I was reading through the Italian magazine of politics,culture and current affairs, l'Espresso, this morning and came upon this extremely timely and
relatively acerbic political satire of the history and origins of the concept of "friendly fire". I thought I would share it with you guys because:
- I thought it was genuinely funny (but that's a matter of taste, and de gustibus non disputandum est).
- more importantly, it offers a facinating window into the collective psyche of Italian high-brow and medium-brow culture with regard to the absurd incident, involving the Italian journalist and the SISMI agent, that took place last week at Camp Victory.
- what the hell?
"Don't Be Afraid, It's Only Friendly Fire"
by Michael Serra
The term "friendly fire" is a part of one of the most ancient and solid of American traditions,like barbacues and apple-pie. It's origins are very remote: according to some historians the first case of friendly fire occured when the Reverend Moses Tribulation, having just disembarked from the Mayflower, got into a heated theological dispute with other pilgrim fathers regarding the doctrine of predestination. In order to demonstrate that everything occurs because of the will of god, Tribulation fired two shots of his rifle, blindfolded, directly at his wife and his eleven year old son. Other sources cite the case of the elderly gunman Buddy Loack (aka Cataract), who during a duel on the main street of Dodge City killed nine nuns becasue he was convinced that they were Mexican bandits. "I could only see their shapes, which were small and heavy, and I'd swear they had moustaches," he justified himself after the shooting, when he was informed that not only were they nuns, but that he wasn't in Dodge City, but rather in the dining room of a convent in Pennsylvania. So much with regard to legend. Sticking to historical fact, the episodes of friendly fire, from the Civil War to Iraq, are mutiple. These are the most important:
Little Big Horn
Surrounded by Indians, general Custer and his men went into the classic circular formation. A hurried consultation with the Manual Of the Military Academy, which Custer always bore with him, turned out to be fatal: since his glasses had fallen off, and he was holding the book upside down, the general inadvertenely skipped a line and read "shoot toward the inside" instead of "whatever you do, don't be an idiot and shoot toward the inside". There were no survivors.
Vietnam
During a fly-over, the pilot of an attack helicopter made a bet with his co-pilot that he could fly so low as to be able to dintinctly read
the numbers on the shoes of the vietcong. Since the Vietcong were barefoot, the pilot lost his bet and, in the meantime, decapitated with his rotatar blades an entire column of marines.
Dallas
It's not true that Lee Harvey Oswald intended to kill JFK. He only wanted to knock out the parking meter in front of his house, just like every morning, becasue he didn't have the change to keep paying. The presidential procession passed in front of the parking meter at the wrong monent. It is true, instead, that a member of the mafia killed Oswald for revenge: the mafia controlled the parking meters and was exasperated by Oswld's behavior.
Somalia
As soon a they had disembarked in Somalia, becasue of faulty orders, the marines asked the fishermen of the area for indications on how to get to Paris. Faced with the confused replies of the locals, who refused to speak French and kept smiling in a perfidious manner, the marines lost their heads and started launching grenades at a tourist village, inflicting a horrible death on six tour guides. The incident has fallen into the memory-hole because not one interantional organzaation was willing to come to the defense of tour guides.
Saturn
During the recent landing on Saturn, the local population, which consists of greenish filaments, was determined to be hostile by US intelligence becasue it refused to immediatly institute free elections, and was therefore destroyed with flamethrowers. Only later on was it discovered that the filaments were pro-American, and that the true dominating population was made up of enormous subterranaean mushrooms , all members of al-Qaeda,
which had survived the American invasion undisturbed.
Iraq
The orders of the Penatagon are clear:
during ordinary circumstances, the soft approach must be used, "shoot at eveything that moves", in cases of emergency one must apply the tough approach,"shoot even at things that don't move."
Among the victims, some bas-reliefs from the museam at Ninevah and their relative guardians,
some tens of thousand of Iraqi civilians mistaken for Iraqi civilians, cats, camels, middle-school teahers, barrels of wine, the carp in the Tigris river, an entire soccer team (benches included),
a garbage truck and a general of the fifth division.