Abstract
The rather long and sub-clausal title of this book creates a presumption about the story it tells. Here, it is hinted, is an American tragedy with resonance beyond the specifics of the case. The book can carry this weight because it offers a sociological analysis of the reasons for, and the implications of, the involvement of US Army Corporal Jeremy Morlock in the murder of three Afghan civilians in 2010. The story is able to take on this wider resonance for two reasons. First of all it is written by a sociologist who was given a special place in the proceedings. Mestrovic acted as an expert witness for Morlock at his trial in 2011 and sought to persuade the judge that Morlock’s actions were social, not psychological (Mestrovic doesn’t talk about public sociology, he does it, albeit maybe not in a way recognized by the proponents of the largely fruitless debate). Second, and Mestrovic does not pick up on this point, Morlock is far from the first young American to have committed war crimes. One immediately thinks of Calley of My Lai notoriety. Neither will Morlock be the last.
At his courtmartial in March 2011, Morlock pleaded guilty to three charges of premeditated murder. He explained how as a member of an unofficial ‘kill team’ he had participated in the murder of civilians in faked combat situations. He was photographed playing with the corpses and implicated in collecting body parts as trophies. These activities were instigated and stage managed by an officer in Morlock’s unit. Morlock was sentenced to 24 years and dishonourably discharged from the US army. However, he will almost certainly get parole after seven years as a result of a plea bargain.
Unfortunately, Mestrovic gives few details of what Morlock did. His concern is rather to understand why he did it. Consequently the book often appears to be circling around a grisly truth it cannot admit. Morlock is presented as a largely passive intersection of micro and macro social processes rather than as a morally conscious – and culpable – actor in his own right. Morlock is ‘over-socialized’. This is a story of the damage done to young American men whereas from a different perspective it is more significantly a story of the harm sometimes done by young Americans.
According to Mestrovic, Morlock and the other killers carried out the murders because, thanks to ambiguities in the strategic aims of the American forces in Afghanistan, they were in a condition of anomie. At the macro level the ambiguity revolved around the replacement of the traditional strategy of counter-guerrilla combat with the new doctrine of counter-insurgency (COIN). The former meant killing the enemy and the latter means having tea with them. One of the fascinating strands of Mestrovic’s story is his revelation of the extent to which the official COIN doctrine was neither adequately explained nor enforced. Morlock’s brigade commander was known to be hostile to COIN, and yet he was allowed to continue in post and to pursue matters according to his own, counter-guerrilla, predilections. In short, Morlock was thrown into a situation of normlessness.
This normlessness filtered down to the micro level. Mestrovic shows Morlock’s unit to be one in which the normal standards of military behaviour had largely broken down. Senior officers were rarely paid their honorific dues and uniforms tended to become idiosyncratic variations on a theme. In one telling example Mestrovic shows how regulations which might have saved soldiers were disregarded by them. There is a regulation requiring soldiers to wear seat belts when they are travelling in armoured vehicles. This is because if the vehicle is blown up by a roadside bomb their movement and therefore potential injuries will be minimized. In Morlock’s unit this regulation was largely ignored.
The implication of Mestrovic’s discussion should be clear. Morlock murdered because he was in a condition of anomie. This anomie was the result of structural and strategic failings by the American military and, therefore, the accusation which Morlock’s mother made after the trial – her son had been made a scapegoat – was valid.
The great strength of this approach is of course that it pounds one more nail into the coffin of the claim that bad deeds are performed by intrinsically bad men. Morlock was an ordinary American in anomic circumstances, and this is why he did what he did. But here also lies the problem. Not every American soldier did what Morlock did. So what made the difference? Why Morlock indeed? Mestrovic does not answer this conundrum because he cannot. If psychological explanations are rejected it is necessary to turn to sociological ones. This is what Mestrovic does, powerfully. But then the specificity of Morlock gets lost – why him? Ultimately, Mestrovic can only really go down the scapegoat route.
This intriguing and indeed dramatic book about an American tragedy raises the possibility of a tragedy for the pursuit of sociology. Does the sociological explanation of someone like Morlock necessarily imply a reduction of their own moral culpability? Is sociology fated to mitigate personal moral responsibility?