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Dear Lunatic Fringe,
Your name sounds impressive, but have you ever been in combat?
If you have, I'd be interested to know under what circumstances. When one gets no more then 2 hours of sleep per night (A sleep that borders on total wakefulness or total shutdown) and then gets put into a situation that is far more intense then I ever saw in Vietnam (We fought in jungle and rice paddy,not in a city), then this young man does not have the liberty of "Monday morning quarterbacking" that you have condemned him with.
In every war I have studied, and the war that I was in, wounded enemy have been sent to their ultimate fate by American fighting men. Your reply tells me that you've never been in that kind of situation, and if so, you have completely forgotten what it was like to have been in a split second decision that rests your entire being.
Had this person been deserving of these kind of charges then he would have shot the embedded NBC correspondent along with the wounded "insurgent" on the ground.
After I get done with this I'm going to call the Marine Corp and tell them that I support this man, but if this young man gets convicted and sees one day of jail time because people like yourself think that "rules" apply in a war, then you get ready to do the fighting over there.
I want to see you go through basic and advanced training and all of the practice they give people before sending them over and then I want to see you with 2 hours of sleep (if you're fortunate)per night. I want to see you develop friendships with people and see the pictures of their families, their wives and girlfriends, and then I want to see you wearing their brain and flesh on your uniform when an "insurgent" sniper (who has picked off more than just your closest friend)or a 12 year old pops out of a sewer and lobs a grenade at you,(with the fuse cut so you have time enough to say "Oh s...". I want you to taste the fear,(It tastes like your sucking on copper pennies with a totally dried out mouth)and you and the last remaining men in your squad get the order a 2am to flush this "insurgent(s)" out. He/she comes out with his/her hands up, or is laying in a corner of a Mosque, and you see a twitch from their body, and when the smoke clears, you see some embedded jerk who hasn't earned the right to be on the same ground with you filming your politically correct one way ticket to the Brig, because there was no "clear threat" coming from him/her.
Our cemetaries here and overseas are filled with those who hesitated and never came back. Sometimes, during their hesitations they got their own people killed along with themselves.
The only rule in war, is to survive it the best way you can, and that's done by not letting the man next to you down.
If your line of thinking is going to rule this military, then we all better start getting to know how to recite The Koran in Arabic.