Getting Out Of Iraq (and Other Dilemmas), Part II: What The Navy Doc And The Reporter Saw

I respect Dan, my oldest son, and we disagree. Halfway through college, he joined the 1980s peacetime Navy, sneaking out on deck to witness 70 foot waves, helping people escape from an erupting volcano in the Philippines, returning nut brown with a reflexive grin and a red bandana, looking like a happy pirate. The 1991 U.S.-Iraq War put him on a carrier deck in the Persian Gulf. Returning to civilian life, he was a web designer, an Emergency Medical Technician [EMT] and within the Navy Reserves, a hospital corpsman, a "doc." Because Marines have no paramedics of their own, Dan trained with a Marine Reserve battalion, and in 2004, it yanked him into Iraq. By then 39, Dan proved his fitness to the far younger troops--and wrenched his back--by running full speed carrying a Marine over his shoulder. Bellowing at hulking warriors to constantly drink water because they were in a #%@&!! desert, with other Navy docs he crouched in under sniper fire to tend shattered people. Meanwhile armed Marines guarded the docs. Whatever Washington was up to, the troops were mainly fighting to get each other home alive and intact. Now back in the U.S., Dan believes that the U.S. should stay in Iraq because we must fight Al-Qaeda over there or fight it here and he wants the sacrifice of those who died to be honored by a win.

An investigative reporter, I have opposed the invasion since before it started, believe that our actions are fueling an avoidable holy war and want the U.S. to honor its pledge to Iraq to be completely out by 2011. Reflecting the majority opinion here, in Iraq and in the world, President Barack Obama [D] is pulling all combat troops out of Iraq by August, 2010. He is however leaving a "residual" of 50,000 personnel (plus corporate soldiers for hire?) As worldwide economic conditions worsen, they are driving impoverished young people not only into the U.S. military and into mercenary military corporations but into the Taliban. So a debate is kicking up and not just in my family. Our combined knowledge might provide some depth of field in discussing this....

By the time Navy Dan and the Marine Reserves arrived in 2004, a cauldron was boiling over. In the wake of the 2003 invasion, the U.S. had suddenly disbanded the Iraqi Army, causing massive unemployment among well-armed men; and Sunni and Shia Arabs had begun ethnically cleansing their own neighborhoods. Far from selectively picking off the ethnic cleansers and jihadists, in 2003-2004, U.S. General Raymond Odierno had ordered his Army troops simply to kick down the doors of thousands of Iraqi homes late at night (terrifying women and kids), round up all the "M.A.M's" (military aged males) and ship them by the truckload to Abu Ghraib prison where many were sexually humiliated and tortured . The process was manufacturing insurgents. Trying to make their killings as grisly as possible, foreign jihadists admiring Al-Qaeda [see Part I for expanded jihadist information] were aiming not only at U.S. troops but at any Iraqis thought to be helping them. Corporations meanwhile had hired ex-special-forces fighters collected from many countries and then rented them out to the U.S. government. The"contractors" did not obey U.S. military officers, and some of those from Blackwater [rebranded Xe Corporation]--murdered unarmed civilians. Yet the U.S. government paid them up to 20 times more than it paid U.S. troops, then sent U.S. troops in to clean up after them.

In March, 2004, Sunnis ambushed, mutilated and burned four Blackwater contractors, then hung the grotesquely charred corpses upside-down from the metal trusses of a bridge over the Euphrates--while videotaping. As that scene played on TVs worldwide, U.S. Marines fought their way into the city to get the ringleaders, but at the request of the Iraqi government abruptly withdrew. That was the First Battle of Fallujah. Iraqi rage exploded again in April, when a U.S. Army report, complete with photos broke the Abu Ghraib story. The U.S.-appointed Iraqi government had meanwhile put a member of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party (formerly headed by dictator Saddam Hussein) in charge of Fallujah, making it a safe haven for the insurgents--a combination of nationalists, jihadists, Ba'athists and people who had lost family. Already keyed-up U.S. fighters saw so many of their friends blown to bits by improvised explosive devices [IEDs] that some were realistically afraid even to use a portajohn.

Reaching Fallujah, Dan was soon treating both sides, up to his elbows in that reality. A photo shows him kneeling and smiling in the midst of relaxed and excited Iraqi children. Their backs to the camera, crouched in a ring, covering him, were young Marines, guns at the ready. In Iraq, the frontline was everywhere-- a jihadist had bombed children who had gone near Americans. First warning noncombattants to flee, the U.S. Army and Marines, Iraqi-government and British soldiers moreover slammed into the large town with the Second Battle of Fallujah, dubbed Operation Phantom Fury; to Iraqis, al-Fajr [the Dawn.], It began with horrific ground and air bombardment, blowing up half the houses. Searching the dark ruins door to door, fighting whomever they found, the allied troops then left hundreds if not the sometimes reported thousands of people dead and captured as many. Dan had shipped to Fallujah intending not to carry arms, leaving his hands free for stretchers and medical supplies. Snipers though aimed at the U.S. wounded, and as photos later showed, Dan's compassionate eyes narrowed to slits, like gun turrets. Seeming to pull a tank in around him, Dan the healer for the first time killed.

Dear God.

I felt the sudden change in me. There are few pacifists or atheists with family members in foxholes. True, I opposed this war. I nonetheless was beyond glad that he had shot faster than whoever was shooting at him and trusted that he always would. As stray dogs trotted around Fallujah with human body parts in their mouths, I prayed continuously that Dan would come back physically and emotionally whole. I put yellow ribbons on oak trees, constantly feared that two uniformed people might knock on the door and say "We regret to inform you..." and lived for his steady, reassuring, chuckling voice on the phone. I heard the undercurrents in that voice too, and bled, but gave him a strong, loving, believing, laughing voice in return.

