http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102204B.shtml Is Suicide Part of the Job?
By Jonathan Turley
The Los Angeles Times
Thursday 21 October 2004
When troops' orders in a war are wrongheaded, mutiny can be the result.
The recent refusal of at least 18 soldiers in the 343rd Quartermaster Company to go on a perilous mission in Iraq has created a torrent of competing allegations of mutiny and military incompetence. With an election approaching, the Bush administration is now desperately seeking to defuse the controversy.
History has shown, however, that alleged mutinies do not go away easily and that they often reflect deeper problems in a war. For the military, even saying "mutiny" is like crying "Fire!" in a crowded theater. When it first appears, commanders are trained to isolate it and crush it before it spreads. In Roman times, reluctant or mutinous soldiers were punished through "decimation," a word often used incorrectly to refer to total destruction. Generals would "decimate" units by executing every 10th soldier as collective punishment. (In one case, Marcus Licinius Crassus put as many as 4,000 legionnaires to death.)
Yet history has often proved the mutineers to be correct in their judgment of the incompetence or futility of military orders. Indeed, as with the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, the public often comes to not only agree with but to lionize mutineers who opposed tyrannical or self-destructive commands.
The 343rd, an Army Reserve unit, clearly was not facing tyrannical conditions, but the actions of some of its soldiers have raised widespread concerns about military incompetence.
After returning from a four- or five-day mission marred by inadequate or broken equipment, the soldiers were ordered to take a shipment of jet fuel to Taji, a perilous route even for armored and functioning equipment. According to family members and media accounts, many soldiers objected that their trucks lacked essential armor, vehicles were broken down, there was no plan for adequate combat support and, finally, the fuel shipment was contaminated (and thus unusable). They reportedly raised these concerns with their command but were ordered to carry out the mission anyway. It was then that the 18 soldiers refused to go on the convoy.
The incident in Iraq follows other cases of dissension, including the action taken against a National Guard battalion in South Carolina after 13 members went AWOL before shipping out to Iraq. There have been cases of soldiers not returning from leave. Clearly, these are the exceptions rather than the rule in our forces, where morale still seems high and the number of such incidents remains relatively low. (By comparison, in World War II, 2 million men out of a force of 16 million were court-martialed for various reasons.)
SNIP
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