What does it take for a person to do this?

The other day I happened across the video of what is said to be a US Marine combat infantryman throwing a puppy from a cliff in Afghanistan.

I didn't look into this a whole lot, but after hearing and reading a bit more about it, there are a few things that need to be explained. It's painfully obvious that there is a world of ignorance out there.

I did take a quick look at a couple more You Tube clips people had posted that were held out as being 'responses'. I watched each for approximately a minute before moving on. In the first one, the guy seemed more or less okay and his little beagle was cute. After sixty seconds, though, he hadn't said anything worthwhile. The second guy decided to film in the dark, and apparently has lost his voice or was trying to not wake up a roommate. With two metallic loops in his lower lip, he spent a minute muttering and murmuring about what a crappy day he had doing whatever he does in his day. A minute later, he still hadn't gotten around to saying anything meaningful, although he'd used the word 'suck' twice or three times by then. I decided to agree with that much and moved on once again.

When I saw the video, the resolution was so low that I couldn't tell for myself if he was wearing the desert MARPATT 'cammies' or the ACU, the Army Combat Uniform. The video claims it's a Marine, so I'll take their word for it. All of the commentary refers to a US soldier perpetrating that disgrace.

Let me make my first point: The Army has soldiers, the Navy's Marine Corps has marines. Please do not be the next person to insult soldiers by confusing them with marines. They are two very different kinds of people in most cases.

There has long been a, shall we say, urban legend that USMC really stands for Uncle Sam's Misguided Children. As with all stereotypes, they stick because there's at least some truth to them. I have known a few Marines that were really quite all right, including one of my mother's friends and a sister in law of mine. Both, of course, happen to be women. I'm trying to think of the men I've known who are ex-Marines that were all right. Hmmm....my elementary school principal was a Marine, and he was a truly swell guy. He was at Iwo Jima, among other places. He's been gone for a few decades now. Walt Disney had been a Marine, too, in WWI. He's been gone for a long time, too. All of the men I've known who've been Marines in more recent times, say Viet Nam era or later, haven't been very nice guys. In fact, I can think of a few that have held near-nemesis status as far as I'm concerned. What gives?

One of the first things I learned upon reporting to the Basic Military Training School at Lackland AFB outside of San Antonio, TX, was that a lot of old Marines tend to migrate toward the Air Force, and more than a few end up being training instructors. I am partly the product of one of them. I say partly not only because I had other Military Training Instructors, but that the MTI I had who sported a USMC Eagle, Globe, Anchor tattoo on his forearm was removed by the squadron commander after he had physically injured several of the trainees, one of whom was hit by a flying bed frame and required a number of stitches to close a gaping head wound. A similar incident occurred not too long before I arrived, in which another such individual was fed up with one of the small Asian or Hispanic kids who was less than five feet tall and a hundred pounds in weight. Apparently the squadron's Operations Officer was heading out to the car when he heard a terrified scream. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a this kid being held upside down by the ankle over the fire escape platform, roughly twenty feet above the ground, while the MTI with prior time in the 'Corps' drilled an object lesson into him. Every fellow airman I've ever discussed it with has had the same opinion about Marines: THEY SCARE US!

For one thing, take a look at T-shirts. Yes, the USMC=Uncle Sam's Misguided Children slogan is on a T-shirt, showing a skeleton with glowing red eyes and an OD peaked top fatigue cap brandishing an unsheathed Kabar. Air Force T-shirts, of which I own a few, will feature things like 'Cross Into the Blue', 'Above All', 'Aim High', 'It's not the planes, it's the men (and women) who fly (and maintain) them'. 'Got a problem? We've got a solution' is another one going around lately. To the Marines are dedicated one that reads, 'Locate...Close with...Destroy...USMC Infantry' with the image of an M40 Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) protective mask. Kinda' spooky. There's also another one in tribute to the leathernecks that I could've said about my kid brothers: 'If it absolutely, positively, has to be destroyed overnight...US Marine Corps'. The scariest ones I remember seeing about the Air Force were only seen around base and they were dedicated to the Security Forces personnel. 'Some of the Air Force's best fighters operate on the ground' wasn't the example I was thinking of, either. 'Old SF's don't die...they merely regroup in hell!' was about as pernicious as anything in the Air Force was likely to get.

The first thing about the Marine Corps is its image. What they're intended to do from 1798 onwards, that is acting as naval infantry, is not for your average bloke. Initially, battling pirates and storming to capture enemy ships was their intended role. Neither of those are places where the faint of heart are likely to succeed. It takes very aggressive, nearly fearless warriors to do those jobs. We've always had at least a figurative handful of Marines since George Washington's time, but we never did a whole lot with them until after the turn of the 20th century. I can't remember the Marine Corps figuring into the Civil War in any meaningful way. I'm not sure if they even had a whole lot to do with the Spanish-American war of 1898 in Cuba or shortly thereafter in the Philippines. The Corps put in some very notable combat in the trenches of France in the first world war in 1918, however, and they did some pretty tough duty in Panama and a few other places in central America in the 1920's, though. WWII, in the Pacific, is where the Marines really came into the spotlight. Amphibious invasions really are what the Marines do best. Imagine it: you land by boat, and 'they' can see you coming from miles away. You land on a beach, loaded down with gear, and you wade ashore through waist deep water. From the jungle beyond the beach, you're being shot at by everything the defenders can bring to bear on you. You have nothing to hide behind, nowhere to take cover. You can only go forward until you hit the beach or something hits you. It takes nerves of steel to do that kind of thing. What, may we ask, does it take for a person to want to specialize in doing that on their own free will? Remember, a good number of the WWII era Marines were draftees. They're all volunteers now. Why would you want to volunteer to do a job like that? Anyone who would choose to do that sure as heck is not normal in my book or in most anyone else's!

