A new film is dramatizing the effects of our government’s backdoor draft policy.  “STOP-LOSS” is playing in theaters around the country and those opposed to the mistreatment of America’s soldiers who are fighting and dying in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and being re-deployed, are seeing it as an opportunity to raise awareness and take action against the STOP-LOSS policy. A petition is circulating to tell Defense Secretary Robert Gates to end the stop-loss backdoor draft.  A flyer is circulating on-line (http://act.credomobile.com/campaign/stoploss/stoploss.pdf) for those who are wanting to participate in this action to hand out at theaters.  I hope this encourages folks to see this film and to take action to end these wars.

Here’s what I received this morning that alerted me to the film and to the action being requested:

Once in awhile a film comes along that makes you want to tell everyone you know. Starring Ryan Phillippe as a soldier ordered to leave home and go back to Iraq, “Stop-Loss” is a new film dramatizing the practice of stop-loss — the forced extension of service members’ enlistment contracts.

Spread the word.  The petition to Secretary Gates is available at http://act.credomobile.com/campaign/stoploss/

Please see this movie and help spread the word and increase awareness about the stop-loss policy and its tragic effects.

In the words of Iraq veteran and chairman of veterans’ organization VoteVets.org Jon Soltz,
“Stop Loss has been one of the most painful Pentagon policies for those who have served in Iraq. While the film examines how the policy might affect one soldier, this issue affects thousands and thousands of those who serve our nation, in a very similar way. Longer and more frequent deployments have been linked to depression and even suicide among our troops and veterans. We must rally behind our troops, and end this destructive policy.”

Thank you for working to build a better world

Will Easton, Activism Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

I found this on the internet this evening.  It puts a human voice to the awful number 4,000 that came and went with little attention from the co-opted media and with some typically inhumane pronouncements from the administration.  Here one soldier tells about his losses and the significance of his time in Iraq.

Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008

The Real Meaning of 4,000 Dead

By Lieut. Sean Walsh

TIME MAGAZINE

The passing of the 4,000th service member in Iraq is a tragic milestone and a testament to the cost of this war, but for those of us who live and fight in Iraq, we measure that cost in smaller, but much more personal numbers. For me those numbers are 8, the number of friends and classmates killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 3, the number of soldiers from my unit killed in this deployment. I’m 25, yet I’ve received more notifications for funerals than invitations to weddings.

The number 4,000 is too great to grasp even for us that are here in Iraq. When we soldiers read the newspaper, the latest AP casualty figures are glanced over with the same casual interest as a box score for a sport you don’t follow. I am certain that I am not alone when I open up the Stars and Stripes, the military’s daily paper, and immediately search for the section with the names of the fallen to see if they include anyone I know. While in a combat outpost in southwest Baghdad, it was in that distinctive bold Arial print in a two-week-old copy of the Stars and Stripes that I read that my best friend had been killed in Afghanistan. No phone call from a mutual friend or a visit to his family. All that had come and gone by the time I had learned about his death. I sometimes wonder, if I hadn’t picked up that paper, how much longer I would have gone by without knowing — perhaps another day, perhaps a week or longer until I could find the time and the means to check my e-mail to find my messages unanswered and a death notification from a West Point distro list in my inbox. The dead in Afghanistan don’t seem to inspire the keeping of lists the same way that those in Iraq do, but even if they did it wouldn’t matter; he could only be number 7 to me.

I’m not asking for pity, only understanding for the cost of this war. We did, after all, volunteer for the Army and that is the key distinction between this army and the army of the Vietnam War. But even as I ask for that understanding I’m almost certain that you won’t be able to obtain it. Even Shakespeare, with his now overused notion of soldiers as a “band of brothers,” fails to capture the bonds, the sense of responsibility to each other, among soldiers. In many ways, Iraq has become my home (by the time my deployment ends I will have spent more time here than anywhere else in the army) and the soldiers I share that home with have become my family. Between working, eating and sleeping within a few feet of the same soldiers every single day, I doubt I am away from them for more than two hours a day. I’m engaged to the love of my life, but it will take several years of marriage before I’ve spent as much time with her as I have with the men I serve with today.

For the vast majority of Americans who don’t have a loved one overseas, the only number they have to attempt to grasp the Iraq War is 4,000. I would ask that when you see that number, try to remember that it is made up of over 1 million smaller numbers; that every one of the 1 million service members who have fought in Iraq has his or her own personal numbers. Over 1 million 8’s and 3’s. When you are evaluating the price of the war, weighing potential rewards versus cost in blood and treasure, I would ask you to consider what is worth the lives of three of your loved ones? Or eight? Or more? It would be a tragedy for my 8 and 3 to have died without us being able to complete our mission, but it maybe even more tragic for 8 and 3 to become anything higher.

Somehow it is tragically fitting that NPR announced this morning that our casualty total for Bush’s War passed 4000 in the last 24 hours since this evening PBS is screening the first of a two part program subtitled, “A step-by-step examination of howthe Iraq War really began.  Here’s what the pbs website has to say about what sounds like worthwhile viewing:

ON FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF IRAQ INVASION FRONTLINE PRESENTS DEFINITIVE CHRONICLE OF BUSH’S WAR ON TERROR

FRONTLINE presents
BUSH’S WAR
March 24 & 25, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS

From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge — for six years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence.

Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush’s War, airing Monday, March 24, 2008, from 9 to 11:30 P.M. and Tuesday, March 25, from 9 to 11 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings). Veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (The Lost Year in Iraq, The Dark Side) draws on one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism — more than 40 FRONTLINE reports on the war on terror. Combined with fresh reporting and new interviews, Bush’s War will be the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation’s history.

“Parts of this history have been told before,” Kirk says. “But no one has laid out the entire narrative to reveal in one epic story the scope and detail of how this war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government.”

