The actions of four marines who were based at Camp Lejeune have been the subject of a lot of media attention this past week. They’ve been called “barbaric” by the President of Afghanistan, “against everything the military stands for” by Marine General John Allen, and put down by just about everyone who has heard about what they did. The four marines in question were videotaped by a fifth, unidentified, marine while they urinated on dead bodies in Afghanistan.

President Karzai was spot-on when he called it barbaric. The marines showed a complete lack of respect for the humanity when they decided to urinate on the corpses. What’s worse is that the event was videotaped. That means that the marines thought that urinating on those bodies would be funny, or perhaps supported in any way by American citizens. They were wrong.

The video has received nothing but negative attention and outrage from public officials, and the general public as a whole. An article on CNN said that they undermined the entire US effort to establish positive relations in Afghanistan. To satisfy the outrage of the general public, the NCIS has launched an investigation into the making of the video, and the event portrayed in the video. The marines involved are expected to see disciplinary action very soon, as they have already been identified.

Amidst the promises of disciplinary actions and the public condemnation of the video, a bigger issue is being lost. Were these boys the first soldiers to ever do something disrespectful to a dead body in a combat situation? I find that doubtful. They’re the first ones to post a video of it on Youtube, but I bet if the internet had been around for the past century we’d have a number of these videos. These boys were probably eighteen or nineteen years old when they were shipped off to a combat zone in a foreign country with little to no familial contact.

I won’t pretend to know anything about the strains and hardships of being in combat, as I haven’t been there, but I do know that they exist. I know that at eighteen or nineteen, people aren’t fully developed. If you’re older than that, I bet you know it, too. Look back at your freshman and sophomore year, and I’m sure you can think of a number of errors in judgment and embarrassing mistakes that you made. The only difference is that college is a place for mistakes to be made, and a combat zone in a foreign country is not.

Those boys made a decision to join the Marines, though. They made a decision to hold themselves to a higher standard. That’s why they will be punished. What we should ask moving forward, though, is how realistic it is to expect boys of eighteen and nineteen years old to be able to handle themselves like exemplary men over long periods of duress in a foreign country, with no real emotional support. We should ask ourselves how the future of our nation will be affected if the capstone experience of growing up for many boys in our generation continues to be going off to war.