At the time he enrolled the Gulf war had been and gone. The second 'Iraq' was not on the cards and neither was Afghanistan. Basically the only threat of 'active' service was Northern Ireland, which he was sent to as a private.
Many of the armed forces don't want to be there. They are trained and ready to be deployed wherever they are sent at a moments notice, be it domestic soil or Afghanistan. They may have political beliefs but they are not considered when sent abroad.
When the dole queues are long then the lure of a military career can be quite appealing. Good pay. Good pension. For a lot of young people it is a way out of living at home. Plus there are all sorts of trades and qualifications to be gained. For example a HGV class 1 driving licence - it can cost thousands to get one here. It is not that simple to say they all joined up to kill. I didn't. I did join to play with guns and utilise heavy machinery, I admit. However the Empire long was lost and the prospect of utilising all that training into a real 'kill' was remote.
I think the main factor in this case is combat stress. You can argue that he should have reported how he was
feeling but it is a very macho environment and you score no points for
feeling. The following was written by a journalist for the Telegraph newspaper
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/10487226/Marine-A-criminal-or-casualty.html who spent some time in the actual place where this happened. It is worth reading.
I don’t know Marine A personally and I am not privy to the details of what took place on that fateful day, but I do know something of what he and his comrades were going through at the time; something of the physical threat they faced and also the psychological pressures they endured.
Just days after the incident occurred, Marine A’s company, defending a remote British outpost deep in the Helmand valley, was relieved by another company of Royal Marines with whom I was embedded. Over the next few weeks, I came face to face with the sort of horrifying war this had become in what was described to me then as “the most dangerous square mile in Afghanistan”. Four men had already been killed and many more had sustained appalling injuries.
The British outpost – a patrol base – was effectively behind enemy lines. Nicknamed “Rorke’s Drift”, it was manned, at any one time, by about 35 Marines pretty much cut off from the outside world. Their job was to keep the enemy busy so that bomb disposal and important development work could take place in a village barely a mile to the north.
The Taliban, left to their own devices, would have disrupted this work by direct attack and through intimidation of the locals, so they needed to be kept away at all costs. The Royal Marines, holed up in their patrol base, provided the diversion. They were the lure, the bait, the red rag to the Taliban bull.
Travelling to this outpost by road was a sure-fire way of committing suicide. If a Taliban ambush didn’t get you, then a deadly roadside bomb would have done – the place was riddled with them: small ones that tore legs off and bigger ones that would turn a human body into what the Marines called “pink mist”.
The only way to reach the place was by helicopter, but even that was highly risky because any low-flying aircraft was a prime target for Taliban rockets or bursts of small-arm fire.
The patrol base was no fortress, rather an old farming compound surrounded by dry mud walls about 50 metres square, ill-equipped to keep out the wind and rain, let alone bullets and bombs. We pitched our mosquito net tents right up against the walls because of the insurgents’ habit of lobbing grenades into the compound.
It was sobering to think that just beyond these fragile, crumbling walls there were people intent on one thing – killing us at any opportunity. The Marines, however, did not cower inside the base. Every day they would send out patrols to scout the ground, and I will never forget my first patrol briefing.
“Right lads, listen up!” barked the patrol sergeant just before stepping out. “If you get blown up and live, stem the bleeding and stab in the morphine pronto – that is, if you have any arms or legs left.”
The men smirked. A couple guffawed. Gallows humour was all part of life at the base. It’s how the commandos got through that hell on earth
“OK, game faces on!” whispered the sergeant through our headsets. “Lead off point-man.”
We went out on these patrols in multiples of around 15 or 20 walking in single file about 10 metres apart to ensure that if one man trod on a mine, those next to him would not be hurt. We were also careful to vary our routes so that we did not set patterns. That would have helped the insurgents know where to place their mines.
Having said that, the Marines were always hoping to be attacked. It was a chilling prospect, but they reckoned that in a straight fight they could not be beaten.
It was always hot, about 50 degrees, and the chances of ambush were always high – but not as high as the prospect of stepping on an IED, an improvised explosive device. The number-one killer of Nato troops in Helmand and this place was riddled with them. The lads dubbed it “IED Central”.
The fields we had to cross had probably been freshly mined overnight and the tree lines separating the fields would have been thick with explosives. Some IEDs were triggered by a hidden insurgent but the vast majority, concealed under a layer of earth or sand, needed only someone to step on a hair-trigger pressure plate.
As indiscriminate as they were deadly, they could be detonated by the heavy combat boot of a Marine, the sandalled foot of a working farmer or the bare, scampering foot of an innocent child. These were the ultimate killing fields.
