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Gattigap
Just so I can follow, is this essentially the Christmas in Cambodia thing? Or does the corroborating witnesses saying, "yeah, we treated the woman that way, but it was in Kuwait" make it different at all?
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Um, one witness confirms that he
and the author made fun of a woman before they ever stepped foot in Iraq.
Hardly the meme of the story -
that the war is turning soldiers into beasts. More like the author and his corroborating friend are and were dicks long before they got to Iraq.
And this being the case, why would you publish an article by a total dick irrepresentative of the Armed Forces, other than sheer nepotism obviously.
on the same theme, from the weekly standard:
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So just to be clear, the first line of the original piece stated that Beauchamp “saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq.” That turns out now to be a blatant lie–and one that Beauchamp stuck with after THE WEEKLY STANDARD first asked Foer to reveal the base at which this incident occurred. Further, TNR says in this new statement that “Shock Troops” “was about the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war.” But now we find out that Beauchamp hadn’t even gotten to Iraq when this incident allegedly took place. He was, in fact, a morally stunted sadist before he ever set foot in Iraq.
After recounting this tale, Beauchamp asks a rhetorical question:
Am I a monster? I have never thought of myself as a cruel person….I was relieved to still be shocked by my own cruelty—to still be able to recognize that the things we soldiers found funny were not, in fact, funny.
Relieved that he was still shocked at his own cruelty? After his tour in Germany and the long flight to Kuwait? This whole essay was meant to demonstrate the damage war does to our own troops–but if this incident occurred at all, it only proves that Beauchamp was a vile creep to begin with.
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