For those of you who know, and watch, LinkTV, you may have seen this. For those who haven't, I strongly recommend finding them, to get access to news and features unfiltered by a corporate power. It's enlightening.
And they even allow opposing viewpoints to be heard. It's just that they actually let progressive, liberal, secular viewpoints to be put forward as well.
Today I've been watching parts of a program called "The Real Cost of War". And watching interviews with soldiers, it hit me that the real patriots are those soldiers with the courage to speak out against an unjust war. They are "Winter Soldiers", another movie that brought me to tears recently...quotes and more on the flip...
Real emotion from real experience is powerful stuff. There is a crediblity that cannot be impugned. War hurts the "winners" as well as the losers. The part of "Winter Soldiers" that just crushed me was a vet describing watching another group of soldiers demand the turnover of four North Vietnamese nurses, their staking naked to the ground to be tortured and raped, and finally to be
executed with flares inserted into their vaginas to blow the tops of their heads off.
The soldier who described it was obviously very much affected by it. I can't imagine what I would do in such a situation. The big Jim Webb controversy seems quite tame in comparision.
War is war. It's brutal, there are few if any rules, and we have the firepower to kill everything in sight. Whether civilian or not.
We are on a very similar path with this war as we were in Viet Nam, but the power of communications, of the Internet, may be speeding the conclusion up. God, I hope so.
So I've been watching these films of people that have actually been in Iraq and it's been powerful. If this was on ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox, there would be an uproar.
The strongest voices have been the actual vets, as they have such a ring of truth. Let me share some of them with you:
Rickey Clousing, who went AWOL and then surrendered
"My name is Ricky Clousing, I'm a sargent in the United States Army. Like many in uniform today I enlisted after 9/11 wanting to defend the freedoms and priviliges that we enjoy here. In Iraq I operated as an interrogator assigned to to a tactical infantry unit...I witnessed our baseless incarceration of innocent civilians for prolonged amounts of time...I saw an innocent Iraqi killed before me by US troops...I saw first-hand the abuse of power that goes without accountability...wearing the uniform demands subordination, to your superiors and the orders passed down. But what if these orders violate morality, ethics, and even legality?...My convictions spiritually and politically began to question my ability to function each day. I finally concluded after much consideration, that I could not train or be trained under a false pretense of fighting for freedom."
Joshua Casteel
In the interrogators' school, they don't tell you things that you end up learning in combat. They don't tell you that you and your comrades are going to be told to strip a man naked, poor cold water over him and place him in front of an air conditioning unit...They don't tell you that you are going to be used the blunt end of an axe to soften a guy up before interrogations. They don't tell you that Donald Rumsfeld is going to go before the Senate Armed Services Committee and tell the world that we don't use dogs four days after you've been ordered to use them.
Darrel Anderson, went to CanadaWhen asked what caused him to go to Canada before his return to Iraq
"I guess it was that throughout my tour in Iraq the constant procedures and orders to fire on vehicles who come through traffic stops, most of them carrying innocent people. The orders that tell us that if we are fired upon in the street to open fire on everybody in the street...that no matter how good of person I am no matter what I try to do is good, that I'm going to kill innocent people if I follow my orders, and by going to Iraq there is now way I'm going to be able to avoid not killing innocent people."
Lt. Ehren Watada...Mark Twain once remarked "each man must for himself alone must decide what is right and what is wrong. Which course is patriotic and which isn't."...The oath we take swears allegiance not to one man, but to a document of principles and laws designed to protect the American people...I was only following orders is never an excuse...If I am guilty of any crime it is that I learned too much, and cared too deeply, for the meaningless loss of my fellow soldiers and my fellow human beings. If I am to be punished, it should be for following the rule of law over the immoral orders of one man...MLK once said "history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."
Lt. Watada faces eight charges, six of which are for voicing his oppostion to the Iraq War.
Real, field-experienced voices. They need to be more widely heard.
And on LinkTV you actually get to hear the voice of someone, another Marine, who doesn't always agree with them, right after hearing them. A disagreement based on his feeling a need to serve with his fellow soldiers. Yet he agreed that simply listening is the most powerful way to help a returning soldier.
We simply need to hear more voices like this in our country.