CounterPunch
November 14 / 23, 2003
Hold On to Your Humanity
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
By STAN GOFF
(US Army Retired)
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 shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit about
what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit 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 shit 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 bullshit 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 bullshit 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 stated 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 fucking asses stuffed full of
cordon blue 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 "fucking missionary" or a
possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was
untouchable, people too crazy to fuck 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 redheads 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 anaesthetics--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 ever 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 fucking 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, about the loneliness,
the doubts, the pain, or about how you 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 fucking 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
US Army (Ret.)
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" (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.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
