Seeing how I have never experienced war firsthand, it’s hard for me to know what it’s like to be in the military handling prisoners of war. I can understand how hard it must be to look some people in the face. In 2003 a British soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, was accused of a war crime and dismissed from the military, and jailed for a year, for allegedly causing the death of an Iraqi prisoner, Baha Mousa. News recently surfaced from a former colleague of that soldier who claimed to see him and another soldiers kick and beat the Iraqi.
“I don’t believe he was a threat. I do not even believe he was trying to escape, I just think he was injured and wanted to get help. I saw them struggling with him. One of them – I cannot remember which one – was trying to get the sandbag on his head. Baha Mousa was struggling and he seemed to be trying to break free. I saw Payne and Cooper kicking and hitting Baha Mousa trying to get him in the room. I just walked out of the room… because I wanted nothing to do with that. This was not what I had signed up for.”
As a soldier, I feel like you are trained to kill people whom you are told to kill. Sometimes, I feel like it can be misinterpreted. But can you really blame a soldier for his actions? Would they have done something like this before they went to war? Was it prejudice or just what they were trained to do? I feel that post 9/11 many people had a negative attitude towards anyone from the Middle East. I feel like it would be more expected from a US soldier than a British soldier, though. So how can you really justify your actions? I’m not saying the British soldiers were right. What they did was terrible, as Mousa was a prisoner of war. I just wonder if it was because of hatred or training that they committed the act.
As far as their behavior goes, however wrong it may have been, I also feel it is an improvement from the way things went during World War II. While reading Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut explains the fate of the two scouts. They were killed on the spot, no questions asked.
“Three inoffensive bangs came from far away. They came from German rifles. The two scouts who had just ditched Billy and Weary had just been shot. They had been lying in ambush for Germans. They had been discovered and shot from behind. Now they were dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow into the color of raspberry sherbet. So it goes…”(pg. 54)
Sure, Baha Mousa may not have been an armed infantryman, but he was still a prisoner of war. He could’ve been shot like the scouts in Slaughterhouse Five, but at least he was a prisoner first. It just seemed to happen unfortunately that he was put into the wrong hands, and accidentally beaten to death. So it goes…
Soldiers ‘Hit and Kicked’ Mousa
BBC World News
9 November 2009
LenardS18's War and Pieces 
I think what you say is interesting. I don’t agree with everything but I do agree with the idea of training a man to kill. The opposing side is often dehumanized, think of all the racial names for those of Middle Eastern decent. This dehumanization is hard to unlearn. I mean think about if your Grandpa was in WWII, your Uncle in Vietnam, or your Dad in desert storm; how do they few their “enemies?” That dehumanization makes it possible to hate and fear the enemy, which in turn makes it possible for you to kill him/her. This I suppose is beneficial in war; people want soldiers to kill not to make friends. But as the example you have given clearly states, at what point is it too much? At what point can people no longer turn the switch off. Even scarier is the fact that citizens are not safe from learning dehumanization of the enemy. How is this justified? Who is responsible for this? These are hard questions to answer because no one wants to be responsible.