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 |
 |  Stan Goff | An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
 |  http://propaganda.lege.net/humanity/
 |  http://truthout.org/docs_03/111703D.shtml
 |  http://truthout.org/docs_03/printer_111703D.shtml
 |  http://bringthemhomenow.org/what/latest.html#openletter031115
 |
 |
 |  Hold On to Your Humanity:
 |  An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
 |  by Stan Goff
 |  posted 15 Nov 2003
 |
 |  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 is 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.
 |
 |  by Stan Goff   
 |  posted 15 Nov 2003
 |
 |
 |  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 Mili-
 |  tary 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@mfso.org.
 |
 |  Stan Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
 |
 |
 |  (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
 |  material is distributed without profit to those who have
 |  expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
 |  information for research and educational purposes.)
 |
 |
 |  ( Also see other texts at
 |  http://bringthemhomenow.org/what/latest.html )
 |
 |  ( At the bottom of the CounterPunch and CommonDreams copies
 |  of the above article there are links to books written by
 |  Stan Goff, see  http://counterpunch.org/goff11142003.html
 |  or  http://commondreams.org/views03/1115-06.htm )
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