What they saw

But what I didn't know was the Humvee behind me, after the car failed to stop after the first three rounds, had fired twenty, thirty rounds into the car. I never heard it.

Perhaps now you may finally start to realize why some of us have been almost apoplectic with anger over the mishandling of this war.

We have been trying to get you to see this has been affecting our troops and innocent civilians in just this manner for five long years.

I've posted countless excerpts from articles about entire families slaughtered at checkpoints, made the point over and over and over again that without enough troops to do the job, just staying alive would become the only priority.

How in the name of God could we hope to convince these people we are the ones bringing democracy and the rule of law to them when they have hundreds of examples of callus, cruel, and barbaric treatment at the hands of their liberators.

You haven't yet begun to see what a nightmare this war will wreak upon us once the troops are finally past their IRR call up dates, certain to be never called to active duty again.

They will tell their horror stories at the VA and to the press. The pictures, just like at Abu Gharib, will start to surface. And then the shame will be upon us as a nation like you have never seen before.

This is why expressions of regret from the recently awakened like yourself garner no sympathy from me at all. We told you. We warned you. We shouted at you for five long years to wake up.

Well you're awake now.

This posting is a real service, Rod.

Yesterday the Minneapolis paper had a feature on the military families who are turning against the war. A mother described how her 20-something son told her in a phone call the "we killed women in the street...we killed kids on bikes..."

Similar horrors happened in Vietnam, and civilian acusations of "babykiller" came from early ignorance of the situation. After the vets came back and took over leadership of the movement, the movement learned more of the horrors of the war from the point of view of the grunts.

Thank heavens the population knows enough now to not blame the soldiers for what they may have felt forced to do.

Do you suppose your little caveat at the beginning of the piece changes the impact of the aid and comfort to the enemy the Nation are, once again, deliberately providing?

Shooting families dead at checkpoints is what gives aid and comfort to the enemy.

When the Nation start reliving their glory days by calling our soldiers baby killers, are you going to link to that too?

And when we actually have killed babies, what then should happen?

Look, read the whole Nation piece. These soldiers quoted in at are on the record with their stories.

And shooting a 14 year old who opens fire on them with an assault rifle is wrong why?

You're missing the point. The point is not that what they did was wrong. They had to do that to save their lives. The point is that our troops are in situations in which they have to cut 14-year-old kids to ribbons to protect themselves.

And shooting a guy who ignores warning shots and merges into a military convoy is wrong why?

This isn't some slow moving line of school buses driving through suburbia, these are 5 1/4 ton trucks and Humvees tear a****g through city streets.

There is absolutely no shortage of documented cases of civilians blasted for no reason and not just in traffic.

Published on Monday, July 25, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

Shots to the Heart of Iraq

Innocent civilians, including people who are considered vital to building democracy, are increasingly being killed by U.S. troops
by Richard Paddock

BAGHDAD - Three men in an unmarked sedan pulled up near the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit. The two passengers, wearing traditional Arab dishdasha gowns, stepped from the car.

At the same moment, a U.S. military convoy emerged from an underpass. Apparently believing the men were staging an ambush, the Americans fired, killing one passenger and wounding the other. The sedan's driver was hit in the head by two bullet fragments.

The soldiers drove on without stopping.

This kind of shooting is far from rare in Baghdad, but the driver of the car was no ordinary casualty. He was Iraqi police Brig. Gen. Majeed Farraji, chief of the major crimes unit. His passengers were unarmed hitchhikers whom he was dropping off on his way to work.

"The reason they shot us is just because the Americans are reckless," the general said from his hospital bed hours after the July 6 shooting, his head wrapped in a white bandage. "Nobody punishes them or blames them."

Angered by the growing number of unarmed civilians killed by American troops in recent weeks, the Iraqi government criticized the shootings and called on U.S. troops to exercise greater care.

U.S. officials have repeatedly declined requests to disclose the number of civilians killed in such incidents. Police in Baghdad say they have received reports that U.S. forces killed 33 unarmed civilians and injured 45 in the capital between May 1 and July 12 — an average of nearly one fatality every two days. This does not include incidents that occurred elsewhere in the country or were not reported to the police.

The continued shooting of civilians is fueling a growing dislike of the United States and undermining efforts to convince the public that American soldiers are here to help. The victims have included doctors, journalists, a professor — the kind of people the U.S. is counting on to help build an open and democratic society.

"Of course the shootings will increase support for the opposition," said Farraji, 49, who was named a police general with U.S. approval. "The hatred of the Americans has increased. I myself hate them."

making enimies

Anything that appears in the Nation I take with a grain of salt.

But the truth vel non of the specifics isn't relevant to the larger, very valid point. In all wars, one of the long-term and under-remarked costs is the emotional and psychological impact of combat on those who survived it. That impact can reverberate for multiple generations.

Have you ever watched Saving Private Ryan?

Chaplains give us regular briefings called "Combat Ethics." Now, it is our own commanders' responsibility to teach us the standards: Law of Land Warfare, Rules of Engagement, Counter-Insurgency Tactics and the like. It is Chaplain's job to make us think. I went to one of these briefings two weeks ago, and he set up a few scenarios for us and asked us what we'd do. These scenarios were all historical, such as the My Lai massacre and the Warrant Officer who turned in the men responsible. This was an extremely tough decision, as loyalty trumps almost anything in a combat unit.

His main question for us, is what decides our actions? What is our personal ethic? He didn't answer this question for us, but gave some basic categories. He got pretty philosophical about things. He said that one way of looking at ethics in warfare was rule-based. Going by the book, by the law. Another way of looking at ethics is more utilitarian. I want to survive and come home to my wife and little girl, a soldier might say, and I will do whatever it takes to come back alive. This seemed a very worthy goal to many of us listening. Then he played a clip from Saving Private Ryan.

This may be a familiar scene to some of you. The unit is searching for Private Ryan, and they end up with a German prisoner-of-war. In the action leading up to this scene, one of their own is killed. The debate: what to do with the POW. Their mission is to continue the search for Private Ryan's unit, and they cannot complete that mission AND process the POW as they should. Some of the men want to shoot him - he had been shooting at them just moments prior. The commander orders the men to let the POW go free. An argument ensues as half the men do not want to obey, and indeed, the senior sergeant has one of his own men at gunpoint (little known fact, your commander can shoot you in the face for refusal to obey an order in time of war.) The commander of this little unit, Captain Miller gives a very honest and simple speech.

The highlight, "So I guess I've changed some. Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me, whenever it is I get back to her. And how I'll ever be able to — to tell her about days like today. I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel."

Chaplain's point: what do you mean by surviving to come home? Will you be the same person if you do anything it takes just to live? Or would you rather survive with your morality and soul more or less intact? The question was answered for Captain Miller. In a later scene in the movie, the same man he let walk free as a POW is again manning a machine gun, and this time he kills Miller. The right decision is not necessarily the easy one, and could well get you killed, or worse, someone you care about killed.

Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.

Ponder this, while you are at it. Since the war began, the US Army has dropped its enlistment standards at least twice that I know of. This means some of the soldiers are now people who could not meet the standards that Lyndie England met.

Expect more Mi Lais.

Kim M