Quote:
Originally posted by YourNeverThere
First off, i never said that they deserved prison time, if fact i said that they dont deserve it, they had no intention of killing anyone innocent, so why should they go to jail?
Also, the part about shoot and first and asking question later, that is was a statement from a Canadian Air Force soldier said after being asked by a CBC reporter, i tried to find the transcrict of the interviews because i heard it on the radio on the way into work one day. They disregarded orders, period. They were told to stand down and didn't. I dont know anything about the pressures and stresses of war, and really dont know much about war at all because I dont believe in it, call me a hippy, call me whatever, I will stand by my convictions. Here is a report by CBC, the one that i heard but without the whole conversation with Claire Leger, the mother of Sgt. Marc Leger – one of four Canadian soldiers killed by Schmidt's bomb in April 2002.
That is were i got my information from my first post.
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Hmmm...O.K., I just reread my post and can see the confusion here. I wasn't directly addressing you throughout the entire post, YourNeverThere. I didn't make a clear delineation there. My fault...I wasn't clear.
No, I realize that you never said that they deserved prison time. But, any time a service member goes up in front of a military court martial, that is a very real and distinct possibility. The Uniform Code of Military Justice can be very unforgiving. I assume that both pilots, being Majors, have been in the service for awhile. Their careers are finished. The fraction of a second that it took them to twitch their thumbs to release those bombs erased years of otherwise (I'm assuming here) exemplary service to their country.
I do have to wonder how a Canadian Airman (not soldier, btw) comes by such knowledge as American Rules of Engagement. Is that representative of a perception (not just by the Canadians) of the U.S. military? Are our servicemen viewed as a bunch of trigger-happy cowboys? That concerns me.
War sucks! People die. Families mourn. It can only rub salt into an already open wound to discover that a loved one was killed by friendly fire. To find out that your loved one gave his/her life, not in firefight against hostile forces, but in a freak accident. My heart goes out to the friends and family of the Canadian Soldiers killed...believe me it does. But offering the pilots up as sacrificial lambs, to appease political concerns, does service to no one.