In a commentary for National Catholic Reporter about the recently leaked video of U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, Jerry Lembcke, associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross and a Vietnam veteran, argues that the incident brought to light a “disturbing underside of American society”
“Atrocities in war happen, sure. But their staging by troops for the purpose of photographic documentation is behavior that makes no sense outside a cultural context in which the commitment of atrocities is conflated with martial accomplishment,” he wrote
Lembcke, who is also the author of Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal and The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, continued, “When the clouds of denial, confusion and excuse-making generated by the photographs are parted, we'll see beyond the insensitivity and narcissism of the posing poseurs and see the still-uglier sight of a country that lost its sense of place in history, its people supporting wars only because the troops have been sent to fight them, its troops displaying their own degradation as a badge of honor.”
This "Holy Cross in the News" item is by Sara Bovat '14.
