The Rag Blog

Three veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan share the nightmare experiences that war has brought into their lives.

Statistics are one way to tell the story of the approximately 1.4 million servicemen and women who’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004, 86 percent of soldiers in Iraq reported knowing someone who was seriously injured or killed there. Some 77 percent reported shooting at the enemy; 75 percent reported seeing women or children in imminent peril and being unable to help. Fifty-one percent reported handling or uncovering human remains; 28 percent were responsible for the death of a noncombatant. One in five Iraq veterans return home seriously impaired by post-traumatic stress disorder.

Words are another way. Below are the stories of three veterans of this war, told in their voices, edited for flow and efficiency but otherwise unchanged. They bear out the statistics and suggest that even those who are not diagnosably impaired return burdened by experiences they can neither forget nor integrate into their postwar lives. They speak of the inadequacy of what the military calls reintegration counseling, of the immediacy of their worst memories, of their helplessness in battle, of the struggle to rejoin a society that seems unwilling or unable to comprehend the price of their service. Strangers to one another and to me, they nevertheless tried, sometimes through tears, to communicate what the intensity of an ambiguous war has done to them.

One veteran, Sue Randolph, put it this way: “People walk up to me and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And I know they mean well, but I want to ask, ‘Do you know what you’re thanking me for?'” She, Rocky, and Michael Goss offer their stories here in the hope that citizens will begin to know.

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Michael Goss, 29, served two tours in Iraq. He grew up in Corpus Christi and returned there after his other-than-honorable discharge. He lives with his brother. He is divorced and sees his children every other weekend while working the graveyard shift as a bail bondsman. He is quietly intelligent, thoughtful and attentive, always saying “ma’am” and opening the door for people. He struggles with severe PTSD and is obsessed with learning about the insurgency by studying reports and videos online. He is awaiting treatment from the Veterans Administration. He has been waiting for over a year.

Michael Goss:

I gave the Army seven years. It was supposed to be my career. I did two tours in Iraq, in 2003 and 2005. But during the last one, I started to get depressed. I lost faith in my chain of command. I became known as a rogue NCO. That’s how I got my other-than-honorable discharge.

One night they said to me, “Sgt. Goss, gather your best guys.” I say, “Where we going?” They say, “Don’t worry about it, just come on.” So we get in the car and go. We drive three blocks away, and there’s six dead soldiers on the ground. They say, “You’re casualty collecting tonight.” I’m not prepared for that. I wasn’t taught how to do that. But you’re there. So you pick them up, and you put them in a body bag, pieces by pieces, and you go back to your unit, and you stand inside your room. And they’re like, “You’re going on a patrol, come on.” You’re like, “Hang on a minute. Let me think about what I just did here.” I just put six American guys in damn body bags. Nobody’s prepared for that. Nobody’s prepared for that thing to blow up on the side of the road. You’re talking, and you’re driving, and then something blows up, and the next thing you know, two of your guys are missing their faces. They just want you to get up the next day and go, go, let’s do it again, you’re a soldier. Yeah, I got the soldier part, OK?

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time?

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

Israeli historian Benny Morris is famous in his country for reopening the forgotten history of the expulsion of the Palestinians during the 1948 “war of independence” and deconstructing the Israeli myth that they freely chose to abandon their homes.

By five years ago, however, he had lost faith in a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and was openly saying everybody would have been better off in the long run if one side or the other had won a decisive victory in 1948.

If Israel had conquered all of Palestine and expelled all the Palestinians in 1948, Morris wrote, “today’s Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan. Alternatively, Arab success in the 1948 war, with the Jews driven into the sea, would have obtained the same, historically calming result. Perhaps it was the very indecisiveness of the geographical and demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the persisting tragedy of Palestine.”

Well, of course, but most outcomes are indecisive. Like many knowledgeable people in the Middle East, Morris’s mood was strikingly pessimistic even before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but five years later the mood is darker still.

Beyond forecasts of civil war in Iraq, however, there has been little effort to discern what the Middle East will actually look like after the U.S. troops go home.

There is already a civil war in Iraq, and it might even get worse for a time after American troops leave, but these things always sputter out in the end.

