Should this marine be rewarded for defying orders?

[purplehorseshoe]

Yeah, those are some epic typos!

AK84 -> English Dictionary:
if = of
onion = opinion
dose = does

[SteveG1]

@Euphonious_Polemic

At the risk of Godwinizing the thread, to agree with you would put you in a position where you’d turn in Anne Frank’s family because they were breaking the law.

Sometimes orders need to be disobeyed.

Yes. In fact, didn’t the Allies execute people for “just following orders”? They were called war crimes.

When I was in the Army, they had official traiining about this, and made it clear what a lawful order constituted, and that we were not expected to follow an order that was obviously criminal or (to use the word) evil. At the time, the My Lai incident was still fresh in their memory and they apparently did NOT want a repeat.

[SteveG1]

@Norse

At the risk of continuing the Godwinizing hijack, there were these rather well-known trials in a German city some decades ago, where it was established by an international court that orders never relieve the soldier from individual responsibility for his or her actions. When I did my service, one of the things we were taught in basic training was that as a soldier, it’s your obligation to not follow orders you believe are morally wrong. There may be a court-martial afterwards, but that’s one of your duties as a soldier.

We all had that training, at one time. I don’t know if they still teach it, I hope they do.

[Chronos]

So far as I can tell, the orders he was given were not illegal, just stupid. And so justice demands that he receive an appropriate punishment for failing to follow them. I figure a half-hour of cleaning the latrines should do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for him.

This in addition to the awards he rightly received for his bravery, of course.

[AK84]

@Elendil_s_Heir

Could you express this in the English language, please?

My apologies. never trust iPad. What I meant was that the leader on the ground has sufficient leeway to decide what to do and the military usually defers to him if he gets it right.

[Sailboat]

@Frank

What if his actions had led to a Taliban breakthrough at the point in the line he wasn’t defending?

Is there really a “line” to be broken through over there? I was under the impression that the reason we haven’t utterly crushed the Taliban is that the fighting is asymmetric and irregular without fixed lines. If they attempt anything so conventional as massing to break through a line in a set-piece battle, they play into our hands and will be defeated with massive firepower and technology.