Gość: veteran
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08.07.03, 19:48
A Former Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis to
Attack US Troops
Bring 'Em On?"
by Stan Goff
Counterpunch 3 July 2003.
www.globalresearch.ca 8 July 2003
The URL of this article is: globalresearch.ca/articles/GOF307A.html
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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."
