Iraq Vets
It’s always interesting to hear or read what U.S. soldiers have to say about the war in Iraq. AlterNet’s Terrence McNally interviewed three Iraq war veterans who are attending the Sundance Film Festival. A few choice quotes from the interview:
SEAN HUZE: It all comes down to weapons of mass destruction, for me. And they weren’t there. Dick Cheney’s going around accusing all of us of being revisionist now. But if you’re trying to say that the war in Iraq was about anything other than WMD, that’s revisionism. I don’t care how many times Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, whoever, says that this war was about anything other than WMD, or that we were given a justification or rationale other than WMD.I’ve got a long memory, and it was only a couple of years ago. I know why I was sent to Iraq; I know why I went to war. And when that proved to be false, I think that’s when we lost our credibility and our world standing. And ultimately we’re in a quagmire right now.
Everything that makes you a functional and healthy individual amongst society are all detriments in a combat zone, and it takes a while to decompress from that. You kind of go numb.
It’s not like two armies went out there on a battlefield. This war was fought in an urban environment amongst the civilian population, and ultimately it is that civilian population that has paid the heaviest toll. It’s difficult as a husband and as a father to reconcile who I was over there with some of the things that I saw. I mean, a dead child on the side of the road in Nasiriyah, about the same age as my son right now. And how unfeeling I was at the time about it, with who I am now, how I feel about it now.
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PAUL RIECKHOFF: I don’t care what George Bush tells you, our military’s been run into the ground. More than half of our folks are there for a second time, the divorce rates have doubled, we’re now moving combat units out of Korea and out of training units in the United States to perform combat missions in Iraq, recruiting numbers are in the toilet, and retention numbers will soon fall. At the end of the day, he’s really destroyed our military, and that will have long-term effects for our national security for decades.
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TERRENCE MCNALLY: Let me ask you about your actions since you returned. You saw combat—from what I’ve read you were horrified by what you experienced?JIMMY MASSEY: Yes, primarily the killing of innocent civilians. That’s where I really began to question our overall motives. My questions to my command became, how do you tell a 25-year-old Iraqi male who just witnessed his brother being killed at a checkpoint, how do you tell this young man not to become an insurgent? So I was very critical of our mission and what we were performing and the lack of humanitarian support to the Iraqi people.
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PAUL RIECKHOFF: Recently, I got an email from a very close buddy serving as an officer in Ramadi. He speaks with a candor and level of frustration that you won’t hear from the generals. Check this out:Paul, I wish I had the time or energy or memory capacity to describe to you how wrong this whole thing has gone. It’s just as you described it a couple years ago. We can make a difference here, and I believe in the mission as it looks on paper. But your president and his brain-dead colleagues aren’t even trying to give us what we need to do it. The add-on armor HMMWVs are a joke. The terrorists target them b/c they know they offer no protection. The M1114s have good armor, but every time we lose one (I had one blown up Monday, driver had his femoral artery cut—will recover fully—b/c there apparently is no armor or very weak armor under the pedals) it’s impossible to replace them. So now I have to send yet another add-on armored vehicle outside the wire daily. The M1114s also have certain mechanical defects, known to the manufacturer, for which there is apparently no known fix. For example, on some of them (like mine) if it stalls or you turn it off, you cannot restart it if the engine is hot. We have to dump 3 liters of cold water on a solenoid in order to start it again. Not that much fun when your vehicle won’t start in Indian country. I wonder if DoD is getting a refund for the contract. Speaking of contracts, KBR is a joke. I can’t even enumerate the problems with their service, but I guarantee they do not receive less money based on how many of the showers don’t work, or how many of us won’t eat in the chow hall often because we get sick every time we do. There is so much. I could go on forever. The worst thing, which we have discussed, is that they are playing these bullshit numbers games to fool America about troop strength. If they stopped paying KBR employees $100,000 to do the job of a $28,000 soldier, maybe they’d have enough money to send us enough soldiers to do the job. As it stands we have no offensive capability in the most dangerous city on earth. General Shinseki should write an Op/Ed that basically says, “I told you so.” Idiots. Where are the AC-130s? The Apaches? They have them in far less active AOs (areas of operations). All we ever get is a single Huey and Cobra team, both of which are older than I am. It’s such a joke. They’re not even trying. At all. They have Apaches in Tikrit but Hueys in Ramadi. I wish every American could see this for him/herself. Registering your frustration at the ballot box isn’t nearly enough. There should be jail terms for this.
Paul Rieckhoff also mentioned a great website named Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. One segment of the site (Vets of the Week.) provides a sort of blog-like space for Iraq vets to tell their stories about Iraq, Afghanistan, and their transition home.
—loquacious
March 11th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Doesn’t matter for or agianst the war are wounded need your help check out www.saluteheroes.org the general public support the brave men and wemon in uniform
March 12th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I appreciate the response, “unknown.” I took a peek at the site you linked as well. I’ll have to look at it more crefully later, though. From first glance it seems like a good website for wounded vets looking for help. After the latest exposure of Walter Reed’s failures (and the failures of other vet hospitals) to provide adequate care for wounded service men and women returning from Iraq it’s obvious that private support from citizens is certainly needed. Lord knows the Armed Services aren’t going to responsibly or conscientiously care for the wounded or discharged vets in general. Once their service is finished they are discarded like so much trash. It’s despicable. The war as a whole has been despicable.
There was a heartbreaking story today on Ed Gordon’s NPR radio show. It was an interview with the parents of a soldier who committed suicide in either Kuwait or Iraq. It was the serviceman’s second tour of duty in the army. It took the parents over a year to find out what had happened to their son (other than being told he had killed himself). One of the details they discovered from reading the CID report (again, a year later) was that their son had threatened to kill himself at least once before. He had locked himself in a port-a-potty with a gun. After he was talked out of it they took his gun from him. But, and this is horrifying, after talking with his lieutenant for about an hour they gave him his gun back. He was never sent to a psychiatrist, psychologist, doctor, nurse, no one who even remotely might be considered a mental health professional. That’s our unprofessional and irresponsible U.S. Army not supporting the troops. No matter what support I give or don’t give, nothing I will ever do will do more harm to those soldiers than what the Pentagon and the Bush administration is doing to them. It is disgraceful.
Anyway, thanks for the brief response.