Rohan Pearce
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the most successful anti-war film ever, doesn't gloss over the atrocities committed by the US occupation forces in Iraq, depicting graphic scenes of carnage inflicted on Iraqis by US soldiers. But neither does it condemn the soldiers as mindless killers. Instead, it shows that they, too, are victims of Washington's imperialist war, many of whom just want to go home.
Moore's approach seems to have paid off. "Fahrenheit 9/11, a left-sided documentary that bashes the Bush administration's war on terrorism, wouldn't find much of an audience in a military town", reported a June 29 Fayetteville Observer article. "Or so they thought." In fact, screenings of Fahrenheit in Fayetteville (population 121,015), the home of Fort Bragg, the base for some 45,000 military personnel, broke records.
The Cameo Art House Theater, the only Fayetteville cinema to screen the documentary, sold out both of its June 25 premiere screenings. "A midnight showing added at the last minute Friday brought in 60 more people", reported the Observer. Another 1000 attended Saturday and Sunday screenings, with an estimated 75% of tickets sold to soldiers or their relatives.
While some of the success of Fahrenheit in army towns can be put down to the controversy surrounding the film's release, it's also likely that it strikes a chord with increasingly disillusioned soldiers and their families. Many feel like Army Specialist Peter Enos. The June-July issue of Travelling Soldier quoted Enos' last phone call to his mother before he was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Baiji by a rocket-propelled grenade: "Go to every radio and TV station and newspaper, and you tell them this war is wrong. They don't want us here."
No-one can deny that — like the Iraqis they are ordered to conquer, torture and kill — US soldiers in Iraq are forced to pay a hefty price for the imperial ambitions of their political masters in Washington. As of July 28, the US war was already responsible for the deaths of some 909 US soldiers, 770 of them since US President George Bush declared "major combat operations" over on May 1, 2003. During the same period, according to a count kept by Antiwar.com, some 5362 US troops have been wounded.
The statistics don't reveal the full story, however. Not only will many of the US soldiers wounded in Iraq never fight again, many have paid the price of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq with injuries that have all but extinguished any hope of living a normal civilian life. For example, on July 11 Associated Press reported on the case of Jamie Brown, a 22-year-old soldier injured on November 20, 2003, when a grenade exploded in his tent. Brown lost his spleen, his adrenal gland and a kidney, his pancreas was damaged, he had shrapnel lodged in his stomach and his brain was damaged. Now, reported AP, Brown is learning "to recall the last thing he read and remember the next place he is going" at the Walter Reed hospital's Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in Washington.
Brown's brain injury is far from an isolated case — such injuries account for 14-20% of surviving combat casualties.
Hidden toll
A study reported on by the July 1 New England Journal of Medicine revealed the hidden toll that the war and occupation have had on US troops. The study found that US soldiers stationed in Iraq suffered levels of major depression, generalised anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder that were "significantly higher" than prior to being sent to Iraq. Up to 17.1% of US soldiers returning from Iraq suffered such disorders, compared to 9.3% before deployment.
The White House has been eager to hide the real toll of the Iraq war, particularly in the lead-up to the November presidential election. A Washington Post poll conducted on July 22-25 found that 53% of Americans disapproved of the way Bush is handling the war in Iraq. After the "economy and jobs, the war in Iraq was cited by most participants in the poll as the most important issue in the presidential election", the Post reported.
The potential political price that the Bush regime will pay is rising, as more soldiers, and the families of soldiers, turn against the war.
The Iraq war will create more people like Nadia McCaffrey. The June 28 Los Angeles Times reported on the struggle of McCaffrey, whose son was killed in Iraq the week before the LA Times' story. McCaffrey was infuriated at the ban, introduced by the Pentagon in 2000, on photographing or filming the return of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The LA Times reported that McCaffrey planned to hold a short ceremony when the coffin of her son Patrick arrived at Sacramento International Airport, and was encouraging the media to cover the ceremony, which she planned to be a protest against the war. "I don't care what [Bush] wants", she explained. Patrick "said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there", she told the paper.
