A story about the real face of this war...
Last night we showed the film Gunner Palace at the German-American Insitute here in Tübingen. We are happy to report that about 50 people came to see the show, including a large proportion of Americans.
After watching the first hour of the film, Bob Evers and Michael Sharp took the stage to answer questions. Michael Sharp represented the Military Counseling Network. Bob is a former NCO with 14 years in the military behind him. He participated in the 1991 Gulf War as well as in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo in 2002. He spent seven months in Iraq before being wounded and then released on a medical discharge. We invited him to come to the event to comment on the film and field questions from the audience. It turned out to be an unforgettable event.
One of the main elements in the film - a dcoumentary about an artillery unit on occupation duty in Baghdad - are raids on Iraqi residencies to round up people for questioning, get suspected insurgents or capture weapons caches. These scenes clearly moved Bob and he began his part of the evening by describing such raids as very terrifying events for all concerned. He said that the scenes of dozens of soldiers bashing down a door and rushing into some living room might seem excessive when viewed on the cinema screen, but was quite normal considering that there is often resistance and people do not just open the door when you ring the bell. Bob noted that soldiers are often killed or injured during these operations. He got his purple heart on a raid. While often nothing is found, they often turn up exactly what they're looking for: armed bad guys. He also recellected one case where U.S. soldiers uncovered a stash of discarded American letters - letters from home which G.I.s had thrown away. The isurgents had gone through the trash and were obvioulsy collecting information on American occupation soldiers, including home addresses - a very scary thought.
Mr. Evers also spoke about patrolling the streets of Baghdad, something the movie also showed. He recalled the constant fear: checking every window, every alley, every pedestrian. You never know who may want to kill you. Very tellingly, he contrasted his experience in Iraq with what he felt in Kosovo in 2002. There, he said, he had the feeling of being a liberator. He was approached daily by people who thanked him for what he was doing. His mission had saved lives. He had been in houses where people had pictures of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on their walls. In Iraq, he was not wanted, not thanked. He realized he was doing more harm than good, and, he noted, "For me that stings." "When I joined the military," he continued, "I joined to defend the constitution of the United States. I believed, I still believe, that we have a special responsibility as the sole superpower in teh world. It is absolutely devestating to see what we have been doing and what we have become."
Bob's account of the Kosovo operation is food for thought for those in the peace movement who oppose all use of armed force.
Asked by a member of the audience whether doubts about the mission were distracting for soldiers doing their duty on a day to day basis, he said they stay "on task." "You do whatever you need to do to stay alive and keep your friends alive." As a squad leader, he said he would have done anything for the 10 men for whose lives he was responsible. Getting them home to their families was at the top of the list. For one soldier in particular, he recalled, he was the family. That young man had no parents, wife and children waiting for them back home in rural California. Even now that young soldier is back in Iraq and Bob is still a mentor for him. There is a scene in Gunner Palace where a soldier raiding a house recounts seeing an Iraqi going for a weapon. The soldier punches the Iraqi. Bob noted that he is not sure he would have merely punched the man.
Later in the evening, Bob noted how difficult it was for him to watch his unit return to Iraq without him.
It was during moments like these that Bob's account connected not only with the movie in an especially vivid way, but also showed us live what we know about soldiering from countless popular accounts of war and from the social science literature on men in battle: the mechanism of small-unit loyalty that drives men to do things they otherwise would not do; the ability of war to limit empathy for the enemy, etc.
Empathy for the enemy was a topic of discussion when an Arab member of the audience observed that Americans only turned against the war when it went sour for Americans. Iraqi, Arab lives matter much less. One of our members noted that this is the same mechanism that still dominates our memory of Vietnam: The 50+ thousand American dead are the tragedy, not the over one million Vietnamese dead. That sentiment seemed to divide the audience into those who agreed and those who defended the American people as a whole. Bob admitted that he had been in favor of operation Iraqi Freedom in the beginning because he had trusted the administration. He had taken Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. to the bank, so to speak. When that turned out to have been a lie (he used a explicative referring to the feces of male bovines), that is when the war became wrong in his eyes. There were those in the audience who then briefly debated the issue of whether even real WMD would have justified the war. One even brought deposing Saddam Hussein into the equation. There were somewhat caustic, rhetorical questions about how many Arab or American lives are worth which political result. The evening was not supposed to be about "big" politics, however, but about one man's personal story, and the discussion quickly focused on the ground level again.
