Posted on 10/22/2005 6:17:26 AM PDT by AliVeritas
There simply wasn't enough room on the rocky hilltop above Gonbaz village in southern Afghanistan for the U.S. platoon and the corpses of the two Taliban fighters. The Taliban men had been killed in a firefight 24 hours earlier, and in the 90 degree heat, their bodies had become an unbearable presence, soldiers who were present have told TIME. Nor was the U.S. Army unit about to leave — the hilltop commanded a strategic view of the village below where other Taliban were suspected to be hiding.
Earlier, Lt. Eric Nelson, the leader of B Company, I-508 platoon leader had sent word down to Gonbaz asking the villagers to pick up the bodies and bury them according to Muslim ritual. But the villagers refused — probably because the dead fighters weren't locals but Pakistanis, surmised one U.S. army officer.
It was then that Lt. Nelson took the decision that could jeopardize his service career. "We decided to burn the bodies," one soldier recounts, "because they were bloated and they stank." News of this cremation may have remained on these scorching hills of southern Afghanistan, had the gruesome act not been recorded on film by an Australian photojournalist, Stephen Dupont. Instead, when the footage aired on Australian TV on Wednesday, it unleashed world outrage. A Pentagon spokesman described the incident as "repugnant" and said that the army was launching a criminal investigation into the alleged desecration of the corpses, which is in violation of the Geneva Convention on human rights.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Semper Fi
All of my sympathy dried up on that day too.
Heck, I would have tossed the reporter into the fire too and then taken a long lunch.
The part about Vietnam was accurate as well but that and the carry over into desecrating bodies for fun is a legitimate comment made in the wrong place.
We'll get there. Just keep rowing, my Friend.
Can someone build a transporter I wanna go there. On second thought, does that mean I already exist there as a lib? Perish that thought!
Yes, you are a lib in another dimension. You can get rid of that by having either lib-o-suction or or a lib-otomy.
Wowo we went from burning corpses to taking souveniers.
Once you allow your troops to start desecrating bodies for fun you no longer have an army, you have a mob.
by stating that the Muslims deserved any insensitive thing the troops did to them. So there's no big jump. I don't care about the taliban or jihadists; allowing our troops to mutilate bodies will eventually warp our troops' minds.
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