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Will, you are romanticizing past generations of soldiers. Pinkos, gooks, Nips, ragheads, camel jockeys, Japs, etc... They've dehumanized the enemy for this entire century and likely all the ones preceding it. Hell, look at the portrayals of Japanese civilians in the old Loony Toons cartoons. An enlightened war has yet to take place. I think the gallows humor BOR speaks of is two-fold: it is both a protection of the sanity (through disengagement) of people in inhuman circumstances, and it is a measure of the psychological damage already sustained by those conditions.
host: I am interested that you think I need to "do better", but I don't agree. I didn't disagree that soldiers et al have a responsibility to disobey orders that are unlawful to a reasonable person under the Constitution or UCMJ. However, even this can only be justified at your court martial, and in the face of murky water at the UN combined with Congressional authorization, the standard of unlawful to a reasonable person doesn't apply. Unlawful and unethical are completely different standards.
If you are suggesting that the military has an obligation to disobey the directives of our civilian government (as it seems you may be doing), then I can only repeat that the idea is breathtaking in its shortsightedness. How many nuclear wars would we have started in the Cold War? (It's a trick question - the first would have been the last.) What would have happened at the Cuban Missile Crisis the Joint Chiefs could have over-ridden Presidential authority?
If you think that I am suggesting that civilian authority or military war criminals are above the law (winners or losers) you are misunderstanding me. On the other hand, if you think that military service involves each soldier weighing the moral basis of policy (which is what you are talking about - not the legal basis for a specific order) then you are misunderstanding much more than just me.
Also, I don't think including assessments of Bush and Goering as moral equivalents do your cause any good at all. There's a lot more to Goering's villainy than "a pack of lies".
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Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam
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