There will still be an Iraqi state, plus or minus Kurdistan, and regardless of whether or not the central government in Baghdad exercises real control over the Sunni-majority areas between Baghdad, Mosul and the Syrian border.

The Sunni Arab parts of Iraq have been turned into a training ground for Islamist extremists from all parts of the Arab world by the American invasion.

Once the American troops are gone, however, the action will soon move elsewhere, for the U.S. defeat in Iraq has dramatically raised the prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world and beyond.

It’s not possible to predict which Arab states will fall under Islamist control, and they certainly aren’t all going to: the pipe-dream of a world-spanning Islamic empire remains precisely that.

But it will be astonishing if one or more of the existing Arab regimes does not fall to an Islamist revolution in the next few years.

For the citizens of the country or countries in question, that could be quite a big problem, since it would probably mean not democracy and prosperity, but just more decades of poverty and a different kind of tyranny. For people living outside the Middle East, however, it would probably make little difference.

Islamist-ruled states are not the same as bands of freelance fanatics. If they have oil to export, then they will go on exporting it, because no major oil producer can do without the income those exports provide; they need it to feed their people.

And they would have little incentive to sponsor terrorist attacks outside the region, for they would have fixed addresses, and interests to protect.

For Israel, however, the situation has changed fundamentally. For the first 20 years of its existence, Israel was a state under siege. For the past 40 years, since the conquests of 1967, it has had the luxury of debating with itself how much of those conquered lands it should return to the Arabs in return for a permanent peace settlement. (The answer was always “all of them,” but that was not an answer many Israelis would hear.)

Now the window is closing. Before long, some of the Arab states that Israel needs to make peace with are likely to fall to Islamist regimes that have an ideological commitment to its destruction. (Hamas’s capture of the Gaza Strip is a foretaste of what is to come.) Israelis trying to evade hard choices have long complained that they had “nobody to negotiate with.” It is about to become true.

Israel faces another generation of confrontation and quite possibly of war, and the Palestinians face another generation of military occupation.

Significant chunks of the Arab world face Islamist revolutions that would bring more poverty and a new kind of oppression.

Ain’t this a bitch?

I get all busy for a day, hunkered down in a basement in Jersey editing video–shitty FM radio signal, no AM at all, and no free WiFi signal to be had in the hood, (Plainfield) so I was kinda cut off–and totally focused on choppin’ up about an hour of digital zeroes and ones…

And I come home at one a.m., check the blogs and find… THIS?

For about fifteen seconds, I was all “What the fuck? I’ll be damned! Aw, hell-to-the-naw!”

For about fifteen seconds, that is.

And then I remembered that I’d heard more than a few folks I trust, recently talking about the dipshit-no-one-wants-to-admit-they-voted-for-as-president-in-’04- except-for-Joe-Lieberman’s-scrotum-faced-self, having a “Why not do it?” attitude when it came to tossing Scooter’s sentencing salad.

“What the fuck’s gonna happen? His poll numbers are gonna drop some more? Please. He may as well.”

And so, the dipshit-no-one-wants-to-admit-they-voted-for-as-president-in-’04- except-for-Joe-Lieberman’s-scrotum-faced-self, most certainly did just that, on Monday afternoon.

Now, you may ask…why did my desire to box-grater the bastard’s testes over this ass-rape of justice last but a mere fifteen seconds?

Because I saw that pic of Bush from yesterday morning–before he did Scooter that solid. Look at the scuttling little cockroach in the pic from the Times’s link [here].

That boy’s as we say around the way, “gettin’ up”.

“Doin’ the low run”

Perambulating like a sweaty, Goddamned boost artist trying to get out of Macy’s front door with a pants-front full of shoplifted panties, barbecue utensils, and a shit-on legacy.

The dude ain’t doin’ his bullshit, overcompensating Texas “swagger”, here. He is skulking off like a criminal on the lam, looking over one shoulder to see if security’s chasing him to the front doors. And I so wanted to see Scooter in the big house, the pokey, joint, hoosegow and the jug. Oh yeah…The Rock Farm and Barsville, too.

But you know what? All this commutation does is give people one more thang to rain stale fruit, spit, and the dog shit you just scooped in that black plastic bag down on this light-scurrying pest of a president. Think it’s going well for him on this reaction to pressure from his baby-chomping veep?

