Have We All Become Such Cowards – Or What Is In Washington DC Is Not What This Soldier Fought For

During the course of my military career I received training on how to survive being a Prisoner of War (POW). In a very controlled training environment I was subjected to “torture” that included humiliation (being kept nude), physical abuse such as slaps, belly slaps, punching, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, threats of electrocution, and even water-boarding. We, I and my fellow soldiers, were exposed to this in training because it was made clear to us that as soldiers, should we ever become a POW we should be prepared for and expect this kind of treatment from the “bad guys”.

This treatment was put upon us in a controlled environment and we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that no matter what we would not be permanently or irreparably harmed in any way and yet it was still a life altering, horrendous and humiliating experience.

The training was particularly poignant to us in that it was conducted in conjunction with our training on the Geneva Conventions. It was made clear that we as American soldiers were expected to conduct ourselves in a morally upright and honorable manner no matter what ours or our comrades in arms treatment was at the hands of an enemy. We were given detailed in depth training on the Geneva Conventions and we were given extensive hands on training in how to treat prisoners of war should we be faced with that situation. I believe that we all, to a soldier, learned our lessons well because I can say without equivocation that in the ensuing nearly three decades of my military career, which included several combat tours, I never treated a POW, nor did I personally witness a POW being treated in any manner that could ever be construed as inhumane.

As a young soldier that training taught me something much deeper than just how to expect to be treated as a POW or how I should treat a POW. It taught me that America was a nation founded on the rule of law and a nation that still strived to achieve and maintain the moral high ground no matter how the enemy conducted themselves. It taught me that we weren’t a nation built on religious fanaticism but one build on human dignity and justice. We didn’t gauge how we treated others by how we were treated but how we as human beings expected to be treated.
Today in Washington DC we have an administration that has lost touch with America. It has lost touch with American and all that this great nation has stood for better than two centuries. The conduct of the war in Iraq has been and continues to be an embarrassment to this nation and has undermined our moral standing in the world to the point of making us virtually irrelevant. From the falsehoods that took us to the preemptive war in Iraq, to the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, to the shame that is Guantánamo Bay, and on to the injustices put upon innocent victims of rendition such as the Canadian Citizen, Maher Arar, and many others currently incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, this administration has ceded the moral high ground. Indeed the chaos that is Iraq today serves only to shine a bright light on what I believe is this administrations ineptitude and moral depravity.

The debate that is occurring in Washington DC is one that should never occur and is a simple continuation of a policy that is lost. It is indeed a needless exercise that can only result in the further deterioration of what is left of our standing in the international community and jeopardize the well being of every American Soldier for generations to come. Torture simply does not work. This has been proven time and time again and I can personally witness to that fact and Senator John McCain can certainly attest to that fact even more strongly than I. Torture is not and instrument of extracting truth but is more accurately an instrument of revenge and extractor of fiction.

Have we become a nation of cowards who seek revenge at all cost? Have we become a nation that would resort to physical and psychological torture to extract information from another human being? These are the acts not of just and honorable people but of cowards and people of no moral stature. If the answer to these questions is yes then the constitution and nation that I and millions of other Americans dedicated their lives to and shed our blood for no longer exist.

Those Are The Sergeant Majors Thoughts On That.