I found a collection of five videos online that supposedly showcase “American soldiers at their worst.” I didn’t find all the videos to be conclusive evidence of soldiers at their worst, so here are my opinions of each of them. First off, though, here’s the page I found containing those five videos: Five YouTube videos show American soldiers at their worst.

Video #1

This is the harshest to me and also the one that I thought was most clear-cut between right and wrong. A man dressed in army gear holds up a little puppy, adorable and whimpering, before drawing back and flinging it across the desert, over a cliff. He and a fellow soldier are talking in high-pitched voices beforehand about how it’s such a cute little puppy. After the guy throws it, another man whom we can’t see—though from the sound of the voice, I would guess it’s the camera operator—says that it was mean to do that. The thrower just grins and shrugs.

To me, this indicates a sick individual. Either some fucked-up guy joined the army or some regular guy joined the army and became fucked-up because of what he went through there. I find it very sad that a person could become this way, or was that messed up from birth, but of course I know such people are out there, and this video is a clear demonstration of that.

Video #2

This one to me doesn’t necessarily mean that the soldiers involved are sick fucks, since all that happens is a tank drives over the front end of a car. The tank’s rolling forward across an intersection and some car darts out at the last second, right in front of the tank. I think it’s reasonable to assume the tank couldn’t stop in time, or steer out of the way in time. Does it suck that no one got out of the tank to check on the passengers of the car? Yeah, maybe, but maybe there was someplace urgent that the soldiers had to get to. Maybe it’s not a bad thing at all that the soldiers didn’t stop, either, because we’re at war, and whoever is in that car isn’t guaranteed not to have a machine gun or be an enemy.

Video #3

In this one, the point of view is from the back of a truck, though we can’t see any people in the truck. The truck is driving on a road, alongside of which a herd of some type of animal (sheep? cows? I can’t tell) is running. All of a sudden, what looks like fireworks go off amongst the animals, while people in the truck laugh. Is this cruel and unnecessary? Yes, definitely. The thing is, you can’t see anyone operating the camera or around the cameraman, so we can’t tell if the asshole is an American soldier, an Iraqi native, or a Canadian goose a long way from home.

Video #4

This is one almost as bad as the first, because we can clearly see American soldiers around the cameraman, the cameraman sounds American himself, and the group is doing something to injure a dog that isn’t offering them any harm. From the little clouds of dust coming up around the animal, it looks like they’re chucking clods of dirt or rocks at it. At one point you can see one of the soldiers picking something off the ground, further supporting this idea. The dog whines at being attacked and the men laugh. Finally, the dog runs off, tail between its legs, and it’s running strangely. One man comments, “That is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”, while another laughs, “It’s walkin’ on two legs, too.”

I can’t make out the beginning of one sentence, but it ends with “…want to kill him, dude, I really do,” to which someone else responds “You wanna go over and kill it?” Now, if the guy sounded sad about having to put down an animal that they felt was suffering needlessly, I could understand and condone this behavior, but the guys are still laughing and sound like they’re discussing something completely normal. Maybe some people out there are otherwise normal folks but get a kick out of killing animals. I’m no psychiatrist, but that doesn’t seem normal to me. I’m going to have to say that attacking or wanting to kill animals is a sign of mental upset. To put it in layman’s terms, shit ain’t right. Note that the video doesn’t show the men killing the dog, just hurting it and driving it off.

Video #5

This one is less clear cut for me. The P.O.V. is from the inside of a dark building, and the camera is pointed at a soldier holding a rifle. An opening in the wall is to the left, through which you hear a dog barking. The camera points down and to the right, into the dark building, and you hear a gun go off. Is it from the man with the rifle? I’m guessing so, because when you last saw him, his gun was up as if about to be aimed. However, the shot doesn’t sound nearly loud enough for the close proximity the camera had to the rifleman.

The camera points back to the man with a rifle and another shot goes off, though this time I don’t think it was from that particular rifleman. The video switches P.O.V.’s to point at a dog rolling on the ground. A professional male voice has been dubbed over the tape, saying that one of the soldiers shot a dog “he said was about to attack him”. Some man with a turban around his head walks over to the dog, crouching down beside it; he puts his head in his hands. A male, American voice in the background says “We tried, sir.” The dubbed-over voice says, “We had seen the entire incident” before being cut off mid-word.

Who knows what “entire incident” was seen, since the video ends here. The man saying “We tried, sir” didn’t sound like he was laughing or happy to see the dog hurt—he sounded unhappy.

So what’s my overall take on the videos? The ones that I can interpret as showing an American soldier doing nasty things are sad, and they’re indicative that there are a lot of negative side affects to a war that aren’t human injuries or death. An obvious one I can garner from the videos is animal suffering and almost certainly death (I’m referring to the first video), but also the trauma soldiers must go through to cause them to enjoy that sort of thing. Maybe they were messed up to begin with, before even entering the army, or maybe the war over there is what’s caused them to be that way. Who knows, and it’s sad either way.

However, there are a few where the situation is hard to determine, and one where I thought flat-out that the soldiers involved didn’t do anything wrong. That’s the main reason why I posted this entry, because many of the comments I’ve seen about these videos imply that all people involved are worthless, sorry excuses for human beings, and I just don’t see it that way. Here are some sample comments:

Hope they all catch shrapnel in the balls.

— Truculent

Getting shot in the face isn’t horrible enough for that sick fuck. Puppies = all that is warm and furry and right with the world, and people who hurt them deserve to die excruciating deaths.

— Yellowbug2001

Is it too much to ask for a friendly Hell-fire bomb to drop on their sorry asses.

— TripsyDaily