Mindless Killing Machines - Not

Michelle Malkin and neo-neocon (or "Neo" as we call her when she's wearing her fashionable sunglasses) have posts up excoriating Jane Fonda for her recent commentary that American troops had been brainwashed into killing machines, and so were relatively blameless for all the atrocities they were committing.

No, really.

"Starting with the Vietnam War we began training soldiers differently," the anti-American actress says in an email to the Washington Post.

Fonda claims she learned of the policy switch in "secret meetings" she had with military psychologists "who were really worried about what was happening to our combat personnel."

One doctor, she insists, told her U.S. troops had been deliberately trained to be "killing machines."

"This began," Fonda maintained, "because the military discovered that in World War II and Korea, [U.S.] soldiers weren't killing enough."

"So they changed training procedures" to teach troops how to commit atrocities.

It's not for a moment worth taking anything Jane Fonda says about anything more serious than movies, cellulite, and celebrity culture with any seriousness whatsoever. What, in her entire personal history, would demonstrate any measure of historical or political awareness?

The fact that this woman would bloviate about this in the middle of a war where our troops take immense personal risk to avoid killing where they easily could; a war with less collateral damage than any war in recent history; a war where our enemies commit atrocities and run schools to condition their young jihadi to do so - unremarked by Ms. Fonda, unsurprisingly - should remove whatever shred of seriousness people may have foolishly granted her.

Let me offer Ms. Fonda some relatively simple facts.

I'm not a soldier and have never been one. I have shot guns competitively, and trained in places where those who train soldiers train, sometimes alongside those trainers.

The exercises we've done - in clearing houses, crossing streets and moving through neighborhoods while engaging targets simulating enemies - are, I'm told, very similar to what troops undergoing training for fighting in urban terrain are given. In fact, they are probably more intensive than what a typical infantry rifleman would get.

One interesting thing that is a factor in all these exercises - not shooting certain targets is as important as shooting others. In my first, untrained exercise in Gunsite's training house, I did what a lot of novice shooters do when they are adrenalized and ill-trained. I shot everything in the house, often several times. Clint Smith was my training officer, and his sad, laconic question when he stopped me mid-drill - "Marc, why in the world did you shoot Bozo the Clown?" - has pretty much stuck with me.

The reality of it is that someone who is well-trained is likely to do two things that pretty much everyone - including Ms. Fonda, if she'd taken time to actually learn anything - would think are good things. They teach you to shoot the bad folks better and faster, and equally importantly, not to shoot the good folks.

I've been through maybe a dozen similar exercises since then, and I'm happy to say that I've never shot at a "no shoot" target again. Why? because of that awful "killing machine" training that I went through.

Go read any of the milblogs, or ask anyone who has contact with any of our troops. Go read some history about what war was like in the recent past, or what it's like in other parts of the world. Then realize that the restraint they take, and the risk they undergo to exercise that restraint, far exceeds that of any other army in history. We are not brainwashing our troops into mindless killing machines anywhere except in the fevered imagination of celebrity salons.

I'll also note that Fonda is largely basing her fantasy on the work of LTC Dave Grossman, author of "On Killing," a book I like a lot and which I think makes some interesting points. I also believe that some of the core premises of the book - based as they are on SLA Marshall's work on World War II - are potentially significantly flawed.