Since the war on terror began, FRONTLINE’s award-winning reporting has gone behind the headlines to connect the dots and reveal the true story of an administration at war with itself over how to respond to the devastating 9/11 attacks.

In the fall of 2001, even as America was waging a war in Afghanistan, another hidden war was being waged inside the administration. Part 1 of Bush’s War, airing Monday, March 24, from 9 to 11:30 P.M. ET, tells the story of this behind-the-scenes battle over whether Iraq would be the next target in the war on terror.

On one side, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet squared off against Vice President Dick Cheney and his longtime ally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The battles were over policy — whether to attack Iraq; the role of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi; how to treat detainees; whether to seek United Nations resolutions; and the value of intelligence suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks — but the conflict was deeply personal.

“Friendships were dashed,” Powell’s deputy Richard Armitage tells FRONTLINE. As the war within the administration heated up, Armitage and Powell concluded that they were being shut out of key decisions by Cheney and Rumsfeld. “The battle of ideas, you generally come up with the best solution. When somebody hijacks the system, then, just like a hijacked airplane, very often no good comes of it,” Armitage adds.

Others inside the administration believe they understand the motivation behind some of the vice president’s actions. “I think the vice president felt he kind of looked death in the eye on 9/11,” former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke says. “Three thousand Americans died. The building that the vice president used to work in blew up, and people died there. This was a cold slap in the face. This is a different world you’re living in now. And the enemy’s still out there, and the enemy could come after you. That does cause you to think [about] things differently.”

More than anything else, the Iraq war will be the lasting legacy of the Bush presidency. Part 2 of Bush’s War, airing Tuesday, March 25, from 9 to 11p.m. ET, examines that war — beginning with the quick American victory in Iraq, the early mistakes that were made, and then recounting the story of how chaos, looting and violence quickly engulfed the country.

As American forces realized they were unprepared for the looting that followed the invasion, plans for a swift withdrawal of troops were put on hold. With only a few weeks’ preparation, American administrator L. Paul Bremer was sent to find a political solution to a rapidly deteriorating situation. Bremer’s first moves were to disband the Iraqi military and remove members of Saddam Hussein’s party from the government. They were decisions that the original head of reconstruction, Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.), begged Bremer to reconsider at the time. Now they are seen by others as one of the first in a series of missteps that would lead Iraq into a full-blown insurgency.

But Bremer has his defenders: “We believed, Bremer believed, and I think the leadership in Washington believed that it was very important to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that whatever else was going to happen, Saddam and his cronies were not coming back,” Walter Slocombe, the national security adviser to Bremer, tells FRONTLINE.

Garner was not the only one on the outside. As senior officials complained about inattention at the top, Gen. Tommy Franks and his deputy, Gen. Michael DeLong — the generals who had planned the war — found that decisions were being made without them as well.

“All the recommendations that we were making now in the Phase IV part weren’t being taken — weren’t being taken by Bremer or Rumsfeld,” DeLong tells FRONTLINE. “That’s when Franks said, ‘I’m done.’ They said, ‘Well, you’ll be chief of staff of the Army.’ He said, ‘No, I’m done.’”

What followed is well documented: insurgency, sectarian strife, prisoner abuse and growing casualties. But within the administration, a new battle over strategy was being fought — this one between a new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The clash between America’s top diplomat and its chief defense official would go on for more than two years and be settled only after the Republican loss in the 2006 congressional elections. It was then that the president forced Rumsfeld out, ended his strategy of slow withdrawal and ordered a surge of troops. FRONTLINE goes behind closed doors to tell the most recent chapter in this ongoing story, and asks what Bush will leave for a new U.S. president both in Iraq and in the larger war on terror.

Bush’s War is a FRONTLINE co-production with Kirk Documentary Group, Ltd. The writer, producer and director is Michael Kirk. The producer and reporter is Jim Gilmore. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and described for people who are blind or visually impaired by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.

COMING MARCH 24
FRONTLINE’s New TV/Web Experience

Across the entire four-hour Bush’s War series that will be streamed online, FRONTLINE will integrate and embed in its video player an array of related interviews, background material and video that can be viewed with just a click. In addition, more than 100 video clips of key moments and events in the Iraq war will be the centerpiece of an annotated master chronology which FRONTLINE will publish on the Bush’s War site.

The interviews, video and background material are drawn from one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism: FRONTLINE’s 40+ hours of documentaries and 400 interviews done since 9/11 on Iraq and the war on terror, as well as new interviews conducted for Bush’s War.

A very important article from THE NATION on the effects of the Iraq War on America’s working class.  It discusses the “economic draft” that enables this war to continue without the divisive draft of the Vietnam War. 

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The War and the Working Class

by MICHAEL ZWEIG

[from the March 31, 2008 issue of THE NATION]

The government treats its soldiers the way most corporations treat their workforce–as an invisible, disrespected, disposable means to an end that is contrary to workers’ interests. Members of the armed forces come mainly and disproportionately from the working class and from small-town and rural America, where opportunities are hard to come by. The “economic draft” operates, in effect, to recruit young people from these communities as they sign up to gain job skills, experience and educational opportunities absent from their civilian lives.

A number of parallel experiences link the lives of soldiers with those of working-class civilians, going well beyond their common discipline of following orders. Consider “stop-loss” as an example. The military reserves the right to extend the deployment time and active-duty status of every soldier beyond the service dates prescribed in their enlistment contracts and mobilization papers. Most soldiers were unaware of this as the Iraq War intensified, but by the start of 2006 the military had enforced its stop-loss provision on 50,000 of them. Outraged soldiers and their families challenged these extensions in court, but they were upheld.

