An Incidental Defense for Ilario Pantano
By MARINE OFFICER
I would like to take a few minutes to present my own defense for a man named Second Lieutenant Ilario Pantano, who has recently been accused of pre- meditated murder in a combat zone, better known as Iraq.
Let me first say that while I know Lieutenant Pantano personally, and am very familiar with the area, in which the alleged murders were committed, I was not present for the incident. However, as far as I can tell, that should not be a factor. Let me explain. It seems to be generally agreed upon that Lieutenant Pantano, at that moment in question, was in a shoot/no shoot scenario. In other words, a situation presented itself, to which he was forced to react urgently. We're talking about a decision point, a judgment call, and the government of the United States is attempting to pass judgment on his. The particulars of the situation, as I will demonstrate, are irrelevant. And I would further suggest that his default to the more aggressive of the two available courses of action (shoot or don't shoot) should in no way have shocked or appalled the government, his countrymen, or his chain of command.
For this argument to be fully appreciated there are some assumptions, five to be precise, that I have made and that I will now present as self- evident or generally recognized fact. If these assumptions are agreed upon as true, which I am confident they will be, then there is little foundation remaining for any accusation of wrong doing on the part of the man I have temporarily (and without his knowledge) claimed as my client.
The first of these assumptions is that war is an instrument of policy. That is to say that war is used to enforce or bring about some political aim. That is also to say that those solely responsible for the application of military force are our civilian governors, not the Generals who are the customary scapegoats for your average anti-war activist. Those civilian governors in our case obviously would be the politicians who represent us. The United States Congress. The White House. And ultimately the President himself who has committed his military force in a War on Terror that has found itself centrally located within the boundaries of Iraq.
The second assumption is that the application of military force assumes the application of violence (i.e. killing). The purpose of war is to impose one government's will on another through violence. That doesn't sound very nice, but it does get to the heart of reality. Governments use military force, violence, where diplomacy fails. It is a deliberate act of hostility in which killing is not only inevitable, but it is expected. This is an important point and is worth repeating. Killing is expected.
The third assumption is that the area where Lieutenant Pantano's incident occurred was extremely dangerous at that time. Maybe this is not so much an assumption as it is a well-documented fact. I know. I was there. It is now commonly referred to as "The Triangle of Death". That is not a confidence-inspiring name, particularly if you happen to be a marine who is charged with its stability. This was a place where enemy activity was rampant, and by rampant I mean daily. IED attacks, mortar and rocket attacks, direct fire ambushes, drive-by shootings, kidnappings, attacks on police stations, abductions, murders, massacres were all taking place at the time of this incident on a daily basis. The environment was quite honestly terrifying, or invigorating if you're Ilario Pantano. This brings me to my next assumption, which is also more of a well-known fact than a postulation. You see Ilario Pantano, as anyone who has ever been in his presence for five minutes can tell you, is an extremely passionate man. He is a passionate man who is passionate about killing terrorists. He gave up a lucrative career in Manhattan to fight back against terrorists who would attempt to victimize his city. He for one was not going to let that happen. So he joined up. He fought back. He brought all his passion to bear on a very zealous enemy.
My last assumption requires a somewhat more lengthy discussion. This is a discussion of human nature. Human beings, all human beings, all over the world including marines, are naturally resistant to killing other human beings. Ninety-eight percent of society finds the taking of another human life morally reprehensible. That's a fact, a fact that I would say we, as a species for all our destructiveness, ought to be proud of, but an inconvenient reality for the military. In WWII only fifteen to twenty percent of men on the battlefield actually shot their weapons at the enemy. (There are, incidentally, many well-documented studies that have shown that this lack of firing back was not due to fear of death or injury. It was almost entirely based upon a reluctance to kill.) Now while that fact may be little known in civilian circles, it is well enough known to the professionals of war. At least it is now. But it wasn't always. That figure was staggering to military leaders when they first discovered it a half century ago and not a little bit disheartening, and they knew in order to more effectively gain fire superiority in future battles they would have to overcome this problem. They did. By Viet Nam that figure was up to ninety-five percent. Here's what they learned.
There are three principal factors when attempting to mitigate, in men, the disinclination to kill. There are certainly a whole host of variables that affect each individual as they attempt to take the life of an enemy combatant, but as a rule these are the three big ones. The first is an acknowledgment by the group that what a man is doing is socially acceptable. The group, for say a marine in a position to kill in combat, can exist on many levels. Of course there is his immediate unit, his fire team, his squad, his platoon, his closest friends with him on the battlefield and so on, and that is certainly an important group. And then there is the Marine Corps as a community, which also can provide a general climate of approval for all of its members. But the most powerful group that he will look to for acceptance, for the killing he has done, is his society. He will want to inoculate himself against the remorse that he is sure to face with society's praise and justifications. (That might shed some light, by the way, on why there is such an emphasis on supporting the troops. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder cases that have arisen from wars are not generally from the terrible things that happened to those men, or the terrible things that they saw, but from the terrible things that they did. Guilt is the primary ingredient for the majority of those men. Hence the stark contrast between the number of PTSD cases from WWII where the percentage of men willing to fire was relatively low and society's approval was high compared to Viet Nam where the percentage of men willing to fire on the enemy was high, while at the same time society's approval was much lower.)
