The Royal Marine Murderer

This young man is a Royal Marine, a member of one of the most respected units of the British Armed Forces. He should not have shot that Afghan, in that way, despite everything he and his troop had been through. We must not lower our standards to the level these Afghans use. I think that his identity should not be revealed, to protect his family. However, he may have stirred up a hornets nest of trouble, not only for the forces out in Afghanistan, but possibly here in the UK, there are quite a few young men willing to join in any " jihad", and this marines action, maybe just be the thing they need.

My mother had a friend who went into Belsen gracesmum he had apparently mentioned seeing a hut set on fire while there may still have been people alive in it, but beyond that he would say nothing.
I have heard people saying that even 50 years later they were still having nightmares so I'm sure even in those days people were badly affected by what they saw and did.

Gillybob - I feel this man should be shown some leniency. I don't mean no sentence, but I share wheni'm64's views about the prevalence of undiagnosed ptsd amongst serving, and ex-servicemen. I don't condone this man's actions in any way, but my experience of involvement with ex-servicemen, and those who have worked in the police and fire service suggests that most of us have some kind of tipping point. I wonder if this Marine had reached his. We can't know, but I believe that showing some compassion to him is very unlikely to set of a load of copy cat behaviour.

He had a fair trial and the judge is giving him(or is it her)self sufficient time to think carefully about the appropriate sentence. The judge heard every bit of the evidence and had the defendant before them for the length of the trial. I feel confident that all the relevant factors will be considered before sentencing.

I agree with you gracesmum, after WW1 many many lives were shattered for an umpteen number of reasons. My Grandfather was went through it in the Light Infantry as a volunteer and was both shell shocked, not severely, and gassed, again not severely. Neither he nor my stepfather ever talked of their experiences, maybe to their wives, but not to us! However, both in WW1 and WW11 the majority of the combatants (including them and my father) were conscripts/volunteers, and, by today's standards, not particularly well trained, and certainly NOT prepared for the horrors of war. The armed forces are now manned by professional personal who join of their own free will go through rigorous training with the opportunity to drop out at any stage during that training, they are made well aware of what they are likely to face in EVERY respect and how they MUST behave in every circumstance, both for themselves and for the welfare of their comrades in the face of a merciless enemy who they know could retaliate with extreme barbarity. They also have the benefit of trained, sympathetic people to help them at all times should they need it, whatever that help maybe. So a very different 'playing field' than the one in which our forebears had to do their fighting. We know too that this was not only calculated cruelty by a senior NCO, but that two other junior ranks were actually encouraged to behave in like fashion so I'm sorry to sound harsh, but I see no mitigating circumstances here.

No you are not gillybob I get the feeling that while we all condemn the action we do not necessarily condemn the perpetrator without reservations.
Niggly asks a very relevant question Were previous generations made of sterner stuff? Maybe their life experience made them that way but we had many many young WWI soldiers traumatised by their war experiences, euphemistically called "shell shock" and in those awful cases many of those traumatised soldiers executed for so called "cowardice" because they could not take any more.
Given the situation in WW II I agree many widows and others had to "get on with it" but I also know of men like my father who was one of the first groups into Bergen Belsen who simply said "What I saw there I will never talk about". Yes they were tougher, death was more prevalent and life often regarded as cheaper - look at how in previous centuries people underwent dental extractions, or even surgery or amputation without anaesthetic - but we would never want those sorts of living conditions to exist again

I totally agree with your comments FlicketyB. Most of us do live in a very cossetted world where nothing really nasty happens and if it does it is usually 'someone' elses fault, or an episode in our lives that justifys certain behaviour! Taking resposibility for our own actions can sometimes be very thin on the ground when in fact that is exactly, as in this case, what we should be doing. My mother was widowed in 1942, as were lots of young women - service pension even for a Flying/Officer was dismal neccessitating her to dry her tears asap and get out to work after I was born to keep us both. (Lots of day nurseries in those days for such an event!) No counselling not even much in the way of sympathy so it was fotunate that both she and countless widows had the stamina to cope. The same applied to my Stepfather who was POW for four years in the far east and saw and heard unimaginable horrors on a never ending basis - both of them just got on with their lives after the war - were they made of sterner stuff? or is it just a generation thing?

