Marine A’s sentence must consider wider social context

Michael White makes the case for leniency in the sentencing a marine sergeant for the murder of an Afghan prisoner

The actions of Marine A that led to his court martial and conviction for the murder of an Afghan prisoner were both shocking and wrong. From what little the public could hear and see of the evidence, the verdict was correct. Does that mean he should face the maximum sentence or leniency? In my opinion, the latter. It’s what we would wish for ourselves – and we sent him to Afghanistan.

“War is hell,” as General William Tecumseh Sherman, a great soldier of the American civil war, once observed. What the forces are asked to do on our behalf remains pretty hellish and must often – always? – scar the survivors physically or mentally for life. That is not to say it is not also fascinating, exhilarating (military memoirs like The Junior Officers’ Reading Club make this abundantly clear) and sometimes very necessary.

Whether Britain’s 12-year war in Afghanistan is necessary is open to debate. But political and military strategy is not the responsibility of a 39-year-old Marine sergeant, even a battle-hardened veteran with experience in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. The backbone of any army, senior non-commissioned officers do what they are told to do to the best of their often considerable ability.

But anyone who has read war books, let alone experienced conflict first-hand (as I have not), knows that when someone is trying to kill you, fear is a component of the adrenaline rush. Experienced soldiers should know better than to shoot their prisoners, and most don’t do so. But it happens in all wars and all forces, including ours.

In Naples ’44, his memoir of being a British intelligence officer in Italy in the second world war, Norman Lewis describes how he had interviewed enough American soldiers to have concluded they had sometimes been ordered to shoot German prisoners, but that plenty of farm boys from Tennessee were troubled by this because they knew it was wrong.

Not just the Americans, of course. The British army in Iraq is still embroiled in civil and criminal proceedings. Torture and death inflicted on Kenyan prisoners during the brutal Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya is only now coming into full daylight; and the counterinsurgency in Malaya and other retreat-from-empire stories are replete with such incidents.

Secret files from the second world war – including the alleged torture of elite prisoners for information at the “London Cage” in Kensington? – are still under lock and key. One of the charges laid against the notorious publisher Robert Maxwell, a penniless Czech refugee who ended the war with a Military Cross, included the shooting of prisoners. His biographer Tom Bower quotes him saying as much.

Of course, Maxwell’s “take no prisoners” attitude explicitly arose from hearing that his mother and sister had been executed as “hostages” by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. I think we can all follow that, though …read more