Throughout human history, wars have ravaged cities and civilizations, razing whole communities and ending countless lives. Whether you support your nation’s troops or believe there is no such thing as a just war, one thing everyone can agree on is that dying on the battlefield is a tragic, sometimes sudden but often horrible fate. Whether by the thrust of a pike or the burning shrapnel of an IED, innumerable soldiers have died for causes of their own and of others.
Many thinkers have posited that war is inevitable, inseparable from human civilization, but most people would agree that war has no place in an ideal world. Utopian thinking is by definition a pipe dream, but it helps us focus on admirable goals. One such goal is a world without war and violence.
Until we can achieve that, war will remain an unfortunate fact. All we can do is reduce its incidence to the minimum and ensure that when war does occur, the people responsible are brought to justice. However, there is an invisible barrier to our efforts to protect soldiers from harm: victim-blaming.
Since the earliest days of war, soldiers have been blamed for their own injuries and death. How? Yes, soldiers are held responsible for their own actions, as any adult would be when entering a potentially dangerous situation. More important, though, is what we do to alleviate their danger: we hold them responsible for their own safety. Everyday we continue to develop new equipment that we expect soldiers to use to protect themselves. The flak jacket dates as far back as the American Civil War, designed to protect soldiers from shrapnel and eventually evolving into the modern bulletproof vest.
This is a blatant example of victim-blaming battlefield-fatality culture: social attitudes and practices working to trivialize war violence, making violence against soldiers seem normal, and shifting responsibility from the enemy to the injured soldier.
Soldiers going into battle are told to remember their helmets, their armor, their vests, and this reinforces battlefield-fatality culture, making soldiers responsible for the violence about to be committed against them. Bomb detectors, radiation monitors, radar, surveillance support, tactical intelligence, and armored vehicles all contribute, putting the onus on the victimized soldier.
This inevitably leads to victim-blaming: You were shot? Well, was your body armor on straight? And a mine took off your foot? Guess you should’ve swept better.
Step out of the bunker without a helmet and you are just asking for a headshot with how you’re dressed.
All this “protection” and “self-defense” and “basic combat tactics” normalizes violence against soldiers by making them the target of blame. Instead, we should be blaming the people responsible: enemy combatants. Our troops shouldn’t have to wear body armor and drive in tanks and walk across the base at night clutching their dog tags between their fingers to use as a weapon if an assailant comes. The problem is battlefield-fatality culture. It makes our enemies feel entitled to shoot at our soldiers’ bodies. This runs deep in all societies, making us doubt injured soldiers, question whether they did everything they could to protect themselves, and fail to justly prosecute assailants. After all, militants will be militants.
What next? Nail polish that changes color in the presence of concealed explosives?
Don’t be that enemy combatant. It is time we end PTSD apologia and stop battlefield-fatality culture.
Teach the enemy not to shoot!
Editorial note: As is often the case, critics of the Men’s Human Rights Movement seem to require a satire notice. So yes, people, this is satire. —DE
