When in Doubt, Blame the Soldier

Mack Hall


“War hath no fury like a non-combatant”

-- Charles Edward Montague

On the night of 6 June 1944 my father was on a ship in the English Channel with his armored car and crew and a few thousand of their closest friends, waiting for their turn to land in Normandy on the second day of the invasion. He said “it looked like all Europe was on fire.” He landed on 7 June, and was told by the beachmaster to “drive inland as far as you can go; drive like *&##; nothing is secure.”

“As far as you can go” turned out to be Zwickau some ten months later, with leisurely stops at Bastogne and Dachau.

Imagine a soldier in World War II landing on a beach in Normandy or anywhere else and being sent home for saying something rude about Hitler or the Emperor of Japan: “Sergeant Hall, stop that; mass-murderers have their feelings too, you know. We have to understand Hitler’s special needs. After all, he had a rough childhood. Didn’t you pay attention during the group therapy sessions that replaced lifeboat drill? We’re pulling you out of the invasion and sending you home for sensitivity training.”

Perhaps a journalist from, oh, Princess magazine heard about that exchange, and published it. In a few days Hitler could have read the sad story in the Washington Zeitgeist or the San Francisco Morning Screed and wept into his morning injection of weird drugs before filing a complaint with the United Nations.

Recently an American soldier was sent home from Iraq because he was accused of using a copy of the Koran for target practice. This was said to be offensive to the sort of people who strap bombs to their own children.

More recently a Marine was removed from checkpoint duty for handing out coins which bore the quotation from Saint John 3:16 on them instead of quotations from the Koran about how lovely it is to kill Jews.

Okay, okay, a soldier surely has better things to do than pot at a book, and a Marine at a checkpoint should be watching carefully for the little girl whose father packed her school bomb that morning so she can kill and die for his god.

Somewhere nearby there is a cranky old sergeant whose job is to growl “Private Ponsonby, if you want to discharge that firearm you find an Al Queda,” or “Corporal Snortborger, you ain’t no missionary.” And that should be the end of it. The United Nations, whose craven peacekeeping forces are a terror only to women and children, doesn’t get a say. Neither should the sort of people whose experience of war is limited to John Wayne movies and pose-for-the-camera protest marches.

A soldier who gives someone a token or religious medal with a few words about divine love on it may be a little off-task (or maybe not), but he’s the one who was sent in to clean up the mess the politicians made, and he appears to have a better idea than most politicians about how to do it.

Could we at least pause for a moment to say something at least slightly disapproving of an ideology that tortures and murders the few prisoners it manages to take? Dare we suggest that strapping bombs to one’s own child is not good parenting? Is it beastly to infer that cutting the throat of a diminutive stewardess is not nice? Is one boorish to notice that the previous Iraqi regime actually built a concentration camp for the children whose parents it had imprisoned or murdered?

Could we at least pause for a moment to say something at least slightly approving of the American soldiers we have sent into combat and, worse, “peace-keeping?”

Giving a Christian blessing to a civilian is not a soldier’s duty, but neither is it a war crime.