Of course they'd sooner go home. Any soldier who wouldn't sooner go home shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the army, because nuts like can get everyone killed.

Of course it's hard being in a foreign country knowing that there are people out there who would like to kill you, and not knowing which they are. It's very natural if soldiers instinctively react in ways that make things worse, and turns potential sympathisers into enemies.

But training is about teaching people to overcome natural instincts when these get in the way of doing the job properly. It appears pretty clear that this type of training has been lacking in the US forces involved in this war.

When you don't train people in the right way to deal with difficult situations, you don't just leave them under-equipped, you ensure that they will rapidly be trained, through action, in the wrong way to deal with these situations. And that goes both for ordinary soldiers and for their commanding officers. If there is one lesson the USA should have learnt in Vietnam, that was it.

That mention, in that report I quoted, of desecrated holy books - it's absolute insanity to have that kind of thing happen. It appears to indicate a life-threatening slapdash attitude towards military discipline. Things like that matter, they aren't just peripheral stuff to be shrugged off or regretted as inevitable. They cost lives.