The Damage We Do.

[JohnyCanuck]

Snip from a letter by a Vietnam vet to Tom Englehardt, www.tomdispatch.com

At about the same time My Lai occurred, I was flying as a crew chief/gunner on a Chinook . Passing a small village I thought I heard a single shot directed at my helicopter. Or maybe it was just "blade pop." Looking into the village, I could see women and children in the streets in what I'd call a "pastoral scene." I elected not to "return fire," though by my unit's rules of engagement I could have done so. About an hour later we happened to fly past that village again. There was no one in sight, but there were numerous bomb craters in the rice paddies and where homes had been. My guess is that someone else received fire, or thought they received fire, returned fire, and the pilots called for an air strike. I doubt any of the people in the village had time to flee from the attack. Never ever have I heard anything about that event, just My Lai…

I'm not guiltless. At about the same time, flying low level – like 20 feet AGL at 140 mph – we passed a family tending a tapioca field. As we came by, a young boy of 12 or so picked up his hoe and pointed it at us like a weapon. I tried to swing my M-60 around and shoot him, but we were going too fast. At the time, I would have felt it was a good shoot as he was "practicing" shooting us down. Now, with young sons of my own, I'm appalled I could have been so callous.

People here got really worried about a flashlight at a Starbucks (which might have been a bomb). Had it been a bomb, which it wasn't, it would have weighed about 1/500th of what we routinely drop in residential neighborhoods in Iraq. It's like most people don't seem to realize what devastation we inflict there on a frequent basis. Today, for example, someone I know sent me some "feel good pictures" about our troops in Iraq. You know: old ladies holding up "Thanks, Mr. Bush" signs, smiling kids. Pictures she said that "just don't make the news." For "don't make the news," how about some pictures of kids that our bombs have eviscerated? Pictures of the sort that are found in Where War Lives, a Photographic Journal of Vietnam by Dick Durrance (intro by Ron Kovic).

We should be the bright light to the world, spending our tax monies on cures for malaria, not on killing innocents.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=51741

[acmejack]

1. There you go.

People have no idea. I had a big argument with someone on this board who vociferously supported the idea of the US developing a new generation of land mines. I asked him (or her) if they had ever seen anyone who had been so victimized, they had not but were unswayed. They felt it was something we must have & could not be swayed.

I suppose that unless you've been there, case in point the current administration!