FORWARD OPERATING BASE JACKSON, Afghanistan — It is a conversation, the military surgeon said, that every Marine has with his corpsman, the buddy who is first to treat him if he is wounded by an insurgent’s bomb.

The Marine says, “‘If I lose my manhood, then I don’t want to live through it,’“ according to Navy Lt. Richard Whitehead, surgeon for 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, which is fighting in one of the most treacherous combat areas of Afghanistan.

“They ask us not to save them if their ‘junk’ gets blown off,” said Whitehead, using a slang term for genitals. “Usually, we laugh. We joke with them about it. At the same time, you know that you’re going to treat them anyway.”

This is a world of fear, resolve and dark humor that is mostly hidden from accounts of the human cost of the war in Afghanistan. American troops who patrol on foot in bomb-laced areas know they might lose a leg, or two, if they step in the wrong place. But for young men in their prime, most unmarried and without children, the prospect of losing their sexual organs seems even worse.

Whitehead said: “It’s one of the areas we can’t put a tourniquet on.”
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Several months into the deployment, the Marines in Sangin were issued so-called “blast panties” or “ballistic boxers,” British-made underwear made of densely woven silk that ends above the knee. The black garb resembles cycling shorts and can’t stop shrapnel, but it protects against infection and the tight fit compresses flesh and offsets the impact of a blast wave, which separates skin from muscle.

“We’ll get guys in here with all of the skin on their legs pushed up like a pair of loose pants around their waist,” said Whitehead, of Pascagoula, Miss.. “All that tissue is going to die. With the compression down around their knees, the blast wave stops.”

Early on, some Marines complained the heavy underwear was hot and uncomfortable. It is now mandatory clothing, deemed as essential as gloves, helmets, plastic eyewear and other protective gear. Before a patrol, squad leaders check to make sure their men have it on.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The secretary of the Army has released a report detailing improvements made at Arlington National Cemetery more than a year after embarrassing revelations at the burial ground.

Secretary John M. McHugh released the report Tuesday and wrote a letter to lawmakers. He said the new management team at the cemetery has made progress in reconciling decades’ worth of paper records with physical graveside inspections. He said new policies have been put in place and equipment and training were modernized.

McHugh said mismanagement no longer exists after he ousted the leadership last year.

The Army’s inspector general office said last year it had found hundreds of discrepancies between burial maps and grave sites as well as a host of other problems.

Six years ago, Congress tried cracking down on rape in the military. Prompted by disturbing reports of sexual assaults in military academies and war zones, lawmakers rewrote the rules. They wanted to protect victims and help prosecutors.

Now it's clear that the effort backfired.

The politically attractive but poorly understood legal changes have incited courtroom confusion, judicial frustration and constitutional conflict. Extensive interviews and a McClatchy Newspapers review of thousands of pages of court documents and internal studies find a congressionally caused crisis of military justice that few civilians know anything about.

The rewritten sexual assault law puts judges "in an impossible position," the top military appellate court warned. Military lawyers find it "cumbersome and confusing," a Pentagon task force noted. It leads to "unwarranted acquittals," Defense Department officials added. And some judges call it unconstitutional.

"The law is an abomination as it is now written," said Charles Gittins, a former military judge advocate who is now a defense attorney.
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The problem was that the rewritten law had shifted the burden of proof involving consent, appeals court judges concluded...The defendant had the burden to prove that the alleged victim was capable of consenting. Under the Constitution, though, it's the prosecution that's supposed to shoulder the burden of proof.

This "results in an unconstitutional burden shift to the accused," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces said of the new law in its February 2011 decision.

Disturbing footage of Apache attack helicopters killing people in Afghanistan is being shown to frontline British soldiers in "Kill TV nights" designed to boost morale, a television documentary will reveal.

The discovery of the practice comes in the wake of the damning verdict of the Baha Mousa inquiry into the conduct of some in the military. It casts fresh questions over the conduct of soldiers deployed abroad and has provoked a furious response from peace campaigners.

Andrew Burgin from Stop the War last night described it as the "ultimate degradation of British troops", comparing it to the desensitisation to death of US soldiers in the final stages of the Vietnam War.

The footage, seen by The Independent on Sunday, shows ground troops at the British headquarters in Helmand province, Camp Bastion, gathered for a get-together said to be called "Kill TV night".

Described as an effort to boost morale among soldiers, it shows an Apache helicopter commander admitting possible errors of judgement and warning colleagues not to disclose what they have seen. "This is not for discussion with anybody else; keep it quiet about what you see up here," he says in the film. "It's not because we've done anything wrong. But we might have done."

Last night, the MoD confirmed the speaker to be Warrant Officer Class 2 Andy Farmer, who is based with the Apache squadron in Wattisham, Suffolk.

Much of the footage is along the lines of the now infamous video of a US Apache helicopter strike on civilians in Baghdad in 2007, first released on WikiLeaks last year. In one clip an Afghan woman is targeted after a radio dialogue between pilots refers to her as a "snake with tits".

Another clip from a recent "Kill TV" night shows the cross-hair of an Apache helicopter taking aim at an insurgent. WOII Farmer gives a running commentary: "OK, so he's walking along... then thinks... I'm gonna go off and get my 70 vessel [sic] virgins 'cause daylight's coming quite quick."

As the missile hits the target and kills the person, he says "Goodnight princess", adding "this is where you see he's actually had the clothes ripped off him by the blast".

He defends the decision to celebrate the deaths of Afghans. "People look at it and say you know... young lads are laughing at the enemy being killed," he says. "Well, I don't know if the Taliban do something similar but I'm sure they rejoice when they kill one of us."