Billiken Man

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Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 15:22:46

Sorry About Your Lunch

     It's hard not to apologize profusely for these pictures. I personally shy away from horror movies, bloody pictures...even lions attacking straggling gazelle on Animal Planet. But it is high time for everyone in America to see death in Iraq. To know what our tax money is financing each and every day of the week, and has for over 3 years now. I got no joy finding these pictures and I get no joy showing them to you. Whitewashing a war is a sin. Life is good in America because we are not allowed to see the daily carnage on our TVs, in newspapers or magazines. It's not fair that we are let off the hook so easily while being a part of such death and destruction.
   It is not my intention to dishonor our troops. Turning a blind eye honors no one. What should we expect from 19 year old kids, who if still at home would make us very nervous every time they took the family car? Kids who can't legally drink are trained to kill and then turned loose with the most deadly weapons known to mankind. If age doesn't matter, why set the drinking age to 21 or the eligibility to be President to 35? No, I'm not demonizing American troops, I'm demonizing the insanity of war.
   What follows are excerpts from a November, 2006 Vanity Fair article titled Rules of Engagement by journalist William Langewiesche. An investigation into what happened at Haditha after a land mine tore one of our HumVees in half, also tearing one of our Marines in half, what happened to the soldiers of Kilo Company as they sought revenge in their terror, anger and grief, what happened to 24 innocent Iraqi men, women and children whose only sin appears to be having been living in the wrong place at the wrong time. I want to share several paragraphs that should make it clear why war should always be the very last tool in our bag and why we should bring our troops home now.

    "They got to the house, kicked through the door, and in the entranceway came upon the owner, a middle-aged man, whom one of them shot at close range, probably with a three-round burst to the chest. The Marine's M16 would barely have kicked in his hands. Beyond the sound of the shots, he might have heard the double pops of the rounds entering and exiting the man, the heavier snap of bullets against bone, perhaps the metallic clatter of spent cartridges hitting the ground. The Iraqi was not thrown by the rounds as people are thrown in the movies. If no bones were broken, he may not have felt much pain, except for some stinging where his skin was torn. Unless he was struck in the heart, he did not die immediately, but soon succumbed to the massive hemorrhaging. Chances are his blood first splattered against the wall, then flowed into a dark-scarlet puddle beneath him until his heart stopped pumping.

      The power was out in the house, and the light inside was dim, all the more so for the Marines, who were piling in from the sunshine of the street. Inside a hostile house, survival requires fast reactions. The Marines fired on a figure down the hall, who turned out too late to be an old woman. There could have been a message there, but guerrilla wars are tricky, and the Marines were not about to slow down. She screamed when she was hit, apparently in the back, and then she died. The Marines were shouting excitedly to one another. They worked down the hallway until, busting open a door, they came upon a room full of people. Later some of the squad said they had heard AK-47s being racked, though whatever they heard turned out not to be that. The room was dim, and the people where glimpsed rather than clearly seen. The Marines rolled in a grenade, hugged the hallway for the blast, and then charged into the dust and smoke to mop up with their rifles as they had been trained to do."
      "Nine people had sheltered in that room, three generations of the same family, from an ancient man paralyzed by a stroke to an infant girl just three months old. When the grenade exploded, it blew some of them apart, wounded others with penetrating shrapnel, and littered the room with evil smelling body parts. In the urgency of the moment the old man forgot that he was paralyzed and tried to stand up. He took rounds to his chest, vomited blood as he fell, and then lay on the floor twitching as he died. In that room four residents survived. A young woman left her husband behind, grabbed the infant girl, and managed to run away; a 10-year-old girl and her younger brother lay wounded beside their dead mother and remained conscious enough to be terrified."

In the next house another innocent family was slaughtered. Here is what the sole survivor, a 13 year old girl recounts. " Daddy was shot through the heart. He was 43. Mommy was shot in the head and chest. She was 41. Aunt Huda was shot in the chest. She was 27. My sister Nour was shot in the right side of her head. She was 15. My sister Saba was shot through the ear. She was 11. My brother Muhammad was shot in the hand and I don't know where else. He was 10. My sister Zainab was shot in the hand and the head. She was five. My sister Aysha was shot in the leg and I don't know where else. She was three. The brains of at least one of the little girls were shoved through fractures in her skull by the impact of a bullet. This is a standard effect of high-velocity rounds fired into the closed cavity of a head. Later that day, when a replacement Marine came in to carry out the bodies, the girl's brains would fall onto one of his boots."
  
   (He didn't stop his car correctly)
  "By now, nearly one year later, hatred of the American forces in the city (Haditha) has turned so fierce that military investigators for the trials at Pendleton have given up on going there. That hatred is blood hatred. It is the kind of hatred people are willing to die for, with no expectation but revenge. This was immediately apparent on a video that was taken the day after the killings by an Iraqi from the neighborhood--the same video that was later passed along to TIME. The Marine Corps was wrong to dismiss the video as propaganda and fiction. It is an authentic Iraqi artifact. It should be shown to the grunts in training. It should be shown to the generals in command. The scenes it depicts are raw. People move among the hideous corpses, wailing their grief and vowing vengeance before God. "This is my brother! My brother! My brother!" In one of the killing rooms, a hard-looking boy insists that the camera show the body of his father. Sobbing angrily, he shouts, "I want to say this is my father! God will punish you Americans! Show me on the camera! this is my father! He just bought a car showroom! He did not pay all the money to the owner yet, and he got killed!"
   A man cries, "This is an act denied by god. What did he do? To be executed in the closet? Those bastards! Even the Jews would not do such an act! Why? Why did they kill him this way? Look, this is his brain on the ground!" The boy continues to sob over the corpse on the floor. He shouts, "Father! I want my father!" Another man cries, "This is democracy?"  Well yeah, well no, well actually this is Haditha. For the United states, it is what defeat looks like in this war."

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