by James Glaser
January 4, 2005

There is something in all Americans that tells them that killing is wrong. Most kids memorized the Ten Commandments and "Thou Shalt Not Kill" seems to be the easiest to remember. A lot of kids never did learn what "covet" meant, but "Kill" was easy to understand.

Military Boot Camp only lasts at the most three months, for me that was Marine Corps Boot camp and the Marines did their very best to erase all the good things that my parents and church taught me. With out a doubt I screamed the word KILL, at least a thousand times in those twelve weeks. The Marine Corps wanted us to obey orders without thinking of the consequences. They tell you to take a hill, up you go. You get the order to kill, you kill.

It is only after, that you think about what happened and sometimes that "after" is years later. Combat puts you in an atmosphere of utter disorder and confusion. Things are happening so fast that even though your mind records everything going on, sometimes the mind puts that information in storage right away, while you are concentrating on staying alive.

Sometimes when you have a quiet moment after some action everything comes back to you and sometimes it takes something to trigger that thought to jump out and grab you. It might be a smell, like that sickly sweet smell of death that you might get a whiff of when you come upon an auto accident or the sun might hit your eye the same way it did back when. For me it was seeing a child, my child, laying down in the living room in a weird position as she colored in her book. The position of her body was the same as a little girl I had seen in Vietnam, only that girl was lying in a poll of her own blood. I didn't kill her, I just turned a corner in Hue City and there she was and she got imprinted on my mind.

In an article written by Carolyn McConnell for Yes! Magazine, titled Finding a Way Home, the work of Rachel MacNair is discussed. MacNair, the author of "Perpetration-induced Traumatic Stress: the Psychological Consequences of Killing," compared rates of PTSD among Vietnam veterans, and she found that soldiers who were in low-intensity battles but had killed someone suffered higher rates of PTSD than soldiers who experienced high-density battles but did not kill anyone. She wrote that "As traumatic as it is to witness a buddy lose his life or to see a civilian killed, it is more traumatic to kill someone yourself."

Soldiers who kill go through a lot of self doubt and remorse. They have done something that has been against everything their Parents and clergy tried to instill in them for years growing up. Reading about Just Wars and having people slap you on the back, or give you a high five, does nothing to erase that snapshot in your mind and the feeling that something was wrong with what you did. Being called a hero doesn't change the thought of, "Though Shalt Not Kill."

Because Washington and the Pentagon try their best to keep the numbers of "Collateral Damage" a secret and state that "we don't do body counts," the guilt factor multiplies in a soldiers mind, because what he did, even in self defense or an honest mistake, becomes a dark secret that we are ashamed of. Even though we know civilian killings happen in every war, for some reason America finds those killing even more distasteful that the killing of an enemy combatant and we try to believe that they happen seldom. Truth be told, in some wars, more civilians are killed than the military we are fighting.

Former Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey talks about killing civilians in Iraq. He said, "A red Kia failed to stop at a checkpoint near Baghdad." Massey's platoon followed orders and fired at the car. When the car rolled to a stop, they pulled three dying men from the car. Massey and his platoon found no weapons in the car, nor did they find any in the other cars they shot at checkpoints early in the war. He believes they killed more than 30 civilians, many of them women and children.

In a June 19, 2003 article for Veterans For Peace by Naveed Raja, it is written, "American troops today admitted they routinely gun down Iraqi civilians, some of whom are entirely innocent. US soldiers said they killed civilians without hesitation, shot injured opponents and abandoned them to die in agony."

Sergeant First Class John Meadows summed up the prevailing attitude amongst his colleagues telling the Evening Standard that Iraqi fighters were dressed in civilian clothes. "You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not."

Later on, sometimes much later on, it starts to sink in that you killed an innocent civilian, even though you had orders and you were scared, that guilt starts to creep in. You didn't kill an enemy, you killed an innocent person, maybe a good person. Doubts abound and all you can do is think.

Some veterans shut those thoughts out with a bottle or a joint, but they are always there. Nobody in the Boot Camp ever told you about this. Killing was what you were paid for and that makes it even worse. You have that shiny medal up in your dresser, but all that does is bring back the memories you are trying to get away from.

You can go to the Veterans Administration for help, but they have a full load with other guys going through the same thing and mostly they will try to get you on one drug or another, so you have to learn to live with what you have done. You broke that commandment of your youth, you killed someone.

Yes, you did it for your country and that thought helps for a while, but the doubt and second guessing starts to eat at you. Many soldiers live out their lives with the guilt of a killing on their minds and every new war brings back the thoughts of old wars. This war in Iraq and these stories of civilians getting killed makes many WW II, Korean, and Vietnam war veterans lose a lot of sleep as they relive what they did,

But still we have men like George Bush and Dick Cheney pushing our country and our troops off to another war so that some Americans can get rich off what they sell our government. Neither Bush nor Cheney will ever have to lose any sleep, because they have never been to war, they have never seen that dead child or even any bloody American soldiers. To them war is a tool to be used and they have no concept of the life long price our troops will have to pay, because killing is what all war is about. Thou Shalt Not Kill, has no meaning for those in power, because they can get others to do it for them.