RW ONLINE:\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nGulf War Vets: Resisting and Telling the Truth\r\nPart 1\r\n<\/p>
by Michael Slate<\/p>\r\n
Revolutionary Worker #1190, March 9, 2003<\/i>, posted at rwor.org<\/p>\r\n
Just about every guy I knew when I was a teenager ended up in Vietnam. The \r\ndraft board buses used to load up outside the steel mill, and they were packed \r\nfull--week after week, year after year. Everybody just staring out the window, \r\nno smiles, no laughs, sometimes a few wet eyes.<\/p>\r\n
A whole lot of the guys never came back. Some came back with no legs or \r\nmissing arms. And many came back to our streets consumed by day-long \r\nnightmares.<\/p>\r\n
And still many others came back to oppose the Vietnam War and to speak out so \r\nthat everyone could know the truth about the war.<\/p>\r\n
America always claims its wars are just and noble, all about freedom. Some \r\nfolks still buy the okie- doke on this, but a whole lot don't. Because of their \r\nexperience as soldiers in an imperialist military fighting an unjust war, vets \r\nhave a special ability and responsibility to speak the truth to the rest of \r\nus.<\/p>\r\n
Lots of youth join the military today because they're looking for a job, \r\ncollege money, a way to see the world while they figure out what they're gonna \r\ndo with their lives. They didn't think they're going to war. And a lot of people \r\nfigure that even if they do end up in war, the TV news showed how clean and neat \r\nthe 1990-1991 Gulf War was--a video game war with smart bombs and precision \r\nmissiles. But many of the vets who fought the war--not to mention the Iraqi \r\npeople who were the victims of the war--know all too well that this is a \r\nhorrendous lie.<\/p>\r\n
Almost 700,000 U.S. troops served in the Gulf War between August 2, 1990, and \r\nJuly 31, 1991. As many as 100,000 of these troops suffer from what's known as \r\nthe Gulf War Syndrome. They were exposed to repeated low levels of chemical \r\nwarfare agents, including sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gases. Eight thousand \r\ntroops received botulinum toxoid (Bot Tox) vaccine and 150,000 got the anthrax \r\nvaccine as part of some human experimentation routine. At least 436,000 soldiers \r\nentered into or lived for months in areas contaminated by more than 315 tons of \r\ntoxic waste from radioactive depleted uranium from U.S. ammunition. Almost all \r\nof these troops had no awareness about the dangers, no training or protective \r\nequipment, and no medical evaluations.<\/p>\r\n
On the Iraqi side, somewhere around 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed by \r\nOperation Desert Storm. More than a million Iraqi civilians have died since the \r\nGulf War--from the effects of the bombings and the economic sanctions imposed by \r\nthe U.S. and its allies. Many more could die in a new U.S. war on Iraq.<\/p>\r\n
U.S. military veterans who fought in the Gulf War know the real story behind \r\nthe official American story. They live with what they saw and what they did. As \r\nU.S. imperialism rushes toward another war on Iraq, many of these vets feel \r\ncompelled to tell what they experienced, first-hand, about U.S. crimes in Iraq. \r\nAnd some of the vets tell the story of how they resisted during the Gulf War. \r\nThey feel a responsibility to help build the anti-war movement today--and to \r\nhelp the soldiers facing a new Gulf War do the right thing.<\/p>\r\n<\/b><\/i>
Andrew McGuffin is quiet and calm these days. He says it took him a long \r\ntime to get there. He started out dirt poor in Beckley, West Virginia. He's a \r\nlawyer now, a far cry from the penniless youth who stood alone in San Diego more \r\nthan 12 years ago--no high school degree, no job, no nothing. He was a kid when \r\nhe joined the Marine Corps, and he hoped it would turn his life around. Today he \r\ntalks about how he was drafted by poverty.<\/p>\r\n
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\"I went to Marine combat training and then to School of Infantry. While I \r\nwas in School of Infantry, about 12 days before I graduated, the Iraqi forces \r\ninvaded Kuwait. Four days after I graduated, I was on my way there.<\/p>\r\n
\"We really didn't know that it was going to be Iraqis until August, and by \r\nthat time there were only a couple of weeks of training left. But it was \r\nimmediately impressed upon me that [the Iraqis] were sub-humans, through various \r\nepithets about their head attire or whatever. There were all kinds of pejorative \r\nterms that were used to describe anybody of Muslim or Arab descent.<\/p>\r\n
\"There was this one song that we used to sing as we ran. It was, `Gonna rape, \r\nkill, pillage, and burn. Gonna rape, kill, pillage, and burn.' And that's \r\nsomething that we sang quite a bit. And we talked about `Blood makes the grass \r\ngrow, we make the blood flow.'<\/p>\r\n
