"One suspects that U.S. troops were party to some awful events in the Pacific and European theaters of World War II, all gone in the mists of history and the enemy's defeat. Not now. Gen. Chiarelli's magnificent "99.9%" notwithstanding, it's the phenomenon of the so-very-public 0.01%--at Abu Ghraib, on an Afghan street, at Haditha--that is breaking America's will this time."
Absolutely. I had three uncles plus one aunt and her husband who served in WWII. Of the five, three are alive, and they still won't talk about it. My father was too young to serve at the time, but later he knew a WWII veteran who served in the Pacific. After the Vietnam stories began surfacing, this man told my father that he was haunted by one incident: They captured some Japanese soldiers, made them dig a hole for their own grave, then shot them and buried them. The man said those Vietnam stories were nothing new. War is not pretty.