The New Republic has published the results of their investigation into the events described by Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp. The editors say,
we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp's company, and all corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously.
Except they didn't.
The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp's on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation [mocking a disfigured woman] occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq. When presented with this important discrepancy, Beauchamp acknowledged his error. We sincerely regret this mistake.
So just to be clear, the first line of the original piece stated that Beauchamp "saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq." That turns out now to be a blatant lie--and one that Beauchamp stuck with after THE WEEKLY STANDARD first asked Foer to reveal the base at which this incident occurred. Further, TNR says in this new statement that "Shock Troops" "was about the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war." But now we find out that Beauchamp hadn't even gotten to Iraq when this incident allegedly took place. He was, in fact, a morally stunted sadist before he ever set foot in Iraq.
After recounting this tale, Beauchamp asks a rhetorical question:
Am I a monster? I have never thought of myself as a cruel person....I was relieved to still
be shocked by my own cruelty-to still be able to recognize that the things we soldiers found funny were not, in fact, funny.
Relieved that he was still shocked at his own cruelty? After his tour in Germany and the long flight to Kuwait? This whole essay was meant to demonstrate the damage war does to our own troops--but if this incident occurred at all, it only proves that Beauchamp was a vile creep to begin with.
The New Republic editors claim to have "granted Beauchamp a pseudonym so that he could write honestly and candidly about his emotions and experiences" in Iraq. The pseudonym seems to have had the opposite effect, enabling him to write dishonestly and less than candidly about the monstrous behavior displayed before he ever saw a shot fired in anger.
So we're back to where we started: Has anyone ever seen a badly disfigured woman at Camp Beuhring, or any other camp in the Middle East which might subsequently be revealed as the scene of the crime?
More to come . . .
