November 16, 2004 - The wounded man is lying on the stone floor. He is not moving. He is unarmed. His wounds have been treated with his enemy’s field dressings. An enemy soldier, part of the occupation, stands over him, rifle at the ready. “This one is f***ing faking being dead”, he shouts, “He’s breathing. He ain’t dead!” A shot rings out. “He is now”, says another voice. We saw scenes like that in World War II movies with the executioner dresses in SS black with the silver lightening slashing the points of the color but this is not one of those films. It was shot by the embedded NBC cameraman in a Fallujah Mosque. The screen blacks out as the rifle cracks. Some things are too gruesome to be broadcast so we don’t see the bullet smash into the wounded man’s body or the blood splatter on the wall. When the image returns he lies there as the US Marines go about the business of checking the other bodies lying about on the stone floor.

The scene should be shocking. We have just seen the execution of a helpless and unarmed prisoner by a member of the armed forces of the United States. We have just seen the kind of atrocity we were taught as children more than justified what Dwight Eisenhower called our Crusade in Europe. But we are not shocked and we reach for justification of the act; we formulate excuses for the young Marine with the rifle. It is, we say, after all a war. Just down the street another Marine has been killed and two of his buddies wounded when he checked out a corpse lying in the roadway. The booby trap rigged beneath the body exploded and one more was added to the coalition body count. It is, after all, a war.

We leap to the conclusion that a wounded man lying in a captured Mosque is an insurgent, a rebel, a member of the resistance. No civilian citizen of Fallujah caught in the crossfire could be there. He is a Moslem. He is in a Mosque. He is therefore the enemy and his death is thereupon justified. He is one of them, the dehumanized foe and so we seek justification for what is an inhuman act – the cold blooded execution of a helpless prisoner. It is Malmedy on a small scale but this time there were no escapees to tell the tale – just film at eleven and we are not shocked.

We are not shocked because it is, after all, a war. The dead are either our heroes or inhuman insurgents. They are no longer men. We have dehumanized them. The only good Moslem is a dead Moslem and we have just witnessed the making of another good Moslem. We have dehumanized a whole religion but in doing so we have dehumanized ourselves. It is, after all, a war and we have seen it all before and we are fated to see it again and again as we reap the bitter harvest in endless campaigns.

Military justice, that elegant oxymoron, will work its will and in the fullness of time pronounce its verdict. We will be left with the indelible image of two men. One holds a rifle. One lies still as a stone. Both are the victims of war.