As horrible as this is, I guess it s sort of inelbtaive. And I m sure there are more occurrences like this that we just don t know about. I could look at this from two perspectives. The first sort of rationalizes it. Imagine being in Afghanistan for six hard months and all you feel like you ve been doing is killing people. I think maybe I d go a little crazy too- I definitely wouldn t feel the need to kill civilians, but I sort of get it. Maybe they got some sort of rush out of it, knowing they ve been fighting armed soldiers this entire time, wouldn t it be nice to kill just one civilian. I kind of see it as going to the shooting range to fire a few shots, except in this case, you re shooting a live person. Completely immoral, but I can put myself in their shoes and see maybe why they did it. Then I could look at it from another perspective. This perspective does not rationalize it alt all, it actually does the opposite. What I can t understand is why you would want to kill innocent civilians if all you ve been doing is killing people for the past six months. We hear all these stories back in the US that soldiers are suffering from PTSD because they were forced to kill a young child for instance because he was holding a machine gun. If the idea of killing someone is so traumatic, why would you want to go out and kill civilians just for the fun of it? After exploring some different perspectives that I may not fully understand, I ve come to a conclusion myself. I see these people as murderers, people who should be locked away in jail for life. Some may argue that they did not kill a US citizen and they re soldiers so it s what they re trained to do. I would argue back that US citizen or not, they re a human being and no innocent human should be killed. Secondly, yes they are soldiers, but they were not trained to kill innocent civilians- they were trained to kill opposing soldiers to protect us. That poor boy was doing absolutely nothing wrong and he was killed for it. How could anyone trust US soldiers if this is what they re capable of? It almost makes me sick to my stomach to say that I am proud of our military. Of course of proud, and I respect every US soldier, however it s the corrupt ones like these who give us a bad name. As Americans we see all the good things our military does, but from the outside, others may only see the bad, like killing innocent civilians. You think since we have such a great military, there would be a way to weed out these bad seeds.
