A letter.

Haven't posted in awhile. 8-)

The following is an open letter to the US troops now in Iraq. It was
written by Stan Goff, a Vietnam veteran. You can find the letter
online at:

http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/what/latest.html#openletter031115
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Hold On to Your Humanity: 
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.
by Stan Goff   
posted 15 nov 2003
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~Chris (Icicle Child)~
-- 
[  "Okay, we'll talk about the ethical ramifications  ]
[          of using destiny for profit later."        ]
[              -White Mage, 8-bit Theater             ]