EDITORIAL – Lowering standards proves lethal

Let’s suppose that you’ve been involved in a car accident and sustained life-threatening… Let’s suppose that you’ve been involved in a car accident and sustained life-threatening injuries. After being cut from your car, you’re whisked away to the nearest emergency room. You’re taken into surgery and although you are probably unconscious, you’re not too concerned about the qualifications of your surgeon because they don’t let just anybody perform surgery. Med school weeds out the incompetent.

But what if there was a shortage of qualified surgeons and they let just anyone, even the janitor, perform surgery? The janitor is a smart guy and he’s worked in the hospital for many years, but he’s no surgeon. He can fix a broken light, but he’s not quite sure where to locate your spleen.

The Army’s ever-diminishing enlistment requirements, a result of sheer desperation for troops, have resulted in lower-quality soldiers. The people are no longer the best and the brightest of applicants – they’re the varsity, junior varsity, club team and a neighborhood pick-up team all in one. Across the board, standards are being lowered, and that’s just not a good thing for our armed forces, according to an October 2006 AP article on MSNBC.com, “Army Tops Recruitment Goals by Lowering Standards.” In fact, lowering aptitude standards helped the Army to recruit an extra 2,600 people last year, according to the article.

And people are slipping through the cracks. People who are unfit to serve, especially in war, are being sent to Iraq, and the results are frightening.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that an army private, Steven D. Green, was diagnosed as having homicidal tendencies three months before he orchestrated the murder and rape of an Iraqi family in 2006.

The charges claim that Green led three other soldiers into the home of a family in Mahmoudiya on March 12, 2006, where he shot the father, mother and youngest child as the rest reportedly took turns raping the family’s oldest daughter. When they finished, they supposedly killed the daughter with the family’s AK-47, doused her body in fuel from a lamp in the kitchen and burned her body to hide the evidence.

According to the article, Green was “angry about the war and desperate to avenge the death of comrades and driven to kill Iraqi citizens.”

Three months after his initial diagnosis and eight days after the killings, Green was evaluated again, and it was determined that he suffered from “an anti-social personality disorder.” He was declared unfit to serve and sent home.

Green was charged with the rape and murders and has pled not guilty. He’s being held in an undisclosed location in Kentucky awaiting trial. The other soldiers involved have been charged and are awaiting court-martial.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time this sort of gruesome crime has happened at the hands of unfit soldiers.

On Nov. 19, 2005, Marines massacred 24 unarmed locals in Haditha, Iraq, in response to an insurgent attack that killed one Marine earlier that day.

The occurrences also offer ample criticism of what the article describes as the Army’s practice of keeping “mentally and emotionally unfit personnel in the killing fields of Iraq.”

It’s as simple as this: Quantity is not better than quality. And in this case, it’s proving to have deadly consequences. It’s no wonder that our presence in Iraq is so heavily scrutinized and disparaged. We can’t pretend to be the bringers of peace and order when our forces show up and rape and murder the locals. No wonder we’re not trusted.

Leadership within the armed forces should instill proper values with regard to life and war, and people who sign up for the Army should be aware of the realities of wartime service. People die, and it is absolutely inappropriate to massacre innocent people to exact revenge. Soldiers shouldn’t plot revenge, especially on innocent people.

Desperation for soldiers does not warrant low enlistment standards and keeping homicidal troops around. Recruiters need to be more apt at questioning the motives of potential enlistees and weeding out the unfit.

Soldiers serving in war should act as a unified force working toward peace, and while the responsibility of choosing the right people begins with recruiters, it extends to the leadership on the battlefield as well.