\"The Marine Corps went from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait. We infiltrated in the \r\nnight through various minefields, concertina wire, and obstacle belts. When I \r\ngot there I saw the fires from the oil wells, smoke filling the sky, fires 50, \r\n75, 100 feet in the air, and people dying. People dying from mines, from \r\nautomatic weapons fire, from our planes killing them, from us killing them with \r\nmachine guns and mortar fire and artillery fire.<\/p>\r\n
\"It was horrific. It was non-stop horror. It just wasn't covered in the U.S. \r\nmedia because the government didn't want the American people to be fully \r\ninformed about what we were doing there or what was happening to the troops.<\/p>\r\n
\"I had the knowledge of an infantryman that depleted uranium tank shells \r\ncould easily penetrate the armor of Iraqi tanks. I didn't have the knowledge \r\nthat depleted uranium would cause lifelong illness to the people who were \r\nexposed to the particles that are airborne from firing depleted uranium shells. \r\nI didn't know that the bombs that were being dropped by our aircraft or by our \r\nartillery were coated in depleted uranium. I didn't know that countless \r\nthousands of Iraqi children would be dying from depleted uranium illnesses.<\/p>\r\n
\"Another one of the things that really disturbed me while I was there was \r\njust seeing the massive destruction of the landscape, the harm to the \r\nenvironment. But most of all it was burning people around the highways, around \r\nKuwait City, the infamous `highway of death'--those people who were just \r\nannihilated. There can be no doubt in anybody's mind who sees the pictures from \r\nwhat happened there that that was a crime against humanity, a war crime.<\/p>\r\n
\"It still affects me to this day. The smell of burning people is very much \r\nlike the smell of burning hair. But of course, most people who smell burning \r\nhair only smell it in small doses. And when it's people, it's much more \r\nprominent and disturbing. It's a smell that I don't think anybody can ever \r\nforget once they've smelled it. I had to go in for oral surgery at some point, \r\nand something was cut out of my mouth with a cauterizing gun. I smelled that, \r\nand it immediately took me back to Kuwait and what I experienced there. It's \r\njust the most horrible smell. And almost immediately you know what it is.<\/p>\r\n
\"Not only are there the smells, but also the visions of the wrecked and \r\nbombed vehicles being mashed into the road, mashed into craters, or just \r\nincinerated with people incinerated around them. Or seeing the dead who have \r\ndied from gunshot wounds who are just really, really messed up. The firepower of \r\nan automatic weapon or a heavy machine gun will really, really destroy a human \r\nbody, and it's not a pretty sight.<\/p>\r\n
\"It not only changes your mind, but it makes you carry a burden of shame and \r\nguilt about participating in those things for the rest of your life. I think \r\nit's a sadness that I'll bear with me for the rest of my life.<\/p>\r\n
\"The things that I was participating in was our units' killing people in \r\ntrench lines across the minefields and taking a lot of prisoners--or not taking \r\nthem. There was an incident where we took an Iraqi officer prisoner and turned \r\nhim over to our intelligence officer. From my understanding, [the Iraqi officer] \r\nwanted to have his troops be able to surrender to our forces. But because of the \r\nemphasis on moving forward and getting to Kuwait City and being on the attack, \r\nthe intelligence officer apparently just called artillery on these people and \r\nblew them up.<\/p>\r\n
\"A lot of the people that we encountered who were prisoners of war, our \r\nprisoners, were people who were starving, who had been bombed for a month, who \r\nwere barely holding onto their sanity, and were very much like me. They were \r\npoor people. They were uneducated by and large. They were not really wanting to \r\nbe there for any personal reasons but having been told by their government that \r\nthey were there for the right reasons. They perhaps felt compelled to be \r\nthere--either conscripted or whatever their situation might be.<\/p>\r\n
\"I think that the concept of `supporting the troops' is such a lie. I think \r\nthat when I got back and there were all these parades and people treating me \r\nlike I was some war god, it really confused me more than anything--because I \r\nfelt like what I had done wasn't necessarily right.\"<\/p>\r\n<\/b><\/i>
