My two cents

Some of you may have heard about a controversy going on here in Israel over a soldier's facebook account. She posted photos of her self smiling with blindfolded and tied up captives to document her time in the army.

A huge media kerfuffle has sprung up and she can't figure out what she did wrong.

She has been stripped of her rank and she feels let down by her military. And she still can't figure out what she did that was wrong.

In a way she is correct. Her military let her down. She is not the first, or dare say the last soldier to have taken a smiling picture with a captive or a dead enemy. Yet she alone has become a figurehead of behavior that is both repugnant and rampant, which many would like to think doesn't happen.

I chalk this up to her being very young and very, very stupid. At my advanced age, I have lived through times of great military shame and dishonour. I remember the Somalia affair vividly and how shocked I was that our soldiers, the good guys, could so something so awful and evil.

But as I get older, the soldiers stay the same age. What were many of today's soldiers doing during Somalia in 1993? Learning to tie their shoes.

What was I doing at 19? I was learning to cook, my mind was being opened to higher learning, I was becoming independent and I was growing up. I most certainly was not asked to question the moral correctness of what myself and all of my peers were being told to do and I most certainly was not put in such positions of power over another human being.

In the blush of youth, it is so easy to paint the world into good and bad, us and them. And I imagine the culture of every military is as such, because a soldier who pauses a moment to recognize the humanity of the man on the other side ends up dead.

But even at 18 or 19, these soldiers should know better than to strip the dignity of another. Part of growing up is realizing that everyone, even yourself, is capable of evil. If a society is going to put young people in such positions of power, they should prepare them for where they may meet their own devils.

Even if they have not come to recognize this aspect of themselves, the youth are very versed in pop culture. And everyone knows from the movies that only villains grin and gloat over the bodies of their captives.