Hometown Hero: He's Only a Pawn in Their Game

The story is powerful mythology:

The brave young soldier, gravely wounded trying to save the lives of his comrades during the Battle of Fallujah, orders military doctors to cut off his finger rather than destroy his wedding ring as they operate to save his life. "But that would mean destroying my wedding ring," he said. "My wife is the strongest woman I know. She's basically running two people's lives since I've been gone. I don't think I could ever repay her or show her how grateful ... how much I love my wife, my soul mate."



In a cruel twist of fate, during the chaos of the battlefield surgical hospital the ring is lost anyway. But just a month later, recuperating at home, Marine Lance Cpl. David Battle, gets a Christmas surprise when a local merchant replaces the ring and treats L/Cpl Battle and his young wife ... they were married just weeks before the Battle of Fallujah ... to a limousine ride and night in the Presidential Suite of a local hotel.



L/Cpl Battle ... who, it turns out, was a high school football star ... says "I always wanted to give something back to my country because the country has been so good to my mother and father," and then makes personal appearances at Toys for Tots fundraisers around town.

No one in the media, not even the foreign press, has done anything but take this story for granted. There isn't a reporter or editor willing question the story of the brave citizen soldier (high school football hero no less!) who was willing to make such a sacrifice.



No one has asked what kind of an unethical doctor would agree to amputate a finger to save a ring, even if the patient requested it, especially given that the patient was in shock and already anesthetized.



And no one is willing to ask about the convenient plot twist where the precious ring is lost. Perhaps misplacing the ring is understandable, but no one has wondered how the dramatic episode could make such an impression that someone took the time to make a record of the soldier's words of devotion to his young wife, and yet still misplaced the physical object that was at the point of it all.



Let's face it, this plot-line wouldn't hold up as the next Law and Order episode. Yet people who watch that show every week are buying L/Cpl Battle's story lock, stock, and barrel.



These are the things that ought to make citizens skeptical about what their government says, and especially about what it says at a time of war. Without taking away from L/Cpl Battle's personal integrity at all, this story has become a powerful piece of propaganda, and the young soldier merely a pawn in a much larger game.



And as propaganda this is a beauty. It is a plausible story that underscores the propagandist's message while discouraging rational examination. Somewhere there is a surgeon or a medical technician of some sort who knows what really happened in the operating room and where the ring went, but as the story grows it becomes less and less likely that he or she will ever come forward with the rest of the story.



There are three forces that demand stories like L/Cpl Battle's and continue to create them and use people like him for different purposes:



First, to convince soldiers to do the things they must do in battle requires deep psychological conditioning, something akin to brainwashing. Legends like the one about L/Cpl Battle are powerful tools to help coerce ordinary human beings to commit the inhuman acts that are commonplace in battle.



Second, another kind brainwashing on a mass scale is required to convince an entire society to accommodate and support war. We start with lies, preferably really big ones. Who can forget Condoleeza Rice's "mushroom cloud" comments? Then we bolster them with carefully constructed stories. Remember, early in the war, the story of Pvt Jessica Lynch who bravely fought the enemy when she innocently took a wrong turn into a bad neighborhood in Baghdad after dark and then had to be liberated in another act of valiantry from a hospital that the dark enemy had seized? And now we have L/Cpl David Battle (is his last name a mere coincidence?), gallantly sacrificing his finger for the love of his wife (a cynic might note that the sacrifice of life and limb for mere physical possessions is an even more appropriately American trait).



Third, and an obviously unpatriotic point of view, each time an individual in battle decides to pull the trigger he or she makes a moral judgment, one for which he or she pays moral consequences. They make that moral judgment each and every moment they are involved in war, which sooner or later causes them to become morally ambivalent (how else can you explain the torture of fellow human beings at Abu Gahrib?). One of the things that keeps these individuals from coming completely unglued when they get back home is the mythology that we build up with stories like the one about L/Cpl Battle.



No doubt L/Cpl Battle will quickly fade from the scene, as did Pvt Lynch. When she was interviewed recently Pvt Lynch was remarkably forthcoming and guileless. She freely admits that she has little memory of the events of that evening or the following weeks. She thinks the popular story could be true, and since she's been told the story over and over she thinks it might be true, but she does not really remember it that way ... all of the earmarks of successful propaganda.



A few months from now L/Cpl Battle will still be missing his finger and will still be living with the memories of the things he had to do in Fallujah, but the propaganda will have worked its magic and we still will not have asked the important questions about what really happened, and who put L/Cpl Battle in that awful position and why.



San Diego Union - SoCal Marine Who Sacrificed Finger for Ring Gets New Wedding Band



WIS-TV (SC) - SoCal Marine Sacrifices Finger for Wedding Ring