Dead-checking

Just found this, a photocopied page from the Australian magazine Arena 77 (June-July 2005), about dead-checking, which you don’t see portrayed in too many war movies…

Evan Wright (RIP), wrote Generation Kill, which was made into a very good miniseries.

To be crystal clear – If I were a soldier deployed to a war zone like that, I absolutely would be dead-checking, to improve my odds of being alive and getting back to “the World.” There’s a great documentary about a guy who was in Vietnam (who later went on to be heavily involved in anti-War stuff down in Florida, iirc who said just this about his time in country. He said that after an attack on his firebase he stared into the faces of all his dead friends and swore that from then on he would just kill everything and everyone who posed even a theoretical threat. (Obviously the problem lies in the “distinction” between an active firefight and the in-cold-blood-executions-for-the-lulz-bodycount stuff that Special Forces clearly got up to in Afghanistan…)

Yes, soldiers commit atrocities. What about the assholes who send them there?