Am I the only person gransnetter who believes that this man should be treat with some leniency?

None of us could begin to know what horrors he has experienced in theatre although from what we already know ( and sorry for being graphic) he has seen his friends being blown up and heads hanging from trees etc.

Yes I agree that he should have risen above it, but how can we know what might have been going through his mind?

The MoD did start a Prison-in-Reach initiative, as 1 in 10 prisoners are army veterans, many with hitherto undiagnosed and/or untreated PTSD arising from armed conflict, identified whilst going through the civilian court process. There were 8,500 such offenders on probation supervision in England and Wales when the probation service undertook a trawl of our records. Too many army veterans commit violent acts after discharge, having developed drug and alcohol problems.

How do you know he is mentally damaged by his army experiences? if that was so it would have come up at his trial. We do have to face the fact that these extreme units do attract the kind of men that thrive in these difficult conditions and some of them find violence attractive. That is why they are trained, and trained, and trained again to channel their aggression through what they have to do but not know when they have to stop.

I think most of us have led very cossetted lives, the last war that directly affected this country ended nearly 70 years ago, we live in a society where even raising your voice to someone can land you in court.

There will always be hard, difficult and downright unpleasant jobs to do and somebody has to do them and the people in these jobs are trained to deal with the unpleasantness that goes with it, Fireman, collecting the human bits after explosions, cutting the mutilated out of cars, police who as well as violence also face many other deeply unpleasant experiences. Some of these people will be left mentally traumatised by their experiences and they should receive all the help and compassion they require. It doesn't follow however that everyone who has these experiences is mentally traumatised by them and should be treated with kid gloves if they later go off the rails.

There is no evidence this man was mentally damaged and his training would have ingrained in him what the rules are. He deliberately and with malice aforethought chose to transgress these rules. he must live with the consequences.

The recording of the discussion at the moment of the murder did not give a man speaking in anger or fear , this leaves hatred and revenge which is possibly what caused the two men who murdered Lee Rigsby to carry out their crime. We cannot condemn the enemy for brutality but look for understanding when we are

- I don't know if he is a brutal human being or another victim of war

Acts of brutality are no less because they are committed by one side or the other. I think most people are rightly outraged by atrocities committed by Afghan fighters, and would not accept such actions as an inevitable reaction to them seeing their colleagues being horribly maimed or killed.

But war must eventually damage the minds of everyone involved and I'm sickened to see the army recruiting advertisements on television that portray a soldier's life as one of challenge and excitement. What they do not show is severed limbs hanging from trees or a soldier so mentally damaged that he will commit murder as casually as if he were swatting a fly.

We are made fully aware that Afghan soldiers don't "play fair". As to whether all our own soldiers "play fair" we really cannot know. If this footage hadn't inadvertently come to light, we would never have known about this incident.

At the height of the troubles I travelled from Cornwall to London on a coach with some soldiers who had just come back from Northern Ireland. They were talking about some of the operations they had been involved in and after they left I remember thinking that I never wanted to meet them again, but I was damn glad they existed.

nigglienellie I am with you all the way. I grew up in a military family and have some understanding of the situation. This was a cold blooded murder by a senior NCO in a frontline unit which is trained to deal with the most difficult and challenging situations.

Whatever the victim and his comrades were doing before the event, when they were legitimate targets and when this man, presumably, received his first injury, nothing justifies what this sergeant slowly, deliberately and with thought did.

I'm sure we did Tegan, but that was 5/600 years ago, but then we keelhauled, hanged, bearbaited and did hundreds of horrible things that today are totally unimaginable never mind acceptable and I think we have progressed since then on the humanitarian front!. No,it was for me as previously stated, the calculated torment of this captive that shocked me so much even trying to make sure that the overhead aircraft didn't spot them!!. The fact that the 'enemy' would do the same to us is simply not the point, if we decend to the same brutality then what hope for peace and order, there would be none, only the slippery slope to chaos. Luckily this episode is very rare, and as far as I'm concerned our armed forces are the best in the world, no question about it!

