Americans are trigger happy

I'm quite wary of pulling out the Vietnam comparison again, but a few stories have popped up recently that resemble common themes of that conflict. Specifically, there's been a bunch of reports of American soldiers being itchy on the trigger, no doubt due to the fog and pressures of war. In yesterday's NY Times, there was this:

At the base camp of the Fifth Marine Regiment here, two sharpshooters, Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, 28, and Cpl. Mikael McIntosh, 20, sat on a sand berm and swapped combat tales while their column stood at a halt on the road toward Baghdad.

"We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people."

...Both marines said they were most frustrated by the practice of some Iraqi soldiers to use unarmed women and children as shields against American bullets. They called the tactic cowardly but agreed that it had been effective. Both Sergeant Schrumpf and Corporal McIntosh said they had declined several times to shoot at Iraqi soldiers out of fear they might hit civilians.

"It's a judgment call," Corporal McIntosh said. "If the risks outweigh the losses, then you don't take the shot."

But in the heat of a firefight, both men conceded, when the calculus often warps, a shot not taken in one set of circumstances may suddenly present itself as a life-or-death necessity.

"We dropped a few civilians," Sergeant Schrumpf said, "but what do you do?"

To illustrate, the sergeant offered a pair of examples from earlier in the week.

"There was one Iraqi soldier, and 25 women and children," he said, "I didn't take the shot."

But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down.

"I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way."

A related story comes from the Times of London, which relayed the criticism of a British soldier wounded by friendly fire from out-of-control American soldiers.

“Combat is what I’ve been trained for," he said. "What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me.”