Training Marines How Not to Kill

[Rose Siding]

The young captain herded the Marines of Fox Company into a semicircle in the sand facing a plywood easel from which hung a sheaf of long laminated pages. The first one read: "Cordon and Search Operations."......
"Over the last 12 months or so we killed about 1000 Iraqis at blocking positions and checkpoints," the captain told the grunts. "About 60 -- six zero -- we could demonstrate that, yeah, he was a bad guy. He was an insurgent. Six zero out of about 1000. So all we're doing -- if we don't communicate what we want them to do, all we're doing is creating more enemies.".....

The gruesome 60-out-of-1000 stat popped up in another talk, this one by an earthy corporal, a trainer himself. "This statistic's roughly a month old now, but over 1000 Iraqi civilians have been killed at traffic control points, VCPs , blocking positions, and out of those -- this was in a 12-month period -- and out of those, only sixty-something were declared bad guys on the spot -- so, had explosives, weapons anything like that. So obviously 900-something innocent Iraqis have been killed. That's pretty shitty numbers, right?".....

The corporal at Mojave Viper laid out a few more reasons why drivers don't always stop. "Maybe his wife's pregnant -- he 's trying to get her to the hospital. That happens all the time. Maybe he's just a fucking retard." Marines make mistakes too, he allowed. "Marines grab an Arabic sign. They throw it out at the blocking position thinking, that's a stop sign; when in actuality it says, "Coalition Checkpoint, Proceed with Caution." What do you think the Iraqis do? They fucking proceed with caution, and they proceed to get lit up."

The corporal told the men to give the driver the benefit of the doubt, even if his vehicle passes the first three barriers of their four-layered security cordon. Yell louder, make more hand signals, pump more warning shots into the ground. But if and when the vehicle crosses the trigger line, do what you must.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-palmer/training-marines-how-not-_b_24581.html

[LibDemAlways]

1. "For whatever reason it turns out to be a carload of

women and children or whatever....you're still gonna be justified..."

Oh, really? Would the corporal feel the same if his wife and children lived in an occupied America? Would he justify the occupying force killing them under any circumstances?

This is one fucked up point of view.