Should Soliders Take Personal Photos And Videos Of Enemy KIA?

Cpl. Jeremy Morlock with Staff Sgt. David Bram. Yahoo Groups

Photos With Dead Afghans Stirred Pride, Soldier Testifies -- McClatchy News

Some of the first images in a set of notorious photographs showing soldiers posing with dead Afghans were taken with a sense pride that the Army was fighting and killing its enemy, a Stryker officer testified Thursday.

Capt. Roman Ligsay told an Army investigator at Joint Base Lewis-McChord that he posed for one of the pictures in November 2009 even though he knew soldiers were ordered not to take photos of casualties for personal use. He said he felt a “sense of accomplishment” when he saw an Afghan who was killed by an American helicopter.

To him, the image showed “we were fighting the enemy. We weren’t just out there on patrols every day and not seeing the success of those patrols.”

Read more ....

My Comment: A few months one of my readers in Afghanistan sent me some pics and videos of combat and enemy KIA .... I ended up deleting the file. In the many years of this blog I have only posted a handful of enemy combatants killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan (about 3 or 4 photos), a video of a U.S./Afghan raid on a Taliban safe house that resulted in the death of an Afghan soldier, and a picture of a U.S. soldier who was critically injured in Afghanistan and who succumbed to his injuries a few minutes later. That was then .... today I do not see the point of publishing such photos .... and if there was ever going to be an exception .... it would only be Bin Laden's death photo.

But the fact is that every soldier in a war zone can arrange to have access to a cell phone or ipod that can easily take pictures and/or videos .... and while I am guessing .... human nature being what it is .... I am sure they are sometimes being used to document what soldiers are experiencing during combat .... or after combat .... even though it is against military regulations. And if I was to be bold to venture an even bigger guess, I would not be surprised if a good number of soldiers do have "trophy pictures/videos" in some computer file somewhere, and will only show them among themselves or a select few.

So .... should such pictures/videos be made by soldiers .... definitely not. But should the rules that prohibit soldiers from taking such pictures/videos be strictly enforced .... I wish the authorities luck in trying to stop such behavior in some distant and isolated FOB.