From One Who Knows

We're a Band of Brothers, Not a Gang of Louts - The most honest writing I've found.

"...The first time a Royal Marine goes into battle, that's the initiation. When the machine-guns open up and the bombardment starts, with the mortar rounds landing behind you and the aerial support raining bombs, nothing in your life has prepared you for the terror. It goes deeper than fear for your life: hell is all around and it is trying to claw its way inside.

Then the training kicks in. You do what you've learned, operating your weapon, staying alive, keeping to the rules drummed into you during the 30-week course that earned you a green beret. You fight and you kill and you see the dismembered bodies of women and children, and you are still only 18 years old. But now you have been through the initiation. You survived the test. Some of your friends won't have. You don't understand how you feel about everything you have been through, and you know you'll never be able to describe it to anyone who hasn't been there.

All the men in the video had completed a tour of duty in Iraq, despite inaccurate claims that they were raw recruits. They had been through an initiation more intense and binding than anything that can happen in any other walk of life. They've been through hellfire..."

"...There's a moment on the tape when the situation goes out of control, and a man is knocked unconscious by an NCO. That's bad, and against the whole spirit of the Marines. But what the news has not shown is what happens next, where the NCO is grabbed and restrained by two Royals. Everyone present knew the man had gone too far, and he quickly saw it, too.

Outsiders might think the men were naked to make them weak or humiliate them. In fact, nakedness makes us equals. A band of commandos have nothing to hide from each other, because nothing can be hidden: in battle the real man is laid bare. 'Naked bar' parties, where you don't get a drink if you don't strip, are the norm - you're stripping yourself of your ego and your bull. I've been stark naked with men who are closer than brothers to me, in the Arctic wastes of Norway, cold enough to freeze my balls off but also profoundly happy.

The media's over-reaction stems from ignorance. Most ex-Marines I've asked are fuming, not at the video but at comments like that in the Times: 'It looked like the worst kind of loutish bullying, fuelled by alcohol, with a sinister homo-erotic streak running through it. The pictures were reminiscent of Abu Ghraib..."
Read the rest.