Is the morale among the American troops in Iraq really high?

Question

When I was there in 04-05 it looked pretty low to me. Now the place is even worse and all I am hearing is the troops are happy with the mission and support it. I cant ever remember hearing someone saying that while I was there.

Answer 1

I recently spent 18 months working in Iraq and had contact with the troops practically every day. Of the hundreds of troops I spoke with I can recall only a handful who displayed low morale. Normally it had more to do with problems at home than accomplishing their military mission. I ate meals with, traveled in convoys with, took flights in helicopters and fixed wing aircraft with and worked out at the gym with the troops. I spoke with soldiers holding the rank of private to Major General (2 stars) and every rank in-between.
The know how important the mission in Iraq is and want to complete it successfully. And yes, they want to return home, but not until they complete their duty. Having served as an army officer, I have experience in sensing the level of commitment a soldier has and not just accepting what they might tell me. The troops I had the privilege of meeting were dedicated professionals.

Answer 2

Absolutely - it is very high. Even though they are having tough times - with the fighting and the heat etc. They believe in what they are doing and morale is very high. They now have a sense of winning and coming home in the near future.

Answer 3

I believe that the morale was boosted by the killing of those 2 soldiers recently. I think that the soldiers are now more focused than ever to find the scums who did this to them.

Answer 4

i think it will get better as things improve and all the guerrilla warfare dies down. i wouldn't expect every person there to be happy, it is very stressful and very hot.
i just don't understand why the insurgents keep fighting. don't they understand that trying to kill ppl will not make peace and only more war for them?

Answer 5

Probably because you're one of those people that could have everything you ever wanted available to you at the snap of your fingers and STILL not be happy.

Sucks to be a liberal with no purpose to fulfill your life, doesn't it?

Answer 6

Ordinary Iraqis--many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein--are attacking the American occupation army more than 35 times a day in the Baghdad area alone. Morale is low. American soldiers say "We shouldn't be here and we should never have been sent here,". Maybe you can tell them: why were you there?
The Stars and Stripes, the American military's own newspaper, reported this month that one third of the soldiers in Iraq suffered from low morale. And is it any wonder, that being the case, that US forces in Iraq are shooting down the innocent, kicking and brutalising prisoners, trashing homes and--eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds of Iraqis--stealing money from houses they are raiding? No, this is not Vietnam--where the Americans sometimes lost 3,000 men in a month--nor is the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble. Not yet. And they remain light years away from the butchery of Saddam's henchmen. But human-rights monitors, civilian occupation officials and journalists--not to mention Iraqis themselves--are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the American military occupiers. Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys under attack--or who merely pass the scene of an American raid--are being gunned down with abandon. US official "inquiries" into these killings routinely result in either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their rules of engagement"--rules that the Americans will not disclose to the public. The rot comes from the top. Even during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, US forces declined to take responsibility for the innocents they killed. "We do not do body counts," General Tommy Franks announced. So there was no apology for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when they bombed a residential suburb in the vain hope of killing Saddam. When US special forces raided a house in the very same area four months later--hunting for the very same Iraqi leader--they killed six civilians, including a 14-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman, and only announced, four days later, that they would hold an "inquiry". Not an investigation, you understand, nothing that would suggest there was anything wrong in gunning down six Iraqi civilians; and in due course the "inquiry" was forgotten--as it was no doubt meant to be--and nothing has been heard of it again. Again, during the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster bombs on villages outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a butcher's shop of chopped-up corpses. Film of babies cut in half during the raid was not even transmitted by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The Pentagon then said there were "no indications" cluster bombs had been dropped at Hillah--even though Sky TV found some unexploded and brought them back to Baghdad. The absence of remorse--or rather absence of responsibility—is evident ,in a slum suburb of Baghdad called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men had run a new American checkpoint--a roll of barbed wire tossed across a road before dawn one morning in July--and US troops had opened fire at the car. Indeed, they fired so many bullets that the vehicle burst into flames. And while the dead or dying men were burned inside, the Americans who had set up the checkpoint simply boarded their armoured vehicles and left the scene. They never even bothered to visit the hospital mortuary to find out the identities of the men they killed--an obvious step if they believed they had killed "terrorists"--and inform their relatives. Scenes like this are being repeated across Iraq daily.
Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian organisations are protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of the US army even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their own role in killing civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork said. "But it is really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths." Human Rights Watch has counted 94 Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in the capital. The organisation also criticised American forces for humiliating prisoners, not least by their habit of placing their feet on the heads of prisoners. Some American soldiers are now being trained in Jordan--by Jordanians--in the "respect" that should be accorded to Iraqi civilians and about the culture of Islam. About time.
But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a licence to kill. Not a single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians--even when the fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities. No action has been taken, for instance, over the soldier who fired a single shot through the window of an Italian diplomat's car, killing his translator, in northern Iraq. Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim protesters in Fallujah in April. (Captain Cirino was not involved.) Nor against the troops who shot dead 11 more protesters in Mosul. Sometimes, the evidence of low morale mounts over a long period. In one Iraqi city, for example, the "Coalition Provisional Authority"--which is what the occupation authorities call themselves--have instructed local money changers not to give dollars for Iraqi dinars to occupation soldiers: too many Iraqi dinars had been stolen by troops during house raids. Repeatedly, in Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit, Mosul and Fallujah Iraqis have told me that they were robbed by American troops during raids and at checkpoints. Unless there is a monumental conspiracy on a nationwide scale by Iraqis, some of these reports must bear the stamp of truth.
American troops in Iraq understand neither their war nor the people whose country they are occupying? Terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the difference?