Meanwhile, in the civilian economy, one out of every five full-time hourly employees worked mandatory overtime–the requirement by management that the worker stay on the job beyond the normal quitting time. Many workers want overtime for the money, but they generally resent being forced into it, especially when it disrupts family plans or taxes their physical or mental strength. While the consequences of stop-loss are more far-reaching, the principle is the same. Both disregard the needs of the workforce and abrogate the expectations working people have of a life outside the control of their employers.

Counter-recruitment activity, an important element of the anti-Iraq War movement, responds to the many ways recruiters imply commitments to prospective enlistees that the military is under no obligation to keep and promise benefits that in the end do not materialize–a pattern with many parallels in working-class civilian life. Common among the misleading enticements are offers of training that will lead to civilian employment in good jobs; education benefits to pay for college costs and even the signing bonuses, $10,000 or more, that can seem like a fortune to the kids at the desk. The most outrageous reason for yanking back the signing benefits comes when a soldier leaves the military before the full commitment is over because of severe combat injuries. The military, insisting that the benefits are contingent on honorable discharge after completing the full term of service, has moved to take back the signing bonuses that injured servicemembers, unable to complete their tours, have already collected. To combat these practices, young people, often accompanied by veterans with their own stories to tell, are challenging military recruiters in high schools, shopping malls and other places where recruiters seek out volunteers to fill their quotas. Congressional attempts to stop these abuses have so far been unsuccessful.

These bait-and-switch practices are reminiscent of the way corporations demand local and state government subsidies to locate offices and factories in depressed communities desperate for jobs. Such corporations typically promise good jobs and long-term economic stability if local communities underwrite roads and other infrastructure, give tax exemptions for the company’s property and profits, and sometimes even give it direct cash subsidies. All too often the company collects the subsidies but fails to live up to its end of the bargain. It fails to create the promised new jobs and moves out of the community when the subsidies end, leaving the local working people and their government depleted and often mad enough to sue, but almost never successfully.

When jobs disappear, workers are supposed to be able to collect unemployment compensation, a program begun in the New Deal era and a critical part of the social safety net. But over the last thirty-five years, unemployment compensation programs have been cut back and made more inaccessible. At this point, only 35 percent of unemployed workers actually collect these benefits.

In the military we also see problems in the amount and quality of benefits provided to discharged soldiers. Last year’s scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center shocked the nation, but veterans’ organizations across the country are regularly forced to fend off proposed cuts. Just as corporate employers fight against claims for workers’ compensation by injured employees, the military resists treatment for service-related disabilities, such as the psychological damage from post-traumatic stress disorder or the physical aftereffects of Agent Orange from the Vietnam era.

In the United States we rightly have a tradition of civilian control of the military. Our armed services are not independent entities; they are deployed to defend and advance the interests of greatest importance to the civilian leadership that guides the country overall. So it is unsurprising that the basic priorities guiding our military operations overseas should correspond to those that dominate our society at home. That’s not good news for working people, here or “over there.”

In Iraq the occupation authority under Paul Bremer wiped the slate clean in terms of economic policy, with one exception–it kept in force the 1987 Saddam Hussein decree that stripped all legal protection from unions representing public-sector workers–a large portion of the workforce. Despite formal acknowledgment of union rights in the new Iraqi Constitution, the Parliament has passed no law to protect unions or workers trying to organize them. But then public sector unions are also illegal in North Carolina and many other states. Upon taking office after their election in 2006, the Republican governors of Missouri and Indiana immediately suspended all collective bargaining agreements their states had negotiated with state employees and declared the end of their collective bargaining rights. When Congress and the Bush Administration formed the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, they stripped collective bargaining rights from all DHS workers, even those who’d had those rights in their former agencies, declaring that union protections ran counter to national security. After more than five years of determined opposition and court challenges, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 22,000 of these workers, recently forced the DHS to give up its unionbusting power and agree to respect collective bargaining and civil service protections for all its workers.

The Bush Administration has made it clear that it expects the Iraqi Parliament to pass a hydrocarbon law that opens Iraq’s oil reserves to US corporate exploitation, in addition to a law to distribute oil revenues among regions. Congress has made the hydrocarbon law a “benchmark” in all its attempts to tie continued funding of the war to “political progress” in Iraq. But it requires no such benchmark for women’s rights (the Iraqi Constitution imposes Islamic law in all family matters) or, of course, for labor rights. US policy in Iraq reflects the same drive toward privatization and increasing corporate power that workers face here in the dismantling of our public sector and its services.

Emphasizing such parallels–and the fact that the best way to show solidarity with US soldiers is to bring them home–a movement to end the war has been growing in American unions. The state federations of labor in Connecticut, Maryland/DC, South Carolina, Vermont and Wisconsin have joined US Labor Against the War (USLAW; uslaboragainstwar.org), this country’s first broadly based antiwar organization among workers and their unions (full disclosure: I am on its national steering committee). A coalition of more than 150 union locals, central labor councils, state federations and other labor organizations, USLAW coordinates its activities with Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War and other veterans’ organizations that support the troops with calls for their immediate return. The AFL-CIO, for its part, has called for the rapid withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq. And the ILWU Longshore Caucus is continuing its tradition of political interruptions of work with a call to shut all West Coast ports on May 1 to protest the war, a work stoppage it hopes will spread to other industries.

Labor opposition to the war stems in part from the war’s economic cost, counted not just in dollars but in what else that money could buy. So far the war has cost more than $522 billion (not counting interest payments on the borrowing that has paid the bills and long-term costs for veterans’ care). Taxpayers in Louisiana alone have paid about $4 billion, which could have created more than 47,000 units of affordable housing there, and the jobs that go with their construction. (The National Priorities Project has a thorough accounting on its website, nationalpriorities.org, of the real costs of the war to states and communities across the country. See the chart in this issue for a visual representation of these trade-offs.)

