You aren't going to like this diary, but that's okay.
You know that uneasy feeling you get when you see some war footage that makes real death and destruction look as inconsequential as a video game? I'd like to suggest that part of the unease comes from what such footage reveals about us. It is a visual metaphor for how we engage in our country's military aggression. That is to say, how we keep ourselves remote from the wars we start because they feel nicer that way.
Just replace the video monitors with our mainstream media. Replace the high-tech controls with our day-to-day political involvement as citizens of a democracy. Replace the almost miraculous guidance systems with our abstract political-religious values ... You see? There we are, blindly excelling at making war in such a way as to convince ourselves that it is always someone else's doing.
What this diary attempts to do is yank the data cable out of the machine and jam it right into your heart.
Like I said, you aren't going to like it. But you should read this diary anyway.
Part 1: The Ultimate Sacrifice
Seven years after the beginning of the Iraq war, photographer Ashley Gilbertson has gifted us with a look at some of the bedrooms America's young war dead have left behind in "The Shrine Down The Hall," part of the NY Times' Lens series. You may at first, as I was, be inclined to turn away — to allow the gift to remain unreceived — but we really should look and, while we're at it, imagine the parents standing right there with us, just out of the frame.
Part 2: The Other Ultimate Sacrifice
Leslie Kammerdiener began making daily postings to her blog, Mended Wings, within days of finding out that her son Kevin was blown halfway to hell and back by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan on May 31st, 2008. I began reading her blog a month or two after she started writing it and described it here, in an earlier diary, as the "daily journal of a mother's nightmarish journey into hell."
That journey (into hell) is complete now. What has taken its place is her day-to-day struggle to deal with all the damage that's been done. Kevin lost a good portion of his left brain (see the 2nd and 3rd photos, here). You don't fully recover from that. In a way, Leslie's life has become one of providing 24/7 care for her son that is not her son. She sees things he does that remind her of the young man who went to fight in Afghanistan, but they are forever intermixed with the terribly wounded soldier who came back (see the 2nd and 3rd videos here).
I really can't imagine what it must be like to be living her life but I continue to believe that it is important to try. And it's equally important to realize that Leslie is just one of thousands upon thousands of parents who watched a son or daughter step whole into the war machine only to be spit back to them in broken pieces. And not just the parents of our soldiers, but of theirs.
Part 3: "Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle."
The military video leaked this past week showing a 2007 incident in which two Apache helicopters armed with 30mm machine guns kill a group of men walking together down a street is significant on a number of levels. It's quite significant, for example, that the military had refused to release the footage. On the other hand, it's not surprising.
The video is a perfect example of the type of war footage I referred to above. Were it not for the language, it might get a PG rating for "violence so remote as to seem pretend." What you see was filmed from the helicopters which were several hundred yards away. If anything, the audio might prove more disturbing. If you've only relied on US media for your war news, one of the more shocking things here might come as a result of your first encounter with the crude bravado our soldiers use to keep themselves amped up and focused on the job.
Psychologically, I get what they're doing and why, but it's never something I would want to be comfortable with. The fear it gives rise to in me is that when too amped up and too focused the human mind is prone to making mistakes. I don't want to second guess the decision to open fire here. At the very least all of the context preceding the incident is missing and there could have been valid reasons to suspect this group of men, but you can see rather quickly how the adrenaline and focus on what might be dangerous about these men led to photojournalists with cameras being perceived as insurgents with AK-47s.
It's impossible to tell for sure from the video but I see the first serious error in perception occurring in regards to the person thought to be aiming an RPG at the helicopter. Yes, it does look like the individual is partly concealing himself behind the building while aiming something, but nothing in the subsequent behavior of the group of men on the street makes any sense if that something was, in fact, a weapon. You don't point an RPG launcher at a circling Apache as it disappears behind a building and then stand around talking to each other as the helicopter reappears on the other side. The behavior makes perfect sense, though, if what was being aimed was instead the large telephoto lens of a camera.
The second serious and, as far as I'm concerned, unpardonable error in perception happens when people stop to help the sole survivor of the initial attack who was desperately trying to crawl to safety. The video gives no credence at all to the pilot/gunner claims that there are 4 or 5 people collecting guns and bodies. Nor is there any sign that the two children visible in the front seat of the van are noticed although they are far more clearly children than the photojournalists' cameras were AK-47s. There is, instead, an unquestioned conviction that these people in the van must be enemies—not possible civilians wanting to help, just more "fucking pricks" and "bastards."
I can understand how everything prior to this was, while a tragic mistake, just that. This was happening in the vicinity of a battle that had occurred earlier in the day and, though not clear in the above video, some of the men in the original group walking down the street were armed. But here, there was no reason to have gone beyond disabling the van. Even a warning shot would have sufficed in this case as these were civilians happening upon an injured man who quite likely had no idea they were stopping in the middle of a military operation.
Al Jazeera, just after the above video was leaked, interviewed the children who were injured when their father had, in true Good Samaritan fashion, stopped to help one of the injured photographers and was subsequently murdered.
Part 4: But At Least It Was A Just War, Right?
And finally, a video recorded March 18th, 2010. In it, Republican Congressmen McClintock and Rohrabacher agree that now, with 7 years of accumulated hindsight to aid their thought process, all Republican members of Congress now think the (still ongoing) Iraq war was a mistake. It's probably worth noting that also by this time the war has cost more than one trillion dollars1, there have been over 4,000 US casualties, more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed and millions have been displaced in a country that has no adequate means of caring for them.
_________________
1 One trillion dollars, $1,000,000,000,000, is an almost incomprehensible sum. It is equivalent to the combined wealth of 1 million millionaires.