Meet Steven Green
We write a good deal here about war, sex, enemies, and power. As we read about Steven Green, a name not yet popularized, and the infamy of Mahmudiyah, maybe we can grasp in greater detail how these big things – war, sex, enemies, power – can emerge in these moments of concentrated, and sexualized, fury and unspeakable horror.
At the time, the soldier’s matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him — mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn’t afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.
But the private was Steven D. Green.
Stan:
Begging patience re moderation for the next couple of days. A new grandchild is acting like she is ready for her debut.
10 May 2010, 5:31 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
First, congrats, grandpa
Well, I was disappointed that the author of the piece seemed not to have much of a grasp on the “greater detail of things”, as you said. I don’t mean to insult him, and granted, there are different standards when writing for “Stars and Stripes”, I’m sure. However, I really can’t think of a way to describe his summation at the end without including the word “trite.” =-(
I’m reminded of watching the Branch Davidian debacle that happened in Waco. There was all this criticism of the abuses of David Koresh on the MSM that seemed to shield the government from criticism. And if you offered criticism of the government, you must be some kind of white supremacist/gun nut/Christian millennial cult militia wackjob — PS, didn’t you hear what David Koresh was ding to the CHILDREN!?!?!? And so right back to the scapegoating.
And let me be clear, by “scapegoating” I am in no way calling for a re-analysis of David Koresh or advancing a “pro-abuse” agenda. To the contrary, I find this kind of “let’s find the evil-doer” witch hunt to be the thing that actually *does* push a pro-abuse agenda precisely because it is so sublime in how it seems (on the surface) to do just the opposite. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a critique of David Koresh, it was simply a matter of how FAR less important it seemed than critiquing the response. I mean, is there this large segment of society overtly voicing a pro-abuse, pro-”brain-washing” opinion? And if not, why would the MSM be so vehement in its condemnation of such?
David Koresh in no way represented me or anyone I knew. He was also dead and highly unlikely to be a problem going forward. Neither of these things was true about the FBI and other State actors. We may as well invent fictitious beings to criticize, it’s hardly less academic.
Fast forward to this story, and we get a first hand account of this gentleman’s interaction with PFC Green along with the final judgment that “no level of combat stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts Green allegedly committed.” Really??? I mean, I think people either would have been already appalled or are going to need more than a newspaper article to bring them back to humanity! Who is looking for an excuse (other than his lawyers, etc.)? As US citizens in particular, the concern should be on how this happened in the first place. He was not some lone actor in this, and this incident is not likely to be an isolated incident. Even if the case was different, where were the safeguards?
The truth is, far from safeguards, this is exactly the kind of outcome we should probably be expecting from the system structure as is. I won’t pretend to have any idea what PFC Green would be like today if we lived in a world with no Army for him to join and no war in Iraq to fight, but I can’t help but be reminded of some of the “maxims” we heard (and repeated) in the special operations forces community: “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’; and if you ain’t tryin’, we don’t want you.” Or, “it’s only cheatin’ if you get caught.”
I can only imagine that somewhere is another soldier with a story remarkably similar to PFC Green, save for the fact that he has not been caught; and so he has a medal in place of a prison sentence, although I think he and the rest of us are serving a kind of sentence for having failed to end the status quo, yet.
10 May 2010, 9:50 amStan:
Absolutely. The chilling thing about Green is that there a lot of him now moving among us. We’re hammering Greens out of the same forge every day. Bad news.
BTW some good news. (:
Janae D’Ann Travers, 20 inches, 6 lbs 10 oz, Born May 10, 2010 at 2:14 EDT. Healthy, noisy, curious, strong grip, and hungry in less than an hour. Grandma and Grandpa say, Praise the Lord.
10 May 2010, 3:43 pmeoinmonkey:
“along with the final judgment that “no level of combat stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts Green allegedly committed.” Really??? I mean, I think people either would have been already appalled or are going to need more than a newspaper article to bring them back to humanity!”
I wouldnt be so sure that peoples reactions would be instant condemnation, or fervent denial. There are many levels of bullshit to go through before any actual condemnation comes out- such things as “you cant prove it happened anyway; its all a political prosecution; a few bad apples” etc etc. Sooner or later you will end up at The Vietnam Movie Defence of War Crimes; “Our boys only did bad things, if they even did, because they were scared and angry, and you cant judge because you werent there.” The booby traps, hard-to-read asiatic faces, “unfair” asymetrical warfare, our poor, poor boys etc etc etc. Even supposedly ‘progressive’ anti-war Vietnam movies push this bullshit justification- if anyone can direct me to one that doesnt, i would be very pleased to hear about it. To be perfectly honest, I saw the same attitude expressed in Saving Private Ryan, and The Hurt Locker, to name two important/popular/famous American war films that werent about Vietnam. A lot of it hinges, unsurprisingly, on the assumption that “we” are unlike “them”, particularly in our relative importance to the world.
“I’ve seen my buddies ambushed
On the left and on the right
And their youthful bodies riddled
By the bullets of the night
Where all the rules are broken
And the only law is might
As we go marching on.”
http://www.lyricsbay.com/battle_hymn_of_lt_calley_lyrics-c_company.html
Congratulations on the new grandkid, btw.