The second factor in mitigating this human resistance to killing is leadership. Leaders in the military serve the purpose not only to set an aggressive example for the troops to follow, but to exist as authority figures to which those same troops can displace their guilt when faced with the horrors of combat. In short, it is easier to obey an order to kill than to kill by one's own volition. The case studies of this phenomenon are vast, conducted over many years, and widely available so I will assume in this instance that people are generally aware of its truth and will argue my point here no further. Now the last of the principal factors in getting a man to kill, getting him to shoot vice not shoot, is desensitization. Over the decades, getting soldiers to not look so gravely upon the subject of killing has been an integral part of increasing combat efficiency, (i.e. increasing the number of men who will actually fire their weapons at enemy troops). The specific methods used to desensitize these men are numerous. Here are just a few:
I would have to say the frequent and callous discussion of war, of combat, of killing is the most prolific technique used in the military today to desensitize its troops. These kinds of discussions can be heard on military bases all over the world, all the time, and for such talk the military man is often lambasted as a warmonger. This, however, is generally not the case. In fact, as I've mentioned before, a very minute population in the military could accurately be characterized as such. But the callous talk of killing continues nonetheless. Why? It is a cultural norm now, created to desensitize men to the concept of killing. When a recruit at boot camp acknowledges a command from his Drill Instructor, he shouts out a blood curdling, "KILL!" The motto on a Marine Corps rifle range is "One shot, one kill." When marines pass each other around the base they will often use the affectionate greeting "Oohrah!" which is the Marine Corps' modified version of the Turkish word for "Kill". When Lieutenant General James Mattis was quoted saying, "It's fun to shoot some people," and that "it's a hoot" he was met with significant criticism. People were appalled. They were horrified even. But oddly enough, there was no real shock from within the ranks of the Marine Corps. While the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Hagee, did express some regret for the callous remarks, and suggested that General Mattis should have chosen his words more carefully, he was certainly not appalled. Why? The fact is, he knows, just as every other marine knows, that this is exactly the kind of language that is used all around the Marine Corps at all levels of command, all the time. Making callous remarks about killing is not merely a reality in the military, it is a necessity. There is not one combat leader in Iraq who does not speak of violence and killing with some degree of callousness, if not enthusiasm. You have to, if you want to train those young boys to do what they are naturally so loathe to do. Yo u have to, if you want to transform those young boys into killers. I know that sounds terribly harsh to those soft ears out there who don't want to think of their sons as trained killers, who cannot bear the thought of their baby's innocence being stripped away by the military machine, who do not want to hear that killing is a central purpose of their job, who can't seem to accept that rifles are for killing, not parades, who have not experienced what General Hagee called "the harsh realities of war." I know they don't want to hear it, but it is true all the same.
The Marine Corps uses computer games now, to minimize the cost of training perhaps, but also to allow the "player" to identify and kill an enemy. The weapons in the game are realistic, the graphics are realistic, the view of the screen can be made to look like the sights of a rifle or a machine gun and you can focus on a man running or shooting back at you and you can kill him. The man will fall and bleed on the ground. It's very realistic. When infantrymen train with their rifles, they don't shoot at colored circles; they shoot at silhouettes, black silhouettes of men, or they shoot at plastic dummies that look like enemy soldiers and pop up and fall down when they're hit. They fire from fighting holes and they wear battle gear, flak jackets and helmets to give them the feel of war. They make shooting a target so much like shooting a man that it is really not that difficult to make the transition. And when a man shoots well he is admired and given medals and badges and promotions. All this to encourage a man to pull the trigger with another man in his sights and kill him. Marine recruits will participate in bayonet training where there are dummies that hang upright, dressed in military attire, that are heavy like a man, and as dense as a man, which have replaced the old inanimate stacks of tires that were once used. To thrust a blade into the flesh of another human being has been historically more difficult for men than say slashing him. It is more personal. It is more gruesome. It is more deadly. And that is exactly why it is a necessary skill. When recruits train, they train to thrust the bayonet into the man sized, military attired dummy to get them comfortable with the concept, with the motion, with the feel of killing another man. Like it or not, that is desensitization, and that is critical to the man who must fight that zealous enemy or die from inaction.
So if we take all these assumptions, all these points together, and if we agree that Second Lieutenant Ilario Pantano is a passionate man, fighting passionately the War on Terror that his country has dispatched him on (understanding innately that this will require killing), and he is spending his time in a highly dangerous city in Iraq, getting attacked on a daily basis by those very terrorists he's been sent in to kill, and he is a marine who not only has been conditioned himself by the design of the military (a.k.a. the government) to be callous towards killing but also to be an aggressive leader, a figure of authority in a combat zone that must turn boys into killers (no easy task), and that man, that officer, Second Lieutenant Ilario Pantano, is faced with a split second decision in the face of two known terrorists who make a sudden move toward him with unknown intent, what do we think he's going to do? He's going to do what he was trained to do by his government, fight and if necessary, kill. He's going to do what he was asked to do by his country, eliminate the threat of terror in the world. He's going to do what he was born to do, passionately defend himself and those he cares about. He's going to do exactly what we would expect him to do. There is no reason why anyone should be surprised that this man opted for the aggressive course of action under the circumstances he was in. There is no reason why anyone should be appalled.
If we agree that this was in fact a shoot/no shoot scenario, and we all agree to the assumptions I've made herein, then the question of pre-meditated murder is a simple one. It's academic. We don't have to have been there. Based on all that we understand of the world and of war and of the military, we know, without having seen or even heard a shot fired, that Ilario Pantano is innocent of this charge, and that if anyone is responsible for his reaction to these terrorists it is the government of the United States, the very same people who declared this War on Terror, the very same people who embraced him as a passionate officer and trained him to kill and to train his marines to kill, the very same people who sent him to kill those terrorists that day in Iraq, and the very same people who now charge him with murder. He did all that they asked. He did all that the Marine Corps asked. He did all that his country asked. If there is fault to be had in this case, it is with those who have done the asking,not with Ilario Pantano.
I rest my case.
