Folks,
After reading the articles of/from Sgt. Kevin Benderman and his wife. It brought to mind the stories my father, a frontline combat Veteran of WWII, told me years ago and the autoricities if not war crimes he saw and was ordered to commit. These included: his own units capture of enemy german prisoners who were summarily executed because "we haven't got time to process them' - they we usually escorted just outside of visual range and shots were heard and when the troops escorting them returned their jovial remarks to the question of what happened 'Oh, we had to shoot them, you know, they were trying to escape" this happened dozens of times; shortly after the war was over he was ordered by a captain to shoot anyone who came to a truck that had food on it for the troops when outside the concertina wire enclosure were families literally starving and this food was plentiful and some of it was going to waste inside - one elderly grandfather braved the wire and snagged some rations to bring to his starving children, the captain ordered my dad to shoot - he did raising his rifle he shot in the air the captain told him 'not in the air you asshole at them', my dad replied his rifle had jammed and couldn't be fired at that time he was berated and threatened with courtmarshall but by that time the grandfather had disappeared into the crowd; my father had helped liberate one of the death camps but shortly afterwards he was ordered to drive some hardend german military prisoners to a special camp mutually run by the Soviets and allies where these folks were purposely given inadequate rations for months and many thousands suffered and died, he was upset by this irony we were holding War Crime trials at the same exact time while we were operating our own special death camp; he was ordered to transport Soviet troops who were prisoners of the Germans to be turned over to the Soviets with our own governments full knowledge that these folks once handed over were to be exceuted or sent to gulags for not fighting to the death; he saw mysterious deaths to some of our own prisoners of war who supposively jumped to their deaths from/through cells with anchored barred windows, on and on and on. But many of these have been hushed up, records misplaced, etc. We all know the problems of Force Recon and the Mi Lai incidents in Vietnam, we know many, many, many other incidents in most all of our Wars, like the purposeful genocide of Wounded Knee in the Indian Wars, Andersopnville in the Civil War, even as far back as the purposeful torture of prisoners in the revolutionary war where they were 'tarred and feathered" and acts of Terrorism was committed by our own troops against the British at the time. Yes, Sgt. Kevin Benderman what has occured is historic....when we follow the higher moral and ethical road?....thank you.....