These time-consuming and exhausting patrols were sent out every day, twice a day – and every time the Marines would edge forward in their long, snaking line, each man knowing that the next step could be his last. It was a deadly lottery and patrolling was called “Afghan Roulette”. If an IED did not kill, it would maim horribly – loss of limbs and genitalia have been the signature injuries of the Afghan conflict.
While the physical risk was undoubtedly enormous, the psychological threat was just as fearsome. The Taliban have never been averse to hanging the body parts of dead soldiers in the branches of trees – to taunt, to provoke, to goad. Often it was legs and almost always they were booby-trapped. There was also the knowledge that capture was a guarantee of torture – probably skinning followed by beheading.
These were professional men doing a professional job, but that did not stop them feeling outrage and fury. Marine A had witnessed three men killed in his time at the patrol base and seen many horrific injuries. He described in court how limbs were left hanging from low-lying branches: “Close friends we lived with had been killed and parts of their bodies displayed as a kind of trophy for the world to see.”
It came as no surprise to me that the Marines were ever eager to track down, confront and neutralise this unforgiving enemy. I was not even a combatant, I shot with a camera not a gun, but I was soon consumed by that same sense of anger and loss – especially after I started to suffer personal grief for those men, killed or terribly injured, whom I had counted as friends.
I recall one patrol in which the “atmospherics” were particularly concerning. The farmers in the fields, normally friendly and chatty, looked uneasy and would not engage with us – a clear sign that the insurgents were close by. Sure enough, we were soon ambushed with a volley of rocket-propelled grenades, but at least the enemy had finally shown themselves.
A furious firefight ensued, but after a few hours the Marines won the day. A number of Taliban were killed, the rest fled. One wounded insurgent was taken to the nearest British military base. We heard later that he had died, but not for the want of the best medical attention. I won’t pretend the Marines were unhappy to hear of his demise, but they knew, as a prisoner, he had as much right to medical aid as they did.
These men are trained to be ferocious in combat, but always magnanimous in victory. The latter can be a tough call – especially if you have just seen your mate’s mutilated remains hung in a tree to dry.
When we got back to our compound, one of the men said to me over a hot wet (Marine-speak for a cup of tea): “We won that one, but next time it could be very different. Out here, you never know when it’s your time to catch it.” Two weeks later the same Marine was blown up – he survived, but suffered horrendous, life-changing injuries.
It is not difficult to understand the bitterness and hatred some Marines feel towards the ruthless enemy they have faced in places such as “IED Central”. Most, indeed the vast majority, will have tempered that bitterness with the need, born of duty, to be merciful and benevolent. But it often goes against the natural grain of human instinct and emotion. We should not always be surprised when those natural instincts bubble through. These men are trained to be tough, but sometimes that very toughness is their undoing.
Living among the Marines at that God-forsaken patrol base, I experienced not only the thrill and fear of battle, but also the extraordinary, selfless comradeship that binds soldiers on the front line. It is a bond that is not replicated in the civilian world.
War is war. Nothing else comes close to its challenges, its chilling excitement or the hideous experience of it. I have seen the rugged determination that drives soldiers in combat. I have seen the haunted, exhausted look in their eyes after enemy contact. I have witnessed their night terrors following the elimination of their foes, and the grief and anger that grips them when comrades are lost or wounded.
Make no mistake, going to war changes a man’s view of himself; it radically recalibrates his mindset. But at least he is with like-minded men. To be part of this band of brothers is not only life-affirming but spiritually reinforcing. Comrades will validate each other’s actions in the most brutal of situations against an enemy who observes no conventions or rules of engagement.
Magnanimity, fair play, chivalry, that good old British sense of fair play, the qualities we all try to espouse, will always be challenged by the realities of front-line warfare – from Helmand to Goose Green; from Normandy to the Somme; from Belfast to Basra.
And there’s the rub. Soldiers are not automatons. They are flesh-and-blood human beings with frailties and vulnerabilities like all of us. They are ordinary people doing extraordinary things on our behalf; risking their lives in combat and having to make difficult and morally confusing judgments in the heat of battle. They don’t always get it right because, sometimes, the stakes are just too high for any one man to cope with.
Chris Terrill is an anthropologist, film-maker and the only civilian to have won the Royal Marines green beret. He has embedded many times with the Marines in Afghanistan
He did wrong. The rules are clear and they were broken. Irrespective of whether or not the other side display a code of conduct.
I just see this man as a scapegoat. He was exposed too long to too much shit. The majority of blame should be placed with those who sent him.
Also there is a tendency to think that all Afghans are Taliban. They are not. They are intimidated by them. The war is not with the Afghan people.
