published. Papers are calling it Obama Graib.

 

 

[/quote']

 

 

Even today people deny the My Lai Massacre ever happen. It was only a small bunch of people mostly old men, women and children totaling about 350 - 500 people.

 

It took one and a half years before it became news.

 

Some people considered Second Lieutenant William Calley a hero.

 

Considering his 'punishment', I would say the government 'almost' approved of what he did.

 

Curious if you remember 1971 and the controversy surrounding the trial of Calley. The Army was more then willing to prosecute all the way up the chain of command, but after Medina was acquitted (with F. Lee Bailey as his attorney) , any further prosecution were vetoed by Nixon in political decision.

 

Opinion polls at the time showed overwhelmingly disapproved of the verdict and life sentence that Calley got. Nobody “approved†of what happened but politics won out in the end.

 

Many say that it was the 1968 Tet offense that turned the American public against the war, but it was only after the Calley trial that polls showed the majority against the war.

TH

 

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It disgusted us when we read about it. Fact is my company saw more combat that Calley's did (though we were engineers not infantry), yet we didn't go massacre anybody.

 

I do blame the Army for commissioning such an incompetent as William Calley. The moron barely made it through high school, couldn't get into a university and flunked out of an open admission community college. Yet the Army decided he was officer material. I was told he was recycled in OCS too, didn't graduate with the class he entered with. (Wikipedia seems to confirm this ... says he entered OCS in mid-March 1967, and graduated on 7 September 1967. That is almost 6 moths. OCS lasted 4 months.) He was not fit to be a Pfc, let alone a platoon leader.

 

<< Calley was not highly regarded as a platoon leader. His Officer Evaluation Reports describe him as merely "average". Later, as the My Lai investigation progressed, a more negative picture emerged. Many men in his platoon told Army investigators that Calley lacked common sense and could not even read a map or compass properly. A few of Calley's men claimed he was so disliked that some secretly discussed assassinating him. >>

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley

 

 

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Easy to see why.

Scoop the bottom of the gene pool, give them a gun, then teach them to kill. Send to a country where they are told everyone there is potentially the enemy and what do you expect :dunno:

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Easy to see why.

Scoop the bottom of the gene pool, give them a gun, then teach them to kill. Send to a country where they are told everyone there is potentially the enemy and what do you expect :dunno:

 

Curious as to how many US military personnel you actually know or have met in your entire life.

 

That is huge generalization which you cannot begin to defend mostly because it only based on isolated cases picked up and sensationalized by the mass media to satisfy the appetites for such stuff by people just like you.

TH

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Easy to see why.

Scoop the bottom of the gene pool' date=' give them a gun, then teach them to kill. Send to a country where they are told everyone there is potentially the enemy and what do you expect :dunno: [/quote']

 

Curious as to how many US military personnel you actually know or have met in your entire life.

 

 

Most likely none.

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<< MYTH: The war was fought largely by the poor and uneducated.

 

Reality: Servicemen who went to Vietnam from well-to-do areas had a slightly elevated risk of dying because they were more likely to be pilots or infantry officers.

 

Vietnam Veterans were the best educated forces our nation had ever sent into combat. 79% had a high school education or better. [McCaffrey]

 

 

MYTH: The average age of an infantryman fighting in Vietnam was 19.

 

Assuming KIAs accurately represented age groups serving in Vietnam, the average age of an infantryman (MOS 11B) serving in Vietnam being 19 years old is a myth - it is actually 22. None of the enlisted grades have an average age of less than 20. [CACF] The average man who fought in World War II was 26 years of age. [Westmoreland]

 

 

MYTH: The fighting in Vietnam was not as intense as in World War II.

 

The average infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II saw about 40 days of combat in four years. The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in one year thanks to the mobility of the helicopter.

 

One out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. 58,169 were killed and 304,000 wounded out of 2.59 million who served. Although the percent who died is similar to other wars, amputations or crippling wounds were 300 percent higher than in World War II. 75,000 Vietnam veterans are severely disabled. [McCaffrey]

 

MEDEVAC helicopters flew nearly 500,000 missions. Over 900,000 patients were airlifted (nearly half were American). The average time lapse between wounding to hospitalization was less than one hour. As a result, less than one percent of all Americans wounded who survived the first 24 hours died. [VHPA 1993]

 

The helicopter provided unprecedented mobility. Without the helicopter it would have taken three times as many troops to secure the 800 mile border with Cambodia and Laos (the politicians thought the Geneva Conventions of 1954 and the Geneva Accords of 1962 would secure the border) [Westmoreland]. >>

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.military-money-matters.com/vietnam-veterans.html

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Gereralization about the perportrators of this and other incidents not the military itself. The "trophy photo" doesn't do the cause much good.

 

Dirty work needs to be done, and I guess the military must find those people who will do it with least mental anguish. I think war is a good place for sociopaths as long as they direct their sickness toward the enemy.

 

Correct me if I am wrong but these "kill squads" are selected for their unique personalities? I remember the Abu Graib incident and those kids just seemed to be let loose. Perhaps the command knows exactly what they are doing.

 

Happy to hear your explanation of how this kind of behaviour happens. As long as you don't go down that war is hell path.

 

Never been to war but I do know the difference between right and wrong, what's acceptable behaviour and what isnt. :beer:

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