Glen Motil describes himself as a Marine Corps Gulf War Veteran for Peace \r\nand Social Justice. He grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, and he was 17 when \r\nhe joined the Marines with a self-described great desire to serve his country \r\nand to defend democracy. The military has been a long tradition in his family, \r\nand there was never any question whether he would do his four years. Glen joined \r\nin 1987 and got out in late 1991. In those four years Glen began to change his \r\nviews. He ended up in the Persian Gulf War, but by the time he got there his \r\nviews had begun to change.<\/p>\r\n
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\"I immediately began to question my decision when I arrived in boot camp. \r\nBoot camp itself was a culture shock to begin with. In the Marine Corps boot \r\ncamp, you're trained to be a killer, basically. There's no nice way to put it. \r\nIngrained in that is a lot of racism and a lot of things that were against \r\nvalues that I was also <\/i>taught growing up. So I was taught to respect the \r\nmilitary, but I was also taught various religious and moral values. I believe \r\nthat what I was experiencing in boot camp was counter to those values. So it was \r\nan immediate contradiction. I felt that contradiction throughout my time in the \r\nservice.<\/p>\r\n
\"After boot camp I began reading American history, seeing films about the \r\nVietnam War era, and learning about the anti-war movement of that time, studying \r\nhistory that we didn't learn in high school. It seemed that American history \r\nalways ended with World War 2 and there was never enough time at the end of the \r\nyear to cover what happened after <\/i>World War 2. Even that history was \r\nuncritical and just handed down to us from the point of view of America was \r\nalways `the shining city on the hill' kind of perspective.<\/p>\r\n
\"So by the time the Gulf War came around, by the beginning of 1990 even, I \r\nwas settling into somewhat of an anti-war position, even at that time. I was \r\nstudying Vietnam and thinking that this kind of thing would never occur again or \r\ncould never occur again now that our country has been through that.<\/p>\r\n
\"In August, with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and then the military buildup, \r\nI was dismayed and I was in disbelief that this was happening again. I always \r\nfelt that somehow it would stop. At the time I wasn't anti-war as I would say \r\nI'm anti-war today. I was not taking a pacifist position. I believed that there \r\nwere still things worth fighting and dying for, such as democracy, human rights, \r\nand so forth, protection of my family and my way of life. I call it an evolution \r\nof my political thinking over the past 15 years.<\/p>\r\n
\"In the military itself, there's people with all different opinions. I found \r\nmyself drawn to people with similar opinions that came from either lower \r\nsocio-economic backgrounds or minority groups. They seemed to have a more \r\ncritical point of view from the start, so I was drawn to people like that. There \r\nwere several of my fellow Marines who had some college experience, and I enjoyed \r\nhanging out with them because I could express these kinds of thoughts. And I did \r\nexpress this even to my direct supervisors and so forth. I had a fairly liberal \r\nunit--so I was fortunate for that--where that kind of thing was not looked down \r\nupon.<\/p>\r\n
\"I was a field radio operator and I worked at a communication unit, 9th Com \r\nBattalion out of Camp Pendleton. When we went over there we were stationed at \r\nCamp 5 in Saudi Arabia. They already had barracks set up. Saudi Arabians have \r\nmigrants come in to do a lot of the menial tasks from places like the \r\nPhilippines. So they already had these camps set up, but we turned it into a \r\nmilitary encampment. I provided radio watch for the troops that were in the \r\nfront. Perhaps you've seen it in films when a radioman is with a platoon, say, \r\nand he's calling in for aerial bombardment or something and he calls the central \r\ncommand. I would be the person he was speaking to if I was on radio watch that \r\nevening.<\/p>\r\n
\"I didn't have a chance personally, and I thank God for this, to see the \r\ndevastation. I know people from my unit who were actually on the Marine \r\nExpeditionary Force. Many of my friends, they just saw many, many dead bodies \r\nand charred bodies, the result of these bombs that fell. Any Iraqis they did \r\nmeet were surrendering at the time. I don't know what my friends witnessed, but \r\nI've read reports of unarmed Iraqis being shot in half as they were trying to \r\nsurrender. I just remember the looks on their faces after the ground war was \r\nover and they came back to Camp 5 before the transition home. These were guys \r\nthat were happy-go-lucky guys, and I used to party with them and everything. And \r\ntheir faces were as if they had just seen a ghost. In many ways they had, I \r\nfound out later--but they didn't want to talk about what they had just seen. \r\nThey were visibly changed. I could tell just by looking at them.<\/p>\r\n