A theme throughout the movie, and something Bob Evers confirmed quite colorfully, is the sense of isolation among our men and women in Iraq. People who have been to Iraq form a distinct subset of Americans who have a very, very different perspective from the rest of the population. Bob recounted going home and sitting in a restaurant seeing the people at the next table laughing and having fun. These people went about their
daily lives totally untouched by the war. If they pay any attention to the war at all, then only during the two minutes of coverage on the nightly news. Bob said he felt like going over to the other people and shaking them. That "really, really bothered me...nothing has changed for them." Asked about the yellow ribbons sported by so many American patriots, he said, "If I see another ribbon on an SUV I am going to shake somebody." It reminded me of the scene in All Quiet On The Western Front where the narrator returns home to feel alienated by the normalcy and shallow patriotism of his home town while on leave.
One member of the audience, referring to friends who had joined the military even after it had become obvious that the administration's arguments for the war were bogus, asked rhetorically, "Why should we care?" (about the soldiers in Iraq). After all, they had brought it on themselves. Bob observed that most of the men and women over in Iraq are "people who have been failed by the economic and political system of the United States." Later, he also expressed his respect for those who aren't like the chickenhawks who are for the war, but only send other people's children into the firing line. If someone is willing to go over and fight the war themselves, then at least they are consistent.
Part of the discussion revolved around the qusetion of PTSD - post-traumatic stress syndrom. Both Bob Evers and Michael Sharp from the Military Counseling Network spoke about a disgraceful state of affairs in the U.S. military: Men coming out of Iraq are screened for PTSD, but most fall through the holes in the net since they are in a hurry to get home. They are filtered through a series of medical "tents" in Kuwait where they are surveyed about their needs and symptoms. In Germany, PTSD has become so pervasive that the military community around Kaiserslautern is starting to draw on local English-speaking doctors to treat American personnel. According to official data, something like one third of American soldiers with combat experience in Iraq have PTSD in some form. But even that figure is low, considering the measures taken by the military to avoid PTSD diagnoses. The intent is clearly to save face and keep military retention rates high by making as few PTSD diagnoses as possible.
Bob recalled that he had gone to Iraq with every intention to let his wife in on everything he experienced. He would keep nothing from her. He said that lasted "about three weeks" in Iraq. He also related another family encounter. He comes from a military family. His father had been in the Navy in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and had been decorated in Vietnam. Before it was clear that Bob would get a medical discharge and not have to return to Iraq, he had already decided that he could not go back and "enforce a policy that I think is fundamentally wrong." He
needed a week to work up the courage to call his father and tell him he would sooner go AWOL than continue fighting. His father fell silent on the line for a few seconds and finally replied, "Good."
Asked by a member of the audience how we who are not in Iraq can stay informed about the reality of the war, Bob recommended looking at individual stories, stories with a name and a face. The statistics on the news are not the real story.
Asked about the quality of military blogs from Iraq, the speakers mentioned a project by the American military to censor U.S. soldiers' blogs. They have a whole national guard unit set up to surf the web for blogs and look for any excuse - the revelation of ostensibly classified information, for example, to shut the blogs down.
As an example of a real story, Bob recounted what he wanted to be the core message of his contribution to the evening: "If you don't remember anything else tonight, I want you to know that I had the responsibility of zipping up one of my friends in a plastic bag and taking him down to the mortuary and doing the official identification for the military. His name was Peter Enos. he was from Massechussetts. He was two weeks shy of 24. He had a wife and a six-month-old baby at home who will
never know his father."
Asked what we could do from here for friends and acquaintances in Iraq, Bob said it depends on the people. We can write, send things, stay in touch. It was clear that supporting the troops must mean more than a yellow sticker, more than just "keep on shopping," and also even more than the now proverbial "Bring them home now."
