Lately as I’ve been watching the news and listening to talk radio at work the old cliché, curiosity killed the cat seems to make a lot of sense. It seems that each week there is another fine example of the terrible things that human beings are capable of with a new video or new pictures of terrorists doing unimaginable things to people they’ve captured. It would seem that just doing these things isn’t enough, they have to document it on video and release it for people to watch with their own eyes. And what’s worse is that people continue to seek out these videos and watch them. For those that don’t know, you can find these disgusting video’s online most of the time. And when I watch the news and listen to the radio the common reaction to this is, “I wish I hadn’t seen that.” But curiosity gets the best of them.

I know in my younger days when someone told me not to do something that was usually a good enough reason for me to go and do that exact thing and I certainly hope I’m not giving anyone motivation to seek out these terrible things, but they are certainly out there. The problem with these videos and people watching them, and news organizations showing them is that it can essentially desensitize you to the actual barbarity of these acts of violence because pictures and video’s allow you to be detached from the reality of the situation. It’s easy to forget that when you look at those pictures and video’s that it’s an actual human being suffering a terrible death. Seeing a picture or video keeps you from the other horrors that make it more real like the sounds and smells of a real person being tortured to death. Those images aren’t from a movie; it’s a person having their life stolen from them. Not having a personal relationship with them shouldn’t make it any better. I would have to imagine that people wouldn’t watch them if it was somebody they knew being killed.

I haven’t watched any of these videos and have gone out of my way to avoid being shown pictures of them as well. In listening to talk radio at work the general consensus of people who have sought out these videos and pictures is that after they see them they wish that they hadn’t, but as the saying goes, once something is seen it can’t be unseen. Like I said, I haven’t watched any of these recent videos because I’m still trying to un-see similar horrendous acts. I know enough at this point to know that I have no desire whatsoever to see people being tortured and murdered. During my deployment we came across the end results of torture on a terribly regular basis. We often times would find tortured bodies discarded in the Diyala River. What the video’s don’t show you is that those victims are real people with families. More times than I would care to remember we would have to deal with devastated family members of people that had been beheaded or tortured which really leaves an impact on you.

These video’s and pictures are out there for people to see should they choose to seek them out. However I would caution people about doing so based on my own experience with seeing the same thing. I’ve seen a lot of videos of people being beheaded and executed that were in possession of bad guys that we captured. I have seen torture houses with tools that I wouldn’t even know how to use let alone think to inflict pain on someone. I have seen meat hooks hanging from a ceiling with flesh still on them and dried blood puddles underneath them. I’ve seen mass graves and decapitated bodies, murdered families, and bodies that were dismembered and shoved into car trunks or thrown in a shallow grave. They are images that I’d give anything to be able to forget, and images that I can still see and smell if I close my eyes. They are absolutely haunting, and if I can’t un-see them, the least I can do is try to prevent others from having to see them because once you see it you can’t forget it.