The movement that working people and their unions have organized supports the troops with calls for their immediate return with full veterans’ benefits. It seeks the redirection of funds to serve human needs. And it expresses solidarity with Iraqi workers and their labor movement. Should a new Democratic Administration continue the Iraq occupation while offering to satisfy some of labor’s interests as part of its domestic agenda, sustaining this movement will require additional analysis and new resolve.

Last night I attended a meeting at one of the elementary schools in our community that is being considered for closing as a result of a major city and school budget shortfall.  It was a very difficult meeting for the superintendent and the business manager because they had to explain to the overflow crowd that there was basically nothing they could do to prevent the school system from making deep cuts to an essentially already bare bones budget.  One of the saddest moments was when it became clear that some of the folks at Ryan Rd. School were already figuring out a way to save their school by making a case to close Bridge St. School.  I was reminded of an article I had read a couple of years ago in the Unitarian Society “World” magazine about the early days of our country when wealthy landowners sought and found ways to pit poor white people and free black people against one another to preserve their power.  As we all know they were all too successful.  What was missed last night was that the deeply troubled parents at these two schools had common cause and that exploiting their struggles was precisely the goal of those in the federal and even state governments.

Then this morning in our local people the lead article was entitled, “Perfect Storm” and was all about how our mayor, Clare Higgins, will be up against it in finding ways to deal with a $2 million dollar deficit.  Another front page story was about the schools’ plight.  The irony was not lost then,  when on the editorial page was an article under the title “THE 3 TRILLION DOLLAR WAR”.  Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Linda Bilmes, who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, take the reader through the abyss that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have resulted in for our economy and that of the world.  I found myself hoping that at least some of those decrying the fate of our town - a fate that is affecting countless communities across the U.S. - will read this powerful article, which is essentially a chronicle of the costs of these disastrous wars.  Clearly folks need help in connecting the dots.  Here is the article in its entirety.

THE 3 TRILLION DOLLAR WAR

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can’t spend $3 trillion - yes, $3 trillion - on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.

Some people will scoff at that number, but we’ve done the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later called his estimate “baloney.” Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion.

In April 2003, Andrew Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said on “Nightline” that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, hoped that U.S. partners would chip in, as they had in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq’s oil would pay for the damages.

The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly - surpassed only by World War II.

Why doesn’t the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month - $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.

But the costs to our society and economy are far greater. When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, his or her family will receive a U.S. government check for just $500,000 (combining life insurance with a “death gratuity”) - far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident. The stark “budgetary cost” of $500,000 is clearly only a fraction of the total cost society pays for the loss of life - and no one can ever really compensate the families. Moreover, disability pay seldom provides adequate compensation for wounded troops or their families. In one out of five cases of seriously injured soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job to take care of them.

But beyond this is the cost to the already sputtering U.S. economy. All told, the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that’s a conservative estimate.

President Bush tried to sell the American people on the idea that we could have a war with little or no economic sacrifice. Even after the United States went to war, Bush and Congress cut taxes, especially on the rich - even though the United States already had a massive deficit. So the war had to be funded by more borrowing. By the end of the Bush administration, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the cumulative interest on the increased borrowing used to fund them, will have added about $1 trillion to the national debt.

The long-term burden of paying for the conflicts will curtail the country’s ability to tackle other urgent problems, no matter who wins the presidency in November. Our vast and growing indebtedness inevitably makes it harder to afford new health-care plans, make large-scale repairs to crumbling roads and bridges, or build better-equipped schools. Already, the escalating cost of the wars has crowded out spending on virtually all other discretionary federal programs, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal aid to states and cities, all of which have been scaled back significantly since the invasion of Iraq.

To make matters worse, the U.S. economy is facing a recession. But our ability to implement a truly effective economic-stimulus package is crimped by expenditures of close to $200 billion on the two wars this year alone and by a skyrocketing national debt.

The United States is a rich and strong country, but even rich and strong countries squander trillions of dollars at their peril. Think what a difference $3 trillion could make for so many of the United States’ - or the world’s - problems. We could have had a Marshall Plan to help desperately poor countries, winning the hearts and maybe the minds of Muslim nations now gripped by anti-Americanism. In a world with millions of illiterate children, we could have achieved literacy for all - for less than the price of a month’s combat in Iraq. We worry about China’s growing influence in Africa, but the upfront cost of a month of fighting in Iraq would pay for more than doubling our annual current aid spending on Africa.

Closer to home, we could have funded countless schools to give children locked in the underclass a shot at decent lives. Or we could have tackled the massive problem of Social Security, which Bush began his second term hoping to address; for far, far less than the cost of the war, we could have ensured the solvency of Social Security for the next half a century or more.

Economists used to think that wars were good for the economy, a notion born out of memories of how the massive spending of World War II helped bring the United States and the world out of the Great Depression. But we now know far better ways to stimulate an economy - ways that quickly improve citizens’ well-being and lay the foundations for future growth. But money spent paying Nepalese workers in Iraq (or even Iraqi ones) doesn’t stimulate the U.S. economy the way that money spent at home would - and it certainly doesn’t provide the basis for long-term growth the way investments in research, education or infrastructure would.

Another worry: This war has been particularly hard on the economy because it led to a spike in oil prices. Before the 2003 invasion, oil cost less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around there. (Yes, China and India were growing by leaps and bounds, but cheap supplies from the Middle East were expected to meet their demands.) The war changed that equation, and oil prices recently topped $100 per barrel.

While Washington has been spending well beyond its means, others have been saving - including the oil-rich countries that, like the oil companies, have been among the few winners of this war. No wonder, then, that China, Singapore and many Persian Gulf emirates have become lenders of last resort for troubled Wall Street banks, plowing in billions of dollars to shore up Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other firms that burned their fingers on subprime mortgages. How long will it be before the huge sovereign wealth funds controlled by these countries begin buying up large shares of other U.S. assets?

