It is true these men did suffer a massive massive loss of judgment.  We don't know anything about their command and we don't know what their commander's goals were or what their daily lives were like.  Still to this day my husband displays very very dark humor about some of the soldiers in Iraq that he knew took an OER bullet.  Janis Karpinski speaks of soldiers up the chain of command unwilling to say or do anything about torture at Abu Ghraib because when you are a commissioned officer War is time to get to promoted.  For the power hungry in the military it's like being a stock broker during a Bear market.  The really power hungry officers volunteer the troops under them for every crazy mission in the book.  Why?  Well, officers write their own OER's (Officer Evaluation Reports) and because my husband has done his own I know how it goes......an officer lists all of his fresh new accomplishments for the year behind bullets....hence an OER bullet.  Commanding this dangerous mission and that dangerous mission looks real real good and now the crazy have to compete against each others commanded dangerous missions to get noticed.  If your command agrees with your own self assessment they sign off on the evaluation and these evaluations go into a little file that is pulled out and a board goes over it when it is promotion time......WHO KNEW THE MILITARY WAS DOING HIPPY GRADING THESE DAYS HUH?  Commanders over in Iraq right now seeking to climb the power and glory ladder are volunteering their troops for everything and anything that is dangerous and giving no thought to how it could be harming their troops......they don't care - they want Oak Leaves, they want ribbons, they want Stars.  The sane command at the Pentagon has all been fired (retired) and we all know who Rumsfeld has appointed and promoted.  Crazy breeds crazy breeds more crazy down the military chain of command and sane people have no OER bullets that any of these fuckers want to read.  We know nothing of the command these soldiers were under or the amount of stress that had been liberally applied to them daily to make their commander look GREAT......we know nothing other than what they did in Haditha and it is perfectly conceivable that twenty years down the road one of them will bounce his grandchild on his knee and send him home and put a gun in his mouth and end his pain and turmoil that lives within himself and he will have been killed by an OER bullet or maybe even two.

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