This part made me laugh–They turned off the White House comment line this afternoon in the wake of Bush’s little reach-around. FUCKING TURNED OFF THE WHITE HOUSE COMMENT LINE. That’s what you call…that’s right, a bunker mentality, kids. What could possess a “non-poll listening”, alleged man of principle to so nakedly run like Gerry Cooney from the Larry Holmes-esque right hands of overwhelming disapproval with the act?

Oh yeah. Lookit that! The answer’s right there in the question.

So, instead of us wondering what color knit hats Scooter was gonna be knitting for Adebisi in stir for awhile, we get to see a squirming, punk-running Bush try to hide from an increasingly angry mob of Americans over yet another self-inflicted fuck-up.

And the likes of Scooter’s backers such as Rudy and Fred? get to defend their statements backing him–good ol’ “Law & Order” Fred? and law and order Rudy should have great fun parsing this one.

“Rudy! Will you do the same thing for your friend Bernie Kerik if you’re elected?”

“Mr. Thompson? Doesn’t this bring back memories of Watergate for you, sir?”

CUT TO: A SHOT OF RUDY AND FRED SHRINKING RAPIDLY WITH SHAME, LIKE FRED AND BARNEY IN THE CLASSIC FLINTSTONES EPISODE “THE DRIVE IN”.

Oh yeah, a few wingnuts’ll crow…wanly though, ’cause Bush is still soft on them damned meskins, and the hook-up ain’t quite enough to slake that thirst for the level of evil needed to feel like the wanton, shit-dumping alpha dogs they once were.

Bush has forever branded himself, and much to the GOP’s old-guard kingmakers chagrin–the whole party, especially post-their hounding of Clinton and jailing of Susan McDougal (who did her fucking time) as punk-assed, special-treatment addicted crooks. Broderella, Tweety, The Crotch Sniffer and their ilk will tut-tut and disagree…but that walk/run, and the hiding in the attic as the phone beep-beep-beeps off its hook speaks volumes.

Nothin’ to lose, so he doubles down, of course.

Loses the bet.

Nothing to cover it.

Escorted to the back where a dude/the public with a ballpeen hammer awaits to extract payment from freshly-powdered knuckles.

Heckuva job, George. You’re dead-set on making this more fun every week you have left. Impeachment? It would be fun–can’t lie. But it’s such a drawn-out trip to get there. Damned if it isn’t almost as much fun though, seeing you caught naked time and again, eyes popped like Don Knotts on crack, picking up leaves to cover your wee, cold-shrunken gonads, only to realize–ooops! I did it again! “I fucking grabbed Poison Ivy!”

WICHITA, Kan. (July 4) – As stabbing victim LaShanda Calloway lay dying on the floor of a convenience store, five shoppers, including one who stopped to take a picture of her with a cell phone, stepped over the woman, police said.

The June 23 situation, captured on the store’s surveillance video, got scant news coverage until a columnist for The Wichita Eagle disclosed the existence of the video and its contents Tuesday.

Police have refused to release the video, saying it is part of their investigation.

“It was tragic to watch,” police spokesman Gordon Bassham said Tuesday. “The fact that people were more interested in taking a picture with a cell phone and shopping for snacks rather than helping this innocent young woman is, frankly, revolting.”

The woman was stabbed during an altercation that was not part of a robbery, Bassham said. It took about two minutes for someone to call 911, he said.

Calloway, 27, died later at a hospital.

Two suspects have been arrested. A 19-year-old woman was charged with first-degree murder. Another suspect who turned himself in had not been charged as of Tuesday, the Sedgwick County prosecutor’s office said.

The district attorney’s office will have to decide whether any of the shoppers could be charged, Bassham said.

It was uncertain what law, if any, would be applicable. A state statute for failure to render aid refers only to victims of a car accident.

Eagle columnist Mark McCormick told The Associated Press he learned about the video when he called Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams to inquire about a phone call he had received from a reader complaining about a Police Department policy that requires emergency medical personnel to wait until police secure a crime scene before rendering aid. McCormick said Williams then unloaded on him about the shoppers in the stabbing case.

