Joseph Chamblin; saving the world

We wrote about Joseph Chamblin back in February, but the story is making the circuit again. He was the platoon commander of the Sniper Platoon which ended up getting punished for urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban in Afghanistan a few years back. By all accounts, up until that incident, Chamblin was on his way to promotion to Gunnery Sergeant, but the outrage that the media generated over the video put the brakes on his career – he got a $500 fine and reduced one rank to Sergeant. Hardly commensurate with the worldwide outrage over the minor occurrence. So he left The Corps and met up with this former woman Marine, Laura A. Buckingham who owned a bakery and had a son with a former fiance. Chamblin and Buckingham fell in love, according to the Washington Post.

Buckingham was attractive, educated and ran her own bakery. Her customers and her town loved her. After all, she was something of a local celebrity in New Albany, Ind. — just last fall, she was on the cover of Southern Indiana Living with her son.

She was also a veteran who could understand Chamblin’s experiences. The two fell for each other, and soon Buckingham was pregnant again.

Then Buckingham decided that her life would be simpler if she could rid herself of the ex-fiance, Bradley Sutherland, because of child custody issues;

While she wasn’t baking fresh loaves of bread, she was busy — busy allegedly trying to find someone to murder Sutherland.

The first person to whom she allegedly turned was Chamblin.

At first, when she allegedly asked him at the beginning of the year to make Sutherland “go away,” Chamblin thought she was kidding. A dark joke, no doubt, but a joke nonetheless. Slowly, though, her requests allegedly grew more detailed as she wondered aloud about the specifics — Where would it happen? How could Sutherland be killed?

Chamblin recorded those conversations and turned the recordings over to the authorities. Soon Ms. Buckingham was discussing the execution of her ex with an undercover detective. They faked his murder in order to get Buckingham to hand over the money to the detective (the amount fluctuates between news sources from $3,000 to $30,000). She’s looking at many years of nightly pillow fights in a woman’s prison.

But the most important part of the story, to me, is that this Marine, Chamblin was made out to be some kind of heartless sniper killer dude who tolerates urinating on corpses of his enemies, but obviously, he has limits. I’m sure most of the media is surprised that he didn’t make the dick decision to kill Sutherland on the orders of the smoking hot chick – like he would have done if it had instead been a Lifetime movie. Even actual highly-trained killers in the military have morals and they can make good, lawful, civilized decisions even after they’ve been screwed over by the government because of misplaced civilian outrage. Just like the rest of Americans.

Category: Veterans in the news