We all likely agree that war as executed is a form of mass insanity. We deceive ourselves about the efficacy of things like "smart bombs" and the "professionalism of our military." Whoa, whoa, whoa, before I get flamed, I think the American military is the most professional on earth. They generally conduct themselves as honorably as can be expected in light of being required to make split second life or death judgements turning on moral distinctions that the vast majority of us, thanks to our servicemen and servicewomen, will never have to make.
I look into my own heart and feel incredible sorrow. So many days we seem incapable of doing anything even remotely effective in stopping the madness that King George, his courtiers, and their corporate allies have unleased upon the Iraqi people and upon a small segment of America's children, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. But we can never forget. We can never stop fighting to stop this madness.
UPDATE: Part of the point I am trying to make is that maybe we could give it a rest on the Cindy Sheehan diaries and remember what is truly important.
Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian just dropped an 11 page bombshell over at The Nation. This particular type of reporting possesses qualities that can greatly impact those who still believe something remotely resembling a "positive" outcome can still be had in Iraq. It is the most common and pernicious of lies: that criminal occupations where indiscriminate violence is perpetrated upon a people CAN yield positive results. It can't and we'll all be paying for this for a very long time.
People regardless of race, nationality, ethnicity, sect or faith have an intrinsic sense of justice. And once they've been repeatedly subjected to injustice, those scars have a tendency not to heal correctly. They may scab and fade or be a little less visible, but those wounds are always there waiting to break open and fester.
My mom's youngest brother was in the Marine Corp in Vietnam. He came back, got married, had four kids, and assimilated--at least for awhile anyway. Eventually drinking and trouble with the law ruined his marriage. Thankfully, from all outward appreances, his children survived after my aunt remarried and seem to be living healthy well adjusted lives.
My uncle wasn't so fortunate. After his marriage imploded he never was able to stay consistently employed. He drank, drank some more, and basically made ends meet on minimum wage jobs and whatever he could scrounge engaging in certain petty extralegal business ventures. A sad story all the way around. Sad because my family said he was a normal kid. Liked to fish and hunt. He was at one time into photography and cars. Normal redblooded rural American kid like so many others serving in the Middle East today.
His brothers and my mom and dad tried to help him over the years with money or place to live. Tried many times to get him into alcohol rehabilitation programs. At times he seemed to keep it together. Unfortunately, his inability to meet their expectations, whether reasonable or not, diminished their collective willingness to help. He and I used to shoot pool and throw darts at neighborhood taverns before I got married and returned to school to finish my undergrad work.
I used to ask him what it was like in Vietnam. Because I was never one to judge his lifestyle or mistakes, he would occassionally open up. At least I think that's why he did it. Never with gruesome details or anything like that. I don't think he liked to dwell on what he'd seen or heard. He certainly didn't like to talk about anything he had done. I always got the sense that he felt that if he talked to me about it, it might change how I viewed him as a human being, an uncle, and as a friend. He didn't have many real friends that I recall. Lots of people around but nobody he really seemed to trust.
I'll never forget the saddest thing he ever told me. After too many beers and him giving me the usual beat down in pool, I was probably more insistent than usual. That kind of cluelessness regarding personal boundaries only comes with youth, beer, and morbid curiosity. He said to me, "how do I explain to you what it does to your soul to have to consider killing a kid. A kid you don't know from Adam. How can I explain to you what a place is like where you have to look at every kid and wonder if he or she will be the one to throw a grenade into your tent while you're sleeping. Most of the Vietnamese people didn't want us there." And that was that. It was enough. He never would admit to me whether or not he actually had to take life but I always got the sense he had. I'm sure he never got over being put in that position.
Last I heard he was living at the coast. He mows yards, picks mushrooms in season, does odd jobs, lives in someones garage, and spends what little money he has trying to blunt the pain of a life blown away in service to his country. He's in his early sixties, no teeth, and no retirement. I don't know if he even takes advantage of his veteran's benefits. I doubt it.
My uncle's story isn't any different from tens of thousands of others in that war and it is already the same story being told by thousands coming home from these wars. War, to me, seems to be mankind's greatest failure. A failure of creativity, a failure to set proper priorities, a failure of greed, and most importantly a failure to be honest about the true price of war on the lives of those who serve.
The only victors are those who never serve. The rest are simply victims--victims of other men's weakness, hubris, lust for power, and fear of the "other." That's why propoganda that dehumanizes our "enemies" is an absolute necessity. It's necessary to start wars and a necessary as part of a soldier's training. Without it people would recognize the inhumanity and insanity of war and refuse to fight them. The article is a long read but worth every moment. A stark reminder why we can never stop until every American soldier is home and the geographic area that was the former Iraq is returned to the people of the region to do with as they see fit.
Following are a few excerpts from the article:
Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."
"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't--motherfucker--he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog--I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....
"And--I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but--and I had tears then, too--and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that.
"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not."
Specialist Chrystal said such incidents were "very common."
"So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.
"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."
Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.
"It's like very barren desert, so most of the people that live there, they're nomadic or they live in just little villages and have, like, camels and goats and stuff," she recalled. "There was then a little boy--I would say he was about 10 because we didn't see the accident; we responded to it with the investigative team--a little Iraqi boy and he was crossing the highway with his, with three donkeys. A military convoy, transportation convoy driving north, hit him and the donkeys and killed all of them. When we got there, there were the dead donkeys and there was a little boy on the side of the road.
"We saw him there and, you know, we were upset because the convoy didn't even stop," she said. "They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down. But, I mean, that's basically--basically, your order is that you never stop."
"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," he said. "This car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the daughter was aged 3. And they briefed this to the general. And they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
These excerpts aren't even the worst of it. If it is inappropriate to post this type of diary I'm sure everyone will let me know and I'll delete it. For what it's worth I hope everyone reads it and remembers why our frustration at times boils over on this site and scalds unintended targets.