Gość: chickenShorts
IP: *.abo.wanadoo.fr
06.04.03, 06:34
This is a rather thought provocing letter from a woman calling herself JennG:
"Let me preface this by stating that I am an American living abroad. I am an
American who loves the idealistic dream of the country which I call my
homeland. I grew up in the fertile farmlands of Western New York and have
been fortunate enough to have had a comfortable and happy life, to have been
well educated and to have travelled extensively. This war has taken a huge
toll upon my family, as I am sure it has to many American families. We are
split down the middle. We can’t speak of this war to each other except with
the most tentative of voices. Some of us feel the American administration is
shamefully using the plight of Iraq under Saddam Hussein as banner with which
to launch a war that is about anything BUT the liberation of the Iraqi
people. Some of my family refuse to accept anything but the government
approved brand of patriotism, which comes as a sort of neatly wrapped package
of American flag pins, yellow ‘support our troops’ ribbons, Old Glory bumper
stickers, stirring patriotic songs and the blindfold of a disconcerting lack
of credible information about the causes of this war. Some of my family feel
they have only one recourse of thought and action about this war; that they
must support our troops or else be seen as a traitor not only to our country
and armed forces, but to my brother.
My brother is an officer in the United States Army. I worry for him at every
moment of this war. I worry not only for his physical being, but for his
psychological and emotional being as well. I worry for his wife and children.
I worry for what will be waiting for him in the future if he is lucky enough
to walk away from this conflict with his life. I worry that having my own
opinion about this war is disloyal to him and might destroy my relationship
with him. That my opposition to what my government has done, might weigh upon
him as he is doing the only thing he can…obeying orders.
What will be waiting for him? I will still, for the most part, defend the men
and women fighting this war. And yet, as I state that, I realize that it is
taking every ounce of self-will to manipulate my own thoughts to do so; and
that it is only the fact that I must find some way to allow for my brother’s
participation in the war, that I can bring myself to even that much of an
allowance for the actions of the military. The troops are fighting because
they were sent there. They have no choice, really. Many, like my brother, are
in the military with the hope of finding some sort of life for themselves in
a country where education, employment and the American dream is not a reality
that can be afforded by most. My brother, a husband and father of three small
children, is in the midst of an education being funded, largely, by the US
Army. It was his last chance, his final hope of making something of himself.
He can not afford to defy the military and refuse to fight. His family can
not afford the many costs of a court-marshal. And yet, how can he afford the
costs of this war? Will he ever be the same again? I know that he had
resigned himself to the fact that he is just doing his job. He believes, with
the aid and pressure of the US Government and the constant and all consuming
force of their propaganda, that he is liberating these people. But if he
kills someone, even just one person, how will he live with himself? When he
sees the children who will have been killed by the munitions of his military,
when he sees the destruction of the average man and woman, the elderly and
the innocents, their lives and livelihoods, and the wasteland of their very
future in the name of our ‘liberation’ of them, how is he ever going to
reconcile himself to what he has done, to what he has participated in?
I see the way the some of the coalition forces are treating these people, and
I cringe when I see them being stripped of the very few things they have left
to them: pride, dignity and self respect. I see that the majority of the
truly abhorrent behaviour of the troops is being done by the Americans. I
like to think that my brother won’t behave that way. I remember him telling
me of the disgust he felt over the lack of common sense and intelligence he
saw in some of the men he is in command of. I try to remember that he is a
good person who has pulled himself up from a troubled adolescence, and who
has compassion for those who seem beyond hope. I see the picture of tanks
with human skulls strapped to them, bombs with disgusting maxims painted on
them before deployment, ships using the tanks and vehicles they are
transporting to spell out horrifying epithets upon their decks. I see and
read the words of young men in the thick of battle, glorifying the kill,
dehumanizing their victims as they charge on in some sort of euphoric killing
frenzy, and I pray my brother doesn’t get caught up in it. I know he is
better than that. He must be better than that. And then I think, somewhere
there is a sister of a soldier thinking the same of her brother as he shoots
an unarmed woman and says ‘the chick was in the way’.
My sense of shame over this war is like an oppressive mantle that I can not
shake from my shoulders. Everywhere I turn there is shame and guilt. How can
I stop this senseless destruction of human life? How can I type out a letter
which is so disloyal to a brother I love so deeply? How can I love a country
whose administration is willing to call the death of an Iraqi child, severed
in half by a cluster bomb, an acceptable loss? How can I go to a peaceful
anti war demonstration at an air force base in England (flanked by the
monstrous American B52’s which will soon be deployed to rain death and horror
upon innocent lives so far away) and be too embarrassed that my accent will
identify me as an American to chant ‘peace not war’ beside my fellow
protestors? How can I sleep at night when I know that people I love, whether
inadvertently or indirectly or not, are participating in the deaths of
innocents? People I love are unwilling to look at all the facts surrounding
this war, facts which point out so damningly that the United States is not
actually ‘liberating’ anyone. And they can not accept them because to do so
would shame them as well. How can I feel anything BUT shame when I sit a
thousand miles away from any war on my comfortable sofa and see the
condemning eyes of a ‘freed’ woman weeping, broken and grief stricken. A
woman dehydrated and starving in the desert heat of a bombed and defiled
shell of what was once an ancient Iraqi city… her home, clutching the dead
body of her child and wailing at the camera filming her complete destruction,
her total degradation and her all- encompassing desolation. How can there be
anything but shame?"
