Many more stories can be heard from Iraq veterans and returning
soldiers, including those who refused to be sent on a 'suicide
mission' runnning escort without vehicle armor. www.optruth.com the
website of Operation Truth, founded by Army National Guard 1st Lt Paul
Reichhoff, a market analyst who volunteered for the Iraq invasion.
He was interviewed last month on Democracy Now:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1438232&mode=thread&tid=25
As I understand it, over 700 'ready-reserve' former soldiers have
refused to answer the latest call-up of discharged and retired
military personnel.
--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Cosmic One <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Iraq veteran Jimmy Massey speaks to the WSWS "We're committing
> genocide in Iraq" By Jeff Riedel 11 November 2004
>
> Former Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, a 12-year Marine veteran,
> lives in Waynesville, North Carolina, a small town in the Smoky
> Mountains just outside of Ashville, where he spoke to the World
> Socialist Web Site. He is one of a growing number of American
> soldiers returning from Iraq who have become outspoken opponents
> of the war.
>
> Massey entered Iraq as part of the initial US invasion in March
> 2003. He witnessed-and in some cases participated in-the killing
> of innocent civilians. During a single 48-hour period, he says,
> he saw as many as 30 civilians killed by US gunfire at highway
> checkpoints.
>
> The brutality of the US military's retaliation against the
> growing resistance of the Iraqi people transformed his view of
> the occupation and changed him for life. Massey, horrified and
> unable to reconcile himself to what was taking place, began to
> speak out to his superiors. He was eventually medi-vaced out of
> Iraq and diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress
> disorder. Labeled as a conscientious objector by his commanders,
> Massey sought legal counsel and won his honorable discharge in
> December 2003.
>
> Massey grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina. His
> father was a truck driver who was shot and killed during a
> confrontation with the Florida State Police when Massey was still
> in his early teens. He then moved with his mother to Texas, where
> she took a job with the Texas Board of Corrections. He grew up in
> a household where at times there was very little money and little
> to eat. He would eventually join the Marines and became a
> recruiter himself in the late 1990s. He was sent to Kuwait in
> December 2002, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq.
>
> Massey's disillusionment with the military began as a recruiter,
> when he started to question the methods used by the Marines in
> preying on young people from economically depressed areas. His
> feelings would soon be deepened by his experience in Iraq.
>
> "When I was on recruiting duty, I really began to question what
> was going on," he said. "I'm not going to say that the Marine
> Corps is all flat-out lies, but it is very misleading the way we
> enlist recruits. A lot of the kids joining the military are from
> the 'barrios' and 'hoods,' or the poor parts of the Appalachian
> Mountains, where we're sitting right here. Appalachia has some of
> the poorest counties in the country-so they're sweeping them up.
>
> "You know, these kids are just thankful that they've got some
> health care-for a lot of them, the first time they even went to
> the dentist is when they joined the Marine Corps. Then you pump
> them full of patriotism and intangible benefits-self-confidence
> and what not-and now you're indoctrinating a young person with an
> ideology.
>
> "Boot camp is designed to dehumanize and desensitize a person to
> violence. I was a Marine Corps boot camp instructor for
> two-and-a-half years, and I know that it is designed to strip you
> down and rebuild you. The only purpose of the Marine Corps is to
> meet the enemy on the battlefield and destroy them."
>
> Massey asserted that, given the economic conditions in the US
> today, there exists what amounts to an economic draft of young
> Americans into the military.
>
> "Here's the problem in America, what we're living in is becoming
> an increasingly militaristic society, where poor people have been
> encouraged to sign up as the front line," Massey said.
>
> "A large percentage of the so-called growth in this country is
> associated with the military. The bottom line is, for the
> Halliburtons and Enrons war is good, but for the poor and for all
> of the soldiers coming home, especially the ones coming home
> wounded, there's not much of a future. But for a lot of the kids
> getting ready to graduate high-school, the military is looking
> pretty good because their families have no money to send them to
> college."
>
> Massey's career as a recruiter ended after he wrote a mission
> statement to his commanding officers, outlining his personal
> concerns with the issues of recruitment. The process of reaching
> the point of speaking out was not an easy one, he recalled.
>
> "I'll be honest with you, when you're in the military, it's a lot
> like being in a mafia family. You don't step outside the family,
> and it's a very sheltered environment. I mean, you're taken care
> of. You've got a guaranteed paycheck on the 1st and the 15th, and
> when you're living on a Marine base, it's a bit like a utopia.
> But with the utopia comes the conformity to the ideology, which
> allows the utopia to continue. If you break away from the family,
> they're going to do whatever they can to keep you quiet.
>
> "It's very hard to break away from-you have to reach down deep in
> your soul for answers to questions that begin to come up. And
> what happened with me was, I was coming into contact with groups
> like the War Resisters League while I was out on recruitment
> duty. They were out there counter-recruiting. I started reading
> some of the literature that they were passing out at the high
> schools. I became curious and started doing my own research,
> finding out certain things about America's involvement in other
> countries."
>
> In Iraq, Massey was brought face to face with this involvement.
> The initial invasion took on the character of a one-sided
> slaughter, with the world's strongest military power armed with
> the most technologically advanced weapons, on the one hand, and a
> disarmed and virtually defenseless military of a country already
> devastated by a decade of sanctions, on the other.
>
> "You have to look at what was the overall goal of the mission.
> That was pretty evident when, eight months before we even left to
> go to Kuwait, the Marines were training to shut down and take
> over the Ar Rumaylah oil fields. We had detailed schematics and
> terrain models of all of the oil fields outside of Basra, and
> once we took care of those, all that was left was the ride into
> Baghdad.
>
> "We were like a bunch of cowboys who rode into town shooting up
> the place. I saw charred bodies in vehicles that were clearly not
> military vehicles. I saw people dead on the side of the road in
> civilian clothes. As a matter of fact, I only remember seeing a
> couple of bodies in military uniform the whole time.
>
> "There wasn't a whole lot of direct fighting to speak of. There
> were some firefights-I mean I had bullet holes in the side of my
> Humvee-but it wasn't like major combat action. We took the
> highway the whole way up to Baghdad. They had no artillery; they
> had no air support. They were so weakened by all the sanctions.
> All of their equipment was in very bad shape. Most of their
> hardware was left over from the war against Iran. The first Gulf
> War just devastated them. I don't think they had the will or the
> opportunity to fight."
>
> Massey said that the hostility of the Iraqi people to the
> presence of the US military grew exponentially over the time he
> was there in direct response to the brutal methods employed by
> American troops against the entire Iraqi population.
>
> "As far as I'm concerned, the real war did not begin until they
> saw us murdering innocent civilians," he said. "I mean, they were
> witnessing their loved ones being murdered by US Marines. It's
> kind of hard to tell someone that they are being liberated when
> they just saw their child shot or lost their husband or grandmother."
>
> Read the rest here....
> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/vet-n11.shtml
> --
> "People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a
> greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient
> and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from
> responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.
> They are eager to barter their independence for relief of the
> burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable
> failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to
> those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility."
> ~Eric Hoffer "The True Believer"
> http://www.cosmicrose.com
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/XgSolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
-----
/ o o \
===OO=====OO=============================================
(4)Portals (2)News Wikis (2)Conferences - No BuSHIT!
Start here: http://pnews.org/ (On Internet since 1982)
http://pnews.org/PhpWiki/ (West Coast News Wiki)
http://g0lem.net/PhpWiki/ (East Coast News Wiki)
=========================================================
FIGHT THE RIGHT!
==================
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rhetoric-list/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
