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Mutilating Taliban dead: a first for the British army?
A British soldier has been accused of cutting off the fingers of enemy dead. If guilty, he wouldn't be the first
THE HEADLINE in Monday's Sun read 'Scot probed over digits stash'. Alas, it wasn't a scoop about a Tartan banker and his offshore bank account. Rather, it's the gruesome story of a British soldier alleged to have cut fingers off Taliban corpses during a recent tour of duty in Afghanistan.
The unnamed Scot is a member of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 5th Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Scotland, and the Sun quoted a military source as saying: "It seems he may have been chopping off the fingers of the dead Taliban fighters. There is a rumour that he may have wanted to keep them as souvenirs, which is macabre in the extreme."
The Royal Military Police's Special Investigation Branch (SIB) has opened an inquiry into the claims, which are believed to involve just one soldier during the regiment's tour of Helmand Province between September 2010 and April 2011.
While the Ministry of Defence refused to comment because of the ongoing investigation, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie appeared to have already found the accused guilty, saying: "If these sickening acts were the result of severe military trauma, then the army needs to act quickly to ensure that others are not suffering in this way."
And Clive Fairweather, a former SAS commander and honorary colonel of the Argylls' Cadet Force, also expressed his dismay at the revelations: "In all my time with the army, both with Scottish soldiers and with the SAS, I have never heard of anything like this happening."
While mutilating the enemy dead was once common practice among many warrior races (remember the Sioux and their scalping Custer's Seventh Cavalry), the British army has traditionally refrained from the practice, though there was a notorious incident during the Falklands War that perhaps has slipped Mr Fairweather's memory.
It was in June 1982 when the 3rd battalion The Parachute Regiment fought what was (and remains) the bloodiest battle by British troops since the Second World War.
The Paras lost nearly a quarter of its fighting strength as it fought with great courage and skill to oust the Argentine forces from the top of Mount Longdon. Sergeant Ian McKay was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, and there was talk in the immediate aftermath of the battle of a similar award for Corporal Stewart McLaughlin.
Throughout the battle McLaughin had demonstrated exceptional bravery and leadership, at one time rallying his men in the face of heavy enemy fire by standing on a rock and shouting, "Come on lads, I'm fucking bulletproof, follow me!"
Unfortunately for McLaughin he didn't prove to be shell proof, and he was killed in the final stages of the battle by an artillery round that tore through his back.
After the battle the battalion padre, Derek Heaver, was collecting the dead corporal's personal effects when he found in an ammunition pouch several pairs of Argentine ears. In the words of one of the Paras present, the padre "went apeshit".
In their account of the Battle for Mount Longdon, Green-Eyed Boys, authors Adrian Weale and Christian Jennings describe how the grim hoard deprived McLaughin of a military honour, possibly even the VC. His platoon commander, Lt Mark Cox, argued that a decoration was morally unacceptable, a view that was badly received by McLaughin's comrades. In their eyes the fact he'd cut the ears of several dead Argentines didn't detract from his outstanding courage during the battle.
As to why McLaughin did what he did, Weale and Jennings described a conversation with the dead man's father in which he said his son had discussed it with other members of his section on the eve of the battle.
"It was a way of establishing psychological dominance that the Argentines, a largely Latin nation, would understand," wrote the authors. "Just as bullfighters cut the ears from their victims, so would the Paras."
Gavin Mortimer is the author of 'Stirling's Men: the inside history of the SAS in WW2'. ·
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We've had twenty years or more of pretending that soldiers are a touchy-feely International Rescue, whose prime function is to save starving orphans and rescue pussycats.
This is of course, nonsense. We need soldiers to have martial spirit, in other words agressive, even ruthless. If you engender that kind of passion, such practices are inevitable. British soldiers are on record as gouging gold teeth from the mouths of dying and dead Japanese in World War Two, none of this is new. We can't have it both ways: if we need our men to kill, they must have their culture of violence.
Of course it is a mad war anyway run by people from thousands of miles away in the hope of picking up votes. No surprise that the odd freak collects fingers of the dead. If he had collected locks of hair from the thousands killed or the tears of the wounded , it would not reach print. Dead fingers are wagging at us for a war which should never have started.
In view of the illusion of paradise with 72 virgins that seems to motivate the Taliban fighters, I would have thought it more dissuasive to cut off their genitals.
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The Indians could not understand why the whitemen were mutilating the dead. But, somewhere along the line as the Indians were headed towards extinction, they adopted the practice of scalping as retribution.
I would also like to point out that most of the people who stole the lands from the Indians were British descendents which started during the early colonization period, a custom no doubt they learned from the motherland which was bent on colonizing the world - remember the quote, the sun never sets upom the English empire. I could also go on about England's colonization of India and the uncountable murders committed there by British troops.
Cutting off fingers, while a dispicable act by a moron, just extends the long historical pattern of mutilations practiced by the colonizing west European countries.