Reliving a Story of Killing

Re “With Blood on Our Hands,” Commentary, Nov. 22: Frank Pierson does a grave disservice to the Marines he discusses in his first paragraph.

There is a difference between what he says about his own experience and what he says about the Marines: He knows the facts in his own case and doesn’t know them in the Marines’ case. He knows what he has heard and read before the dust has settled. Other information coming out through the Internet and otherwise indicates that the Marine was justified legally and morally far more than was Pierson in World War II.

Richard S. Hawley

Thousand Oaks

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This is a moving piece of writing. I only take issue where Pierson says, “I won’t judge those trash-talking Marines.” Calling them “trash-talking” Marines is judgment.

Mike Burns

Bakersfield

*

Pierson writes, “War demands that we be and act at our best and most noble,” and he’s absolutely right; doing that requires we make choices. Let’s see how the personal experience he presents measures up to that standard: He and his patrol, concerned about being discovered by Japanese troops, suddenly find a Japanese officer apparently asleep, his rifle by his side. There are choices available: Moving on, making no noise that might alert other Japanese troops; overpowering and capturing the sleeping man and returning to base; or killing him. Pierson chooses to kill.

Does he see his act within the context of choice, “military discipline, of humanity, of maturity” that he (rightly) preaches? No, instead he refers to and remembers his own discomfort with the consequences he suffers from his own choice: He senses his own death; a “sadness overcame” him; and the wife and children of the man he ordered killed “live on in my memory.”

He writes poetically of how burdened he is, but expresses none of the self-doubt obligated by an acceptance of accountability. Pierson misses a vital distinction: Discipline is pre-event -- the burdens of regret you endure come post-event. He never turns this inward, instead he expresses regret and discomfort about himself. He preaches “moral balance” and individual responsibility, then states that “our killing [was] a minor incident.” Then he says, incredibly, “we followed our orders.” Good God: the horrors of Nazism were the accumulation of “minor incidents” by individuals who “followed orders.”

Bob Denny

Tustin