Americans are seen as debauched and immoral....
Are you kidding? Do you think that Islamofacists need something like this to see us as debauched and immoral when most movies, TV and music we exports "screams" that we are debauched and immoral?
These are people that cut off heads with knifes, stone their women and believe in their heart that killing you (a.k.a an infidel) will get them a place in Heaven.
A bunch of soldiers, men and women, got drunk and acted stupid. It's not the first time and it won't be the last that troops got a bit crazy as they were celebrating the end of their tour of duty..
If true, this is just ........... sad.
I don't mean to sound callous, but people in the Middle East are not unfamiliar with violence. Open sexuality is another matter. They are more comfortable with murder then they are with sex.
Our soldiers have every right to have fun; they deserve it. But the Middle East is not America. Then again, I think it's foolish to be sending female soldiers to fight in the Middle East in the first place, but that's a debate for another thread.
I was in Oman during Iraqi Freedom. When we got there our luggage was brought to the gym tent. The Security Police said they were going to go through a couple of the guys bags and we had one lady with us and they were going through hers also. They didn't give us the names and said we had 10 minutes amnesty to turn in any alcohol or pornographic magazines without repercussions. After that you'd be in trouble. After that you had a ration card and were limited to 3 beers in a 24 hour period. No hard liquor. When we left to go home we spent the first night in the Azores. What do you think we did. We drank some beer and after being without or a rationed amount of alcohol for an extended amount of time the tolerance goes down and it takes less to get drunk. We played cards and had a few. We blew off steam but we also didn't get stupid. Nothing wrong with blowing off the steam. The problem here was when it got beyond a certain level of decency, someone should have stepped forward and put a stop to it. There are several contributing factors here.
1) High stress for extended period of time.
2) Low tolerance for alcohol so a couple of beers probably loosened them up more than normal.
3) Leaving to go home within a couple of days.
IMHO there probably should be letters of counselling, letters of reprimands or Article 15s depending on the level of involvement. I wouldn't go too overboard because they have earned the right to let off some steam. The biggest problem was a lack of sound decision making or judgement. But I would not crucify them.