Billiken Man: Sorry About Your Lunch

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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.

Men of Kilo Company

"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."

We Must Get Out of Iraq Now!

What is left after a human steps on a land mine

What a US soldier looks like after being hit
by an Improvised Explosive Device or IED

Posted by Death by Inches on November 14, 2006 03:22 PM | Permalink

Comments

Well, you win for most disturbing and sobering post. I have to say I agree with you, this war is insane, to remain there and tell the American people there is a reason other than trying to fix a mess the Bush administration and the Republican Congress created insults the general common sense of this nation. I hope, in the future, when this is over and history looks back, we remember to villify those who deserve to be villified and not the teenagers we sent into war.

Bring them home, people, and remember, all of those who voted for this idiot in 2004, you had a part in this mess. I hope partisian lip service and your conservative agendas were well served by the blood shed on both sides.

Posted by: Mr. Ricky | November 15, 2006 09:34 AM

Wow, D...

I feel like a real shmuck bitching about my silly little problems...

I was raised in the wake of Vietnam believing that there is little, if any, sense to war. This just makes it more concrete...

I'll tell you...this administration is the most arrogant, incompetent group of assholes ever assembled...

Posted by: rosso | November 15, 2006 03:55 PM

When I flip back over to this page...it makes me feel pretty stupid to be wasting any pixels on Huckabee latest gift grab. The shit on this page blows the little stuff away.

There are millions of pictures like this on the Internet. If every American was forced to watch 5 minutes a day.....this war would be over by Christmas.

Posted by: Deathbyinches | November 15, 2006 09:36 PM

I'm trying to copy these photos and hope that someone will get them to Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln's families and ask each of them if they are now proud of what they support.
We should do no less.

Posted by: Lwood | November 16, 2006 03:37 AM

Contemporary movies and video games have helped pave the way for the Administration here. While the pics are disturbing, of course, the people have seen it all before, live action, on the big screen.

Yes, when it's for real it has more impact. I'm just saying the impact is lessened due to the movies, and it probably won't move that many people away from positions they already strongly hold.

Who knows, though, maybe some of the liberals in Hollywood will begin to move away from graphic movie violence. Hard move, though, since violence sells and liberals like money too. At least, I do.

Posted by: Spirit | November 16, 2006 08:04 AM

Really, Spirit, the liberal Hollywood establishment is to blame here? I gurantee I have seen more liberal Hollywood violence than just about anyone on this blog site, I watched some the other night, Equilibrium with Christian Bale, great flick, check it out. That didn't help me look at the photos, or make any less difficult to quicly hit Page Down this morning. I don't think that violence in movies or in video games paved the way for this Administration. That's like saying Furbies paved the way for Fox News, and if they did, I'm glad they died out, little furry annoyance machines. Voter apathy, evangelical lemmings and big business paved the way for this Administration. A brother in a key state helped too. If people would get out and vote like the get out and talk (this is not aimed at you, I don't know your voting record, etc. this is a blatant generalization) then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess, we would have had someone new in there in 2004, who might have found a way not to accelerate the situation and eventual get us out of Iraq. Instead, retired generals are coming out of the woodwork saying we'll have to have troops there for at least 15 years. That's not the Terminator's or Saw II's fault. That's the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch that backed him up. Apparently Americans have finally woken up on one of those. Too bad we couldn't call for a vote of confidence or something...

And they tried to impeach Clinton, sweet Lord....

Posted by: Mr. Ricky | November 16, 2006 09:29 AM

i couldn't read the whole article because of the pictures. someone should make sen pryor see them but after his vote on torture i am not so sure of how much he actually cares. his theory is they will change things when they get control but who will put the pen to it? i have not gotten my vanity fair yet so i am glad for the warning.

Posted by: zonker | November 16, 2006 10:36 AM

i forgot one thing. in the car this morning on air america they were talking about limbaugh making one of his slow pronouncments. he deeply asked why are we in iraq, then simply answered becaused we were attacked. when are these fools going to stop this shit of trying to make us believe that iraq attacked us.

