After the L.A. Times recently published photos showing U.S. soldiers posing triumphantly with the desecrated bodies—or in the current case, body parts—I received numerous requests for media interviews, since people  wanted to know why so many presumably good American boys regularly engage in such clearly bad behavior.

I suggested that there are probably many answers, some of them relatively easy to grasp. Thus, many of these soldiers are 19 and 20 years old, little more than children. Although they have been invested with awesome killing power and subjected to serious training as to what behavior is acceptable and what is not, the fact remains that especially under conditions of high stress, very young adults (perhaps males in particular) are more driven by their hormones than by higher thought processes. Indeed, it is precisely their lack of “cerebral inhibition” that makes …

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