In spite of the constantly changing U.S. progandanda about why we were there, there was a main war goal in which the troops believed. Three months after the second battle, in February, 2005, Dan was posted in front of "Blackwater Bridge" from which the Sunni had hung the contractors. He was treating Iraqi wounded, helping them to the polls, because.Iraqis were that day voting for the first time. True, the U.S. alliance was not yet allowing 90% of the Fallujah population back into their own city, and--seeing voting as an attempt to impose the rule of people instead of the rule of Allah--jihadists were attacking the voters. An elderly Sunni woman, although badly hurt, voted and after casting her ballot dipped her index fingertip in purple ink, holding that finger up triumphantly, as did millions of other Iraqis across the country. Deeply respectful of their courage, Dan was proud to stand strong for them at the birth of their republic.

Yet tough Dan would have been among the first to start an insurgency if a foreign force had invaded us or laid waste to a city of ours; and as in any war, most Iraqi deaths were of women and children. Jihadists moreover were torturing and beheading people then forbidding their families to remove the bodies from the street. Significantly, in 2008, the Third Battle of Fallujah was won by Sunni sheikhs who, already fighting the U.S., suddenly turned on the foreign jihadists as well. As a result of the Sunni Awakening, the struggle between the two foreign groups (the U.S. and Al-Qaeda) who were duking it out on Iraqi soil had by 2009 funneled down to a single province, Diyala. The ancient tribal bonds that were Iraq's strength however were also its Achilles heel, and there wasn't a lot that outsiders could do about it. In 2009, Iraqis again held an election, rejecting fundamentalist parties. Although those in the Sunni Triangle voted, a Sunni woman suicide bomber exploded a tent full of unarmed Shia women and children, one among many attacks on religious pilgrims. The election could not be held in Kirkuk because the Kurds, Turks and Arabs all claimed the oil-rich territory. The Taliban moreover had made a deal with Pakistan, creating safe haven for jihadists.

You can take people out of war faster than you can take war out of people; it does not end when it ends. Dan came back to the States, but not quite. Still thinking of Iraqi children and the old Sunni woman (individuals) with respect and affection, Dan who had gone there wanting to help now detested "ragheads" as a group, and when a car suddenly yanked in front of him on a U.S. highway, as insurgent snipers had done, adrenaline nearly blew his head off as he reached for an assault weapon that was no longer there. As though seeking not only opportunity to serve but the familiarity of extreme danger, Dan volunteered for a Navy program teaching him to parachute into ground-zero scenes of nuclear, chemical and biological war to analyze content, wind speed, etc. thus saving the downwind civilian populations.

He aced the physics and chemistry courses, succeeded. Having to stand guard over his dreams though, repelling Memories, his first act every morning for years was to refuse the Iraq War entry in his mind. Full of plans about starting a tech company, Dan was hesitant to act because the government, by then withholding promised pay, was making noises about sending Marines into Iran. Funneling his paramedical knowledge into a civilian EMT job, finding a wonderful woman, Dan after five years though sounded open and happy--like Dan. He will probably never tell me a billioneth of what he saw, but what I see in him is an unyielding thirst for life. Multiply that by all the U.S. and Iraqi people unnecessarily put in harm's way plus the crumbling world economy, and I hear Dan's fierce desire that such sacrifice not be in vaiin. I agree with military analysts that the Taliban base in Afghanistan/Pakistan promises horror to the Middle East and the U.S.--and to women. On the basis of the same evidence however, I think that we should keep our word and pull out of Iraq by 2011. The fight is real; but it is where Al-Qaeda is, and we keep exaggerating its scope.

The U.S. government moreover is borrowing more billions from the Chinese to fund the Iraq juggernaut, although our economy is collapsing internally, with no end to the job losses, bank closings and foreclosures in sight. We have to find our way again, building from the grassroots up. As most people realize, we no longer have local democracy in most of the United States. I did an investigative series in 2001 with 100 on-the-record inside sources exposing legalized corruption in the Louisville, Kentucky government, and I expanded some of my initial findings into an e-book. By 2004, politicians who were using governing power for personal revenge (payback) had cost me my savings, my health and nearly my house. Louisville people who understood the payback system were afraid to stand up to it, and during one of those phone calls from Fallujah, I told Dan about it.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "While I'm over here risking my life to help Iraqis set up a democracy, some corrupt politician in Louisville is trying to wipe out my mother! While Iraqi civilians risk their lives to vote, U.S. civilians because they're afraid of payback, not even snipers or IEDs, won't get up on their hind legs to clean up their town? As to Iraq, troops can't think about politics and survive at the same time. It is up to civilians not to allow that courage to be misused. Tell them that the key fight for democracy is always in the U.S....."

Surely the best way to honor those who died too young is for us to stop trying to micromanage the planet, and bring our courage home.

Comments

[bonum]

My son was in Iraq. He and his army friends, when they got back, told me how the Bush-Cheney strategies had out-sourced the War. Everything was Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, etc, and so many other numerous corporations that the soldiers couldn't believe how their pathetic wages were being scrutinized for damages to "armor" etc. The big American corporations were over there making a huge profit with "no bid contracts" etc.

"Bush lied, countless have died"

My son still hasn't recovered from what he saw, and how post 9/11 allowed government interests to be fused with corporate interests under the Bush-Cheney financial interests.

Eisenhower, perhaps the last great Republican President said, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." January 17, 1961

It just seems that from the Reagan Era onward, big corporations have fused their interests with our government. It seems to me that the Iraq War is not a fight for democracy, rather it's just a means for the military-industrial complex to grow rich off of the blood and deaths of our people and the Iraqis

My son wants an independent investigation into this War, and now, so do I, and I'm ashamed of the Bush-Cheney Era