Posted by: zonker | November 16, 2006 10:41 AM

"Really, Spirit, the liberal
Hollywood establishment is to
blame here?
Posted by: Mr. Ricky"

I don't believe I said that. George Bush and his henchmen are to blame. I simply pointed out that the photos would probably have a little less effect on people already hardened to gore by movies and video games.

I also suggested that it's a plus that most of Hollywood is liberal, since that might make them eventually reject blood and gore movies, the way Europe and the rest of the civilized world already have.

You're free to believe as you wish about whether movie violence is harmless or not. In my opinion it causes people to be a little less shocked by DBI's photos. You think it has no impact. So we disagree on that. That's fine.

Posted by: Spirit | November 16, 2006 12:18 PM

I couldn't read it...couldn't get past the pictures. I easily puke

They need to be seen, nonetheless. Seen by every American (well, I'd give our children a break) because something needs to break through the Oz-like detachment our country's hiding behind. Other than the military families, NO ONE has even been inconvenienced by this war, muchless suffered--tax breaks all the way around and a gorged military establishment. But it's not all our fault...monkeyboy et al have worked hard to keep ugly, real-war images hidden behind artificial renderings of patriotism. We get a body-count from CNN rather than views of the flag-draped coffins coming home...or of the slaughtered Iraqis.

Supposedly a few hundred students are camping out on Lou Hardin's lawn to protest a decision about some sport. Though I'm always happy when people feel strongly enough to protest...to get involved, I couldn't help but think that something was askew when canceling a college sport evoked so much more anger than the immoral slaughter in Iraq. Sad.

(I love your blog, dbi; I'll try to wander here more often.)

Posted by: zelda | November 16, 2006 05:54 PM

Yes, these photos are horrifying atrocities.

And yet, we have seen them all before in the work of Francisco Goya(1746-1828). The severest indictment ever created against war was a series of 80 etchings by Goya.

The etchings, called The Disasters of War, describe events that occurred from 1808 to 1812 after the French army of Joseph Bonaparte invaded Spain.

Bonaparte invaded for the sole purpose of making a "regime change". He believed that Spain was some kind of threat to France. So Bonaparte invaded to get rid of King Carlos IV and his monstrous Queen Maria Luisa.

The horrifying carnage became known as The Peninsular War. At the end, neither side won. Both sides wore themselves out from fighting and killing. The victims perpetuated the evil and became the murderers.

Goya depicted the war -- ordinary Spanish citizens and French soldiers brutally destroy and slaughter each other.

In one year, 20,000 Spanish corpses were piled in the streets of Madrid to be hauled away by French wagons.

Goya showed it all. Have we learned anything? Goya sent a warning to Humanity, but our leaders never seem to study the past or learn from it.

The Peninsular War was the last hurrah -- a final agony -- for the Napoleonic Era. The French nation went into a decline.

Spain went on to drown in her own blood under despotic kings much worse than King Carlos IV, reviving The Inquisition, torturing and killing all "heretics".

How much repetition of history can we stand?

Posted by: Ecce! Spiro et Spero. | November 16, 2006 11:07 PM

I thought the heads of the studios were not liberals. They are corporatists, who by definition would not likely be liberals.

The directors, actors, writers and others that don't really decide on what is produced are often liberals.

Well, except for the ones that form their own companies. They might be liberals.

Horrific photos. It's just as I thought it would be, and why I am against all wars. There HAS to be a better way.

Posted by: rablib | November 17, 2006 10:15 PM

the photos were horrible but they served the purpose. i have always been against war. i have a son just above draft age and i can't imagine him volunteering but i guarantee i will drive him to canada myself if we ever have a draft again.

Posted by: zonker | November 18, 2006 12:10 AM

"I thought the heads of the
studios were not liberals.
They are corporatists, who
by definition would not likely
be liberals."

No, I just ready my Rove For America Handbook and it assures me that everybody in Los Angeles, including Hollywood, is a commie liberal.

Herr Rove would not lie to me. I'm sure of it.

Posted by: Spirit | November 20, 2006 08:01 PM

Billiken Man

Dedicated to the god of things as they ought to be.

Sorry About Your Lunch

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