Thread:Comments:NATO troops kill four people on bus in Afghanistan/Comments from feedback form - "I wonder why driver didn't sto..."/reply (2)

Is it too much to ask that people actually look at the facts and not immediately try to politicize what's happening? KD3P only asked for positive stories, and while they are less common they do exist in Afghanistan just like any other place. It's a bit disturbing that that is all it takes to cause some people to revert to elementary school antics of name calling (though you didn't help your cause by doing the same thing KD3P).

As for military victories, those aren't really positive stories since it still reads "a bunch of people got killed" the sides don't matter it's still unfortunate. The most positive stories are those of fostering trust with locals and helping them. Do any of you know that we hand out school supplies to the kids in Afghanistan and Iraq? Doesn't get reported much cause it's not sensational enough, but it happens. There are a lot of other things like that too. Those are good stories to me.

I feel bad that a buss load of civilians got fired upon and killed, but as someone who is in the US military and currently deployed, I don't think it's fair to play arm chair general about the actions the troops took.

Standard operating procedures for a check point are to signal the driver to slow down and stop their vehicle at least 100 meters out. If the driver continues you fire a warning shot, then a killing shot (this is subject to change under the ROE for that area/command). This progression can all take place in a matter of seconds. When we did this in an exercise it went from signalling to shooting less than 10 seconds. Depending on the speed and distance of the vehicle headed towrd the checkpoint it could be more or less than that.

Also it should be noted that the reason vehicles are stopped that far out is because if they're packed with explosives they probably wont kill the people at the checkpoint at that range (though it's not exactly gauranteed).

From the description of the incident the troops there did exactly what they were trained to do. I would like to know why the driver felt that speeding toward people with guns was a good idea, or why he didn't stop. Personally I wouldn't it seems like a good way to get shot, for reasons that are all too apparent at this point.

And yes I know that I'm biased toward giving the military the benefit of the doubt, but from the report this doesn't seem like one of the times a scared or trigger happy soldier shot someone. As you've all pointed out there are already a lot of those stories out there.