The Bush team, then, is not merely handing over the war to the next administration; it is also bequeathing deep economic problems that have been seriously exacerbated by reckless war financing. We face an economic downturn that’s likely to be the worst in more than a quarter-century.

Until recently, many marveled at the way the United States could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on oil and blow through hundreds of billions more in Iraq with what seemed to be strikingly little short-run impact on the economy. But there’s no great mystery here. The economy’s weaknesses were concealed by the Federal Reserve, which pumped in liquidity, and by regulators that looked away as loans were handed out well beyond borrowers’ ability to repay them. Meanwhile, banks and credit-rating agencies pretended that financial alchemy could convert bad mortgages into AAA assets, and the Fed looked the other way as the U.S. household-savings rate plummeted to zero.

It’s a bleak picture. The total loss from this economic downturn - measured by the disparity between the economy’s actual output and its potential output - is likely to be the greatest since the Great Depression. That total, itself well in excess of $1 trillion, is not included in our estimated $3 trillion cost of the war.

Others will have to work out the geopolitics, but the economics here are clear. Ending the war, or at least moving rapidly to wind it down, would yield major economic dividends.

As we head toward November, opinion polls say that voters’ main worry is now the economy, not the war. But there’s no way to disentangle the two. The United States will be paying the price of Iraq for decades to come. The price tag will be all the greater because we tried to ignore the laws of economics - and the cost will grow the longer we remain.

Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner for economics, is a graduate of Amherst College; he is a member of the college’s board of trustees and has also served as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations. A professor at Columbia University, Stiglitz also served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton. Linda Bilmes teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. They are co-authors of the new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.”

    Several days ago I received an important reminder of two events that are related to the original WINTER SOLDIER hearings during the Vietnam War.  Here is the letter sent to me by a dear friend:

From March 13-16, Iraq Veterans Against the War will hold “Winter Soldier—Iraq & Afghanistan” in Washington D.C. with testimony from vets about the wars there and the atrocities being committed under direct or covert orders from those in command.  Some or all of the testimony will hopefully be screened live here in the Valley.

This event comes 37 years after the first “Winter Soldier Investigation,” held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  During three days in 1971, over 100 veterans gathered and gave testimony about the wrongdoing and war crimes they had witnessed or taken part in - war crimes that were part of the policy of the military.  The website to obtain additional information and to support this event is: http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier  You can write letters of support, make donations and check out all of the other offerings connected to this event and to Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The film of that first “Winter Soldier Investigation” will be shown in our valley two times.
On Wednesday, March 5, at 8 pm, it will be shown at UMass, in the Campus Center, Rm 165.  A member of the new local chapter of IVAW will also speak.
On Friday, March 7, at 7 pm, it will be shown at the Media Education Foundation, 60 Masonic St, Northampton.

This film is very powerful.

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Some background on these events is in order.  Here is the origin of the term “winter soldier” as described in an article by Fiachra Ó Luain, daughter of Joe Bangart who was a member of the Winter Soldier Collective who made the film “Winter Soldier”:

The name ‘Winter Soldier’ is actually never stated, but rather implied in a homage U.S.A. founding father Thomas Paine wrote in his publication, CRISIS, in December of 1776:
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

The article with this famous quote was read to those at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where the American Continental army wintered from 1777 through to 1778. This was a time of great suffering for George Washington’s army, but it was also a time of retraining and rejuvenation. The fighters at Valley Forge were suffering terribly from hunger, frostbite, and missing their families. Many deserted. In a mood of desperation and despair, George Washington called in the best of the revolution’s writers -Tom Paine- to raise people’s sprits in the middle of the winter, which is when he left to the imagination the term “Winter Soldier” to describe the few men who remained in the trenches of the revolution through the toughest of times.

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It turns out that the upcoming Washington hearings are already filled to capacity.  Evidently, however, for those who want to see what is transpiring during these extraordinary hearings, there will be live feeds, which can be seen on television.  Here is the schedule:

Winter Soldier Schedule
All times below are Eastern Time. Schedule subject to change.
Thursday, March 13 Streaming video only
7:00PM-9:00PM Winter Soldier and the legacy of GI Resistance
Friday, March 14 Satellite TV, internet video, internet audio, radio
9:00AM – 10:45AM Rules of Engagement: Part One
11:00AM – 12:30PM The Crisis in Veterans’ Heathcare
2:00PM - 3:30PM Corporate Pillaging and Military Contractors
4:00PM - 6:00PM Rules of Engagement: Part Two
7:00PM - 8:30PM Aims of the Global War on Terror: the Political, Legal, and Economic Context of Iraq and Afghanistan
Saturday, March 15 Satellite TV, internet video, internet audio, radio
9:00AM – 10:30AM Divide To Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military
11:00AM - 1:00PM Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy: Part One
2:00PM - 3:30PM Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy: Part Two
4:00PM - 6PM Civilian Testimony: The Cost of War in Iraq and Afghanistan
7:00PM - 8:30PM The Cost of the War at Home
Sunday, March 16 Internet video, internet audio, radio
10:00AM - 1:00PM The Breakdown of the Military
2:00PM - 3:15PM The Future of GI Resistance

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Finally the London Times published a comprehensive look at the upcoming hearings with several first person accounts of the kind of testimony that will be heard starting next week.  It is very well done, indicative of much research and a commitment to telling the whole story of what’s in store with these momentous hearings including the backlash of several veterans’ groups that are already seeking to discredit those who speak out.  The same tactics were used against the Vietnam Veterans Against the War 37 years ago.  John Kerry was among those who participated in those original testimonials and the criticism against his words resurfaced to derail his election campaign in 2004.   There are still those who strongly believe his failure to answer his critics whose lies and distortions were outrageous, resulted in his defeat.

