Murdering Iraqis: Reality TV Entertainment

Dead-Check in Falluja by Evan Wright is very disturbing reading. The article responds to the recent videotaped murder of an unarmed Iraqi, showing that this is far from an isolated case - in fact, US forces are trained to do this, it's called "Dead-checking".

Late that afternoon, the Humvee I was in was following about 50 feet behind a Marine Light Armored Vehicle when it pulled alongside a Toyota pickup pushed to the side of the road, its doors riddled with bullet holes. The head of at least one occupant was visible in the truck, but I couldn't determine if he was moving or not. Nor did I see any weapons. As our Humvee stopped behind the truck, a Marine in the vehicle ahead of us leapt out, pointed his rifle into the window of the pickup and sprayed it with gunfire. It was a cold-blooded execution...

"They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms," an enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. "You put two bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded you might not know if they're alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain...."

In fact, commanders in the Marine Corps during the period I was embedded with them in the spring of 2003 repeatedly emphasized that the men's actions would not be questioned. As one of the officers in the unit I followed used to tell his men, "You will be held accountable for the facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to you at the time. If, in your mind, you fire to protect yourself or your men, you are doing the right thing. It doesn't matter if later on we find out you wiped out a family of unarmed civilians."

What the article reveals is how a sick society, which worships violence in Hollywood blockbusters and video games, has exported this voilence and now happily watches the sanitized version of it on Reality TV news bulletins each night. And just like the movies, the Good Guys are always right - there is not need to even contemplate the merits of their actions.

As one Marine says:

"What does the American public think happens when they tell us to assault a city? Marines don't shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people."

Or, in another Marine vet's words:

"Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the reality of war, that it's a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars. You have to become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the mosque was just someone who didn't get hit in the right place the first time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if I'd been there. If the American public doesn't like the violence of war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

Wright is the author of a book, Generation Kill, about his experiences as an embedded journalist in Iraq.