Smile for my Crosshairs Part I
john posted in politics & culture on January 16th, 2007
(Note: since I wrote this, I have been reading Chris Hedges book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I have edited and expanded this with a second part. )
I found a recent thread on the Internet forum I work on unusually upsetting yesterday. It’s a racing forum, typically populated by young men with no children, a group not exactly tactful or subtle. Not surprisingly there are some members who serve in the armed forces.
One of these guys just announced that he was likely to be going back to Iraq with Bush’s so-called surge. Normally these announcements are met with non-political good-will and best wishes, but he has recently changed his signature line to ” Hey Muslim Extremist Raghead, smile for my crosshairs!”
A member objected, saying the tag was offensive, and a mild-mannered discussion ensued. Curiously no one objected to the smile-for-the-crosshairs part which I found the most troubling. They didn’t like the “raghead” and “muslim” epithets. Pretty much everybody was careful to wish for the soldier’s personal safety.
What I think about the tag:
The tag is stupid, offensive, and juvenile. But. The guy has already been there, and been at least close to some fighting. It’s possible he knows somebody who was hurt or killed. Later I realized that he is afraid, and should be, he’s going to the most dangerous place in the world with a big target painted on his back. His clueless generals are right out of Dr Strangelove without the nukes. And allowance must be made for the healthful effects of gallows humor. Seeing the locals as “ragheads” probably insulates the soldier when he has to shoot back. It’s an ugly thing when we send our kids off to a place they can’t understand, with people they literally can’t understand, and ask them to stop a combination civil war and uprising.
Why did it upset me?
First, because I couldn’t say what I really think, because attacking the morale of the guys who are in danger is not allowed. Second, the startling viciousness, the video-game talk of crosshairs, brought home the fear and the reality of staring at a person, a civilian, in your gun sights and pulling the trigger. That’s one powerful image that, for me at least, is usually buried by the political discussion.
As a non-combatant I might be totally wrong, but I believe, from what I have read, that the killing is even more damaging to a soldier than the sacrifice, fear and loss. The Army itself has quite a lot of documentation of this if anyone is interested. Apparently getting soldiers to aim directly at a person they can see and shoot is harder than they make it sound, and the rate of post-traumatic stress damage is running around 30% on top of official physical casualties. Once you actually get people to shoot at people, other forbidden behavior becomes routine. Just today I saw a video of US soldiers callously throwing rocks at a crippled dog somewhere in Iraq, the rapes and brutality are always more widespread than reported, and of course there is the CIA torture and Abu Ghraib mess. Some say the the 100,000 armed civilian employees of the Army are much more brutal than the soldiers, who at least have a manual and training and courts-martial.
Nowadays with this pointless war rolling on with no end in sight, we homebodies still have a strict guideline on the troops’ morale: support the troops, not the war. Who wants to make the wives and children back home more afraid?
What this means practically though, is the flag wavers and ’semper fi’ shouters and magnetic ribbonettes think the rest of us agree with them, because we are silent. Well soldiers I am sorry, but I think all the sacrifices you have made in Iraq, and the high-minded promises you were given about service to your country aren’t worth squat. Worse, the people you killed and maimed and orphaned suffered for no reason. Iraq is a sucker’s deal, rigged against you, the Iraqis, and the taxpayers from the start.
What about the other folks?
Nobody ever mentions the Iraqis. The number of dead ranges from tens to hundreds of thousands, nobody can actually count because the country is a complete mess. The UN says 34,000 this year, the US says 12,000. Hospitals can’t clean their surgical tools, they can’t keep the electricity on or clean up the floor. One fact tells the tale: the place is so dangerous that journalists can’t move about, even the police can’t travel. Don’t the Iraqis matter to us? Does the cynicism of Washington extend to Dubuque, and Anchorage, and Orlando? I hope not.
The freedom to join the Army isn’t free, but the freedom to sell the war for a profit is.
So in the end I think we have built a country with the largest military in the world. We have invested our capital and our young people in it, and told them lies about honor and dignity so they would go off and do the dirty work we don’t want to hear about. So we tell ourselves the same lies so we don’t feel bad, and then we cheap out on treatment when many of our kids come home broken. I am more disgusted with us, with the chicken hawks like Bush and Cheney who never ever put themselves or their children in danger and yet glorify warfare, than I am with one more Marine who sees Iraq more or less like a video game.
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