Killing Is My Business....And Business Is Good

Let me be perfectly blunt: If Steven Green is in fact guilty of what his platoon mates have accused him of, he needs to end himself now. Seriously. There is simply no walking back from stalking, raping, and murdering a 15-year-old girl, and murdering three of her relatives, including a 7-year-old girl.

There may be more here than meets the eye. This may not be a simple My Lai/Haditha war crime, though there's nothing simple about that, obviously. But I mean that we sort of get that under the highly compressed circumstances soldiers in any war face, small-unit cohesion can warp and erupt violently away from the discipline of traditional command-and-control structures. We at least get the idea that sometimes platoons snap, the lizard brains take over, and lots of innocent people die horribly, as in Haditha. What's different here is that Green may actually be something of a psychopath to begin with, and found himself in a situation that complemented his existing temperament.

Several soldiers allegedly planned the attack over drinks after noticing the woman near the traffic checkpoint they manned in Mahmudiyah, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. The soldiers allegedly worked out an elaborate plan to carry out the crime and then cover it up, wearing dark clothes to the home, using an AK-47 assault rifle from the house to kill the family, and allowing authorities to believe that the attack was carried out by insurgents, according to investigators.

"Allowing authorities to believe"? That's why they used an AK-47, to make the authorities believe that insurgents were behind it. C'mon people, didn't anyone ever tell you about using the passive voice?

Former Pfc. Steven D. Green, 21, and other members of 1st Platoon, B Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, allegedly carried out the crimes on March 12. Several soldiers told authorities that Green killed all four people and that he and another soldier raped the young woman.

The plan worked, at least until soldiers began discussing the incident last month while they were going through stress counseling after two other members of their platoon were captured at a checkpoint and beheaded by insurgents. Army officials began investigating the day after hearing about the events in Mahmudiyah.

Once again, an atrocity that, as with Abu Ghraib, was only found out because other soldiers had consciences. This does not exactly give one confidence as to what else might be out there, waiting to be discovered.

But consider what this one event has wrought, on top of the senseless slaughter of innocent civilians, including a small child and a teenager. I doubt if any single policy application was changed because of what they thought insurgents had done, but you never know. It probably went on a virtual pile of other undoubted insurgent atrocities against civilians, but it could also have very easily resulted in a crackdown killing other civilians.

And the two soldiers from Green's platoon, who were kidnapped, tortured, mutilated, beheaded, and their bodies booby-trapped. Revenge killing perhaps? Might those two soldiers still be alive had Green not done what he (apparently) did?

If he didn't do it, if he's been unjustly accused for some bizarre reason, then hopefully the truth comes out and Green can get on with his life. But it seems incredibly unlikely for soldiers to drop such an enormous dime on a fellow soldier from their own platoon. And in the event that it's true, we don't want to hear about how stressed out you are, boy. Every soldier is stressed out; every soldier is in harm's way at every moment of every day, with no end in sight. One can only imagine how living like that tears down the psyche after a while.

But Green's crime has shamed all of them, as well as himself, his family, his country. Maybe he can make a case for PTSD, or maybe he's just Ted Bundy in a uniform. Maybe he thinks he'll get away with it, the way William Calley got away with it. I don't know.

I do know that, on this beautiful Fourth of July, there are greater things on my mind than hot-dog-eating competitions and waving a flag at a parade. I love my country, and I love what my country's all about, which makes me hate what people like Steven Green do to shame it all the more. And his defense is likely to shame the military and the country even more. His only possible out is to claim that he was driven to commit these horrible crimes by the circumstances soldiers face. (Either that or they're lying, which again is pretty unlikely.) He should be marginalized from what 99.9% of soldiers are doing, and face the full consequences.

And, you know, I'd like to think that this sort of thing would weigh heavily upon the consciences of Bush and Cheney, but I know it doesn't. Maybe Saddam would have terrorized that poor family at some point if Chimpco hadn't arrogated power unto itself, but we damn sure know that we wouldn't be responsible for their deaths, and now it appears that we are.