Hold On to Your Humanity
by Stan Goff
t r u t h o u t | Letter
Saturday 15 November 2003
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
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: s**t from the news media, s**t from
movies, s**t about what it supposedly mean 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
in 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 for you 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.
Read the Rest of the Open Letter Here:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/111703D.shtml
Recommended Resources
<http://www.kpfk.org/> http://www.kpfk.org/
<http://www.commondreams.org/> http://www.commondreams.org/
Ara
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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