In a small still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the “white tree” at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree. The white jury and white prosecutor and all white supporters of the white victim were all on one side of the courtroom. The black defendant, 17 year old Mychal Bell, and his supporters were on the other. The jury quickly convicted Mychal Bell of two felonies – aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell, who was a 16 year old sophomore football star at the time he was arrested, faces up to 22 years in prison. Five other black youths await similar trials on attempted second degree murder and conspiracy charges.

Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of the story, which is being reported across the world in papers in China, France and England, is just as chilling. The trouble started under “the white tree” in front of Jena High School. The “white tree” is where the white students, 80% of the student body, would always sit during school breaks.

In September 2006, a black student at Jena high school asked permission from school administrators to sit under the “white tree.” School officials advised them to sit wherever they wanted. They did.

The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, were hanging from the “white tree.” The message was clear. “Those nooses meant the KKK, they meant ‘Niggers, we’re going to kill you, we’re going to hang you till you die,'” Casteptla Bailey, mom of one of the students, told the London Observer.

The Jena high school principal found that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion. The white superintendent of schools over-ruled the principal and gave the students a three day suspension saying that the nooses were just a youthful stunt. “Adolescents play pranks,” the superintendent told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”

The African-American community was hurt and upset. “Hanging those nooses was a hate crime, plain and simple,” according to Tracy Bowens, mother of students at Jena High.

But blacks in this area of Louisiana have little political power. The ten person all-male government of the parish has one African-American member. The nine member all-male school board has one African American member. (A phone caller to the local school board trying to find out the racial makeup of the school board was told there was one “colored” member of the board). There is one black police officer in Jena and two black public school teachers.

Jena, with a population of less than 3000, is the largest town in and parish (county) seat of LaSalle Parish, Louisiana. There are about 350 African Americans in the town. LaSalle has a population of just over 14,000 people – 12% African-American.

This is solid Bush and David Duke Country – GWB won LaSalle Parish 4 to 1 in the last two elections; Duke carried a majority of the white vote when he ran for Governor of Louisiana. Families earn about 60% of the national average. The Census Bureau reports that less than 10% of the businesses in LaSalle Parish are black owned.

Jena is the site of the infamous Juvenile Correctional Center for Youth that was forced to close its doors in 2000, only two years after opening, due to widespread brutality and racism including the choking of juveniles by guards after the youth met with a lawyer. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the private prison amid complaints that guards paid inmates to fight each other and laughed when teens tried to commit suicide.

Black students decided to resist and organized a sit-in under the “white tree” at the school to protest the light suspensions given to the noose-hanging white students.

The white District Attorney then came to Jena High with law enforcement officers to address a school assembly. According to testimony in a later motion in court, the DA reportedly threatened the black protesting students saying that if they didn’t stop making a fuss about this “innocent prank I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen.” The school was put on lockdown for the rest of the week.

Racial tensions remained high throughout the fall.

On the night of Thursday November 30, 2006, a still unsolved fire burned down the main academic building of Jena High School.

On Friday night, December 1, a black student who showed up at a white party was beaten by whites. On Saturday, December 2, a young white man pulled out a shotgun in a confrontation with young black men at the Gotta Go convenience store outside Jena before the men wrestled it away from him. The black men who took the shotgun away were later arrested, no charges were filed against the white man.

On Monday, December 4, at Jena High, a white student–who allegedly had been making racial taunts, including calling African American students “niggers” while supporting the students who hung the nooses and who beat up the black student at the off-campus party–was knocked down, punched and kicked by black students. The white victim was taken to the hospital treated and released. He attended a social function that evening.

Six black Jena students were arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder. All six were expelled from school.

The six charged were: 17-year-old Robert Bailey Junior whose bail was set at $138,000; 17-year-old Theo Shaw – bail $130,000; 18-year-old Carwin Jones–bail $100,000; 17-year-old Bryant Purvis–bail $70,000; 16 year old Mychal Bell, a sophomore in high school who was charged as an adult and for whom bail was set at $90,000; and a still unidentified minor.

Many of the young men, who came to be known as the Jena 6, stayed in jail for months. Few families could afford bond or private attorneys.

Mychal Bell remained in jail from December 2006 until his trial because his family was unable to post the $90,000 bond. Theo Shaw has also remained in jail. Several of the other defendants remained in jail for months until their families could raise sufficient money to put up bonds.

