Fallujah Video: U.S. Army Combat Footage

The streets of Fallujah are eerily empty in this video of a company of soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division as they fight block-to-block against resistance fighters hiding amongst the bombed-out buildings.

2-2nd, 1st ID (3:18, 4.8MB, .ASF)

The footage is not graphic, but it does illustrate the extreme violence that our troops are experiencing. These are young kids, younger than me (I'm only 25 - the average age of our soldiers is around 19) and most of them are not emotionally equipped to effectively handle the stress and the carnage they're witnessing -- even if you don't support the mission concept, it's important that we provide support for the young men and women fighting and dying daily in Iraq and around the world.

•  BTW...

  This file isn't on any servers that I own -- if it goes down, I'll put it on my website and update the link.

  (It was originally found on Drudge, if you're curious, so I have no idea about the exact origin.)

  by mustang dvs on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 07:23:16 AM PDT

•  U.S. Marines Rally Round Iraq Probe Comrade

  FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. Marines rallied round a comrade under investigation for killing a wounded Iraqi during the offensive in Falluja, saying he was probably under combat stress in unpredictable, hair-trigger circumstances.

  Marines interviewed on Tuesday said they didn't see the shooting as a scandal, rather the act of a comrade who faced intense pressure during the effort to quell the insurgency in the city.

  I would have shot the insurgent too. Two shots to the head," said Sergeant Nicholas Graham, 24, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "You can't trust these people. He should not be investigated. He did nothing wrong."

  http://tinylink.com/?2L15dWfNiO

  by pcapone on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 07:23:25 AM PDT

•  Stories of bodies being booby-trapped

  Those guys are scared.  I worry what emotional impact this will have on a lot of those guys.
  Wasn't Timothy McVeigh a desert storm vet?

  by TNforkerry on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 07:36:48 AM PDT

  •  Yes, he was.

    We're probably creating a few more.  Fantastic, huh?

    by Plutonium Page on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 07:48:22 AM PDT

  •  McVeigh was a white supremacist...

    ...long before he went off to Desert Shield/Storm.

    Being a soldier does not a psychopath make.

    by mustang dvs on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 01:52:51 PM PDT

•  sigh

  Kerry went to this type of war and returned to oppose it.  He opposed the administration that would put soldiers in this type of siutation.  For that stance, he was branded a traitor and a coward.  Now, we see the same thing happening all over again.  And 51% of the voting American public blithely accepts it.  Oh man...  Why o why can we not learn from our mistakes?  godfuckingdammit...

  by Hounds on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 08:02:24 AM PDT

•  "Supporting" the Troops

  It's funny.  In almost no country in the world is there a cult of "the troops" that has so fully displaced rational thinking about why and how we (the US) make war.  Perhaps the Soviets -- or, more distantly, the Germans -- deliberately cultivated troop worship as a means of deflecting critical analysis of military policy, but I can think of no other country currently where public debate about war powers has been so debased by knee-jerk sentimentality about "the troops."

  Yes, I admire those who are put in harm's way and do their job under incredibly difficult and dangerous circumstances.  Police, fire fighters and soldiers deserve respect for that.  In the end, however, they are all human -- they have the same character flaws, virtues and ambiguities as anyone else.  Some of them are unthinking killers, racists and yahoos; some of them are noble, humane and selfless.  Most of them are probably like you and me: generally decent folk who can do bad things under particular circumstances of stress, pressure and fear.

  Having said all that, I do think there is something unique about US soldiers that you don't see in other nations' armed forces.  The US follows a military policy of using overwhelming force.  For all the talk about taking great care to spare civilian populations, we have witnessed in war after war, from Vietnam to Panama to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq (1 and 2), this policy play out on the ground in the form of massive bombing campaigns and, where boots get put on the ground, an aggressive hostility to everything that moves in the battlefield, whether it's families trying to cross a river to escape a battle, a van load of civilians misreading signals at a checkpoint or detainees suspected of being one of "them."

  Does anyone remember the complaints -- published only in the British press -- of UK soldiers about the needlessly aggressive and brutal tactics of their US counterparts when dealing with civilian populations?  Has anyone heard the worldwide attitude that US soldiers are singularly ill-equipped for peacekeeping missions?  There's a reason for this.  It starts with the training, is part of the military culture and gets reinforced by tolerance of brutal and, sometimes, criminal behavior.

  I admire people who salute and do difficult jobs, no questions asked.  But I admire even more those who realize that, to truly act humanely on the battlefield, you have to be willing to expose yourself to more risk of personal harm, just as international peacekeepers are trained, and willing, to do.

  In the end, our "troops" are a reflection of our culture, because they are products of it.  In general, we are an insular people who believe, without much interest in looking at the evidence, that we are superior to other nations, that everything we do is motivated by a moral purpose, and that our survival is more important than the survival of others.  Why should we be surprised that these attitudes accompany us to the battlefield?  But, then again, why shrug it off, either?

  "Support our troops."  It's a nice slogan, but it's pretty empty.  If it means not bothering to criticize inhuman or illegal behavior, no thanks.  If it means appreciating the sacrifice it entails, I'm there.  But there's nothing incompatible with appreciating the sacrifice a group makes to serve us, on the one hand, and, on the other, singling out and condemning, and demanding punishment of, those who do not soldier according to the principles we believe we represent.  Unfortunately, "support our troops" is often used as another way of saying "shut up, no criticism allowed."  Like most slogans, it has very limited meaning and usefulness.  I vote to banish it from our lexicon.

  by scorponic on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 08:14:05 AM PDT

  •  Hmmm... how about this:

    Don't blame individual soldiers for the fractured policies of the civilian leadership.

    I'm not advocating a blind devotion to the faceless masses of the Uniformed Armed Services; I'm advocating helping out locally -- for families whose loved ones are spending another Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, New Years, etc. away from home and in harm's way. I'm advocating helping out nationally by donating calling cards for wounded veterans stuck in a bed at Walter Reed or Bethesda Naval -- the Pentagon won't pay for patients' phone calls home.

    Oh, and, you can definitely support our soldiers while not supporting the President and the politically-motivated delusions that got us into Iraq in the first place.

    by mustang dvs on Tue Nov 16, 2004 at 02:00:55 PM PDT