Posted on 11/18/2004 6:41:07 PM PST by CHARLITE
American warriors of the past knew this. Michael Lee Lanning wrote in his account of "Vietnam, 1969: A Company Commander's Journal" that Viet Cong or North Vietnamese army fighters regularly feigned surrender, incapacitation or death in order to lure GIs into grenade or rifle range. Even the actual dead were booby-trapped. The average GI learned quickly to "shoot and throw grenades at the body" rather than risk enemy treachery. And I have a friend who was a Marine at Iwo Jima. As he put it: "After the second time a Japanese soldier faked being dead only to kill one of us, we started shooting every 'body' we found as a matter of course." No surprise that war historian and analyst James F. Dunnigan estimated that, "Historically 50 percent of those surrendering [in war] do not survive the process."
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
cant say that I blame them...
Damn the liberal, anti-American news media for their attempt to crucify our brave Marines!
Thanks for the POST...
Here's the full article, I posted it yesterday from the San Diego Union Tribune:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1282447/posts
"Hey, what the heck does 'bitte, bitte' mean, anyway?"
please please
The Marines pretty much stopped taking prisoners on Guadalcanal...long before Iwo Jima. They caught on to the tricks of the Nippers with great alacrity.
The real reason there were so few Japanese POWs is because of their Bushido Code, which held that it was a disgrace to surrender but glorious to die for the emperor. Shooting the Japanese "dead" happened on Wake as well.
I know that.
The context though is that in the movie a German soldier drops his weapon and stands up to surrender and says "Bitte, Bitte" implying "please, please don't shoot" whereupon the American soldier shoots him in the chest and kills him. The American soldier turns to his buddy and asks "Hey, what the heck does 'bitte, bitte' mean, anyway?"
If you haven't seen it, it is one of the best war films ever made.
Good read. Thanks.
What you're saying; what you're reading, is absolutely true. It is about killing and it is all about staying alive. Nothing more.
You hope those who plan what you are to do and why you are doing it each day stand behind you. Somehow the depictions of war and it's horror are presented in film but to see a real human protecting themselves in real circumstances is too much of a horror. It is what it is, life, and that desire to live.
This is the problem with trying to force the behavior of our GIs into a template - the template is flawed. The first wrong assumption is, that the individual GI has some superhuman reasoning capability, able to detect within a split second that the wounded enemy lying there on the ground really DOESN'T want to take you out with a concealed hand weapon or take you with him in a suicide grenade detonation. No matter how intense the combat training, no human soldier has yet developed that capability.
So the preferred process is to reward sudden moves with a squeeze on the trigger of the weapon the GI is carrying. It is perfectly possible, with training and experience, to place a slug pretty accurately in a target while shooting from the hip. It is not necessary to draw the weapon up to your shoulder, peer down the sights, and draw a bead on the target.
Another wrong assumption is to trust that the enemy is going to abide by the same rules that have been laid down in some distant academic surroundings, and with some code of honor involved that this same enemy has never heard of.
There are old Marines, and there are bold Marines. There are no old bold Marines. Lots of medals get awarded posthumously.
A German comes out with his hands up stammering something in German about surrendering.
One American shoots the Nazi twice, and another American soldier asks, "What was he sying?"
The first replies, imitating the hands up gesture, "He said, 'Look, I washed my hands for supper.'"
please, please - it's pronounce bit-tuh, bit-tuh
To: U.S. Congress
Friday November 12 2004
U.S.Marines were fired upon by snipers and insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades from a mosque and an adjacent building. The Marines returned fire with tank shells and machine guns.
They eventually stormed the mosque, killing 10 insurgents and wounding five others, and showing a cache of rifles and grenades for journalists.
The Marines told the pool reporter that the wounded insurgents would be left behind for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. But Saturday, another squad of Marines found that the mosque had been reoccupied by insurgents and attacked it again.
Four of the insurgents appeared to have been shot again in Saturday's fighting, and one of them appeared to be dead, according to the pool report. In the video, a Marine was seen noticing that one of the insurgents appeared to be breathing.
A Marine approached one of the men in the mosque saying, "He's [expletive] faking he's dead. He's faking he's [expletive] dead."
The Marine raised his rifle and fired into the insurgents head, at which point a companion said, "Well, he's dead now."
The camera then shows two Americans pointing weapons at another Iraqi insurgent lying motionless. But one of the Marines step back as the insurgent stretches out his hand, motioning that he is alive. The other Marine stands his ground, but neither of them fires.
When told by the pool reporter that the men were among those wounded in Friday's firefight, the Marine who fired the shot said, "I didn't know, sir. I didn't know."
"You can hear the tension in those Marines' voices. One is saying, 'He's faking it. He's faking it,'" Heyman said. "In a combat infantry soldier's training, he is always taught that his enemy is at his most dangerous when he is severely wounded."
A Marine in the same unit had been killed just a day earlier when he tended to the booby-trapped dead body of an insurgent.
NBC reported that the Marine seen shooting the Iraqi insurgent had himself been shot in the face the day before, but quickly returned to duty.
About a block away, a Marine was killed and five others wounded by a booby-trapped body they found in a house after a shootout with insurgents.
Amnesty International has noted reports that insurgents have used mosques as fighting positions, and have used white flags to lure Marines into ambushes.
The Marine who shot the insurgent has been withdrawn from the battlefield pending the results of an investigation, the U.S. military said.
These terrorists do not follow the rules of war. These terrorists kill innocent women by disemboweling them, cut of the heads of innocent truck drivers, detonate car bombs in crowds full of innocent people, and fly planes into buildings filled with innocent Americans.
It is my opinion that NOTHING should happen to this American Marine. He should be returned to his unit or be given an honorable discharge. We don't need our young men and women taking an extra second to decide if its right to shoot an enemy terrorist when that could mean that one of our soldiers could lose their life. The lives of our soldiers should be the single most important factor in this war against terrorism. The rights of terrorists can come second.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
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