Originally Posted by Dan_Chamberlain
Askins sounds a lot like John Wesley Hardin. Same cloth. Some remember Hardin fondly.

When push comes to shove, homicide doesn't care which direction your enemy is facing.

Audie Murphy killed two Italian officers who were riding away. Shot them in the back. He writes about it. We hail Murphy. However, some would have called those killings murder.

I'm not defending Askins. But I'm simply not going to pass judgements from heresay.

It is quite possibly true that he was a sociopath. Perhaps he had a "taste" for it. Or, maybe it was all made up.

The account mentioned where he shot a German soldier in the kidney was a result of the German soldier sabotaging army vehicles. I'm wondering if the tampering ceased after that.

But one can't hail John W Hardin in one breath and condemn Askins in the other.

One can't call him a back-shooter as if it's purjorative and say Murphy was a saint.

One cannot truly vilify a man who shoots an enemy at arms length and laud the man who shoots one from ambush at 500 yards. Or the artilleryman who does the same enmass from 10,000 yards!

Killing, whether intimately or remotely, is what man is good at.

I get the same distasteful feeling when I see a goose hunter laughing like a schoolgirl when his goose plummets from the sky and bounces across the cornfield. I believe there are a lot of men who kill geese and enjoy it, who never truly faced another man who would have killed them given the chance.

Again, I'm not defending Askins. But sanctimony aside, he saw some things.

Dan



Good post


I got banned on another web site for a debate that happened on this site. That's a first