From the beginning, but especially since World War II, the Marine Corps has taken an almost perverse pride in how tough the individual Marine is. This is a lot of their appeal to prospective new recruits. While I don't feel it's necessarily true of the women I've known who have been Marines, I can say for a fact that the men I've known who enlisted were most definitely of the macho persuasion and they were, in fact, very rough, brutal people by nature. This also tends to be true, although to a somewhat lesser extent, to most of those I've known who volunteered to be Army infantry soldiers. They were often the football players and the wrestlers in school, and it would not be unfair to say that to at least a degree, they were born to fight. And most of them have been in a few pretty good ones, from time to time, too. Sometimes it doesn't take much to set them off. Especially if alcohol is involved.

If you're really unsure of any of this so far, and you don't happen to know any ex-Marines, I'd suggest you go find a Blockbuster or Movie Gallery (or NetFlix, for that matter) and see Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. It won't be exactly the same as hanging around Marines, but it'll give you a half decent idea of what they're like. Remember, the Marine Corps is a culture as much as anything. I believe it was the Army, or perhaps the Navy, that used to advertise, "It's not just a job, it's a way of life". Also applicable to the Marines, it is, but even more so.

All new Marines get thirteen weeks of hell at either Parris Island or at Camp Pendelton. That's over three months of basic training. The Air Force subjects one to only six weeks, less than half as much time in the 'pressure cooker'. We had more than a few who 'cracked' and were discharged after the Behavioral Analysis Unit deemed them to have developed a personality disorder, become unstable, or whatever else they could conclude. I don't know what the numbers are for the Marines, but I'm guessing it's considerably more. My question is, so what do they do with these guys? I've got a sneaky feeling they tend to look the other way and they aren't so anxious to pull them out of training if they're otherwise getting by.

The Marine in the video was deployed. A lot of people are these days. Let's look at that for a moment. I don't know anyone who particularly looks forward to deployments. At the least, they're a huge hassle for everyone, and at the worst, they're devastating. If you're active duty, it's tough. If you're a Reservist or a National Guardsman, deployment can literally turn your world upside down and tear it to pieces at the same time. Young servicemen, those under thirty (which is the majority of them) and especially those in their first enlistment, have often not conformed to the demands of military service and they become angry. This shouldn't surprise anyone. In the civilian world, note how the younger employees tend to be the ones who are the least inclined to be the industrious laborers. By age thirty, most of us have grown up and settled down a bit more. The young really are the restless.

When we're angry, what do we tend to do? We start to lash out when and where the opportunity strikes. What makes you angry? How do you feel about people telling you what to do? A lot of young men really don't like that too much, do they? Now, consider how you'd feel about not only being told what to do all the time, but literally owned and controlled by someone else. It really becomes quite a helpless feeling after awhile. You can't strike back at the 'system' in any dramatic way. That would literally be like trying to fight city hall. If you get anywhere, it won't be quick nor easy, and most of the time you just can't win. When you're about to explode, who do you direct your rage at? You 'assign' a 'proxy' to be on the receiving end of it. This might be yourself, and you lash out at yourself through self-destructive behavior. It could be inanimate objects. I've known people who've punched quite a few holes through drywall and hollow core doors through the years. I've seen a lot of vehicles abused for this very reason, too. Sadly, for some people, this is never enough. They need to find someone else to exert some dominance over, just so they can still feel like they're in control at least somewhere in their lives. This is the source of much domestic abuse, rape, street crime, and animal torture.

So what I see in this video: We've got a young guy, probably nineteen to twenty one years of age, who is not just a bit irked, but seething with latent rage at those who are responsible for the situation he's in. He can't do most anything a man his age would be doing back home, and he may or may not have much support from his family. It's hard to imagine, but there are servicemen who either have no real family or never hear from their families. If there's a relationship this guy was involved in, his deployment most certainly jeopardized it, and he knows it. That tends to greatly upset young men, too, you know. The weather is generally lousy in that part of the world, and as a combat infantryman, he spends most of his time outdoors. To make it worse, most of that time he spends outdoors is with a load on his shoulders. If not a pack, definitely a helmet, a weapon, and several pounds of ammunition, likely stowed in pouches over pounds of body armor. Try it sometime and tell me how you feel after a day or two. Especially where your knees and back are concerned. When your joints and back hurt, what kind of mood are you in? You are miserable, your entire life very uncertain at this point, and the end isn't exactly in sight. How the hell did you end up in this mess?

They used to mention 'shell shock' more often than they do today. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder seems to be what it's known as today, and we have a lot of service members returning from combat theatres to attempt or actually commit suicide, or run afoul of the law, often involving weapons and abuse of motor vehicles. I've long felt that this comes far later than where this young man is as he tosses a helpless puppy over a cliff in front of a video camera held by his 'battle buddy'. This man has flipped, and one doesn't have to be a warrior for this to happen. Police officers, fire fighters, paramedics, and emergency room physicians can all be vulnerable to it, too.

He has turned to the dark side.

The TiGor