Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 26, 2012

Since 2006, reporter Neil Shea has spent a great deal of time embedded with U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. Prompted, in part, by the recent murder spree allegedly committed by SSgt. Robert Bales ? who is accused of slaughtering 17 Afghan civilians, including at least nine children ? Shea has published in The American Scholar an unvarnished account of his experiences with a unit he calls the Destroyer platoon. Shea?s essay is an unbearably vivid depiction of the wages of permanent war.

The soldiers whose company Shea kept, he writes, ?were men who enjoyed demolishing Afghan houses, men who shot dogs in the face.? One member of the platoon recalled that the rules of engagement in his last deployment were ?Make sure nothing lives. Cows [are] Taliban food. Sheep [are] Taliban food. Donkeys [are] Taliban transportation. Kill everything.?

The basest and most vicious impulses of fallen human nature had been laid bare by what Shea calls the ?subhuman wash of aggression.? When not on duty, the troops amused themselves with ?homoerotic jokes? and idle talk about abusing or killing their wives and girlfriends back home.

As the platoon sergeant said, ?This is where I come to do f***ed-up things so I don?t do them at home.? That habit, once acquired, will be difficult to break.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.