12 May 2010, 7:58 amStan:
Thanks.
I guess the question for me is — TRIGGER WARNING!!! — how does one get this way? I only have some answers, those tentative, because the depth of the evil has to be pondered here to appreciate it.
The association between the erotic and the violent. These guys planned a sexual assault and by most accounts raped this kid for 20 minutes before killing her. Early on in the attack, Green shot her family to death in an adjacent room. Look at your watch and wait twenty minutes in silence while you imagine her screams for 20 consecutive minutes.
They experienced sexual arousal, one after the other, with dead bodies in the next room, while terrifying and assaulting this child, and they had orgasms while raping her, whereupon Green summarily killed her, too. Green wasn’t the 5% of sociopaths (as one poster here insisted was a genetic predisposition), unless against all the odds, all the others were, too. These men, under circumstances where they had extraordinary immunity from accountability, and who expressed their hatred for Iraqis, manifested that hatred with sex.
I am suggesting that ordinary men – socialized as they are in this society – placed in these extraordinary circumstances, do these things because of that ordinary socialization… which conflates sexual desire with vengeance (and normalizes vengeful male-feelings against women-in-general).
14 May 2010, 10:29 amDeAnander:
random materialist thoughts
some tantalising arguments here for brain dimorphism setting up a predisposition to enjoy aggression in testosterone-enhanced males… but that begs the question of the culture at large and why the hostility/sex nexus should be so dominant, when “super alpha” males are a smallish minority (and *not* the ruling class either, which tends to be selected for wiliness rather than brawn and bad temper).
iirc field biologists observe that “harem” behaviour (dominant males corralling and controlling a pack of females and a patch of turf, fighting off all other males) seems to correlate with an environment of abundance, whereas pair-mating and greater equality between sexes seems to correlate with more resource-poor environments. some field anthropology suggests that bare subsistence cultures (!Kung famously) are less patriarchal than those with “wealth” (or with a cultural memory of biotic wealth)…
sexist violence, violence in mating, and abuse of infants are not restricted to us primates. elephant seals are notoriously “sexist” and violent in mating behaviour. not only do the large bulls rape (and sometimes suffocate with their grossly dimorphic body weight advantage) struggling females who try to escape, but they fight viciously male-on-male — and the “losers” who do not get to mate this season sometimes even worry and savage juveniles, taking out their frustration and anger on the innocent. juveniles also get crushed under the bellies of rampaging males as they make forays into others’ turf or flee from a successful defender. the rookery at breeding time is not a pretty social picture. lions, tigers and wolves are gender egalitarians by comparison! however, as soon as the season is over, everyone calms down and the elephant seals become peaceful again. human males seem to be in a mating panic all the time, perhaps overstimulated by the relentless commercialisation of sex in our culture?
some researchers recently suggested that aggression itself is rewarding to our brains, releasing dopamine in a way similar to sexual activity and certain foods; but their experiment makes me rather suspicious. they removed a mouse’s mate from its cage and left it all alone, with the option to press a trigger to introduce an unfriendly strange male mouse. they claim that the mouse’s choice to press the trigger indicates that it enjoyed the aggressive displaying and posturing that invariably resulted; but maybe the mouse was just lonely and would rather spar with a stranger than sit around miserable and bored
but their fundamental finding seems intuitively correct: lots of people “enjoy a fight” and find something rewarding in the buildup of tension and its release in violence, yelling, or other displays of aggression. catharsis?
recently in China there have been a series of “berserker” attacks on schoolchildren in the classroom, by lone males wielding knives/cleavers. the attacker is (all the cases I have read about so far) invariably male, and usually commits suicide after committing the multiple murder. what this means, I am not sure — but it seems to express rage and despair in this peculiarly male-mammal way, taking it out on someone else’s offspring. the case of Green et al seems to bring many themes together: taking out their fear, rage and stress on someone else’s young; the lynching-party expression of racist, nationalist, and gender hatred; probationary manhood being confirmed by group bonding in transgressive violence against “inferiors/enemies” especially women…
but what Stan says remains haunting and (for many people I should hope) unfathomable: these men experienced sexual arousal with dead bodies (that they themselves had just murdered) in the next room, while deliberately and collectively raping a terrified, screaming child. this is why I have not been able for more than a decade to subscribe any longer to the old feminist slogan of my youth, i.e. “rape is violence not sex.” clearly for these men, at that time and place, murder and rape *were* sex.
14 May 2010, 1:25 pmMichael Anderson:
Here is, at least, a little hope in a more positive outcome. Josh Stieber, who was on the “cleanup crew” later in the Wiki video, has some things to say about discovering love. Might not solve the problem, but certainly a step in the right direction.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=74&jumival=555
http://contagiousloveexperiment.wordpress.com/
14 May 2010, 8:48 pmMichael Anderson:
DeAnander’s comments on brain dimorphism got me looking:
http://www.gendertree.com/When%20Does%20It%20Happen.htm
Does our toxic environment help aggression along?
15 May 2010, 8:39 amStan:
-Nancy C.M. Hartsock
29 May 2010, 8:59 am