May 27
Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq
Talking to Mike Ferner reminded me of the unusual group of people to which we both belonged. We had both ended up in the US military at exactly the wrong time. All through my training as a radio operator, news kept coming back that this one or that one had been killed. It was like being in a cancer ward. Of course, a radio operator in Viet Nam was the first platoon member to be shot in an ambush. Not only did you have an antenna on your back, but you also were the only contact the platoon had to the outside world. Radio operators got chewed up so fast that the Army was desperate to train more.
In a twist of fate, I ended up at an Army camp near the DMZ in Korea. Mike became a hospital corpsman in a stateside Navy hospital. Even from those vantage points we came to understand the carnage and the destruction that the US military was bringing to a Third World country. We both ended our military careers certain that our country was headed in the wrong direction when it came to its brutal and wanton assault on Viet Nam.
In the years that followed my supposed "service" in the US Army, I came to generalize. I studied the Korean War and concluded the US invasion and occupation of that country was another monstrous war crime that killed millions of civilians. By the time of US military interventions in Central America and later the Middle East, I saw my country as an empire, ever willing to murder any number of foreign people for geopolitical advantage and economic gain.
The US empire depends on a majority of American people believing in its benevolent intentions. That is why many of us who have experienced US occupations and wars abroad have spent the rest of our lives speaking out. We are in a unique position to use the credibility and the high esteem that veterans are given in the US empire to point out its utter moral bankruptcy.
And we can expose the Orwellian irony of our country's supposed wars for democracy and human rights. Our empire eliminates democracy, as empires have always done. Our empire crushes human rights, as all empires must do to impose their military will on subjugated peoples yearning to be free. Veterans have seen it firsthand, and if there is anything that we can do to expiate the guilt of our own "service" to the empire, it is to let our fellow citizens know what militarism and greed have done to our beloved country.
