U.S. ‘Bwana' Goes ‘Big Game' Hunting for Iraqis
by Nick Turse
This article originally appeared in TomDispatch.
"The Corps hopes to tap into skills certain Marines may
already have learned growing up in rural hunting areas and in urban areas, such
as inner cities."
Earlier this month, news of the military's use of Human
Terrain Teams - U.S. combat units operating in Afghanistan and Iraq that
contain anthropologists and other social scientists who have traded in their
academic robes for body armor - hit the front-page
of the New York Times. While the incorporation of academic
experts into combat units has raised ire in some scholarly
circles, their use as "cultural advisers" to aid the war effort
has been greeted by the military as "a crucial new weapon in
counterinsurgency operations" and in the media as an example of increased
cultural sensitivity as well as evidence of a new Pentagon willingness to think
outside the box.
But the university is only one of a number of areas where an
overstretched military, involved in two losing wars, is in a desperate search
for new ideas. And humanizing allies and enemies alike has only been one part
of the process. Dehumanizing them has been the other. At a recent conference on urban warfare
in Washington, D.C., James Lasswell, a retired Marine Corps colonel who now
heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory,
opened an interesting window into this side of things. He noted that, as part
of an instruction course named "Combat Hunter," the Marines have
brought in "big-game hunters" to school their snipers in the better
use of "optics." According to a September 2007 article by Grace Jean
in National
Defense Magazine, "[T]he lab conducted a war game with Marines,
African game hunters and inner city police officers to search for ways to
improve training." The program included a 15-minute CD titled "Every
Marine a Hunter."
"The Warfighting Laboratory conducted a war game with
Marines, African game hunters and inner city police officers to search for ways
to improve training."
Earlier this year, according to an article by Kimberly
Johnson of the Marine Corps Times, Col. Clarke Lethin, chief of staff of
the I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) - a unit based in Camp Pendleton,
California that took part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and will be returning
there soon - indicated that its commanders "believe that if we create
a mentality in our Marines that they are hunters and they take on some of those
skills, then we'll be able to increase our combat effectiveness." The
article included this curious add-on: "The Corps hopes to tap into skills
certain Marines may already have learned growing up in rural hunting areas and
in urban areas, such as inner cities, said Col. Clarke Lethin, I MEF's chief of
staff." Outraged by the statement, one Sgt. Ramsey K. Gregory wrote a letter
to the publication asking, "Just what was meant by that comment about the
inner city? I hope to God that he's not saying that people from the inner
cities are experts in killing each other and that we all just walk around
carrying guns."
While the colonel's language - defended
by some - did seem to suggest that inner-city dwellers lived in an urban jungle
of gun-toting hunters of other humans, none of the letters, pro or con, considered
quite a different part of the Colonel's equation: the implicit comparison of
enemies in urban warfare, today largely Iraqis and Afghans, to animals that are
hunted and killed as quarry. As Lethin had unabashedly noted, "We
identified a need to ensure our Marines were being the hunters... Hunting is more
than just the shooting. It's finding your game."
That military men might indulge in this sort of description
was perhaps less than surprising, given the degree to which "hunting"
the enemy has been on the lips of America's commander-in-chief. George W. Bush
has, on many occasions,
invoked the image: "We're hunting them down, one at a time" he likes
to say of, for instance, al-Qaeda terrorists, or "we're smoking them
out," as he said
in November 2001. In fact, the President needed no big-game hunters to coach
him on his optics or anything else. He's talked incessantly of hunting humans -
in speeches
to American troops, at photo
ops with foreign leaders, at family
fundraisers, even in the midst of remarks
about homeownership.
"The President has
talked incessantly of hunting humans, even in the midst of remarks about
homeownership."
Nor is there anything new about Americans treating racial
and ethnic enemies as the equivalent of animals to be abused or killed. In his
memoir of the Vietnam War, Dispatches, acclaimed combat correspondent
Michael Herr, for example, recalled a young soldier from the Army's 1st
Infantry Division who admitted, "Well, you know what we do to animals....
kill ‘em and hurt ‘em and beat on ‘em.... Shit, we don't treat the Dinks
[Vietnamese] no different than that." Another veteran, quoted elsewhere
remembered, "As soon as I hit boot camp.... they tried to change your total
personality.... Right away they told us not to call them Vietnamese. Call them
gooks, dinks.... They were like animals, or something other than human.... They
told us they're not to be treated with any type of mercy..." Today, the
slurs of the Vietnam era have been replaced by
"haji" and "raghead," while the big-game hunters and the
language that goes with killing animals have added to the atmosphere of
dehumanization.
That program of instruction is, however, just one recent
example of an undercurrent within the military's institutional culture that
implicitly reduces people to animals. It's not just in the language of everyday
anger and dismissal by soldiers in a strange land where danger is everywhere
and it's difficult to tell friend from foe. It's lodged right in the
institutional language, if you care to notice. Last month, a piece in the Washington
Post, for example, drew much media
attention when it came to light that U.S. Army snipers from the
"painted demons" platoon of the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry
Regiment, 25th Infantry Division allegedly took part in "a classified
program of 'baiting' their targets" to lure insurgents within their sniper
scopes.
"Basically, we would put an item [like a spool of wire
or ammunition] out there and watch it," said Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the
leader of the elite sniper platoon in a sworn statement. "If someone found
the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage
the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S.
Forces." While there has been much subsequent discussion about the ethics
and legality of such a program, nobody seemed to take note of the hunting
language involved. After all, when you "bait" a trap (or a hook),
it's to lure an animal (or fish) in for the kill. But "bait" for a
human?
"There is nothing new about Americans treating racial and
ethnic enemies as the equivalent of animals to be abused or killed."
While the use of anthropologists and other social scientists
has made headlines, the utilization of "big-game hunters" as troop
trainers for the "urban jungles" of Iraq has been essentially
ignored. Programs stressing cultural sensitivity may be covered, but treating
Iraqis scavenging in a weapon-strewn war zone as the equivalent of elephants,
water buffalo, or other prized trophies of great white hunters has gone
largely unexamined in any meaningful way.
From the commander-in-chief to low-ranking snipers, a
language of dehumanization that includes the idea of hunting humans as if they
were animals has crept into our world - unnoticed and unnoted in the mainstream
media. Perhaps a few linguistics professors or other social scientists might
like to step into the breach and offer their views on the subject - unless, of
course, they've already been mustered into those Human Terrain Teams.
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research
director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los
Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, GOOD
magazine, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first
book, The
Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America,
is due out in the American
Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books in 2008. His new website NickTurse.com (up only in rudimentary
form) will fully launch in the coming months.
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