So here is the London Times story in its entirety:

PATRIOT MISSILES: IRAQ VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR

After Vietnam, American veterans testified to the atrocities they witnessed. Now soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are about to do the same
Ariel Leve
Some of them will be okay. They will live with the secrets. They can dissociate from what happened in combat because it was part of the job. It was what they signed up for. They will keep the secrets out of duty – the silence is part of a code, and they honour that code above all else.

But for others, the secrets they keep are like a poison, slowly releasing toxins of shame and remorse. Who can they tell anyway? They talk to each other – other veterans who have seen what they’ve seen, done what they’ve done, and who can relate to the burden of carrying these secrets for the rest of their lives.

In 1971, the protest group Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered at a hotel in Detroit. More than 100 veterans talked about the atrocities they had witnessed in southeast Asia.

The event lasted for three days and was named Winter Soldier after Thomas Paine’s famous article. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he wrote of the terrible winter of 1776, when Washington’s ragtag, demoralised army turned the tide of the War of Independence.

The Vietnam vets, spurred on by the court martial of Lt William Calley, who had ordered the infamous My Lai massacre, wanted to turn a tide too – against public opinion, to demonstrate that the execution of hundreds of innocent villagers in 1968 was not an isolated incident as so many believed. The Winter Soldier event received little coverage in America, but was the subject of an internationally acclaimed documentary of the same name.

This month, for four days in Washington, DC, beginning on March 13, there will be a second Winter Soldier gathering – 37 years after the first. Organised by the protest group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attack on New York will testify about their experiences. They will present photographs and videos, recorded with mobile phones and digital cameras, to back up their allegations – of brutality, torture and murder.

The veterans are not against the military and seek not to indict it – instead they seek to shine a light on the bigger picture: that the Abu Ghraib prison regime and the Haditha massacre of innocent Iraqis are not isolated incidents perpetrated by “bad seeds” as the military suggests, but evidence of an endemic problem. They will say they were tasked to do terrible things and point the finger up the chain of command, which ignores, diminishes or covers up routine abuse and atrocities.

Some see it as their responsibility to speak out – like Jason Washburn, a US marine who did two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq; Logan Laituri, a US Army forward observer in Iraq; and Perry O’Brien, an army medic deployed to Afghanistan in 2003. They believe that, as veterans, they are the most credible sources of information. They say they were put in immoral and often illegal positions. They will speak about what they saw, and what they were asked to do.

) ) ) ) )

Jason Washburn, 28, grew up in San Diego, California. He always wanted to do something to make a difference, and he enlisted in the US marines in December 2001. He wasn’t itching to go into combat, but he wanted the training.

He fought in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 where, he says, he met little resistance. Most people were surrendering.

“There were massive amounts of artillery strikes before we even invaded. We saw the results of that. Streets full of bodies – women and children – body parts, extremely indiscriminate. I’m talking about rolling through villages here, not military encampments.”

He was told there was a military structure in one village. “I didn’t see it. I didn’t see any army uniforms. Or weapons. All I saw were civilians.”

Washburn speaks slowly and with obvious discomfort. This was his introduction to Iraq.

“I still believed everything we were force-fed: weapons of mass destruction and possibly even a nuclear weapon. We felt, like, we’re going to go in, overthrow this evil dictator and give these people some peace, finally. We thought we were doing a good thing.”

Over the course of his three tours, there were more home raids than Washburn can remember. He explains how it worked. “Usually it was based on a tip – we’re told someone in the home is an insurgent. We would pick up people who had nothing to do with anything, keep them locked up until they came up with something.”

He is glad that he didn’t witness some of the techniques used to get them to talk. “That’s not something I want on my conscience.”

It was not a scientific process. Most tips came from people with personal grudges. Washburn and his platoon would kick down the doors in the middle of the night. He was warned not to be complacent. There could be weapons in the children’s beds. In all of the home raids, too many to count, he never found children with weapons. They would take the father away and they never knew what would happen after that.

By the time Washburn served in Haditha he was on his third combat tour. He was there on November 19, 2005, the day of the massacre when 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed, including women and children.

“My squad was doing medivacs out of the town. I was not there to witness the shooting, but I know many marines who were.”

It was a squad in his unit that went on the rampage after their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED).

“I have a lot of feelings about this incident. A friend of mine from my first two tours was in that squad. He was the guy they gave immunity to to testify against the squad leader.

“The people on the ground are looking at serious prison time. Like life. The people who were giving orders were only relieved of command. And I don’t think that’s right.”

Washburn says Haditha was not an isolated incident. “It’s the one that just happened to be uncovered.”

) ) ) ) )

The establishment view is that war is hell and terrible things happen for the greater good. That killing is necessary. That there are those individuals acting on their own who will always smear the honourable actions of the military – men like Washburn, traumatised by war, who are emotional casualties whose testimony is to be mistrusted. Some regard him and the Winter Soldiers of 2008 as traitors for daring to question their commanders and for prosecution of the war.

But there are too many like Washburn to shout down. Many of the orders that combat soldiers were given were not written – but they were understood. At the Winter Soldier event, veterans’ stories will be corroborated by other veterans; backed up by the volume of testifiers who have witnessed the same things – in different units, years apart and in different countries.

There will be up to 100 veterans and, at present, 80 of them have submitted testimonies. Most will be enlisted men and women: privates and sergeants. They have been made aware of the consequences of taking part. Not just that they are likely to be denounced by their fellow veterans, but the psychological and perhaps legal consequences they may face by admitting to witnessing, or even perpetrating, war crimes. The National Lawyers Guild, an organisation of civil-rights attorneys, has volunteered to offer advice. Mental-health professionals will also be on hand to offer counselling. Organisers stress that the goal is to hold the policy makers accountable, not their immediate commanding officers. Nobody is permitted to name anyone below the rank of captain.

