Emotional numbness, flashbacks, nightmares…self-esteem evaporates, jail time, criminal charges, thoughts of suicide…suicide.
When soldiers die after combat, after discharge…after they’ve lived on the streets homeless or at home mindless…they are not counted as casualties. A hose, a rope around the neck and hanging from the garage rafters...a round in the head…needle in the arm. Combat doesn’t leave them until they can shut it off.
It happens especially in this war that has not a single moral footing. A veteran comes home and wonders, why? The question wanders around the soul, through the mind, and over and over again in the heart until the answer comes…in the offing.
Lumbering, slothful bureaucracy of healthcare stands silent, hands in pocket, for the veterans, the middle class, and the poor...the disposable.
Looking for the American Dream in all the wrong...
American patriots sign up to serve their country often because they want healthcare, financial support for a college education...to improve their civilian lives. The US government promises many benefits from military service but delivers much less. Once in, civilians lose their freedom and become warriors.
The government can force the 'all-volunteer, professional military' to stay in combat for extended tours. The stop loss law keeps them captive.
Winter Soldier Conference
We learn from the Winter Soldier Conference that the veterans who have been retained for more than three tours of duty, more than a third will suffer life-long emotional trauma at least, assuming they're not wounded physically.
A president declared a pre-emptive war based on a list of shameless, flagrant lies. Neither democrats nor republicans do a damn thing about it in neither Congress or in Senate. The Government has fallen deaf to realities, whored out to the corporate and the special interest group lobbyists.
Candidate John McCain supports the Iraqi occupation, even though the US does not admit officially to maintain imperial colonies. Nobody voted for that, nobody wants it, except certain parties.
Neither democrat nor republican candidate makes this criminal war a top priority in the campaign for the next presidential election.
Mainstream journalism is complicit now with W's Admin in controlling public opinion. The current issue of Newsweek's cover story: "While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights." Hooray for Petraeus...oops...another suicide bomb in a Karbala mosque today, dozens dead. At least four suicide bombs today...but who's counting?
Comatose Journalism USA
Mainstream media hardly covers the disgraceful and criminal acts of pre-emptive, imperial war and its effects.
The American people focus on what the media does cover: sex scandals, hot sophisticated call-girls in NY, and the rate of foreclosures...and even then, for the later, look at the symptoms of economic failure…but don’t touch the causes. W is all for bailing out the banks and to hell with the middle class families. Thank you.
The Washington Post as well as Pacifica and NPR radio covered Winter Soldier, yet the bulk of the mainstream journalism slipped away into the shadows once again.
The media sleeps on the job rather than cover stories of national and international importance. It slips into the shadows…some gang of hoodlums in the dark alleys of complacency…conspiracy. Did the corporations and the conservative, religious groups…the special interest groups…did they get to American journalists?
Who can buy the soul of America for a few million bucks? Corporations pay for advertisement on TV…on radio…not so much to peddle their products…”Boeing – Remembers those who served…the Proud and the Brave”….”Halliburton: Proud to Serve our Troops”…
The advertisements pay for the silence. American journalism took the weekend off to shop in the malls of America with their bonuses for behaving according to the new rules.
Defense Contractors
The fat defense contractors have bullion for their advertising campaigns…blood money. But the Veterans Admin doesn’t have a nickel…nothing to help the veterans of wars…Vietnam…Iraq…Afghanistan... That’s what we learned last weekend at the Winder Soldier Conference. Let's keep that shushed up…between you and me.
Meanwhile international journalists were there; they covered the event. Journalists from France, Spain, Germany…from all over Europe…they were there…from Japan…but hardly an American Journalist. It wasn’t news worthy for America…not a front page story…not even a story for the obituaries.
Patriots Testify
Mournful-faced and anxious, nerve-rattled veterans by the hundreds sat before an audience of several hundred last weekend in Silver Spring, Maryland and shared their war stories from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jaded, hard-bitten, combat weathered military men spilled their guts out how they witnessed or participated in atrocities. Vetted US Warriors, one after another, told how they followed orders from the highest levels of command...following the ‘rules of engagement.’ The US occupation has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Let’s not talk about it…shush.
Tears puddled up around their shoes…soldiers told how they fired randomly on Iraqi vehicles...an apartment building filled with Iraqi families devastated by an American gunship. Some described gruesome…criminal…vicious acts of war…the wholesale slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Not a polite discussion topic…shush.
All stories streamed live to the IVAW Website. They draw conclusions from their experience on the ground: the occupation of Iraq is a losing policy no matter how long the US military stays there, no matter how many soldiers die there, no matter how much money.
Civilian Awareness?
The four-day event, featured “Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.” Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.org) sponsored the conference which drew more than 200 veterans of the two wars. Planned for the eve of the fifth anniversary of the war's start next week, the IVAW organizers hoped that the soldiers' accounts would spawn public awareness and opposition.
Like many other combat veterans, former Marine Jon Turner described episodes in which he and fellow Marines shot people out of fear or retribution. "I'm sorry for the hate and destruction I've inflicted upon innocent people," Turner said. "Until people hear about what is happening in this war, it will continue."
Reporting War Atrocities-An American Tradition
Winter Soldier continues the tradition after the well-known and controversial 1971 gathering of the same name at which Vietnam War veterans gathered to describe atrocities.
The 2008 Winter Soldier echoed many of the same war stories. This time, though, the Iraq War is no longer a war but an military occupation that the Iraqi citizens resent and fight.
Story after story, the veterans repeated how the Iraqi civilians feel their lives were much safer and better before the US invaded and continues to occupy their country.
The stories these veterans are telling slap cold reality on the Bush Admin's fear that the public might hear about them. W and his cronies do everything they can to hide the Americans who return from W's War with stories to tell.
Since the beginning, many first-hand combat stories have been published in books: The Deserter’s Tale, Generation Kill…
Don't Support Our Troops--Hide Them
The conference covers the virtual absence of any medical or post-service support for the troops from the Veterans Administration.
While our government pays defense contractors millions and billions of dollars to accomplish little or nothing at all, the Bush Admin prefers to sit on its hands rather than provide adequate care for veterans.
The continued occupation of Iraq benefits only the coffers of defense contractors while corpses rot under the Iraqi sun, and veterans are treated as disposable pawns.
No comments:
Post a Comment