[Corporations] open letter to GI's in Iraq

[melissa roberts]

www.truthout.org

>
>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.
>
>      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 value 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 anesthetics-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 ever 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 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.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>      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 : The Military in the New American
>Century" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM
>HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master
>sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email for BRING
>THEM HOME NOW! is bthn at mfso.org.

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