Stan Goff to GIs In Iraq: Hold On To Your Humanity

2003-12-01

Richard Moore

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Delivered-To: •••@••.•••
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 22:23:52 -0500
From: "Charles D. Johnson" <•••@••.•••>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Hold On To Your Humanity - GIs In Iraq

Dear Friends -

I saw combat as a hospital corpsman with the Marines in Korea.
As a psychiatrist in the Veterans Administration I have treated 
many wounded soldiers, some with wounds that will never heal. 
Stan Goff's words have the ring of truth.  Do whatever you can 
to bring our troops home NOW.

Keep Hope Alive!

Charles
******************************************************** 
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: "Hold On To Your Humanity"
by Stan Goff
Published on Saturday, November 15, 2003 by Counterpunch
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Hold_on_to_your_111503.htm

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
peole'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 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
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, 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 •••@••.•••.