SERE and our troops

Just serving in the army is no guarantee of knowing how any facet of the army works.

Anyone who wonders about the ideological diversity of our military should read some of the work of David J. Morris, former Marine officer who now is a journalist and author. He is a classic born-again liberal whose service and subsequent stints as an embedded reporter convinced him that the military and especially W's use of it is evidence of man's inhumanity to man. He parrots all the agit-prop about how Abu Ghraib was an example of US policy, that Haditha and other incidents are systemic and how all in all our efforts to replace dictators and liberate people from oppression are having the opposite effect.
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He has a piece now in Slate bemoaning the SERE course (Survival, Evasion, Resistance & Escape). He attended and describes accurately the training there. But then he hops on the evil intentions train and decides that the course actually teaches our troops how to torture, not how to survive captivity. He even goes so far as to posit that the course ought to teach sweetness and light and how to make friends with your captors.

In fact, our soldiers need training from SERE based on an entirely different premise, as illustrated by the experience of Michael Durant, the helicopter pilot who spent several weeks in captivity when he was captured by Somali fighters during the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" raid. Durant survived by befriending his captors and forcing them to see him as a fellow human being. SERE conditions servicemen to expect nothing but the worst from their captors; Durant's life depended on his ability to understand his captors and find ways to manipulate them psychologically.

It's sure a pity Nick Berg didn't try that with his captors.

Oh, wait. He did.

Didn't work very well, did it?

Morris is a born-again liberal as I mentioned and as such sees only "the horror". He finds a welcoming audience on the left and they applaud his exposes of the dark side of our military. It fits their narrative so much better than the "respect" and "support" for the troops they are forced to mouth. Our military is the most humane and just ever to bestride this crappy planet. Do awful things happen? Of course, but look what happens in the aftermath. The Abu Ghraib scum were punished after an investigation started by the military, the Haditha Marines had their days in court and were found to be acting in good faith in a bad situation. Every instance people like Morris want to cite ends up proving my point not his. We do not tolerate torture, murder or violations of the Law of Land Warfare. Morris and the crowd he now runs with refuse to allow their delicate sensibilities to digest that.