Gutfeld: Great advice on fighting ISIS
Top U.S. officer's warning ISIS to surrender or be shot, bombed and beaten to death 'raises eyebrows.'
Surrender or die. In a gentle reminder that war is not a game of nude Yahtzee, a military leader told troops that if ISIS fighters don't surrender, beat them to death with a shovel. I think I need to lie down. He says kill the enemy? What are we, monsters?
In his Facebook post, senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of joint chiefs of staff Army Command Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell, he wrote this, "If they surrender, we will safeguard them to their detainee facility cell, provide them with chow, a cot and due process. However, if they choose not to surrender, then we will kill them with extreme prejudice whether that be through security force assistance by dropping bombs on them, shooting them in the face" -- that's never good -- "or beating them to death with our entrenching tools."
So finally something on Facebook that isn't about your kid's birthday poem.
If this offends you, then you are as thick as an entrenchment tool because it's that sensibility that wins wars. The problem is, we put guys like Troxell out there to hold the line against the world's monsters, then we jump on our high horses when we actually catch a glimpse of what they have to do. Any objection to this boils down to, we kill bad guys in war? I had no idea.
Of course you did. You just want to pretend you don't, so you can hold the moral high ground. As the saying goes, it's easy to be a holy man on a mountain or in the Hollywood Hills.
So we could use more of this advice, not less. And if this man is punished for it, I might have to break out my shovel.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox