Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
What it means when the US goes to war
By Chris Hedges
July 12, 1942, the battalion, made up of middle-aged recruits, was ordered to
shoot 1,800 Jews in the village of Jozefow in a daylong action. The men in the
unit had to round up the Jews, march them into the forest, and one by one order
them to lie down in a row. The victims, including women, infants, children, and
the elderly, were shot dead at close range.
Battalion members were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a
dozen men took, although a few more asked to be relieved once the killing
began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning says, were disgusted rather
than plagued by conscience. When the men returned to the barracks they
"were
depressed, angered, embittered and shaken". They drank heavily. They were told
not to talk about the event, "but they needed no encouragement in that
direction".
Each generation responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own
disillusionment, often at a terrible personal price. And the war in Iraq has
begun to produce legions of the lost and the damned, many of whom battle the
emotional and physical trauma that comes from killing and exposure to violence.
Punishing the local population
Sergeant Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to
become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and
chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow
soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "shitting
like dogs". The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not
speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals.
The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way
"gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and "raghead" is used to belittle
those in Afghanistan. Soon those around him ridiculed "haji food", "haji
homes", and "haji music". Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless
and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for
hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and
physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejia remembered, "not
knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to
me if I did anything to help them."
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion,
were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejia watched, not daring to
intervene yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He
saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among
Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units
raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to
huddle in the corners at gunpoint, and helped themselves to food and items in
the house.
"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles
we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover
presence patrols in the impounded cars. But to this day I cannot find a single
good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners
except, of course, my own cowardice," he also noted.
Iraqi families were routinely fired on for getting too close to checkpoints,
including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by
a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son. Soldiers shot holes into
cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary
grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot shit up," a
soldier said. Some opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when
improvised explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into
densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who became, in
the callous language of war, "collateral damage".
"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being
hit by an IED," Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming
vehicles to move to one side of the road and considerably slowed down the flow
of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone
could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks,
running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out
of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the
occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade,
riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterward and
determined that he had fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said,
nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo
machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out
grenades.
"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were
attacking us," Mejia said, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to
punish the local population that was supporting them."
The algebra of occupation
It is the anonymity of the enemy that fuels the mounting rage. Comrades are
maimed or die, and there is no one to lash back at, unless it is the hapless
civilians who happen to live in the neighborhood where the explosion or ambush
occurred. Soldiers and marines can do two or three tours in Iraq and never
actually see the enemy, although their units come under attack and take
numerous casualties. These troops, who entered Baghdad in triumph when Iraq was
occupied, soon saw the decisive victory over Saddam Hussein's army evolve into
a messy war of attrition.
The superior firepower and lightning victory was canceled out by what T E
Lawrence once called the "algebra of occupation". Writing about the British
occupation of Iraq following the Ottoman Empire's collapse in World War I,
Lawrence, in lessons these veterans have had to learn on their own, highlighted
what has always doomed conventional, foreign occupying powers.
"Rebellion must have an unassailable base ... it must have a sophisticated
alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to
dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts," Lawrence wrote. "It
must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the
point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by
2% active in a striking force, and 98% passive sympathy. Granted mobility,
security ... time and doctrine ... victory will rest with the insurgents, for
the algebraical factors are in the end decisive."
The failure in Iraq is the same failure that bedeviled the French in Algeria;
the United States in Vietnam; and the British, who for 800 years beat,
imprisoned, transported, shot, and hanged hundreds of thousands of Irish
patriots. Occupation, in each case, turned the occupiers into beasts and fed
the insurrection. It created patterns where innocents, as in Iraq, were
terrorized and killed. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many
veterans said, has given rise to a culture of terror and hatred among US
forces, many of whom, losing ground, have in effect declared war on all Iraqis.
Mejia said, regarding the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, "This sort of
killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment."
Mejia also watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. He
related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the
back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and this motherf---er," said one of the
soldiers who had been in Mejia's squad in Third Platoon, putting his arm around
the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body, revealing a young man wearing only his
pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
"Damn, they really f---ed you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, Mejia noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.
The senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely
experienced combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to
be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejia noted, "was
essential to their further progress up the officer ranks."
This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into
the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they
were wrong." When the badges - bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer
dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath - were finally awarded, the commanders
brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their
desert combat uniforms.
"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," Mejia noted
bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little
patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."
War breeds gratuitous, senseless and repeated acts of atrocity and violence.
Abuse of the powerless becomes a kind of perverted sport for the troops.
"I mean, if someone has a fan, they're a white-collar family," said Specialist
Philip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. "So we get
started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy-ops
[psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers
playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be
saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front
door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had
Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show
of force. And we were running around, and we'd done a few houses by this point,
and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader, and maybe a couple other
people, but I don't really remember.
"And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area; they're, like,
built up into little courtyards," he said. "So they have like the main house,
common area. They have like a kitchen and then they have like a
storage-shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And
it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader,
just out of nowhere, just shoots it. ... the motherf---er ... he shot it, and
it went in the jaw and exited out.
"So I see this dog - and I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals - and this dog
has like these eyes on it, and he's running around spraying blood all over the
place. And the family is sitting right there, with three little children and a
mom and a dad horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so I yell at him. I'm
like, 'What the f--- are you doing?' And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out
without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just scared. And so I
told them, I was like, 'F---ing shoot it,' you know. 'At least kill it, because
that can't be fixed. It's suffering.' And I actually get tears from just saying
this right now, but - and I had tears then, too - and I'm looking at the kids
and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and I get my
wallet out and I gave them 20 bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know,
I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did
that. Which was very common.
"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any
punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not."
The plaster saints of war
The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use
the abstract words of "glory", "honor" and "patriotism" to mask the cries of
the wounded, the brutal killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.
They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in
stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage
and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important
memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war.
The vanquished know the essence of war - death. They grasp that war is
necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin, with its goals of
hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably
to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life.
All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and
seductiveness of violence as well as the attraction of the godlike power that
comes with the license to kill with impunity.
But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when
grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children: what it was
like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to
lose their homes, their community, their security, and to be discarded as human
refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too
late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on
the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping
up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look.
We are trapped in a doomed war of attrition in Iraq. We have blundered into a
nation we know little about, caught in bitter rivalries between competing
ethnic and religious groups. Iraq was a cesspool for the British in 1917 when
they occupied it. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We have embarked on an
occupation that is as damaging to our souls as to our prestige and power and
security. We have become tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. And we
believe, falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the
right to wage war.
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them
uniforms with colored ribbons on their chests for the acts of violence they
committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of
power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want
to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we
cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our
civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a
chosen nation to wield this force against the weak, and rule. This is our
nation's idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious
institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to
separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits - few people in
pulpits have much worth listening to - but are the battered wrecks of men and
women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear,
words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a
soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion,
trauma, and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have
the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York
Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He
is the author of several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning. This piece has been adapted from the introduction to the
just-published, Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians(Nation Books), which he has co-authored with
Laila al-Arian.
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