Mexico was ablaze in late January. Just two months after the election of Felipe Calderon as Mexico’s President, protests had broken out across the country.

Thousands of people were marching on the main cities calling on their pro-free trade businessman President to halt a phenomenon threatening the lives of millions of Mexicans.

In their hands the protesters clutched cobs of corn, the staple crop that makes tortillas and for many of Mexico’s poor the main source of calorific sustenance in an otherwise nutritionally sparse diet.

Over the past three months the price of corn flour had risen by 400 per cent. Despite being the world’s fourth largest corn producer and a major importer of supposedly cheap American corn, millions of Mexicans found the one source of cheap nutrition available to them was suddenly out of reach.

Poor Mexicans, who normally expect to set aside a third of their wages for corn flour, had always been particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations in the corn market, but a four-fold increase was both unheard of and potentially catastrophic.

The reason for such a substantial increase in the price lay north of the border. In order to wean itself off its addiction to oil, the US was turning to biofuels made from industrial corn like never before. Farmers in Mexico and America had been replacing edible corn crops with industrial corn that could then be processed into biofuels, leading to a decrease in the amount corn available on the open market.

As corn imports and domestic production dropped, greedy wholesalers in Mexico began hoarding what supplies they could get their hands on, forcing the price of corn to rise astronomically. Eventually tortillas became unaffordable, so people took to the streets.

President Calderon found himself caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand were the corn importers and major multinationals who would not look kindly on any government intervention on the free market. On the other side were Mexico’s teeming poor, the vast majority of the population who already viewed Mr Calderon as a discredited pro-business leader that ignored the needy.

In the end, Mr Calderon compromised. He capped the price of flour at 78 cents per kilogram but made the scheme voluntary for businesses. So far the price has largely stabilised but many are becoming increasingly concerned that Mexico’s tortilla wars were simply the sign of things to come. “Recently there’s been a huge increase in the demand for industrial corn for the production of ethanol which inevitably pushes up the price of food stuffs,” says Dawn McLaren, a research economist at the W P Carey School of Business in Phoenix, Arizona. “But if we get a particularly bad harvest or if a weather system like El Niño strikes we could be really stuck.”

A familiar face. Could it be?? YES!!

My cousin …………!! I haven’t seen her for so long.

She leaves her car and hurries towards me.

“Hello Habibti! How are you doing??” We sit in my car and catch up on family gossip.

Suddenly she jumps out of the car, “I’ll be back!” With that promise she runs to move her car some ten meters forward, and returns before I have a chance to move my car the same distance.

We are, of course, standing in the petrol line.

“What will you have?”

I motion to the roaming “drinks man” to give us two sodas, “All very cold, Khala (aunty, honorary title given to family ladies)!! Take your pick.”

We drink and chat, our conversation interrupted by jumps to move her car forward every fifteen minutes or so.

So hot, so thirsty and so hungry. So tired and so angry.

I can hardly keep my eyes open.

Hundreds of cars, waiting in line like beggars in front of the King’s gate; waiting for his bounty.

One line (hundreds of cars) for men.

One line (tens) for women.

One line (tens) for holders of “badges”.

One line (tens) for friends and acquaintances.

Which two do you think move forward more swiftly??

I fuel up twice a week, once for the generator and once for the car. And I’m one of the lucky ones – a lady – able to fuel up after only three hours wait, many of the men take a turn today… and reach the filling machine tomorrow.

It is already seven thirty and danger awaits on the path of those who heed not the call of prudence, and get home before this time.

We chat on, as do groups of women and men, who leave their cars in search of a shady spot.

Here comes the ice-cream man; OH! And there goes the sandwich man!! COME!!

We buy sandwiches – tiny falafel sandwiches and more soda to assuage our insatiable thirst.

So hot.

So infuriating.

Some cars fuelled up and have come back to fuel up again – they smile at us smugly.

At half past eight, just about to cross the bridge on my way home, my phone rings, “Where are you, Sahar??”

“Yes, Baba (father), I’m only just crossing the bridge.”

“So late!! And I thought you had forgotten me!”, “No, I’m on my way.”