NAGO
Sherman's March to the Sea:
A war crime, writ large, by any sane man's definitions. Sherman's men burned civilian homes, slaughtered livestock, and left an entire region of their non-combatant countrymen destitute and exposed to the elements and ravages of winter. Any "southron" knows the stories by heart, because they're still engraved, deeply, by the points of bayonets, on the soul of the South.
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LANGUAGE
I plead guilty. I am guilty of an egregious sin of omission, for which I owe every reader of this blog (especially those SF veterans I know are reading it and critiquing their young protege), a profound apology. I am guilty of the sin of hubris. You see, one of the critical lessons pounded into young Special Forces candidates' heads during the Q-Course (at least when I went through JFKSWCS, and I assume still) is that, besides all the cool tactical training and gunfighter schooling, you have a moral obligation to make sure the host nation (HN) forces you are training/advising know, understand, and practice, the Law of Land Warfare. I placed too much faith in the inherent morality of the American patriot movement.
There is an old cliche that there are no rules in a war. That is, to put it as mildly as I am capable, utter nonsense. Every war, from Cain and Abel's sibling rivalry, until today, has been moderated by rules. Too often, throughout history, of course, there have been acts committed that, anyone but Satan himself would agree were crimes against humanity. Even our own nation's military has committed these. The legal crutch of precedence however, does not justify these acts, for they are unjustifiable. It certainly does not justify future actions of immorality by any so-called Liberty Resistance Movement, whose sole claim to legitimacy can be said to be the moral high ground.
There are seven basic legal principles that are supposed to bind any and all actions by contemporary U.S. military forces. They are:
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