You can't handle the truth

First the wingnuts decided the story wasn't true ("Dan Rather! Dan Rather!"). Then, when the soldier came forward and courageously identified himself, it was too predictable that they would then scream, "betrayal!"

There probably is some subset of the wingnutty stupid enough to believe that American soldiers do not commit atrocities. I doubt that anyone who has ever served in or closely studied the military could believe such a thing, but wingnuts and facts have never mixed well. I suspect that for most of the bloggers involved in this nonsense, however, the point is to rebuild the fantasy of the American soldier. Americans may do awful things, but our job is to pretend that they don't; on the one hand, revealing the true costs of war makes it harder to argue that we should be in one, and on the other pointing out such atrocities is a betrayal to the troops that are fighting. This last, I think, comes most often from people with actual military service. It's bad enough that somebody wrote such things, but to find out that the author is actually a soldier is a kick in the gut, a betrayal. This is why there's so much more rage now that we know who Beauchamp is; he betrayed his comrades, betrayed America, and gave aid and comfort to the enemy by talking frankly about the things that happen in war. Recall that one of the primary wingnut complaints against John Kerry was that he talked about the awful things that happened in Vietnam; no meaningful effort was made to deny the things that he said, because the fact that he had spoken at all was the true disloyalty.

And you can forget that, Matt, they can't be engaged. My favorite comment...

Posted by: MICHAEL in MI | July 26, 2007 at 10:16 AM

Sounds like an AstroTurf. A pos leftard who joined the military so that he can have the "cred" to slam the military.

Those crafty "pos leftards."

This whole thing has really been strange to watch. I haven't read Beauchamp's story, but from the summaries I've read, the "atrocities" he describes strike me as nasty, disgusting, and not exactly guaranteed to win the hearts and minds of the occupied, but not, as one of the commenters on LGM noted, exactly Mai Lai. That's why I haven't taken the time and energy to look too deeply or to post anything about it.

I guess it's dangerous to puncture the fantasy of the keyboard kommandos® -- U.S. soldiers are all uniquely able to kill islamonazi thugs using nothing more than their piercing, blue-eyed gaze, while at the same time rescuing a puppy -- even if it's punctured by one of those U.S. soldiers. Young men aged 19-22 rarely act well in large groups. Put those large groups in 100+ temperatures, heavily armed, far from home, basically female-free, and under intense, alternating pressure and boredom, some of them are going to do things of which the folks back home are not going to be especially proud. By telling his story, Beauchamp reminds those open to the reminder that war is inhuman (and therefore the most human activity we engage in) and some of its participants are going to act inhumanely.