My Lai to Baghdad

Forty years ago, on March 16, 1968, US troops murdered several hundred civilians in the South Vietnamese villages of My Lai and My Khe. Most of the American soldiers had been drafted. The rest had entered the war voluntarily on anti-communist, patriotic, or humanist premises.

Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations Into the My Lai Incident, III, 6.

The twentieth century was marked by crimes committed by soldiers who fought on idealist notions - nationalist, communist, anti-communist, religiously fundamentalist, and racist - or because they were drafted into both World Wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and several wars in Africa.

The twenty-first century now witnesses the return of the mercenary, the soldier for money who fought the wars of early modernity. In Iraq private military companies provide various services for the Western coalition. They are also involved in the actual fighting and commit murders on civilians, for example in Baghdad on September 16, 2007 ("F.B.I. Says Guards Killed Iraqis Without Cause," The New York Times [Online], Nov. 14, 2007, acc. March 14, 2008).

These late-modern mercenaries are concerning the concerned in the West. Jeremy Scahill writes a gloomy book on Blackwater Worldwide, one of the companies in US service in Iraq. Süddeutsche.de bemoans that the same company is using German weapons ("Deutsche Maschinenpistolen für US-Söldner," Feb. 19, 2008, acc. March 14, 2008).

What is the point of the discussion if the crimes committed by mercenaries are the same crimes that have been committed by idealists and conscripted soldiers before?

Isn't the idea of a soldier for money comforting? Isn't there the chance that he or she will quit if the money stops appearing worth the trouble? There is little chance for an idealist to quit and there is no chance for a conscripted soldier at all.

Howsoever, the mercenaries of early modernity were less of a problem when they were soldiers for money than when they became soldiers for nothing. Mercenaries trashed Central Europe during the Thirty Years War when their employers stopped paying them.

Likewise the contemporary mercenaries will become a problem after the end of their contracts. Regular soldiers become regular veterans - national heroes or heroes of whatever their cause has been. Today's American mercenaries will not enjoy the ideal and material benefits of regular soldiers. If re-integration of regulars is a challenge, that of mercenaries will be double.