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Thread ID: 7857 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-07-04
2003-07-04 12:09 | User Profile
[url=http://www.counterpunch.com/]http://www.counterpunch.com/[/url]
Search CounterPunch July 3, 2003
A Former Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis to Attack US Troops "Bring 'Em On?" By STAN GOFF
In 1970, when I arrived at my unit, Company A, 4th Battalion/503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, I was charged up for a fight. I believed that if we didn't stop the communists in Vietnam, we'd eventually be fighting this global conspiracy in the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas. I'd been toughened by Basic Training, Infantry Training and Parachute Training, taught how to use my weapons and equipment, and I was confident in my ability to vanquish the skinny unter-menschen. So I was dismayed when one of my new colleagues--a veteran who'd been there ten months--told me, "We are losing this war."
Not only that, he said, if I wanted to survive for my one year there, I had to understand one very basic thing. All Vietnamese were the enemy, and for us, the grunts on the ground, this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was being given to the American public for the war was not true.
We had a battalion commander whom I never saw. He would fly over in a Loach helicopter and give cavalier instructions to do things like "take your unit 13 kilometers to the north." In the Central Highlands, 13 kilometers is something we had to hack out with machetes, in 98-degree heat, carrying sometimes 90 pounds over our body weights, over steep, slippery terrain. The battalion commander never picked up a machete as far as we knew, and after these directives he'd fly back to an air-conditioned headquarters in LZ English near Bong-son. We often fantasized together about shooting his helicopter down as a way of relieving our deep resentment against this faceless, starched and spit-shined despot.
Yesterday, when I read that US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, in a moment of blustering arm-chair machismo, sent a message to the 'non-existent' Iraqi guerrillas to "bring 'em on," the first image in my mind was a 20-year-old soldier in an ever-more-fragile marriage, who'd been away from home for 8 months. He participated in the initial invasion, and was told he'd be home for the 4th of July. He has a newfound familiarity with corpses, and everything he thought he knew last year is now under revision. He is sent out into the streets of Fallujah (or some other city), where he has already been shot at once or twice with automatic weapons or an RPG, and his nerves are raw. He is wearing Kevlar and ceramic body armor, a Kevlar helmet, a load carrying harness with ammunition, grenades, flex-cuffs, first-aid gear, water, and assorted other paraphernalia. His weapon weighs seven pounds, ten with a double magazine. His boots are bloused, and his long-sleeve shirt is buttoned at the wrist. It is between 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. He's been eating MRE's three times a day, when he has an appetite in this heat, and even his urine is beginning to smell like preservatives. Mosquitoes and sand flies plague him in the evenings, and he probably pulls a guard shift every night, never sleeping straight through. He and his comrades are beginning to get on each others' nerves. The rumors of 'going-home, not-going-home' are keeping him on an emotional roller coaster. Directives from on high are contradictory, confusing, and often stupid. The whole population seems hostile to him and he is developing a deep animosity for Iraq and all its people--as well as for official narratives.
This is the lad who will hear from someone that George W. Bush, dressed in a suit with a belly full of rich food, just hurled a manly taunt from a 72-degree studio at the 'non-existent' Iraqi resistance.
This de facto president is finally seeing his poll numbers fall. Even chauvinist paranoia has a half-life, it seems. His legitimacy is being eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered now that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all. Anti-war forces are regrouping as an anti-occupation movement. Now, exercising his one true talent--blundering--George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms.
Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing this war."
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He retired in 1996 from the US Army, from 3rd Special Forces. He lives in Raleigh.
He can be reached at: stan@ncwarn.org
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Genghis W. Bush is firmly committed to Iraqi freedom, no matter how many American boys and girls are blown away. After all, a bit of shooting will make the lemmings forget their troubles, such as finding decent-paying jobs and the effects of runaway government spending on the economy.
-Z-
2003-07-04 14:37 | User Profile
Oh, my Lord! The lefties at counterpunch actually allowed someone to use the term 'race war' outside the context of poking fun at deranged, paranoid 'White Supremacists'. Still, this was a marvelously trenchant piece. Makes one recall Erich Von Zipper's catalog of the Draft Dodgers in Chief of the Late USA during the last century's several Wars to Kill White People (including, of course, FWTKP & SWTKP, aka, WWI & II).
I also recall a similar incident a few years back, during the war to dispossess Serbian White People, when a few Mexican 'US' marines from the great AZTLAN state of Tejas got lost and were take prisoner by some irate Serbian peasants who quite understandably proceeded to give them a piece of their minds. The bruised and bloodied latrinos were then handed over to the Serbian Army for the usual processing. At this point, the mestizo bandidos were entirely out of harm's way, as the Serbian Armed Forces have a sterling reputation for treating captured enemy combatants gallantly. They have even been known to starve themselves to ensure that their prisoners had enough to eat (IMO this is going too far - we aren't Jews, but neither should we be suckers!). Well aware of this, the then current Shabbos Goy In Chief, Mr. Hillary Clinton, he of the heroic cigar that smelled of tuna (or was it gefilte fish?And did he inhale? BTW, in eastern Europe 'smoking' has a rather earthy idiomatic usage - think John Holmes/Eddie Haskell* and Linda Lovelace), went on national television and proceeded to do the one thing that had even the most remote chance of endangering the safety of the soldiers serving under him - he gratuitously dared the Serbian military to harm the Mexicalis. For dessert the Viagra Baptist fulminated grave threats of fire and brimstone (and uranium depleted ordinance and civilian killing cluster bomblets) worthy of the most unregenerate Elmer Gantry.
PS When the low rider detailers were finally released, they all gave the same story to the European press - that the Serbian Military had treated them extremely well, even before the Kosher Kommissar's he man posturing (Disclaimer from the fruit pickers: The Serbian farmers - dey be vatos locos, jefe. Don't be droppin bombs on deir vacas, holmes). Mysteriously though, they ALL conveniently changed their minds a few days later after intense state side 'debriefing', and told IDENTICAL tales of reprehensible mistreatment at the hands of the dastardly Slavs. Double Oy!
*Yes, I am well aware of the fact that the teenage actor who played the mischievously charming Eddie Haskell on 'Leave it To Beaver' did not grow up to be a porno star. Man! Porno and beaver - If I were the ex-president, I'd be getting a chubby right around now.