From The Village Voice: "Dead-Check in Falluja" by Evan Wright

One thing military officials are not saying is that the behavior
of the Marine in the video closely conforms to training that is fairly
standard in some units. Marines call executing wounded combatants
"dead-checking."

"They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms," an
enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. "You put two
bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a
room where guys are wounded you might not know if they're alive or
dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye
with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being
dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet
in the brain. You do this to keep the momentum going when you're
flowing through a building. You don't want a guy popping up behind you
and shooting you."

Horrifying? Yes, but there's no mistaking that these young soldiers
-- and they are young in the Marines -- are bearing the emotional
scars.

There were other times when the enlisted men in the unit fell into
violent quarrels with others whom they felt were too aggressive and
risked civilian lives. In one instance, enlisted men nearly came to
blows with an officer whom they accused of firing a weapon into a house
that they believed contained civilians. Despite their concern, terrible
mistakes were made. I was standing next to a 22-year-old Marine from
the Humvee I rode in when he fired his machine gun prematurely at a
civilian car approaching a roadblock, striking the driver, an unarmed
man, in the eye. The unit was subsequently ordered to drive past the
car without rendering aid. I sat next to the gunner as we crept past,
listening to the dying man gasp for breath. The gunner didn't talk for
the next three days. A few days earlier, the youngest Marine on the
team had shot a 12-year-old boy four times in the chest with his
machine gun, mistakenly thinking a stick the boy had been carrying was
a weapon. When the mother and grandmother of the boy later dragged him
to the Marines' lines seeking medical aid, the sergeant who led the
team dropped down in front of the mother and cried.

Wright's article is a must-read for anyone the least bit curious as to what's really happening on the ground in Iraq. The piece ends with one commentary on our society from the perspective of experience:

Another Marine in the unit I followed—a Democrat's dream, he returned
home from fighting in Falluja in time to vote for Kerry—added,
"Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of
evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the
reality of war, that it's a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a
subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars. You have to
become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the
mosque was just someone who didn't get hit in the right place the first
time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if
I'd been there. If the American public doesn't like the violence of
war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

I don't know if this leaves us much to be thankful
for. But personally I find it reassuring that our soldiers, sent
on such a mission of horror and questionable goals, have managed somehow to hang on to
their humanity. May they all come home soon and safe. And may this bloodbath over -- what? -- come to an end soon.

[Thanks to Meteor Blades (and Red Dan, who posted it first on the Kos.)

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