Mutiny

Lurch, at Main and Central, has a long post about a mutiny in Iraq. I am not going to summarize it, just go read it. He also has a link to the original article in Stars & Stripes.

Lurch has "been there, done that" in a different war. I have not, but I have a story to relate about a similar set of circumstances.

When I was 18, I got a summer second shift job in a factory. They made plastic pellets that were sent to other factories who melted them down and made things. The pellets, in various colors, were shipped in large drums. The customers returned the drums, which had to be cleaned before reuse. That was my job.

This was about the time the process was grinding through for the court martials of Calley and Medina.

One evening during the lunch break, one of the machine operators began talking about that. He had been a tank crewman in the European Theater of Operations during World War 2. The lieutenant in charge of his unit had been killed in an ambush, and, from what the man said, the lieutenant was a good officer and the soldiers were very fond of him.

So they started killing every German they found. Fighting, wounded, trying to run away, trying to surrender or already surrendered; it made no difference, they killed them all. And that went on for two or three weeks until they stopped.

He didn't draw an analogy to the My Lai massacre, he just told his story.