February 11, 2006 - This is dedicated with high hopes to those who support war AND pay lip service to family values. Perhaps you may find it in your soul – assuming you can find your soul – to give some assistance to the many victims of the war who did not die but who survived the war. They include the maimed, the maniacs, the crippled, the distressed, the traumatised, the impotent, the paralysed, the blinded, the friendless, the insane, their mamas and their papas, their children, their spouses…and the unending tragic litany; be they Iraqis or Americans or otherwise.
I felt some of their pain, if only vicariously, about 1969. The Vietnam War was hardly over. A young American sang with massive bitterness how she lost her brother in that war. There was a call from the President’s mansion high up in the sky. It called for a sacrifice, and her brother paid the price. They sent his legless body home in a box draped in the American flag.
And a note said “Thanks a lot.” She felt most diseased she said. She invited everybody to celebrate a kind of dance macabre. I had never heard of Janis Ian before. I have not heard of her since. But her impression on me and her story remained indelible. The song is “Come and Dance.”
Many years later I listened to Kenny Rogers begging “Ruby…Don’t Take Your Love To Town.” It is about the same “crazy Asian war” – Vietnam. The man in trouble is paralysed in the legs. He is sensitive to the fact that he can satisfy neither the needs nor the wants of his young wife. Yet he is resentful of her prostitution brought about only because he went to do his “patriotic chores.”
He has little time to live and he begs her for some company. She slams the door and leaves. He laments:
One should not lose the irony that she takes her love to town precisely because he cannot move.“If I could move, I’d take my gun
And put her in the ground.”
So war does untold mischief to people; even to those who neither die nor get wounded in it. So that, for example, on June 19, 2005, a South Korean soldier reportedly threw a hand grenade and then opened fire killing eight (8) of his sleeping colleagues.
Many thousands of veterans suffer post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and sleeplessness at night. In Lawrence, Massachusetts one veteran is on trial for firing his gun at a nightclub he said was disturbing him. At home he ran his family funeral home. In Iraq, his job was to piece together perhaps 10, perhaps 25 pieces of body parts and send them to the United States.
CNN reported (December 17) that 17% of soldiers from Iraq suffer post traumatic stress disorder, and found their lives spinning out of control.
On June 18, one mother told the media she was now actively opposing the war “because no mother should receive her son in 34 pieces, or a bone.” Today there are many more mothers against the war; CINDY SHEEMAN is only the most famous of them.
One PBS program indicated (October 22, 2005) that 94,246 veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq need health care. Some of them, such as Jeremy Lewis, lose their jobs. Said Lewis, “Those who send veterans to war should know that there is an after cost of sending troops to war.”
An after cost sounds like an understatement. I hope there is no medium more pro-Bush than the FOX NEWS NETWORK. On February 4, 2006, Fox News ticker reported that there were over 56,000 divorces involving army spouses since 2001. Why is the religious right everywhere so thunderously silent on this matter? What about their family values?
The figure is massive: Not everyone in uniform is married; and the data was being reported only 4 years and 4 months since 9/11. 56,000 is 80% of the population of the Commonwealth of Dominica, an independent republic.
Phillippe Sands is an accomplished international lawyer and an academic who wrote a book called “Lawless World.” In an interview (February 2, 2006) he was asked whether he was suggesting that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair breached international law by going to war in Iraq. He responded: “I am stating categorically that they have breached international law and have brought themselves individually to the ground of criminality.” …I consider this a very gentle paraphrase of Harry Belafonte’s candour.
I hope those men will take responsibility for those who died, and for all victims who suffered, whether or not they took their love to town. And if Mr. Sands is correct, why is international law and practice so well-organised to pursue Milosevic and others, but not Bush and others? Back Up