It's an open secret- Big Phama is experimenting on our troops in quest of a pill that will convert our soldiers into sleepless zombies who will kill with no feeling and there are numerous products flooding into the combat zone without any public studies as to long range effects. There's unbelievable companies working in Iraq proposing unbelievable things for our bodies through chemistry.
[Update]: a couple of posters have taken issue with my view that there is a quest for this type of soldier. Maybe it's jejune of them to ignore prima facie evidence. Maybe I'm the one whose hysterical. This phrase was NOT The point of the diary, it was ONE of the points of the diary. It was MY HYPERBOLE, not a claim. I extrapolated things and based it however on my knowledge, which I thought was common knowledge, especially at KOS, of the various pharmaceutical cocktails and experimentsperformed on our troops in GW1 without their knowledge.
Oh, and the Lilly clause in the Homeland Security act which retroactively exempts them from liability. God knows what else is redacted from public view. I submit to you, dear reader that given what we know thus far of war for profit and it's quest for more money out of less materiele, this take is both logical and supportable.
It's all there if you want to look for it. At home our government is involved in "war on Drugs" which seems to enrich the importers and punish the users. Unambigously, the legal drugs alcohol and nicotine are responsible for the predominant damage in lives and dollars to our society. Yet Paris Hilton gets 22 days for a second drunk driving offense while on probation for a first while myriad pot smokers are doing 18 months for possession; in fact the sub-war on marijuana is currently responsible for One in six prisoners in the system. Against this background we find ourselves increasingly dosed at home, joking that we stay off the roads around 3:30 lest we be run over by a giant SUV piloted by a harried soccer mom on xanax.
Now, let me recount some background for you.....among the many Vietnam Vets here on Kos you will find a significant percentage who took "whites" (a form of pharmaceutical speed)on patrol, or knew someone who did. If you wonder how things get so crazy in combat, imagine the amphetamine influenced mind hit by a surge of adrenaline when the first tracer streaks by your head.
Among the troops involved in the dirty wars of Ollie North's devise in the Central American theater, many psychotropic drugs were in use, and whites and tequila were not an uncommon mix. I have firsthand knowlege of this, in the late 70's and early 80's, before things really cranked up, and I have no reason to believe things suddenly changed. You think a politically driven war against the people on the sides of corrupt oligarchs isn't apparent to the grunt on the ground? Think again.
This leads me to the current clusterf**k we find ourselves mired in. If you know someone fighting there, I suggest you ask them about the drugs. Or their aftereffects. Or how prevalent they are. In this openly for-profit venture with poisonous DU leading the way as a recycled for profit metal, big pharma sees a test group, and combine that with altpharma-aka, drug dealers and abusers, and you get stuff that seems illogical, otherworldly behaviors inexplicable except to say "in the fog of war".
To fight boredom and disgust, said Clif Hicks, who had left a tank squadron at Camp Slayer in Baghdad, soldiers popped Benzhexol, five pills at time. Normally used to treat Parkinson's disease, the drug is a strong hallucinogenic when abused. "People were taking steroids, Valium, hooked on painkillers, drinking. They'd go on raids and patrols totally stoned."
"There were problems in Kilo Company with drugs, alcohol, hazing, you name it," said the woman. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."
The saddest and ugliest story was told to a NEWSWEEK reporter by a 12-year-old girl named Safa Younis. When the Marines entered her house that morning, she fled with her mother into a bathroom. A soldier followed them, shooting, she says. When the soldiers left, Safa tried to talk to her mother, but she was covered with blood. "Mama, Mama," cried the girl, until she realized that her mother was dead. So was her father, whom she found lying near the kitchen door. And her aunt, and her five siblings—all shot to death. "I was sorry for staying in the bathroom. I should have died like them," recalls Safa, who now lives with a cousin. "The Americans are murderers, criminals. They have no mercy."
Taken from a longer piece in Newsweek that should have triggered a hue and cry for withdrawal, these accounts share one thing: irrational, insane, near psychotic behavior from what by all accounts were normal American kids before their tours in Iraq. Now we learn of the three soldiers captured, not in abush, as the official story states, but attacked while manning a post where they possibly were all asleep from a Kos diary yesterday. I say it was the drugs. I suggest they found something to help them sleep. Unfortunately, it was the sleep of the dead.
This madness must stop.