The GOLDEN RULE

A message from a veteran.   A real story from a real soldier.  A human being who has experienced training and warfare and survived. Not just retaining his life but retaining his sanity and his sense of right and wrong, his compassion and his reasoning powers.

Editor’s note: Scott Camil is president of the Gainesville, Florida, chapter of Veterans for Peace, a veterans’ organization that aims to raise awareness about the costs of war. He is a former sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps and served four years in Vietnam; his decorations include two Purple Hearts, a Combat Action Ribbon, two Presidential Unit Citations and Good Conduct Medal.

(CNN) — As a veteran of combat in Vietnam, I am often asked about current wars. Recently I have been asked about soldiers posing with corpses or urinating on corpses in Afghanistan. The “patriotic” media wants us to understand what it is like to be a soldier in war, not to condone the conduct but to ask “who are we to judge?” They want to know about rules of war: “Are there rules about taking pictures with dead bodies?”

When I see these pictures, I am not shocked. I have similar pictures from Vietnam. And I’m in them. Such pictures are part of our warrior culture. Not everyone takes them, but they are not in any way unusual.

Look at the famous photos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The U.S. soldiers aren’t looking over their shoulders. None of them appears worried about being caught doing something wrong. They all look comfortable, often smiling for the camera. This tells me that the behavior captured in the photographs was S.O.P. (standard operating procedure).

What I find most disconcerting is all this attention to what is done to these dead bodies and absolutely no question or curiosity about why they are dead in the first place. No questions about why U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan at all.

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