Sorry, I just can't buy into this bravo sierra. You're talking stuff that should have gotten a commanding officer cashiered or executed in any kind of military organziation with a viable reporting structure.

If this happened, all the men involved and their officers, if they had been aware of it and did nothing, should have stretched hemp.

I don't buy any of this volatile hun-hating propaganda that would have been more at home on a French propaganda poster circa 1915. All that's missing is playing badminton with babies and bayonets.

There have always been instances of atrocities in war. Renegade US troops even today appear to have perp'ed similar events in Iraq. Yes, the men were animals in either case, but I have to wonder if there was more of a racial component in the former instance. I don't think any US military commander ever condoned, much less ordered, such behavior as a punishment on the populace.

Bottom line, fallen people do fallen things. I don't think color has anything to do with the heinousness of the crime, do you? Maybe that makes things worse to the Southern mind, sort of like the hate crimes mentality, where it's not so much what you did, which was bad enough, but what you were thinking, or what you were, when you did it.

Jamie