On Loyalty An Open Letter to US Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq
By STAN GOFF 06/15/05 "
Counterpunch.org" - - 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
thugged around 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, and so did millions of other people around the world.
But that brain-dead piece
of shit in the White House who is legally your boss, and all his handlers, starting with Vice President Dick "Halliburton"
Cheney they 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 villified and isolated 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, because
these reptile-minded, preppy gangsters are like spoiled children who can't abide anyone fucking up their toy-emperor fantasies.
But
when those fantasies did get fucked up, by the realities they ran so hard to escape, they continued to pursue their grim agenda
in spite of the mounting consequences, because they don't pay those consequences.
If I had my way, we would issue the
whole shriveled, manicured lot of them their assault rifles, put them aboard an Air Force transport, tighten the leg straps
on their static line parachutes, and boot their sorry asses out from 800 feet right over the middle of Ramadi where
they could drop their harnesses in the street and explain democracy to the locals.
But that's just ranting, because
I do so despise them. I hate people who get away with shit 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 go get their 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, and 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 bullshit, 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 are dumber than dog shit. Some of them say things
when they don't have the foggiest fucking idea what they are talking about. Some of them will say any goddamn thing to get
you to do what they want you to do.
But then again, there wasa 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 fucking 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.
They know that
many ofyouknow that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds
over New York City and phony al Qaeda connections (and then when that fell apart, you were there to deliver democracy at gunpoint).
So they know that many of you can't stay committed to this violent occupation out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington
DC, who are busy every day at home undermining the same Constitution you swore to protect (from all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC).
They
know that you know that plenty of the officers are out there trying to get new fruit salad medals on their Class-A uniforms,
and bucking for promotion, by risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they know that they can't rely on the loyalty
of many of you to the chain of command any more either.
Where do they have to go with this, then, after all? 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
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 bullshit 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
US soldiers quit taking orders. It got to the point where an officer who was using his men's bodies to chase medals might find himself on the wrong end
of a Claymore mine. Now I'm not advocating that again, and I hope we can stop this before it goes that far.
The other
thing many soldiers did was 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, but staying ina 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 demonstrate that macho bullshit they were expected to display as they continued to do terrible
things to those other human beings whose country they occupied.
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 around information you get
about the war from sources other than those
loud-mouthed news-mannequins on FOX. And email or mail your anonymous membership in to Iraq Veterans Against the War. The link is at the end of this letter.
The
day this war stops and they put the last of you on an airplane home, is when you will never again have to smell that fresh-blood
smell that stays in your head for hours after you've loaded someone onto a stretcher or rolled them into that big Ziploc bag.
The day will come when you all pull out, because this was a losing proposition from the outset, but
Bush and his crew were too fucking stupid to know it.
The best thing is that this war of occupation ends sooner than later, and as an exercise of loyalty to your
own conscience, of loyalty to those who are there and those who may go there, and loyalty to the principle of human decency
you can find ways to hasten that day. You can find ways to bring closer the day when the Iraqis can get on about the
business of taking control of their own destiny, and you and your buddies can sleep in security and comfort in your own homes,
play with your children, make love with your partners, and walk down familiar streets unencumbered by the rattling luggage
of war.
If bringing this day closer for all of you is the goal, how much more loyal can you get?
Yours for walking
unencumbered,
Stan Goff
US Army (Retired)
Stan Goff is the author of "
Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "
Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and "Sex & War" which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the
United States Army. His blog is at
www.stangoff.com.Goff can be reached at:
sherrynstan@igc.orgI encourage troops to show this to other troops. I encourage family members of troops to print it out and send it
to them in letters, or to paste it into emails. I encourage troops and family members who are on military reservations to
make copies and place them everywhere you can think of.
Web sites of interest to troops and their families:
www.bringthemhomenow.orgwww.ivaw.netwww.veteransforpeace.orgwww.mfso.orgwww.girights.objector.orgwww.occupationwatch.orgwww.nlg.org/mltfSource and Copyright:
www.counterpunch.org