After the hearings, all the testimonies will be entered into the congressional record. There will be a live video stream on the web. There will also be panels of journalists and scholars to provide context and history.

Perry O’ Brien, who served as a medic in Afghanistan in 2003, is one of the Winter Soldiers on the verification team, which will ensure the testimonies are watertight, lest falsehood undermine the message. The order that O’Brien’s team is hearing most from the testifiers is the “shovel order”.

“Anyone carrying a shovel or any sort of implement that could be used to bury an IED could be considered a target,” he says. “After dark, you can shoot anyone who is outside. Or anyone who puts anything on the side of the road can be considered a target. You won’t find it in writing, but it’s an order indicated to soldiers.”

If not in writing, how can it be proven? “If we have enough soldiers testifying, it will be.”

Washburn says the most dangerous job in Iraq “has to be a taxi driver”. He tells two stories of taxi drivers being shot, both innocent victims. One driver was deaf and didn’t hear the command to halt. The other was at a checkpoint in the Haditha area.

“It was the mayor of one of the towns who was driving, and he was shot and killed. They found out after they shot him. My squad had to apologise to the family. We paid reparations. I don’t know the exact amount. But let’s see: money or a dead husband and father and mayor? People weren’t happy about that.”

During Washburn’s first Iraq deployment in 2003, his unit was told to capture a “rabble rouser”. “We kick down the door and all we find are a few women holding babies and a couple of kids. We were ordered to take the babies away and put sandbags on the women’s heads, tie their hands behind their backs, put them on their knees facing the wall. Here I am zip-tying these women, and my buddy is standing next to me holding these babies asking what do I do with these kids? We stood there, like, oh shit, what do we do? The squad leader came in and shouted, ‘Everybody is bagged and tagged – everybody!’ So we did it.” The babies were put down on the floor. After a few hours everyone was untied.

Inappropriate and immoral actions weren’t just aimed at Iraqi civilians. There was frequent hazing – the mistreatment of soldiers by their comrades. Some were exercises in pure humiliation, common in most military units, like singing I’m a Little Teapot while others stand around laughing. But some were brutal physical punishments, such as callisthenics in a sleeping bag with a gas mask on in scorching heat.

“It’s one thing to do 20 push-ups. It’s another to burn us to the point of exhaustion in combat theatre. There were guys that tried to speak out about it and that made it worse. That would get punished more.”

The futility of speaking out was bolstered by knowledge that complaints would get as far as the commanding officer of the company and no further. “They kept everything in-house.”

Another incident he describes was a step beyond hazing. He and another marine had had a disagreement. The punishment was that they were tied together – and sent out on patrol.

“Outside of the camp, in a war zone tied together, patrolling? Insane,” he says.

Washburn’s anger comes from a feeling of betrayal. “I thought I was signing up to do something honourable.

“What happened at Abu Ghraib,” Washburn says, “is those orders came from the top. If the policy makers and the commanders can dehumanise their own troops, why wouldn’t they dehumanise the Iraqi people?”

) ) ) ) )

So far, the most vocal opposition to the Winter Soldier event has not been from the government, but from pro-war groups such as Vets for Freedom, the largest veterans’ organisation in America.

Their executive director, Pete Hegseth, a veteran who served in Baghdad and Samarra with the 101st Airborne Division, has criticised the Winter Soldier event. In an article in The Washington Independent, he asks:

“Did your company commander tell you to shoot women and children, or to maximise casualties? No! We don’t do that. To talk about systematic brutality is essentially indicting the military as being complicit in war crimes.”

But, as we shall see, there are ways to encourage illegal actions other than direct orders.

Hegseth suggests that speaking out might have more serious consequences: homes in the Middle East have internet access, this kind of information will reach them and affect the attitude towards US troops still over there. But Perry O’Brien doubts that speaking out will foster more anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan and Iraq than the killing of civilians and the dismantling of the infrastructure. After serving in Afghanistan for eight months, there was a slow revelation that triggered his shift.

“Everything that we were doing seemed almost designed to create more terrorists. To turn people against America. I couldn’t understand how we were liberating anyone. But I could understand how an Afghan person who was ambivalent about America could easily become an extremist based on their interaction with American soldiers.”

Resolute pro-war organisations such as Gathering of Eagles are gearing up, getting ready to make their presence felt. They are chartering bus-loads of protesters to show up at the event to confront and harass the “traitors”.

The veterans who will be testifying at Winter Soldier are prepared for their integrity and credibility to be called into question.

Before anyone can testify, they must go through the verification process and be interviewed by a team of combat veterans whom they hope will be able to instinctively detect lies. IVAW is particularly vigilant since Jesse Macbeth joined in 2006 and represented them publicly at various events. Macbeth’s accounts of military service as a veteran of Iraq were false, which he admitted in federal court in 2007.

Since then the organisation has demanded proof of service, and every member must have a DD-214 – their Pentagon-issued personal-service record, which proves where and with whom they have served.

Members are asked to complete a detailed questionnaire. Under the heading Killing or Wounding Noncombatants, Prisoners or Unarmed Combatants, they are asked: “Did you witness or participate in any of the following: Civilians hurt or killed at checkpoints? Purposeful killing of civilians or unarmed combatants? Killing or wounding of prisoners? If yes, was this unit SOP [standard operating procedure] or common practice?”

Some other headings include: Mishandling and Mutilation of War Dead; Torture or Abuse; Rape, Sexual Assault or Harassment; Theft or Fraud.

