Who are the heroes in Iraq?
In the bloody quagmire that is the Iraq war, who are the heroes? Are they the ones who follow orders and garner medals for carrying out the mission? Or the ones who sense they are part of something that has gone terribly wrong, and speak out in opposition -- or refuse to take part?
Mission Rejected, a new book by Peter Laufer, profiles soldiers who decided not to fight, or who came back from the Iraq war speaking in fierce opposition to it.
Whoever you think the heroes in Iraq are, you will be moved by the "ground level" perspectives of those like Joshua Key, a 27-year-old former U.S. soldier from Oklahoma, who details a scene he stumbled on shortly after the U.S. invasion in March 2003:
It's great that the progressive blogosphere has rallied around the Dixie Chicks in the face of the backlash they faced (although they seem to be getting by now). Hopefully a similar movement will develop around supporting soldiers who speak out -- at much greater risk to their livelihoods and lives.
You can read an excerpt of Mission Rejected over at AlterNet.
Mission Rejected, a new book by Peter Laufer, profiles soldiers who decided not to fight, or who came back from the Iraq war speaking in fierce opposition to it.
Whoever you think the heroes in Iraq are, you will be moved by the "ground level" perspectives of those like Joshua Key, a 27-year-old former U.S. soldier from Oklahoma, who details a scene he stumbled on shortly after the U.S. invasion in March 2003:
"We was going along the Euphrates River. It's a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a real sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies. The heads laying over here and the bodies over here and U.S. troops in between them. I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What's caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?' We get out and somebody was screaming, 'We fucking lost it here!' I'm thinking, 'Oh, yes, somebody definitely lost it here.'"As Rahul Mahajan points out at Empire Notes, the only way we're going to really blow open stories like the Haditha massacre is by supporting Iraq veterans who speak out, giving them the space to come forward and tell the truth about this and other tragedies.
Joshua says he was ordered to look around for evidence of a firefight, for something to rationalize the beheaded Iraqis. "I look around just for a few seconds and I don't see anything." But then he noticed the sight that now triggers his nightmares. "I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like a soccer ball. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and it was like, I can't be no part of this. This is crazy. I came here to fight and be prepared for war but this is outrageous. Why did it happen? That's just my question: Why did that happen?"
He's convinced there was no firefight that led to the beheading orgy -- there were no spent shells to indicate a battle. "A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there was any shells. There was never no shells, except for what we shot. I'm thinking, Okay, so they just did that because they wanted to do it. They got trigger happy and they did it. That's what made me mad in Iraq. You can take human lives at a fast rate and all you have to say is, say, 'Oh, I thought they threw a grenade. I thought I seen this, I thought I seen that.' You could mow down 20 people each time and nobody's going to ask you, 'Are you sure?' They're going to give you a high five and tell you that you was doing a good job."
It's great that the progressive blogosphere has rallied around the Dixie Chicks in the face of the backlash they faced (although they seem to be getting by now). Hopefully a similar movement will develop around supporting soldiers who speak out -- at much greater risk to their livelihoods and lives.
You can read an excerpt of Mission Rejected over at AlterNet.
2 Comments:
Your quoted hero doesn't know what he is talking about. There are no doors on a tank. That isn't a small detail, that is a huge detail. That's the same thing that got Kerry. He got the details wrong and it screamed "bullshit" to folks who had been there.
Pawpaw is far too quick to dismiss the hero's story on a technicality, namely nomenclature he thinks is wrong.
Maybe the kid was riding in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, though not a crewmember. They have a door (or more) in the rear ramp and resemble tanks enough to be called one. Maybe he just calls any old damned thing you open and shut a door, whether it be a 32" prehung Luan interior door or the rear loading ramp on a C-5.
Shit, I spent five years repairing heavy equipment in the USMC and we had a whole slew of hooyats, thingamabobs, whatsits and that-damned-green-things peppering the vehicles we dealt with on a daily basis.
Nomenclature isn't important; what happened is.
What "got" Kerry was a right wing noise machine playing off the vapid echo chamber that is media, a personality that is about as engaging as skim milk, and legions of consultants telling him to do anything but have a pair (not that having a pair would have made the evening news, but telling him to act neutered surely didn't help). Not to mention GOP operative in Ohio and elsewhere who weren't above cheating to make sure the "right" man got in like the ocean isn't above the sky.
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