[lbo-talk] Video of US army pilots as cold-blooded killers

[Carl Remick]

>Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > At any rate, the whole atmosphere of the casual slaughter shown
> > here is chilling.  To state the obvious, this isn't traditional
> > combat at all but indeed the high-tech "turkey shoot" that the
> > neocons promised.
>
>I'm not sure what about this conflict could be called 'traditional
>combat' ... or even what you could possibly mean by that phrase or the
>implication that if it were 'traditional combat' it wouldn't be
>chilling?  On the other hand, what's so non-traditional about destroying
>a crew-serviced weapon platform along with the crew?

You're right, Jordan.  The pilots on the tape are just doing their job, with 
job number one being getting out alive.   I agree that my use of the term 
"traditional combat" was wrong; the term means nothing.  Plenty of fighting 
in the past was also done in the detached, clinical way shown on the tape 
and had the same -- yes, chilling -- combination of being highly 
personalized and depersonalized.  Being a machine gunner on the Western 
Front in WWI is one example that comes to mind -- you could see the people 
you were destroying right in front of you as individuals, yet your job was 
just the boring, factory-like, routine task of sweeping the gun back and 
forth with a regular rhythm.

Carl

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