"Post 1” in this base is an access control point between the Iraqi Army compound and the rest of the American-military controlled compound. SOP (standard operating procedures) of this post is to make sure that no Iraqi Army personnel leaves their compound unless accompanied by an American military personnel. This, of course, excludes the IA officers who are authorized to come and go at whim without an American escort. Opposite of Post 1, about 50 feet away, is the Iraqi Army’s control point, which is manned by usually sleeping Iraqi soldiers (if manned at all). They probably realize the redundancy of their post and realize that Post 1 is the one that really matters. Now, about these Iraqi soldiers. They are generally cordial and when they are passing through my control point, they make a point to wave and smile at me. But when they are not passing through my control point, they are all business. Because, apparently, Guard Post 1 is known to the Iraqi soldiers in this base as Trading Post 1. When they are not sleeping in their post, Iraqi soldiers in their spare time operate a booming black market business with the Marines that often guard or pass through Post 1. DVD players for 150 dollars? No problem. Bring dollars tomorrow. Want some cigarettes? What brand? No problem. 12 dollars for a carton. You need not to trade for money either. They are willing to part with their cartons of cigarette for good ol’ American pornography. A magazine filled with dirty photos of American blonde infidels with artificial breasts is worth about five packs of cigarettes. If you have the movie in DVD, even better! I have heard that one Marine managed to part with his “MOTO” for a couple of cartons."
-
Jayel Aheram, from one of the emails sent to his stepfather while stationed at Combat Outpost Rawah in the Al Anbar province in Iraq.
Thank you for sharing this.
"
I made it back to the capital. And, like most war correspondents, soon considered the experience a great cosmic joke. I drank away the fear in a seedy bar in downtown San Salvador that night. Most people, after such an experience, would learn to stay away. I was hooked. Drawn into the world of war, it becomes hard to escape. It perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation - spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical.
I covered the war in El Salvador from 1983 to 1988. By the end, I had a nervous twitch in my face. I was evacuated three times by the U.S. embassy because of tips that the death squads planned to kill me. Yet, each time, I came back. I accepted with a grim fatalism that I would be killed in El Salvador. I could not articulate why I accepted my own destruction and cannot now. There came to be a part of me, maybe it is a part of all of us, which decided I would rather die like this than go back to the dull routine.
During the war in El Salvador, I worked with a photographer who covered the war, had a slew of close calls, and then called it quits. He moved to Miami and took pictures for one of the newsweeklies. But life in Florida was flat, dull, uninteresting. He could not adjust and soon came back. From the moment he stepped off the plane it was clear: He had returned to die. Just as there are some soldiers or war correspondents that seem to us immortal and whose loss comes as a sobering reminder that death has no favorites, there are also those in war who are locked in a grim embrace with death from which they cannot escape. He was frightening to behold, a walking corpse. He was shot through the back in a firefight and died in less than a minute.
"
- Chris Hedges about his experience as a journalist in war torn El Salvador. Recent events have reminded me of this speech.
latimes:
Angel Harris returned from Afghanistan eight years ago pregnant and — like thousands of other female veterans — with a case of PTSD, a disorder that took six years to diagnose. The military has only recently begun to offer women the same PTSD benefits as men.
Photo: Angel Harris is one of more than 230,000 women to serve in Afghanistan or Iraq since 2001, about 15% of the U.S. forces to be deployed there. Credit: Matthew Ratajczak
“I was one tough broad,” says Harris, 34, who did a tour in Kosovo and one in Afghanistan, where she was the first female combat photographer deployed by the Army. “I was a bartender. I bounced people. I had no fear. Now, sometimes I’m afraid to leave my house.”
"It’s enormous. And since we wrote that book, we did—new numbers came in, and things are worse than we said. The disability rates are higher. The cost of caring for the disabled are higher. Almost one out of two people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are disabled. This is an unfunded liability of—we calculate now to be almost a trillion dollars, over $900 billion. So, one of the big ways of reducing our deficit is a—is cut back some expenditures."
- Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist and a professor at Columbia University, responding to a question about the costs of our wars on Democracy Now! this morning.
