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Jim Amos, Hillary Clinton, and the Death of Another American Sniper

Rob Richards
Rob Richards / Facebook
February 24, 2015

Marine sniper Rob Richards died last August, not long after being compelled to depart the Marine Corps at the reduced rank of corporal. Richards had been a sergeant—not to mention a Purple Heart recipient, reportedly nominated for the Bronze Star, and a veteran of three combat deployments—when a video was put on the Internet showing him and three other Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban fighters.

Despite dying in August of 2014, Richards was only laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery this month, in part because his loved ones wanted to coordinate the ceremony with a five-year reunion for veterans of the Battle of Marjah (in which Richards fought and was wounded) that was held in Northern Virginia the same week as his funeral. The Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe wrote an excellent piece about Richards' life and death that appeared on the front page of that newspaper. Its opening paragraphs summed up the situation faced by those close to Richards:

His three combat tours in Afghanistan had been boiled down to a 38-second video clip, played and replayed on YouTube more than a million times. In it, Rob Richards and three other Marine Corps snipers are seen urinating on the bodies of Taliban fighters they had just killed.

"Total dismay" were the words then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used to describe the video when it surfaced on the Internet in January 2012. "Utterly deplorable," agreed then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Richards’s career in the military was finished.

More than two years later — long after the rest of the country had moved on to other scandals — Richards, 28, died at home and alone from an accidental painkiller overdose.

In a very real sense, Richards died of his combat wounds. While on his second deployment (during which—full disclosure—we served in the same battalion) Richards was riddled from shrapnel from an IED while patrolling in Marjah, including having a hole torn in his throat by a "hexagonal nut the size of a quarter" which had to be removed in surgery.

Evacuated to the United States, Richards could have retired from the military at 100 percent disability. He did not. Returning to duty, he could have taken a non-combat assignment training new snipers. He did not. Instead of taking one of these options, he volunteered to transfer to another battalion and return to Afghanistan for a third combat tour. To do so, he had to cease taking his medications.

Try having your body riddled with shrapnel and then stop taking your pain meds a year later. This was an extraordinary, even a slightly crazy, act of will and courage.

It was on this third deployment that Richards and several other Marines, following hard fighting and the deaths of several of their comrades, made the decision to desecrate the bodies of some dead enemy fighters.

When the video surfaced, the Marine Corps launched an investigation, as it should have. The general in charge of the investigation, Thomas Waldhauser, told the then-commandant of the Marine Corps, Jim Amos, that based on his review of the facts and the legal and disciplinary precedents for such cases, he would recommend that the senior most Marines involved (a pair of staff sergeants) face a "special" court-martial, and the more junior Marines (which would include Richards) a "summary" court-martial or, depending on if they would admit their guilt, administrative punishment (which would still likely result in loss of rank, loss of pay, and possibly confinement).

What Waldhauser proposed was—considering the circumstances of the crime and the backgrounds of the Marines implicated—a balanced disciplinary answer, one that considered the need of the Corps to enforce discipline, the legal precedents for such incidents, and that took mitigating factors into consideration.

Amos was having none of it. He told Waldhauser, according to what the general later reported to investigators, that he wanted the Marines involved to be "crushed." Shortly thereafter he removed Waldhauser from the case. As I wrote last year, not a few Marines interpreted Amos’ actions as "joining the rush of Obama administration officials who seemed intensely concerned about making it very clear that they found the whole thing disgusting, rather than reflecting that their own policy decisions had placed these young men in the awful circumstances in which they found themselves, patrolling through minefields every day, and losing their friends one by one while fighting a war that had already lasted a decade."

Forced out of the Marine Corps as a corporal—though, as the result of a plea bargain, with an honorable discharge—Richards fell on tough times, abusing drugs and eventually going into rehab. He had come out clean and appeared to be getting his life together when his wife discovered him dead at home in North Carolina. Doctors subsequently theorized that, considering the damage his body had accumulated as the result of his wounds from 2010, his "weakened liver had been unable to metabolize the prescription painkillers that were slowly building up in his system," according to Jaffe.

Last summer, at an event for midshipmen commissioning into the Marine Corps at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, General Amos came to speak. His retirement approaching, he was in a valedictory mood, and his remarks, which I heard in person, focused at length on his career and time in office as commandant. He said that he considered his most important accomplishment while in office to have been the preservation of the Marine Corps’ moral integrity.

One can make a case for this, using the urination case as evidence. The logic is simple. Desecrating the bodies of dead enemy fighters is wrong. Marines desecrated bodies. Amos wanted them crushed; Amos succeeded; they are out—and Marines know now not to do such a thing.

Slightly less simple, but no less relevant, is another way of seeing the case. Faced with a choice of suffering some political discomfort among the upper echelons of Washington policymakers by allowing a balanced disciplinary option to proceed (that, to be sure, would still have preserved the moral integrity of the Corps) Amos favored a course where harsher measures prevailed. Whether this was Amos' intent or not, these harsher measures suited the conscience of an inept and corrupt policymaking class. Having prosecuted a 13-year-long and failing war, the members of this class prefer not to consider that it is they that ought to shoulder the lion’s share of the blame for that war’s grittier and deplorable consequences—for actions that, as Secretary Clinton put it at the time, were "absolutely inconsistent with American values."

As for Amos, the Marine Corps Times has reported that, following his retirement this past December, he has been appointed to the board of the LORD Corporation, a major defense contractor. In America, in 2015, it seems that war is still hell—unless you’re in charge.

Published under: Hillary Clinton , Marines