A veteran’s letter to the troops

I was a soldier for most of the time between 1970 and 1996. I signed out on my retirement from 3rd Special Forces in Ft. Bragg. I had also served in 7th Special Forces, on three Ranger assignments, with Delta for almost four years, as a Cavalry Scout for a while, and in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantryman. I started my career in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

I served in eight different places in East Asia, Latin America and Africa, where I pointed guns at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American foreign policies—policies controlled, then as now, by the rich.

In the course of that career, I heard everything you have heard and felt everything you have felt about “loyalty.”

Tricky thing, loyalty.

Nowadays, when I talk with some of you, or when I hear conversations recorded with you, I hear many who have very serious reservations about these wars of occupation. I had more than reservations from the get-go about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed them as hard as I could. So did millions of other people around the world.

But your boss in the White House and all his handlers sent you to do this thing anyway.

They talked themselves into believing this would be—and these are their words—a “cakewalk.” They surrounded themselves exclusively with others who echoed what was already in their minds; and they punished and vilified anyone who told them what they didn’t want to hear. Because they made up their minds to conduct these invasions years ago, and with the attacks of September 11—in which Iraq’s role was exactly nothing—they figured now was their chance to conduct the re-disposition of the old Cold War military into their new plan to build permanent bases in Southwest Asia.

Since they’d made up their minds, they didn’t want to hear anything except rosy scenarios for their plans. But when those fantasies did go wrong, they continued to pursue their grim agenda in spite of the mounting consequences, because they don’t pay those consequences.

I hate people who get away with things just because they have money and power. And I hate people who sacrifice the lives of others to amplify or protect that power.

But I’m not telling you anything. You all already know by now what generation after generation has learned the hard way. When the rich start their wars, it’s not the rich that get sent to fight them. Yeah, a few do time as part of putting together a political career, but we know who does the heavy lifting.

And in these conversations that many of you have with me and thousands of other people, we hear you say more and more often now that you know this war is wrong, but that you have to “do your job,” because you are loyal to your buddies; because you feel that you have to back them up; and because if you don’t go, someone else will have to. And I respect that sentiment.

But I have to challenge this loyalty thing, and I do it out of respect for you, because I care about you and because my own son is back there for his second go-around.

A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta, who recently returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently told me, “My platoon sergeant tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and when we resisted, he threatened us with punishment. He told us that the Geneva Convention doesn’t exist in Iraq, and that is in writing at the Brigade level.”

You all know that this is bull, and if you didn’t know, let me give you a news flash about some—not all, but some—military lifers, and this is coming from a military lifer. Some of them say things when they don’t have the foggiest idea what they are talking about. Some of them will say anything to get you to do what they want you to do.

But then again, there was a memorandum that came down that suggested the Geneva Conventions were void in Iraq. It didn’t come from the Brigade level, though; it came from George W. Bush’s office. And it’s a lie. That’s why they sat there in front of Congress before they made the author of that memo into the Attorney General of the United States—get your head around that—and denied that they meant it.

But it is a lie.

You do not have to follow illegal orders ever, under any circumstances, and you are bound by International Law. You should also be bound by what you know is right, by your sense of plain, common decency.

One of the ways they will get you to do things that you will not want to live with for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And “what happens in Iraq, stays in Iraq.” This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.

And I’m telling you that you do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.
What do they tell you?

“You get out there on that Humvee, and face those IEDs together, as loyal buddies.”

“You get out there and ransack people’s houses in the middle of the night, and make their babies cry together, as buddies.”

“You get out there and set up a road block without Arabic signs or interpreters and get put into that situation where you are tense and don’t know, and you shoot up that car and kill parents in front of their children, and you have to live with that for the rest of your lives together, because you are loyal buddies.”

“You get out there and lose life, limb, or eyesight and face mental and physical ailments for the rest of your lives together, as an act of loyalty to your buddies.”

That’s the pressure you have on you today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to Iraq so someone else doesn’t take your place.

But let’s look at the bigger picture here, and for that I’ll take you back to Vietnam, before many of you were born. We heard this same bull then. Almost verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing factors was for getting us out of that war?

We quit being good soldiers.

The United States military got to the point where it was no longer an effective fighting force because U.S. soldiers quit taking orders. The other thing many soldiers did was to become part of the political resistance at home. They looked at this question of looking out for their buddies and for fellow soldiers in the short term, while staying in a barbaric and immoral war. And they realized that the best thing they could do for their buddies—not as soldiers, but as human beings—was to enlist in the opposition to the war and bring it to an end.

In the process, many of them discovered that it took a lot more endurance and a lot more courage to oppose the war than it did to obey orders.

Here’s how you can exercise a deeper loyalty to the troops there now, and to all those who will continue to go as long as this obscenity continues:

Do everything you can to stop the war.

Question every order, and base those questions on the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare. Let them see you keeping a detailed journal of your experience. Send your stories home in letters. Open up discussions about the legitimacy of the war when you are in your billets, even if it does spark controversy. Spread information you get about the war from sources other than those loud-mouthed news-mannequins on FOX. And e-mail or mail your anonymous membership in to Iraq Veterans Against the War. Websites of interest to troops and their families:

www.bringthemhomenow.org, www.ivaw.net, www.veteransforpeace.org, www.mfso.org, www.girights.objector.org, www.occupationwatch.org, www.nlg.org/mltf, www.southsidepride.com, www.pulsetc.com