Source: counterpunch, Nov 2003
An Open Letter to GIs in
Iraq
By STAN GOFF
(US Army Retired)
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 shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit 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 shit 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 bullshit 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 commiting 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 bullshit 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 stated 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
fucking asses stuffed full of cordon blue 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 "fucking
missionary" or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that
group that was untouchable, people too crazy to fuck 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 humantiy 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,
esepcially 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 fucking 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 lonliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how you
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
fucking 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 perfeclty 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
US Army (Ret.)
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