Why Can't We Talk about Peace in Public?

"The fellas from 121 started showing up the other day. It's starting to sink in... I'll have to go home, the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end. Like a hobby I'll never get to practice again. It's not a great war, but it's the only one we've got. God, I do love killing these bastards. ... Morale is high, the Marines can smell the barn. It's hard to keep them focused. I still have 20 days of kill these motherfuckers, so I don't wanna take even one day off. " -- letter home from an unnamed Marine F/A -18 pilot in Iraq.

The above letter arrived in my inbox via an email circular sent by an acquaintance of mine, a defense analyst and former congressional aide named Winslow Wheeler. It came alongside a pained commentary by another former Pentagon analyst named Franklin (Chuck) Spinney, who is probably best known for the famous "Spinney report" of the mid-'80s which exposed the waste and inefficiency of many hi-tech Defense Department projects.

Spinney's career followed the classic whistleblower arc; after sending his courageous Jerry Maguire letter on Pentagon waste up the bureaucratic flagpole, he was nearly buried by his own bosses only to be saved from ignominy at the last minute by the intercession of Senator Chuck Grassley, who invited him to air his findings in Congress.

Spinney ended up on the cover of Time magazine a week later and soon thereafter began a new career as a much sought-after expert on the inner workings of the military-industrial complex. Like another famous post-Watergate whistleblower, Karen Silkwood, Spinney ended up inspiring a Hollywood feature film -- although in this case no Oscars were forthcoming, as the key role in the lighthearted comedy The Pentagon Wars was played by Cary Elwes instead of Meryl Streep. Brutally, Kelsey Grammer also made an appearance as the film's heavy.

Now retired and living in the Mediterranean, Spinney briefly returned to the States and somehow got hold of the above letter by a Marine pilot involved in close air support missions in Iraq. Spinney's commentary about the pilot ran as follows:

Here is a "warrior" who brags about killing for killing's sake, but the people he kills are just spots on the ground that disappear in clouds of explosions. He describes the joy of war at a distance and sees nothing of its horrors. You won't find any descriptions of blood, broken limbs, trauma or destruction in this email. You won't even find reference to his own feelings of menace or fear -- not to mention their noble counterweights courage and esprit -- just braggadocio on the subject of killing. Of course, his targets are all insurgents: no sense of any human capacity for doubt on that point. ... Hopefully, the man who wrote this ghastly thing is an aberration and not at all representative of the men and women in our military.

I searched the internet to see if anyone had anything to say about Spinney's commentary. There were only a few sites that mentioned it, but in this one he is predictably blasted by soldiers who viewed his comments as a betrayal.

"I'm surprised at Spinney's outburst," writes one. "I would have thought that as an AF guy, he'd at least understand the emotion of a fighter pilot doing a CAS mission. I've enjoyed Spinney's views on Pentagon finances -- maybe he should stick with his area of expertise."

"Spinney is pathetic!!!" writes another. "I'm a grunt, we get paid to kill and we do a damn good job. America has kept Marines around for that fact, and not because we look incredibly good in our dress blues."

I'm always wary of these stories about American soldiers acting like hateful, mindlessly violent psychopaths in Iraq, though they're not exactly rare -- from Abu Ghraib of course, to a chilling video of a pilot pointlessly wasting a huge crowd of what appear to be civilians in Fallulah ("Oh, dude!" the pilot chuckles, after the explosion appears to kill dozens), to a gang of squids in the Gulf who lined up on an aircraft carrier deck in a formation that cleverly read "Fuck Iraq," to soldiers running over a cab driver's car with a tank because he was suspected of looting a few pieces of wood to stories about the use of napalm in Tallulah, and so on.