\"I can't speak for them, but what has gone through my mind since that time is \r\nquestioning of, `How could this in any way be right?' How could my country that \r\nI love, that I agreed to serve, have participated in such \r\ndevastation?\"<\/p>\r\n<\/b><\/i>
Charles Sheehan-Miles also comes from a family with a long history of \r\nmilitary service. They all just assumed that he would continue the tradition. He \r\njoined the Army in April 1990, about a year after high school. He finished boot \r\ncamp about a week after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Charles went straight from basic \r\ntraining to Saudi Arabia. His time in the Persian Gulf changed his life, and \r\never since he has tirelessly spoken out against war and especially the coming \r\nwar against Iraq.<\/p>\r\n
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\"I was an Abrams tank crewman and during the war my unit, the 24th \r\ninfantry division, we invaded Iraq from Saudi Arabia. We went up north as far as \r\nthe Euphrates River Valley. I fought in a ground unit against the Iraqi troops. \r\nWe were involved in a number of direct combat engagements against Iraqi \r\nforces.<\/p>\r\n
\"I felt like I was on Mars when I got back to the States and saw the TV \r\ncoverage because it was all so pretty, clean, and precise. It was none of those \r\nthings.<\/p>\r\n
\"Our first engagement was chaotic. It was crazy. We came out of a sandstorm \r\nright into a dug- in infantry brigade of Iraqis. It was relatively close \r\nquarters, close enough that we could see the Iraqi soldiers from 50 meters away \r\nas we shot at them and they shot at us. My unit took some casualties in that \r\nbattle, a number of people were wounded. The Iraqis, I couldn't even guess how \r\nmany were killed but it was many of them. They fought very hard, but they didn't \r\nhave the kind of equipment we had. They didn't have the range. They didn't have \r\nthe ability to fight back. It was by no means a balanced or even fight. I don't \r\nthink military planners intended it to be. We went in there with overwhelming \r\nforce and rolled over these people.<\/p>\r\n
\"The next morning, very early in the morning of February 26th, my unit was \r\njust over on the far side of the highway, approaching the river. There was a \r\nlarge logistics base or something for the Iraqis. I didn't really have a good \r\nfeel for it; it was night, we were in our tanks and all I had was a picture of \r\nmaybe 100 meters to our front. We were there waiting for fuel trucks and \r\nammunition to catch up with us so that we could refuel and move on. I woke \r\nup--we took turns sleeping because we had been up two or three days at that \r\npoint--I woke up hearing cries on the radio that there were trucks coming to our \r\nposition. My platoon sergeant and I climbed up on top of our tank and we saw \r\nthese two trucks. One of the tanks fired and hit one of the trucks and it was a \r\nfuel truck. It splashed burning diesel fuel all over the other truck. The other \r\ntruck was a troop truck. Men ran out on fire; I don't know how many of them. We \r\ndid what we were trained to do. We shot them all and killed them.<\/p>\r\n
\"The human thing to do when you see someone on fire isn't to shoot them. It's \r\nto help them out, to take a blanket and put out the fire. For me that was a real \r\nwatershed moment because it changed the nature of the way you look at war in a \r\nvery, very personal way. It took me years to be able to discuss that or to talk \r\nabout what happened--or to really learn to live with myself.<\/p>\r\n
\"But the war went on. Before the sun came up we moved out and rolled on \r\ntowards Basra. Not long after that we got into further engagements. Then there \r\nwas a huge engagement two days after the ceasefire, which was mind-boggling to \r\nme. My division, the 24th Infantry Division, attacked and destroyed a retreating \r\nIraqi division that was coming up north out of Kuwait. This was in the \r\noilfields. The goal at that point, our orders were to destroy all the \r\nequipment--to destroy all the tanks and trucks. If we saw people we were to \r\nshoot them if they were armed or otherwise let them go. The devastation and \r\nchaos was literally indescribable. We were on this little two-lane causeway \r\nthrough this swamp and it was just packed with hundreds and hundreds of burning \r\nvehicles. It was crazy. The whole thing was indescribably chaotic. And you know, \r\nwe killed a lot of people. There's no way around that.<\/p>\r\n
