American Chronicle: Iraq: Understanding Why They Raped
Suki Falconberg
July 14, 2006
I can kind of understand why Marines in Iraq may have raped a 14-year-old girl and then killed her and her family. (I would like to stress the ‘may have.’ Nothing has been proven against these men yet. They have not been tried, or convicted. They are as innocent as you and I at this moment.)
It seems like a statement of the obvious, but the men are in a wartime situation. Full of the fear of being killed, the frustration of having to deal with this enemy they don’t know or understand—Iraqi culture is incredibly different from ours. They see their friends killed. They could get maimed, disfigured, have their legs blown off at any moment. They’re in the middle of this awful heat and loaded down with 50-100 lbs. of gear and angry as hell. Maybe rape and other atrocities are understandable responses? Maybe I would behave in a really savage way, too, if I were faced with what’s hitting these boys everyday?
In a USA Today article (June 2, 2006), Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, chief of staff in Baghdad, says: “It’s very difficult to determine in some cases on this battlefield who is combatant and who is civilian.” The soldiers, he goes on to say, are experiencing “stress, fear, islolation….They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion, and they could snap.”
**and yet I'm pretty sure a lot of grown men wouldn't see a 14 year old girl as a combatant. If anything, it "may" explain shooting her, but raping her? Murdering her family including a 5 year old? Burning the body afterward?**
The Christian Science Monitor’s “US Troops Weigh Impact of Stress” (July 7, 2006) by Mark Sappenfield reinforces these views. Sappenfield writes: “A number of current and former troops suggest that amid the daily calamity of war, everyone has their breaking point, and the seemingly endless nature of this war could, in some cases, cause frustration to boil over into criminal violence.
“They are quick not to prejudge fellow soldiers and marines implicated in the… murder investigations that have emerged recently.
"'War can make you do terrible things,'says Lawrence Provost," a man who has served in both Afghanistan and Iraq with the Army Reserve.
“Moreover,” Sappenfield reports, “soldiers and marines resent what they see as the self-righteous condemnation of critics who sit thousands of miles from the fight and have little concept of what it means to fight an insurgency.” And he writes of “the stress of a combat environment where friend and foe blur into uncertainty.”
As a protected American woman sitting in my armchair, I am not likely to be called upon to go to war and to face the hardships and pressures of Iraq. About the closest I can come to urban warfare is watching Black Hawk Down. The movie was based on a true incident: on Oct. 3, 1993, young, untried Army Rangers, alongside more experienced Delta forces, engaged Somali militia in Mogadishu; due to poor intel, they didn’t know the whole city was going to come down on them. As a result, a number were killed and wounded. (What the military learned about urban warfare on that day has carried forward, to places like Iraq.) The movie tries to recreate the stress, heat, carnage, and uncertainty of urban combat and does so with a tense, harsh realism.
Although it is not about the rape-murder of civilians, it does hit us in the face with the moral uncertainties of urban warfare, and the confusion. The Somalis used women and children as shields. Somali women would also dart out, in the line of fire, to distract the American soldiers. Telling friend from foe would have been impossible in the circumstances. Avoiding killing women and children would have been impossible.
If I put myself in the place of these threatened young men in Mogadishu, how would I behave? If faced with someone shooting at me from behind a line of women and kids, I would, if necessary, kill the women and kids to protect myself. If I saw my buddies being torn up around me, I might want to exact some revenge. Even though I don’t have the male testosterone that would drive me to rape, I can imagine how men could use this act as an outlet for anger, wartime stress, frustration.
**testosterone does not turn a man into a rapist, and lots of people feel stress. Most of them don't resort to rape and nurder just to "blow off a little steam" **
If the six soldiers implicated in the March rape-murder of the young Iraqi girl and her family are guilty, we should remember that they are ordinary men pushed to extremes. They are just like the men around us everyday—just like our boyfriends and brothers.
**no, they're not. MOST men would likely never do something like this, would never rape a little girl, shoot her family, burn the body. MOST men would NEVER do this. NO MATTER the circumstances. Saying that somehow having a penis will turn a guy into a rapist and that this is a normal course of events is just one of the disgusting things this woman has to say. It comes off as a collosal "so what, all guys are like that", and, if you're a guy reading this, I hope it pisses you off as much as it does me**
How can I condemn any soldiers for wartime rape-murder if I can’t answer for myself? What kind of savagery might I inflict on a woman or child if war pushed me far enough?
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