November 17, 2004

• He’s dead now!
  War

  When the first gulf war started, I was at a cabin with my girlfriend. We returned to the regular world and learned that the war had started and finished while we were gone (it was reported as being the 60 hour war).

  For whatever reasons, I wrote this song. It isn’t a great song, but here are the lyrics (sung in a rough Leonard Cohen style):
  

  I was walking last evening,
  Through a woods and a meadow.
  I came upon a dream.

  The crickets, they were chirping.
  The stars, they were shining.
  An owl, she softly winged by.

  Every thing was tranquil,
  There was beauty and silence
  Peace all across the land.

  This morning I awoke,
  Saw the news in the paper.
  We’ve won the war is what I read.

  As I was walking last evening
  The bombs they were falling.
  A newborn baby, she bled!

  Wars we wage
  Far across the water
  But no one truly says why

  What did they die for?
  Why did we kill them?
  Have we saved the world now?

  Did they die for ideals?
  Or did their blood flow for oil?
  In the end, they still are dead!

  Every thing is tranquil
  There is hideous silence
  Death strewn across the land.

  Ashes to ashes
  And Dust to dust
  Only Death is victorious.

  Tonight I’ll go walking
  Through the woods and the meadow
  But I, I have lost my dream.

  What does this have to do with a young man executing an unarmed wounded man in a Mosque in Falluja?

  In the fifth verse, I mention a baby dying. I hadn’t seen any reports that civilians had died. I had no way of proving that a baby girl was killed.

  But I knew it was true. You can’t bomb areas with civilians without having some “collateral damage”. Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima have all taught us this. We don’t have battlefields, we have cities. Modern warfare is an impersonal horror that inflicts nearly as much damage on the people stuck near it as the people choosing to fight it.

  Similarly, when a war is started, we will have war crimes. When that war is against a people who look different, fight different, and have a different culture, those war crimes will be more widespread.

  You take a bunch of teenagers, train them to be tough as nails, and then send them into hell. What the fuck do you expect? Some of them are going to react poorly. That marine probably wasn’t an evil person. He was a person who spent too much time in the midst of an insane situation. Being in a place where you have to shoot people and you will be shot at is an insane and hellish situation. He was just one of the ones who lost it on camera.

  This guy cracked and did something unacceptable. He will suffer the consequences of that action.

  But when we sent him and 150,000 other troops into that country, we made the choice that this sort of thing was going to happen. When we “won” the war but failed to provide stability, we ensured that these soldiers would be stuck in degenerating chaos, and we guaranteed that this sort of thing will happen a number of times. Dozens? Hundreds? I don’t know, but I know that this is not a “once only” sort of thing.

  Things are bad over there. You can hear it in the comments of soldiers who have gotten to the point where they can’t trust any locals.

  More war crimes will be committed. Atrocities will be committed. While I can not prove it, I know it to be true.

  I’ll make you one more guarantee. Some of these soldiers are going to come home messed up. Even for the ones that followed all the rules, some of them are going to carry nasty psychological scars. Some of them that would have led normal productive lives are going to end up being the grizzled guy sleeping on the street drinking Robitussin.

  Hopefully it won’t be as bad as post Vietnam because hopefully we anti-war folks won’t make their return home hellish as well. I can’t imagine finally making it home after being in hell and being received by a wall of hate. But some of them are still going to be a bit too messed up to function well in society.

  I do have a theory for how we as a society should approach that:

  We have boot camp/basic training which teaches a normal person how to be a soldier. We have refined and developed the psychology of this training so that it is very effective at making a person more capable of dealing with combat.

  We do not have a dress shoe camp/basic training to teach that soldier how to become a citizen again. Not every soldier would need it. Some people can maintain that duality. However, many can’t. Doesn’t a society owe that much to its soldiers? Shouldn’t we give them the help they need to rejoin society once they are done?

  • 1:45 pm
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