Green Beret Who Hit Afghan Child Rapist Should Be Reinstated, Lawmakers Say by Christine Hauser, New York Times
Lawmakers are calling on the Pentagon to fully reinstate a decorated United States Army sergeant whose career status is under review after he hit an American-backed Afghan militia officer for raping a boy.
The Special Forces member, Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, helped to beat up the militia commander, Abdul Rahman, in 2011 after he abducted a boy and kept him chained to his bed as a sex slave.
Sergeant Martland, who was on his second deployment with the Green Berets in Afghanistan and who received a Bronze Star for his actions during a Taliban ambush, later wrote to the Army that he and a Special Forces captain, Dan Quinn, “felt that morally we could no longer stand by” and allow the Afghan Local Police “to commit atrocities.”
Captain Quinn had summoned Abdul Rahman after the boy’s mother took her son to the American base in Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz Province to complain about the abuse.
The beating and its effect on the two men’s Army careers brought scrutiny to a policy of instructing American soldiers and Marines not to intervene in cases of child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies…
Comments
It's my understanding that SF training, like the Robin Sage scenario, is supposed to prepare SF team members for such encounters....therefore the NCO should've known better. That said, one can take only so much of this sort of behavior, especially when your motto is "To Free from Oppression".
Reinstate the SFC, pull him off of a team, and put him on Group or higher staff. He could probably use the staff time anyway.