I'd vote for him.

I've never been more proud.

I still can't understand why they think we're satan.

We almost got out of this thing without an eternal war.

That was close.

Young soldiers in hard places, under dreadful circumstances may perhaps be excused for poor choices in song writing. One can only wonder what our fathers and grandfathers might have been singing in camp during all the now sanitized wars we’ve come to love. I can live with the stupid cruelty of this Marine’s song, he’s no doubt seen things I haven’t, and while this whole thing makes me sad at so many levels, my greatest sorrow and deepest anger is reserved for the swine that put this young man into a place where three years along in this awful war. everyone in the country he’s here to save is still his enemy, and joke-songs about slaughtering families seem worthy of video taping.

P.S. Someday this young man (God willing) is going to come home; it will be rough justice indeed if he brings all he’s so recently learned overseas about love to the marriage bed of the daughter of someone who still thinks this war was a good idea. And they said irony was dead.

Watched it twice. Even accounting for quality issues, there is no synchronization between the words and his mouth movement. I would think it was dubbed.

Imagine that. Soldiers in a brutal, deadly war making fun of the enemy. Give the Marines a break.

Could song by the way.

Because that would be, insensitive and shit.

I would much rather have this soldier (and others) release tension, anger, and disconnection through song than, say, indiscriminately killing real-live innocent Iraqis.

If Matt Stone and Trey Parker had done this on South Park, everyone would be laughing right along.

Let's worry about the ACTUAL WAR, not some Marine in a performance obviously meant only for his fellow soldiers. God only knows what I'd be laughing about under the same unmercifully stressful circumstances.

Didn't anybody watch this at Salon? Durkka Durkka? This was pretty PG-13 coming from cannon fodder. The melody was pretty crappy California rock, though.

I have *some* sympathy for the predicament he is in...but the song is disgusting. And if Trey Parker and Matt Stone did it, I probably would be laughing, because it would be a darkly humorous commentary meant to make a point about how dehumanizing war must be.

(assuming this isn't dubbed and fake...)This just makes me sad because it shows that this man really doesn't see the Iraqis as human any more, and I don't think we can assume it's just a song. He's been desensitized to their humanity, and he actually might be capable of putting a child in front of himself in a combat situation - he's clearly thought about it.

If nothing else, it falls far below Marine Corps standards of conduct. If we can't expect the best of the best to set an example in trying times, what is the rest of our military (and those unaccountable military contractors!!!!) doing?

So, yeah - I am really sorry for the position he's been put in by the administration, but I don't think it excuses this sick display of poor character. Maybe he should be spending his time learning Arabic rather than writing songs.

Maybe they're not liberated until they've been mocked, clumsily, in half-assed song, by their liberators.

Maybe we're not patriotic if we're embarrassed by this sorry little display.

Maybe someday moments like that will be the basis of their own special summer holiday/3-day weekend, rather than lumping them in with commemorations of our more noble battles.

It could happen.

wayloopy wrote:

This just makes me sad because it shows that this man really doesn't see the Iraqis as human any more, and I don't think we can assume it's just a song. He's been desensitized to their humanity, and he actually might be capable of putting a child in front of himself in a combat situation - he's clearly thought about it.

That's what today's military training has done to our soldiers. By design. I know I'm vastly oversimplifying this but here goes anyway:

A recent Rolling Stone article (and excerpted in The Week) discussed the training our soldiers receive. To my best recollection: In WWI, our soldiers complied with an order to fire on the enemy about 25% of the time. As a result, the US military refined its combat training, and has now achieved a near 100% compliance.

It achieved this goal by doing two things: 1) Bonding our servicemen and women together in ways that rival and exceed familial bonds, and 2) by dehumanizing any threat to that bond. Any perceived threat to the unit will be met with maximum allowable force.

This paradigm works fabulously on the battlefield, I'm sure. But plop these incredibly strained soldiers into the middle of a protracted (and seemingly unending) occupation, where anyone resembling an Iraqi could be considered a potential threat? Well, that training's in there pretty deep, and the results will be ugly.

I point this out not to criticize the troops, nor to excuse such dispicible and grossly insensitive behavior as we've heard about. Rather, I mention this because it appears to be a natural result of the design of our modern military, one that I'm sure our military brass was well aware of as an all-too-real possibility when this adminstration got us into this mess. And I fear it will only get worse unless something changes here at home.

Even though this song is incredibly insensitive, former posters are right in that it was meant to be consumed only by other soldiers who are dealing every day with the same thing the songwriter is dealing with.

People lumped together in a stressful situation use each other as outlets in ways that seem incomprehensible to a person outside the situation. I know from experience: my fellow volunteers and I made up and laughed at pretty insensitive songs about our host country while in Peace Corps. I'm embarrassed to admit that the songs exist, let alone acknowledge what they said, now that I'm home. But at the time they provided a way for us to vent cultural frusterations (granted in a over-exaggerated way). None of the songs involved blowing people away, but then again we were not there in a combat situation.

However, were those songs to somehow come to light now in a similar manner, I'm sure people would react to their content in the same way they react to this video: shock, shame for our country, embarrassment for the targeted country, and wonder at what exactly is wrong with the people who created it. Not that this isn't a perfectly legitimate reaction, but it then villifies the creators and nullifies any good that they've strived to accomplish, let alone the good that's attempted by their colleagues or even their country.

When something meant for private consumption ends up in a public sphere, its content may not be excusable, but should be understandable.