COMMENTARY: A Line That Must Not Be Crossed

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) As an Air Force chaplain stationed in Asia, I often visited the Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Facility near Hiroshima, where I was constantly reminded by officials of several things: Marines do not hate our enemies. Dehumanizing an adversary damages fighting abilities. We are professional warriors, not murderers. We know […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As an Air Force chaplain stationed in Asia, I often visited the Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Facility near Hiroshima, where I was constantly reminded by officials of several things:

Marines do not hate our enemies.


Dehumanizing an adversary damages fighting abilities.

We are professional warriors, not murderers.

We know how to control anger even in battle.

We do our job honorably and well.

I recalled those sentiments when I heard charges that last November U.S. Marines killed 24 innocent civilians, including children, in Haditha, Iraq. The military legal process now under way will determine the guilt or innocence of the Marines. The U.S. military has rushed to conduct “Core Warrior Values” courses for our troops. The upcoming courts-martial and the classes in battlefield ethics will be painful for an American public that loves to believe that our troops don’t do such things; they are virtuous warriors.

The Defense Department feeds this concept by employing such terms as “surgical strike,” “precision bombing,” and “minimal collateral damage” to describe operations in Iraq. The intention is to convince Americans that our sophisticated military technology is the sanitized way 21st century wars will be fought. The truth, of course, is far different.

High-tech computers and expensive weapons systems cannot replace the brutal physical and moral elements always present in combat. Spy satellites in the sky tell us little about the insurgents’ values, culture and mind sets. In the asymmetrical war in Iraq, the insurgents are not depending on physical superiority or state-of-the-art technology to achieve victory.

War remains a cruel art form, not a bloodless exercise in high-tech science. War is always saturated with difficult ethical judgments, many of them made in the dangerous heat of battle.

Two great American generals knew this well. William Tecumseh Sherman correctly asserted that “War is hell,” and Dwight Eisenhower declared “Every war is going to astonish you in the way it has occurred, and in the way it is carried out.”

But some people believe the cliche that “all’s fair in love and war.” Winning, after all, is everything; nothing else matters. People think this is especially true in Iraq, where the enemy is not a uniformed “warrior” in the traditional sense. Instead, insurgents use suicide bombers who think killing and sacrificing themselves is a glorious enterprise. They utilize human shields, and cynically convert schools and hospitals into military bases. They publicly murder hostages and mutilate prisoners of war.

Today, the U.S. military faces an extraordinary problem that it has clearly not solved. Troops are given authorization to kill in combat, but there are severe restraints on that license to inflict death. Marines, and others, can only kill certain people, at prescribed times and places, in specific ways and for compelling reasons.

The line between warrior and murderer is a thin one, but nevertheless it remains a line that must not be crossed.


But how can young men and women achieve these carefully crafted, often opposing goals? How can troops in battle survive with their souls and emotions intact, without losing their humanity, their ethical character and their psychological well-being?

Those questions inevitably take us to leadership. Leaders establish and define the ethical tone and create the behavior boundaries in schools, businesses and especially in the military. As the inquiry into the Iraqi killings unfolds, attention must be given to the sergeants and commissioned officers who commanded the Marines in Haditha, and the civilian officials who sent them to Iraq.

We must ask if those leaders taught, preached and practiced the proud mantra I heard so often at Iwakuni, or did they fail to convey the message that we can fight evil without becoming evil ourselves?

In ancient Sparta, mothers sent sons off to battle with these haunting words: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” If a soldier returned home without his shield, it signaled he had laid it down and mentally and physically cracked under battlefield pressure. To come home on his shield meant the Spartan warrior was either dead or wounded.

The poignant words remain valid today. Our troops must fight bravely, maintain discipline and come home with their “shields” _ their physical bodies, their ethical and religious values and their self-respect undamaged. We want our returning troops not destroyed by criminal behavior, guilt and shame.

Sadly, Sherman and Eisenhower had it exactly right.

KRE/JL END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)


Editors: To obtain a photo of Rabbi Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!