I can't get the link to work so I haven't read it, but I do keep trying to imagine what it's like to be in a war situation and to see comrades being killed and then being taunted by their killers. I can't condone what this man did, but, at the same time I can't feel that, in his case the punishment fits the crime. I've never understood a situation where man is there to kill man, but there are 'rules' about it [didn't we break the rules of chivalry by using longbows?].

Good posts gracesmum and nigglynellie

The trouble is that is wasn't a 'split second' reaction, had it been I would agree that eveyone has their breaking point, which afterward no doubt would be deeply regreted. What happened here was a cold calculated pre-meditated decision by a presumaby highly trained and trusted Marine Sergeant, not only to shoot this young 'person', but to torture him both mentally and physically before ending his life, clearly enjoying his victims terror. We know this owing to the fact that it was all recorded, even down to the acknowledgement of the breaking of the Geneva Convention and not mentioning the incident it to anyone for fear of being found out in higher places. I find this aspect of this incident deeply shocking, the young victim could well have been cajoled into terroism,brain washed, whatever, we simply don't know, but whatever his situation he didn't deserve to die so horribly, and for that reason alone I think the perpetrator of this crime deserves the full force of the law.

Without ever having had any experience of what our armed services (and indeed the civilian services) have to undergo, I can onkly give an unqualified opinion.
1) we would hope that our forces do not descend to the atrocities committed by other armed forces especially in civil wars - I am thinking of the barbarity witnessed in Kosovo etc
2) we expect our servicemen and women to react in a split second and their training is geared to just that - so again, I would hope that they are sufficiently trained not to be out of control
3) good leadership is usually reflected in good conduct among the ranks
However
4) our servicemen and women are human and under unimaginable stress and tension - their split second reactions may or may not be what they would do after calm deliberation
5) if they had shot the person in question in "hot blood" (without the added complication of helmet cameras) no more might have been said and I am sure similar incidents have happened in both World Wars, Northern Ireland and wherever there has been conflict.
We are good at remembering "our glorious dead" (no sarcasm or insult intended but the irony of the timing cannot be ignored) but I am convinced one of the reasons many soldiers will not talk about what they experienced in wartime is that they were expected to do things which in peacetime they would have thought unthinkable.
What sticks in the craw is the apparent cold-bloodedness of the action - the fact that it was witnessed and discussed - albeit briefly and the fact that it was recorded for us - who have never had to face what they are facing on a daily basis - to judge.
I do not think you can necessarily apply peacetime logic to a war situation. If our servicemen and women had to debate and weigh up every action, they would be dead.
Finally I beieve it was the Duke of Wellington who commented on the sight of his army that he trusted they would intimidate the enemy "because sir, they terrify me".

Bags, thanks so much for posting this. I've been struggling with this since I heard about the trial. The timing of the article is so poignant. Young men in WW1 were shot for 'cowardice'. Now, we're trying a marine for 'murder' and sentencing him even more harshly than many others convicted of murder. I find it too simplistic to call what he did murder. I accept he took a life, but his long service, and exposure to horrors should surely lead to a more compassionate response to what he did.

Thank you for your article bags. I agree with ffinnochio it does make devastating reading.

I feel that this Marine has been made a scapegoat. Is being used to prove the point that we the British, stand for all that is decent and right? or is he being used in order to appease a certain religious group?

How can we really honestly expect "our" soldiers to play fair and follow the rules when the opposition do not?

Such extreme mitigation for that soldier's actions. He should be treated with compassion. I know his training should make him immune to the provocation that precipitated his actions, but civvies who have left the military would get better justice, having received the same training. A profound and thoughtful article.

This article makes devastating reading, but one that needs to be read. Nothing in it is new to anyone who understands the horror of war, but it's timing of publication is terribly poignant.

Thanks for the link B.