Author Topic: An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq  (Read 1902 times)

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Offline Antigen

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An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
« on: May 14, 2004, 10:42:00 PM »
( http://www.viewzone.com/soldiers.html , 15 September 2003 )

      Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,

      I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a  paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you  -- some more extreme than others -- are changes I know very well. So I'm  going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.

      In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in  northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of s**t: from the news media, s**t from  movies, s**t about what it supposedly meant to be a man, and s**t from a lot  of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even  though they'd never been there, or to war at all.

      The essence of all this s**t was that we had to "stay the course in  Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad  Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside  of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots  more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military  people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing  that crime to a halt.

      When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that  threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured  almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of  sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that  this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I  remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United  States. Including me.

      When that bulls**t story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar  shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you,  that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were i  n Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote.

      What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the  American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock,  poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole  villages, and committing rapes and massacres, and the people who were  grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the  difference between me -- just in country -- and the people who had done  those things to them.

      What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died  between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad  sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the  children, especially very young children.

      My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson  every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children,  so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you  just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them.  Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to  forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the  deaths of half a million kids.

      So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A  lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse  for this obscenity, and a lie to pump you up for a fight.

      And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an  Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over  your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam.  I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of  the Vietcong.

      But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the  role of occupier when we didn't know the people, their language, or their  culture, with our head full of bulls**t our so-called leaders had told us  during training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got  there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, but any one  of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night.  The question we started to ask is who put us in this position?

      In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of  trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their  property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other  by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped  each other on the back in Washington DC with their fat f***ing asses stuffed  full of cordon bleu and caviar.

      They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.

      That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water.

      We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry  backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a  little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story.

      I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either.  I started getting pulled into something -- something that craved other  peole's pain. Just to make sure I wasn't regarded as a "f***ing missionary"  or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was  untouchable, people too crazy to f*** with, people who desired the rush of  omnipotence that comes with setting someone's house on fire just for the  pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly  a second thought. People who had the power of life and death -- because they  could.

      The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust because of  your circumstances, and to rage about what you've seen, what has happened to  you, and what you have done and can't take back.

      It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn't name,  and the reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before  we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was  wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being  transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to "niggers"  here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we  had to kill them to survive, even when that wasn't true, but something  inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same  intrinsic values we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their  homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill them. So we  used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their  essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire  onto the cries of a baby.

      Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the important thing to  understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's  the thing you might not get until it's too late. When you take away the  humanity of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul  because it is standing in the way.

      So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that  even though we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to  people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill  that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetitics,  drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we  shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the  flotsam of society, or we hurt others, especially those who try to love us,  and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient.

      You can never escape that you became a racist because you made the  excuse that you needed that to survive, that you took things away from  people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself  that you may never get back.

      Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to  emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life. Many do not.

      I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one else sees  it. You might hear it in my words. I hate being chumped.

      So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to  survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop  this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove  yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and  frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching f***ing military careerist to make  his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.

      The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world's energy  supplies to twist the arms of future economic competitors. That's what's  going on, and you need to understand it, then do what you need to do to hold  on to your humanity. The system does that; tells you you are some kind of  hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you.

      Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable commodity.  They don't care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing,  about the loneliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how your humanity is  stripped away a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your  illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already are.

      They don't care. So you have to. And to preserve your own humanity, you  must recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and  know that both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are  calling the shots.

      They are your enemies -- The Suits -- and they are the enemies of  peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are black  families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and  bullies who take and never give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq,  but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they f***ing  aren't there. You are

      They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you,  and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who  are having their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and  their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the  chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the  prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses.

      So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your  being there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can't tell you to  disobey. That would probably run me afoul of the law. That will be a  decision you will have to take when and if the circumstances and your own  conscience dictate. But it is perfectly legal for you to refuse illegal  orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering you to  keep silent about these crimes is also illegal.

      I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never  under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to  give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the  sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive  out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself  and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.

      Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who  have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back  and be able to look us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there  like another corpse.

      Hold on to your humanity.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that
they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
--Thomas Sowell

« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
"Don\'t let the past remind us of what we are not now."
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Offline Anonymous

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An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
« Reply #1 on: May 14, 2004, 11:26:00 PM »
Wow, thanks Ginger.  That is one hell of a letter and I hope more Americans get a chance to read it.

"Hold on to your humanity" indeed.  Not so easy to do when one is in a survival mode, whether in Iraq or in a teenage prison somewhere in Utah, Missouri, Mexico, etc ....

 :nworthy:
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline Antigen

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An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
« Reply #2 on: May 15, 2004, 11:31:00 AM »
This is essentially the same thing my dad said of WWII around 40 years after the fact. Not that he'd go into much detail like this guy has. But the basic idea was that he and his buddies had been chumped. This coming from a sailor who had been called in from shore leave @ Pearl Harbour along w/ the rest of the crew of the Enterprise, the crew of the Hornet and a bunch of other major assetts just 2 days before the event.

To go to Journal of Applied Polymer Science go to http://www3.interscience.wiley.com and then journal search and put the journal number and year
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« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
"Don\'t let the past remind us of what we are not now."
~ Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes

Offline Anonymous

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An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
« Reply #3 on: May 25, 2004, 03:12:00 AM »
I find parts of this letter to be a very twisted way of thinking. Just my opinion. Every single person has a choice to serve in the military or not to. I don't see them as victims to the "suits." If you want out you can get out. I appreciate and respect every single person who does make the decision to serve this country weather they agree with what is going on or not. I am not saying I agree with what is going on over in Iraq. I am just saying if you don't like it make sure you vote. I don't think encouraging people in the military to go against their orders is very intelligent. We need the military for the safety of our country. It's not their fault when the politicans screw up.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline Triumvirate

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An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
« Reply #4 on: June 01, 2004, 05:28:00 AM »
Once you are deployed there is no getting out..
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
Entire, complete serenity
Injected intravenously
Transgression euphoric bliss divine
Initiate a timeless stain of mind
Blood will steralize, In fire baptised