Dogs of War

His parents must be so proud. And for the folks out there who will try to excuse this sickening conduct with the "but they're enduring extremes of stress and boredom, blah blah blah", get bent. For precisely the same reason that it would be wrong to broad-brush the 99% of service personnel who find this disgusting, so is it wrong to excuse or even try to explain away the sociopathic behavior of a few. They're all enduring essentially the same conditions; even the "fobbits" have to deal with mortars lobbed over the fortress walls.

And you know, nobody made this asshole join up. He volunteered. He can't not have known what he was getting into; it's been in all the papers and everything. Newsflash for all you kids out there: Iraq is excruciatingly hot in the summer, merely miserable the rest of the year, and incredibly dangerous throughout. Everybody there hates us and speaks an utterly incomprehensible moonman language. If you think those conditions might drive you to sociopathic behavior, then do us all a fucking favor and stay home.

I'm sure we'll hear about this hump again some time in the future; while correlation is not causation, a great many killers get their start abusing animals, since they're cowards at heart.

[Update: Naturally, there is also pre-emptively defensive speculation (not going to link it) that the puppy was actually a stuffed animal, the yelps were added in, that it was "just" a sick "prank". Okely-dokely then. I suppose anything's possible at this point, but seems like a stretch. We'll see. Regardless, even if it proves to be exactly what it looks like, people will always concoct moronic excuses for indefensible behavior.]