“Shock and Awe” It has been twenty years

Last Sunday was the twenty year anniversary of our invasion into Iraq. Yesterday I read an essay by Iraqi war veteran Will Selber, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, It is an honest, hard to read story of his time in Bagdad 2006 as they were trying to keep the lid the erupting civil war.

As I said it is a hard read but it is honest and he cuts himself no slack. I hope you will pay him some respect by going and reading it. It couldn’t have been easy for him to put his story on paper. I’m not going to excerpt it as it needs to be read as a whole. here is the link

The story I linked to also made me remember a couple of friends, so this morning I put a few thoughts on paper.

My late Father in Law fought in the pacific in WWII. He was part of a chemical battalion, he was the man who had the “flame thrower” When a group of Japanese would be in a cave or bunker and they refused to surrender he went up and burned them to death.. He carried the scars from that to his grave. I know about it only because his PTSD psychiatrist ask him to write down his memories of that time and he never threw anything away.

We ask young men and women to do things in our names that are at times horrific, things that will scar them for their life. It doesn’t matter if it is a just war or an unjust war, a smart war or a stupid war. The scars are there

Another story:

Back when Bush senior was running against Clinton, Bush decide to gather all of the Medal of Honor recipients together for a political event. At the time I was working at Smithville lake and there was this old man who was around. He would park his car, take a case of beer, fish until he was too drunk then crawl into the back seat and go to sleep. I got acquainted with him and shared a few beers and talked. One morning, I came across him setting in a parking lot, setting drinking his breakfast. I stopped and talked. He showed me a letter he had received from Bush inviting him to come to the event. I don’t remember the whole conversation but the part that sticks with me was this. He waved the letter at me and said” They call me a Hero” With a strong emphasis on the first syllable. “Do you want to know what I did? I shot a bunch of chinks setting around with their bowls of rice, eating. What kind of a hero does that?”

I didn’t have an answer then, I don’t have an answer now.

Except the very inadequate, “Its war”

Mentally war is hard and though this sounds like a veterans day post we need to keep it in mind every day. Like it or not we are the worlds superpower, we are not really good at it, we aren’t evil either. But as a super power with obligations worldwide we will always be in some conflict, so it is our responsibility to be informed citizens and maybe just once in a while pay attention to what is going on in the world rather than Donald Trumps latest tweet. We owe it to those we send into harms way in our name.

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18 thoughts on ““Shock and Awe” It has been twenty years”

  3. jack, your post brought to mind “johnny i hardly knew ya” that according to wiki the irish adapted in 1867 from the old u.s. civil war song “when johnny comes marching home.”

    Originally seen as humorous, the song today is considered a powerful anti-war song. Except for an initial framing stanza, the song is a monologue by an Irish woman who meets her former lover on the road to Atny, which is located in County Kildare, Ireland. After their illegitimate child was born, the lover ran away and became a soldier. He was badly disfigured, losing his legs, his arms, his eyes and, in some versions, his nose, in fighting on the island of “Sulloon”, or Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka), and will have to be put in (or, in some versions, with) a bowl to beg. In spite of all this, the woman says, she is happy to see him and will keep him on as her lover. Modern versions often end with an anti-war affirmation.

  4. Due to the massive gqp propaganda machine promoting the war in Iraq and Afghanistan being a veteran of a long ago war became acceptable in some places. The stick on “ribbons” and flags to show how patriotic the car driver was still hangs with me as false patriotism.  I lived next to an Air Force base in 2006 and saw a C130 doing the evasive take offs and landings, and it filled me with such hate of the village idiot I was in tears.  The drunk fool who never bothered to show up  for duty was way too much to stand. I have friends who served in Southwest Asia and they found it as worthless as many who served in Southeast Asia.

  5. Patd

    The original version of Johnny I Hardly Knew ye is so disturbing.  Joan Baez does a version that just breaks your heart.  The video is very graphic as well.

     

     

  6. Pat, i had not thought you were disparaging anything :-).  It’s fairly common, especially in folk, western, and country music, for the tunes to be borrowed here and there with different lyrics, but i was just thinking that though the tune for clark’s ‘mater song is  familiar sounding I couldn’t really place it with another song with my cursory recollections.     There probably are 1 or 2 here and there out there however–it’s hard to be entirely original when there are thousands of songwriters past and present working with only 3 or 4 chords.

  7. “He was badly disfigured, losing his legs, his arms, his eyes and, in some versions, his nose, ”

    That has much in common with today’s Book of the Day:
    JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN
    By Dalton Trumbo in 1938. Mr Trumbo also directed the movie of his book in 1971. In Trumbo’s work Johnny was also deaf.

  9. sturge, thanks for reminding us.  here’s part of it from last night

    Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Al Franken discuss how they are aligned politically when it comes to the war in Ukraine, the need for immigration reform, the possible Trump indictment and what Sen. Graham calls a “never-ending effort to take a wrecking ball” to the former president. #DailyShow #Comedy

  12. Jack, wonderful post.  Whole lotta kids (and kids turned old folks and all ages in between) fucked up for life for what they were sent to do in our names, and we as a country treat them terribly inadequately. By virtue of age, a relatively high draft number (211 if I recall correctly) and college (to say nothing of a fear of dying in Vietnam) I never was called upon to serve.  If the numbers had kept ticking up in 1970 and beyond I would probably have taken the route Sturge took – If the line wasn’t too long.
     
    As an aside, my uncle was a Lt. Col., USAF, attached to intelligence in Germany and a stint in Saigon after getting too old and losing his flight status as a result of an ulcer and a bad hip and before he “retired’ to Maxwell AFB to teach in the Air College there. He was an earlyish jet jockey after the end of WWII and during Korea, but I don’t know much about what he did while he was still flying.  He did have one insanely cool flight jacket my cousin now has.
     
    Pat, like sturg, I didn’t take your comment as a rap on Guy Clark. I prefer Jimi’s All Along the Watchtower to Bob’s, but that’s no dig at Bob.

  13. Pogo – I had a week or so at Maxwell AFB, in the hospital where I had my knee reassembled.  There were a few of us in the leg ward.  We had wheelchairs.  What do young active duty airmen do in wheelchairs?  We raced, all around the hospital, through the wards, up and down in the elevators.  We did not have the new type solid wheels.  The nurses took care of our racing by deflating our tires. Slowed us right down.

  14. BB, Montgomery isn’t exactly the garden spot of Alabama – that would be Mobile.  And you have to watch those nurses – they deal with young airmen all day and know how to slow them down.  Only parts of Maxwell I knew were the BX, the flight line and the playground and field across from my Uncle’s on-base housing.  What I remember most about what time I spent there was that they had this very small European car (I want to say Fiat but it could have been a Renault) that had a 4 speed on the column.

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