After watching the first hour of the film, Bob Evers and Michael Sharp took the stage to answer questions. Michael Sharp represented the Military Counseling Network. Bob is a former NCO with 14 years in the military behind him. He participated in the 1991 Gulf War as well as in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo in 2002. He spent seven months in Iraq before being wounded and then released on a medical discharge. We invited him to come to the event to comment on the film and field questions from the audience. It turned out to be an unforgettable event.
|
Here are Bob (left) and Michael speaking. |
One of the main elements in the film - a dcoumentary about an artillery unit on occupation duty in Baghdad - are raids on Iraqi residencies to round up people for questioning, get suspected insurgents or capture weapons caches. These scenes clearly moved Bob and he began his part of the evening by describing such raids as very terrifying events for all concerned. He said that the scenes of dozens of soldiers bashing down a door and rushing into some living room might seem excessive when viewed on the cinema screen, but was quite normal considering that there is often resistance and people do not just open the door when you ring the bell. Bob noted that soldiers are often killed or injured during these operations. He got his purple heart on a raid. While often nothing is found, they often turn up exactly what they're looking for: armed bad guys. He also recellected one case where U.S. soldiers uncovered a stash of discarded American letters - letters from home which G.I.s had thrown away. The isurgents had gone through the trash and were obvioulsy collecting information on American occupation soldiers, including home addresses - a very scary thought.
Mr. Evers also spoke about patrolling the streets of Baghdad, something the movie also showed. He recalled the constant fear: checking every window, every alley, every pedestrian. You never know who may want to kill you. Very tellingly, he contrasted his experience in Iraq with what he felt in Kosovo in 2002. There, he said, he had the feeling of being a liberator. He was approached daily by people who thanked him for what he was doing. His mission had saved lives. He had been in houses where people had pictures of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on their walls. In Iraq, he was not wanted, not thanked. He realized he was doing more harm than good, and, he noted, "For me that stings." "When I joined the military," he continued, "I joined to defend the constitution of the United States. I believed, I still believe, that we have a special responsibility as the sole superpower in teh world. It is absolutely devestating to see what we have been doing and what we have become."
Bob's account of the Kosovo operation is food for thought for those in the peace movement who oppose all use of armed force.
Asked by a member of the audience whether doubts about the mission were distracting for soldiers doing their duty on a day to day basis, he said they stay "on task." "You do whatever you need to do to stay alive and keep your friends alive." As a squad leader, he said he would have done anything for the 10 men for whose lives he was responsible. Getting them home to their families was at the top of the list. For one soldier in particular, he recalled, he was the family. That young man had no parents, wife and children waiting for them back home in rural California. Even now that young soldier is back in Iraq and Bob is still a mentor for him. There is a scene in Gunner Palace where a soldier raiding a house recounts seeing an Iraqi going for a weapon. The soldier punches the Iraqi. Bob noted that he is not sure he would have merely punched the man.
Later in the evening, Bob noted how difficult it was for him to watch his unit return to Iraq without him.
It was during moments like these that Bob's account connected not only with the movie in an especially vivid way, but also showed us live what we know about soldiering from countless popular accounts of war and from the social science literature on men in battle: the mechanism of small-unit loyalty that drives men to do things they otherwise would not do; the ability of war to limit empathy for the enemy, etc.
Empathy for the enemy was a topic of discussion when an Arab member of the audience observed that Americans only turned against the war when it went sour for Americans. Iraqi, Arab lives matter much less. One of our members noted that this is the same mechanism that still dominates our memory of Vietnam: The 50+ thousand American dead are the tragedy, not the over one million Vietnamese dead. That sentiment seemed to divide the audience into those who agreed and those who defended the American people as a whole. Bob admitted that he had been in favor of operation Iraqi Freedom in the beginning because he had trusted the administration. He had taken Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. to the bank, so to speak. When that turned out to have been a lie (he used a explicative referring to the feces of male bovines), that is when the war became wrong in his eyes. There were those in the audience who then briefly debated the issue of whether even real WMD would have justified the war. One even brought deposing Saddam Hussein into the equation. There were somewhat caustic, rhetorical questions about how many Arab or American lives are worth which political result. The evening was not supposed to be about "big" politics, however, but about one man's personal story, and the discussion quickly focused on the ground level again.
