Will They Ever Trust Us Again? Letters From the War Zone
By Michael Moore
Penguin Books, 2004
218 pages, $24.95
REVIEW BY ALEX SALMON
In his latest book, Will They Ever Trust Us Again, Michael Moore set out to continue the work of his most recent film, Fahrenheit 9/11.
After the appearance of the film, Moore received many letters from US troops and their families, expressing their disenchantment and their growing realisation that they had been lied to and cheated by US President George Bush's administration. The collection of letters shows the reality of the human costs of the war and occupation in Iraq, something that is rarely reported in the corporate media.
The book is divided into four sections: letters from troops in Iraq, from troops serving around the world, from veterans of past wars and from military family members. A message repeated by many different troops is that after soul searching, they are realising that the reasons they were given for going to Iraq are not really why they are there.
"The American administration in Iraq was not a failure. It did not secure the rights of the Iraqi people, but it did secure other things. The oil fields are secure, and the American corporations secured multibillion-dollar contracts to plunder that Iraqi oil", wrote Keith Pilkington in one of the letters.
The soldiers writing in the letters are from working-class backgrounds. Kyle Waldham explained: "When a prospective enlistee arrives at the recruiter's station, the thing that lured us in was not a poster saying, 'Come and die for us, even if that means that that action goes against everything you believe in'. It was 'get $35,000 for college!'"
Fahrenheit 9/11 showed the way that military recruiters target the poorer areas in towns like Flint, Michigan, for cannon-fodder. The overwhelming majority of these people are African-American or Hispanic working-class people. It is these people who are forced to fight while the sons and daughters of almost all US members of parliament do not have to. The letters reinforce this point.
A letter from Michael W., a National Guard soldier serving in south-east Baghdad, describes his resentment towards the Bush administration's policies. "Nowhere does my contract say that I should put my life on the on the line for a handful of select socialite elites." He then goes on to describe the role that civilian contractors such as Blackwater, Kellogg Brown and Root and Halliburton are playing in the looting of Iraq's resources, and compares the US$4000 a month paid to soldiers to the $15,000 that a contractor gets for doing the same work.
Michael Moore writes in the book's introduction, "What makes their comments unique and so intense is that they are not the words of the Left or the rhetoric of the anti-war movement — they are the war movement. Their observations are filled with such purpose because they are witnesses to the war, the men and women on the ground being asked to do the killing and slowly realising that their job has little to do with defending the United States of America."
The book serves as an account of a conflict in which more than 1700 US troops have been killed and more than 100,000 wounded, and more than 17,000 Iraqi civilian deaths reported since Bush declared the war to be over on May 1, 2003.
The book ends with a letter from Lance Marine Corporal Abdul Henderson, who has refused orders to return to Iraq because of his conviction that the war is unjust. He writes, "It is an honour to be asked by Mr. Moore to share my thoughts and feelings". Later he writes, "It's also been an even bigger honour to be able to contribute the last five years of my life to defending the United States of America. That is what I felt I was doing by appearing in Fahrenheit 9/11, defending the United States."
The common thread in the letters is that the authors all feel cheated, let down and lied to by the Bush administration and feel it is their duty to help get rid of this government.
In one of the emails titled "I Cried When She Left", C.S. describes his feelings about his wife serving in Iraq. He makes a comparison with Lila Lipscomb and her son Michael Pedersen, portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11. "I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 today, and I cried again. To hear Mrs Lipscomb talk about the loss of her son made me think about what I would do if I lost my wife."
Will They Ever Trust Us Again reveals the widespread anti-war sentiment in the US military. It is an angry, moving and funny account of the reality of the war and shows who is really winning the hearts and minds on the front-line. The book should be read by all anti-war activists.
From Green Left Weekly, June 22, 2005.
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