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Hold On to Your Humanity
by Stan Goff
t r u t h o u t | Letter
Saturday 15 November 2003
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 people'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 never 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 (click
here for a shocking story on depleted uranium health risks),
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.
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 Military 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
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