This month, news of the military's use of
Human Terrain Teams - US 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, DC, James Lasswell, a
retired US 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 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."
This year,
according to an article by Kimberly Johnson of the
Marine Corps Times, Colonel 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 Colonel Clarke Lethin, I MEF's chief of
staff." Outraged by the statement, one Sergeant
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.
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 US 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 Captain 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 US 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?
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.
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.
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