A theme throughout the movie, and something Bob Evers confirmed quite colorfully, is the sense of isolation among our men and women in Iraq. People who have been to Iraq form a distinct subset of Americans who have a very, very different perspective from the rest of the population. Bob recounted going home and sitting in a restaurant seeing the people at the next table laughing and having fun. These people went about their
daily lives totally untouched by the war. If they pay any attention to the war at all, then only during the two minutes of coverage on the nightly news. Bob said he felt like going over to the other people and shaking them. That "really, really bothered me...nothing has changed for them." Asked about the yellow ribbons sported by so many American patriots, he said, "If I see another ribbon on an SUV I am going to shake somebody." It reminded me of the scene in All Quiet On The Western Front where the narrator returns home to feel alienated by the normalcy and shallow patriotism of his home town while on leave.
One member of the audience, referring to friends who had joined the military even after it had become obvious that the administration's arguments for the war were bogus, asked rhetorically, "Why should we care?" (about the soldiers in Iraq). After all, they had brought it on themselves. Bob observed that most of the men and women over in Iraq are "people who have been failed by the economic and political system of the United States." Later, he also expressed his respect for those who aren't like the chickenhawks who are for the war, but only send other people's children into the firing line. If someone is willing to go over and fight the war themselves, then at least they are consistent.
Part of the discussion revolved around the qusetion of PTSD - post-traumatic stress syndrom. Both Bob Evers and Michael Sharp from the Military Counseling Network spoke about a disgraceful state of affairs in the U.S. military: Men coming out of Iraq are screened for PTSD, but most fall through the holes in the net since they are in a hurry to get home. They are filtered through a series of medical "tents" in Kuwait where they are surveyed about their needs and symptoms. In Germany, PTSD has become so pervasive that the military community around Kaiserslautern is starting to draw on local English-speaking doctors to treat American personnel. According to official data, something like one third of American soldiers with combat experience in Iraq have PTSD in some form. But even that figure is low, considering the measures taken by the military to avoid PTSD diagnoses. The intent is clearly to save face and keep military retention rates high by making as few PTSD diagnoses as possible.
Bob recalled that he had gone to Iraq with every intention to let his wife in on everything he experienced. He would keep nothing from her. He said that lasted "about three weeks" in Iraq. He also related another family encounter. He comes from a military family. His father had been in the Navy in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and had been decorated in Vietnam. Before it was clear that Bob would get a medical discharge and not have to return to Iraq, he had already decided that he could not go back and "enforce a policy that I think is fundamentally wrong." He
needed a week to work up the courage to call his father and tell him he would sooner go AWOL than continue fighting. His father fell silent on the line for a few seconds and finally replied, "Good."
Asked by a member of the audience how we who are not in Iraq can stay informed about the reality of the war, Bob recommended looking at individual stories, stories with a name and a face. The statistics on the news are not the real story.
Asked about the quality of military blogs from Iraq, the speakers mentioned a project by the American military to censor U.S. soldiers' blogs. They have a whole national guard unit set up to surf the web for blogs and look for any excuse - the revelation of ostensibly classified information, for example, to shut the blogs down.
As an example of a real story, Bob recounted what he wanted to be the core message of his contribution to the evening: "If you don't remember anything else tonight, I want you to know that I had the responsibility of zipping up one of my friends in a plastic bag and taking him down to the mortuary and doing the official identification for the military. His name was Peter Enos. he was from Massechussetts. He was two weeks shy of 24. He had a wife and a six-month-old baby at home who will
never know his father."
Asked what we could do from here for friends and acquaintances in Iraq, Bob said it depends on the people. We can write, send things, stay in touch. It was clear that supporting the troops must mean more than a yellow sticker, more than just "keep on shopping," and also even more than the now proverbial "Bring them home now."
mhatlie - 9. Nov, 11:48