McCaffrey's protest is just one manifestation of the growing movement of military families campaigning for the occupation troops in Iraq to be brought home.
Among 400 anti-war veterans who attended the July 22-25 national convention of Veterans for Peace in Boston was Michael Hoffman. A marine who participated in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq (he left Iraq in May), Hoffman is one of the founding members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group formed on July 22. The IVAW mission statement explains that, in addition to fighting for veterans' benefits for soldiers who participated in the Iraq war, the group is "committed to saving lives and ending the violence in Iraq by an immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces".
War for oil
Hoffman was interviewed on July 24 by William Rivers Pitt for the Truthout.org website. He explained how he felt when he realised that he was being sent to Iraq to fight a war based on lies: "It was really tough. And it wasn't just me. My own battery first sergeant — someone with 20 years experience in the Marine Corps — knew what this meant. He'd been in the [1991] Gulf War also.
"Before we went to Iraq, he addressed all the enlisted men in the unit, about 100 of us. He said, 'Don't think you're going to be heroes. You're not going over there because of weapons of mass destruction. You're not going there to get rid of Saddam Hussein, or to make Iraq safe for democracy. You're going there for one reason and one reason alone: Oil.'
"The new guys kind of sat there slack-jawed, like 'What did he just say?' Guys like me who have been around for a while... in the military, especially in the Marine Corps, you tend to get a strong sense of cynicism. We kind of nodded our heads like, 'Yeah, that's right'...
"That is the exact reason I am here now, because the only way to make sure these guys come home alive, to make any good out of what has happened, is to get our troops out of Iraq. They're not doing a bit of good over there. They're causing the problem, not solving it."
IVAW collaborates with Military Families Speak Out, a group that brings together more than 1500 families who have loved ones in Iraq or have loved ones who have been killed or injured while serving in Iraq. MFSO, along with Citizen Soldier, Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, sponsors the Bring Them Home Now campaign (<http://www.bringthemhomenow.org>), which aims to "mobilise military families, veterans, and GIs themselves to demand: an end to the occupation of Iraq and other misguided military adventures; and an immediate return of all US troops to their home duty station".
Discontent among US soldiers is likely to increase, as the strain of trying to carry out simultaneous occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan forces the Pentagon to erode the "voluntary" status of the US military. The July 1 Washington Post reported that at least "5000 veteran soldiers from 48 states will receive notices next week that they are being recalled to active duty to fill gaps in the Army, and Army officials announced yesterday that thousands more could be summoned for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan".
Colonel Debra Cook explained to the Post that while soldiers who had been deployed within the last 12 months would not be considered for this tour, "reactivated" troops could be on active duty for as long as two years, including as long as a year "in theater".
Going north
Already some US soldiers have decided to flee to Canada rather than take part in the Iraq occupation. In January, Jeremy Hinzman, a US Army specialist based at Fort Bragg, fled to Canada shortly before he was to be sent to Iraq, seeking refugee status on the grounds that the war on Iraq is a "criminal enterprise". Brandon Hughey, another US soldier, is also seeking refuge in Canada.
According to a July 7 article in Toronto's Globe and Mail, it is possible for US military deserters to be sentenced to death, although Jeffrey House, Hughey's and Hinzman's lawyer, "said US military lawyers have told him that this would only apply for those who deserted before President George W. Bush's declaration that major hostilities in Iraq had ended in May".
In late May, Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for refusing to return to Iraq. According to an open letter sent to Bush on June 14 by human rights group Amnesty International, Mejia had cited "moral reasons and his misgivings about the legality of the war and the conduct of US troops towards Iraqi civilians and prisoners". In its letter to Bush, AI states that it considers Mejia "to have been imprisoned because of his refusal on conscientious grounds to perform military service", and "has accordingly adopted him as a prisoner of conscience and is calling for his immediate and unconditional release".
From Green Left Weekly, August 4, 2004.
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