I was listening to Seymour Hersh on DemocracyNow.org this
morning via podcast on my morning run. What I heard made me stop running. Find
a place to sit. And weep.
I have not wept for some time over the war in Iraq. I get angry, but much
less angry than I did even 6 months ago. In the back of my mind this really bothers
me. How can I, and the rest of the nation, have stopped getting angry as the war
rages on? What is wrong with me - with us?
I suppose you can only be angry about things over which your influence is not so much for only so long. And to my credit (I hope) I have been doing
a better job redirecting that anger towards longer term work for political
change. Nonetheless, the war is such a terrible thing that it is downright
evil to take it for granted. And I point that finger straight back to myself.
Hersh seems to know all too well that war is on. And when he talks about the
war he seems to know that he knows a bit too much. In the speech I heard this
morning (given by Hersh yesterday in Illinois) he didn't sound as panicked
and worried as he sometimes is. But he still had truly terrible things to recount.
He started by talking about war 35 years ago. He described how a mother of
soldier in Vietnam told him that she had "sent them a good boy, and they
sent me back a murderer" to describe her son. Flash forward to now, and
another mother tells Hersh the same thing. Only much more graphically.
The mother of a soldier who gave Hersh the first publicly released photos
of torture in American prisons had told Hersh how her daughter was totally
changed upon return. Depressed, isolated, unhappy. Hersh described his meeting
with the mother, who showed him the photos of violent horror that took place
in Iraq at the hands of soldiers under the command of George Bush.
This I had heard before. So I took in the details once again. But I could
keep running, hearing about the background of the torture story wasn't
too overwhelming to stop and weep or anything like that. I could think about
what was being told
to me. I could
recount my
initial
horror
upon
first
hearing the news.
Hersh finished up his account of the story of how he had gotten the photos.
Then he added a little detail. He had become friends with the mother. So later
she called him to tell him about how her daughter was doing. The soldier had
been going in to get little black tattoos. She'd been doing this on a regular
basis. A black square here, another one there. Eventually, her entire visible
body (and presumably not visible as well) was covered in tattoo. Hersh put
this way, she had given herself a "new skin."
Imagine your sister, mother, daughter or friend coming back from torture camps.
Depressed, isolated. And she then slowly covers herself with a monocolor tatoo.
Imagine
that.
And she says, you know, one thing I didn't tell you that you have to know
about the young woman, when she came back, every weekend, she would go and
get herself tattooed, and eventually, she said, she was filling her body with
large, black tattoos, and eventually, they filled up every portion of her skin,
was tattooed, at least all the portions you could see, and there was no reason
to make assumptions about the other portions. She was tattooed completely.
It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.
And so, they sent
me a boy, and I sent him back a murderer, changing her skin. This war is going
to reverberate in ways that we can’t even begin to see.
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