\"The reason I talk about that is because what got broadcast back in the \r\nStates at the time was `Oh, look at this pretty smart bomb going down the shaft \r\nof this empty building in the middle of the night.' That's not what it was \r\nabout.\"<\/p>\r\n<\/b><\/i>
Jeff Paterson grew up in the Central Valley of California. It's a place \r\nthat plays a big part in feeding the rest of the country but can be like a \r\nprison for an 18-year-old looking for a future.<\/p>\r\n
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Jeff joined the Marines at 18 because, in his words, he wanted to be a \r\n\"bad-ass fighting machine.\" Over the next four years as an artillery controller \r\nand traveling the world with the Marines, Jeff began to see the people of the \r\nworld in a different light. By the time he was ordered to the Gulf War, Jeff was \r\na changed man. He became the first active duty soldier to refuse orders to go to \r\nwar in the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\r\n
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\"I served my four years, and I was a few weeks short of my end of active \r\nduty service, looking forward to going back to school, when the Iraq war kicked \r\noff. And based on what I'd learned, how we were interacting with those peoples \r\nwhere I was at, and the things I'd heard from my buddies coming back from \r\nCentral America--talking about helping out Contras <\/i>down there--and stuff \r\ngoing down in Beirut, I came to the conclusion, with some help of friends, that \r\nit would be in the best interests of the people of the world for me to not \r\n<\/i>participate in the first Gulf War.<\/p>\r\n
\"I basically came to the conclusion that whatever the military could do to me \r\nfor refusing to fight that war, it would be pretty insignificant compared to \r\nwhat we were going to do to the people of Iraq. I sort of knew that first hand \r\nbecause I was trained as a nuclear warhead technician for our artillery unit. \r\nAnd we were promised that we'd get to `nuke the ragheads' if anything went \r\nwrong. My commanding officer, to make us more relaxed about going over there and \r\nmake us not worry so much, promised me particularly that if anything went wrong, \r\nI would be able to assemble the nuclear warhead and `nuke the ragheads until \r\nthey all glow.' That was his way of reassuring us that we'd be taken care \r\nof.<\/p>\r\n
\"So I held a press conference to get the word out, because I figured the \r\nmilitary wasn't going to look kindly on my ideas and that they'd probably want \r\nto `disappear' me to the Middle East as quick as possible unless I got the word \r\nout. I threw together this press conference at the last minute, and basically I \r\njust tried to articulate how I felt and that I wasn't going to be a pawn in \r\nAmerica's power plays for profit and oil in the Middle East. That's the way I \r\nlooked at it, having tens of thousands and later hundreds of thousands of \r\nbasically pawns going out there, being shot up with anthrax vaccines, and given \r\ntoxic amounts of BP pills and botox pills and all these other things that are \r\nsupposed to keep you safe, that obviously have contributed to the illness of \r\n100,000 troops from the first Gulf War and 10,000 dying from Gulf War \r\nSyndrome.<\/p>\r\n
\"I went back and forth with the military about applying for a discharge as a \r\nconscientious objector, and that takes forever sometimes. In my case the \r\nmilitary decided that I wasn't actually `sincere' enough to be a conscientious \r\nobjector, denied my claim to be discharged, and ordered me on to the next \r\noutbound plane to Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\r\n
\"At that point, I actually just sat down on the runway and refused to get on \r\nthe plane. Because of the publicity I had, they didn't just shackle me and throw \r\nme on the plane like they did to people later on as the war progressed and other \r\npeople refused to get on the plane much like I did.<\/p>\r\n
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<\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"www.rwor.org","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"U.S. military veterans who fought in the Gulf War know the real story behind the official American story. They live with what they saw and what they did. As U.S. imperialism rushes toward another war on Iraq, many of these vets feel compelled to tell what they experienced, first-hand, about U.S. crimes in Iraq.","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2003\/03\/rw_online-gulf_war_gis01.htm","filesize":"25.3 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2003\/03\/32937.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]}