Wednesday, June 2, 2010

On Memorial Day. "Reduced To Community Organizers"

In the lead piece in the Jesuit published America, columnist Nancy Sherman writes the Memorial day piece entitled, What Good Soldiers Bear. When you read the full piece notice the words that are missing; Jesus, God, honor, courage, bravery, valor, freedom, liberty, fortitude and self-sacrifice. Nancy Sherman is university professor in the philosophy department of Georgetown University, is author of the recently published The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers.

An excerpt.
Some U.S. soldiers have complained, the new rules require them to fight “with one arm tied behind our backs.” It is even harder to accept the restrictions when
American lives are risked to win the hearts and minds of a population whose army may not itself be sharing adequately in the fight. 
But the rules are also in place to protect the hearts and minds of our own troops. U.S. marines and soldiers in Afghanistan are fighters, but also serve as police and community organizers, charged with building moral and civic order “in a box.”

Link (here) to the article entitled, What Good Soldiers Bear by Nancy Sherman a philosophy professor at Georgetown University and at the United States Naval Academy

Listen to a revealing 50 minute interview of Nancy Sherman at WHYY (here).

Notice the words and phrases the article does contains; "weak contract" , "They want to feel with moral insight" , "psychological anguish in war is also moral anguish" , "psychological trauma" , "sense of revenge" , ,"desensitizing warriors" , "soldiers getting used to killing", "inescapably agents of war’s carnage" , "guilt was the elephant in the room" , “accident guilt.” , "blowing off most of the face of a private" , "awful weight of self-indictment" , "undeserved luck", "betrayal of those who were injured", "accidental or unintended killing of innocents" , "Iraqi children were injured or killed" . "They could not shake what they had done or justify the killing" , "restrictive rules" "the face of a helpless child", "that child’s face haunts a soldier", "irrational guilt" , "soldiers guilt" , "reparations" , "numb the moral anguish of war", "hard to accept morally" , "moral insulation from war’s moral burdens" "feelings of guilt and shame" 

Photo "Raising of the Flag" during the Battle of Iwo Jima
Read the Doctor of the Church Saint Thomas Aquinas on "Just War Theory"contained in his Summa Theologica.

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