So the New Republic’s anonymous soldier-author has identified himself.
This doesn’t do much to determine whether Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s descriptions of vile behavior on the part of U.S. soldiers is true, but it does, helpfully, indicate that the New Republic did not get taken in by a total fraud.
Nonetheless, those who were skeptical of the story have yet to see any corroborating evidence or accounts from the New Republic’s editors. And we’re now, what, eight days into this story?
I meant to publish this earlier, an e-mail from an eight-year army vet:
No US Army unit would build a camp on a mass grave. Even if they felt like that was a good spot to encamp, they’d never get anything done or be able to secure the camp effectively while forensic teams were digging up the remains under the ground that the tents are supposedly pitched.
[In the interim, it has been suggested that this was a local graveyard, not one of Saddam’s mass graves. However, this doesn’t offer much reassurance of Beauchamp’s statement in his account, “No one cared to speculate what, exactly, had happened here, but it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort.”]
My reader continues:
I simply refused to believe that a US Soldier would “squeal” under any circumstances, but certainly not while doing something as depraved as wearing a child’s skull. To a man (& woman, I’m sure) soldiers who will cheerfully shoot grown men are absolutely unable to understand hurting children & feel the need to protect kids & women down to the bone. What galls me about the pictures of soldiers carrying children to safety is not that it is being done, but that the media keep portraying that as somehow aberrant behavior. Soldiers who found a child’s skull would treat it with reverence while trying not to cry in front of the other guys. Soldiers become soldiers because they want to protect children; people with that mindset simply don’t do anything like this. If a psychopath did slip through the cracks, the rest of the unit would squash him like bug. I concede that a single nutjob can make it; but there is no way an entire squad would be similarly depraved.
Over in Turkey, I dealt mostly with Marines who were posted at the U.S. embassy. I wouldn’t claim that the sample of a dozen or so I met and drank with over the two years was anything resembling a statistically significant sample of the armed forces. But I can see these young men and women aren’t perfect. If I hear an allegation of a Marine having too much to drink and getting into a fight, it doesn’t strike me as implausible. They’re young men and women, they have hormones, and their job requires certain levels of aggression and fearlessness. But I concur with my reader – a group of American men in uniform ”folding in half with laughter” at the site of a man “march[ing] around with the skull on his head” would require a collective sense of sociopathy that I have not seen, and find unbelievable.
OOOn the “chow hall” tale, my reader wrote:
Every Soldier & veteran, Marine, Navy, Air Farce, Coastie, what have you, have a tremendous respect for combat wounded. They go out of their way at every opportunity to make them feel better, not worse. Wounded troops are treated reverently, sometimes too much. More than one sergeant with a couple of Purple Hearts has told people to let him get his own damn coffee. As in point#2, even if a sick bastard made a comment like that in public, first he’d get the living [you know what] kicked out of him before getting his Article 15. Meanwhile everyone in that cafeteria would be standing around the “freak” trying to tell her that the scars really aren’t that bad.
Again – Beauchamp’s story, in which the scarred woman “slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall” bizarrely echoes every AfterSchool Special about the evils of bullying. We cannot say with 100 percent certainty that his story is false. But as of yet, there is no supporting evidence, and the response of the New Republic has been, essentially, “trust us.”
Sorry, but in the post Stephen-Glass-era, we don’t.
UPDATE: Sorry, I’m having a flashback to Dan Rather and the memos… “As a standard practice at CBS, each of the documents broadcast on “60 Minutes” was thoroughly investigated by independent experts and we are convinced of their authenticity,” CBS News said in a statement.