When the testimonies begin on March 13, we shall discover how damaging or revelatory their stories will be. Perry O’Brien has confidence in the process. “Someone coming into our organisation and trying to pretend they observed something they didn’t – they can only maintain that for so long.”

Once the stories are told, each is to be researched by interviewing other members of the soldier’s unit. The verification team has recently decided that anyone fabricating their experience or pretending to be a veteran will be handed over to the authorities and charged with violating the Stolen Valor Act, a law signed by President Bush in 2006.

) ) ) ) )

Perry O’Brien admits that he had hero fantasies. He was born on March 24, 1982, and grew up on a small island off the coast of Maine. After two years studying philosophy at university, he decided to enlist in the army as a medic in 2001 – two weeks before 9/11. It was a coming-of-age-ritual, influenced by the movies. He had the romantic idea that he wanted to save lives.

He did not come from a military background. His father works at a hardware store and his mother writes and illustrates children’s books.

In January 2003, O’Brien was deployed to Afghanistan for eight months. While he was there, he had many experiences that made him uncomfortable. Several times he witnessed an Afghan civilian die on the operating table after treatment from a mobile military surgical unit. Rather than prepare the corpse for the family, O’Brien witnessed the surgeons and the medics use the body to practise on.

“One doctor said, ‘Come up and feel his heart!’ This is what a heart feels like.’ ”

Half the platoon, if not more, participated. Daniel Paulsen, 27, was there and corroborates this story. There are photographs as well. Someone had grabbed O’Brien’s digital camera and taken photographs of the heart and the medics walking around and poking it. These photographs were taken for fun.

Eventually the chest of the corpse was closed up. “It was a total violation of our medical oath to use a corpse for medical training,” says O’Brien. “What’s particularly terrible is that these were all doctors that had practices back home – they were familiar with the law and the Hippocratic oath. There was such a huge disconnect between the way they treated Afghans and the way they treated American patients.

“When Americans died, the corpses became these sacred objects that were treated with tremendous care. There was this solemn funerary attitude around them. When an Afghan died, it was [as if they were] treating them like they weren’t human.

“My goal is to expose that these things are happening. And that they are the result of military leadership – part of an unofficial policy of dehumanisation.”

In 2004, while still on active duty, O’Brien attended a protest at Fort Bragg. There he met Mike Hoffman (a founder of IVAW) and joined the organisation shortly after leaving the army. He felt relieved. “Suddenly I knew that I wasn’t the only veteran who was questioning what I had seen and done.”

) ) ) ) )

Kelly Dougherty, 29, is a co-founder and executive director of IVAW. In 1996 she enlisted in the National Guard as a medic while she read biology at the University of Colorado.

On January 10, 2003, she received a call; she had been transferred to a military police unit – and she was being deployed to Iraq.

Dougherty was opposed to the war and surprised by her deployment.

In February 2003, she arrived in Kuwait and then moved to Iraq in March. Her unit was stationed in the south near Nasiriyah, where she often did convoy escorts and patrols.

“You put it out of your mind when you’re over there. And then you get back and reflect on it…

“The soldiers and marines are just doing their jobs, doing what they were trained for or what they were told to do when they got over there. Things that seem really horrible just become routine – and they are implicitly or explicitly condoned, or encouraged, by the commanders and the policy-makers.”

The offices of IVAW in Philadelphia are humble but busy. The group now has more than 700 members in 49 states, Washington, DC, Canada, and on military bases overseas.

I meet Logan Laituri there one afternoon and we sit down over a soft drink to talk. He has a gentle and sensitive manner. His enlistment wasn’t a patriotic stand, but more of a pragmatic decision. He didn’t know what else to do.

He became a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg. “I had no accomplishments outside the military. I didn’t feel that I would be missing out on much.”

There was also a financial incentive. “Every soldier knows that you earn a crap-load of money in combat. Above and beyond my pay cheque I earned $800 a month – and all that’s tax-free. And everything is paid for in Iraq. You can save every single penny. That’s a lot of money you can save for your future.”

He was deployed to Iraq in January 2004, having switched to the 25th Infantry Division. When Laituri got to Samarra, they kicked down the doors of a building and found a police officer in uniform. “Through his interpreter he was telling us that he’d been waiting, and he had all the records. I thought to myself it was great initiative and it displayed insight.

“We handcuffed him and someone took it upon themselves to punch him in the stomach – what made me feel worse was watching it and not doing anything about it.”

As he talks, Laituri seems visibly troubled that he stood by watching this man beaten up. And he admits that so many of his feelings of being in Iraq are wrapped up in what he didn’t do: “What I saw happen and I didn’t say or I didn’t correct. I survived at the expense of Iraqis. I could have said something.”

But the fear of being isolated from the platoon prevailed. Beating up prisoners, abusing the bodies of Afghans, innocents shot dead in the crossfire of fear and threat – these things get lost in the mayhem of war – but other acts, if they become institutionalised, can “try the souls of men” and cannot be so easily dismissed.

Laituri was in Fort Irwin, California in May 2006 during a pep talk at the National Training Center. He alleges that a commander made a speech to his company, and that he “made it clear to us that if an innocent person was shot he would stage a scene to protect us”.

The explicit message was: “We would make sure there was a weapon found at the scene.”

Units go into combat believing that they will be protected from any repercussions. They feel like they have a licence to kill and often they do.

In 2007, the officer was relieved of his command after a death on June 23 last year in the vicinity of Kirkuk. He is not currently a suspect and was never charged – but two soldiers who were under his command have been charged with premeditated murder.

Last month a top army sniper testified in military court – under immunity – that he had ordered a subordinate to kill an unarmed Iraqi man, then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to back up a false claim of returned fire.

But who is ultimately responsible: the individual or the officer? The combatant or the culture? And why is it always the junior ranks who are charged?

) ) ) ) )

On a February morning at a cafe in Brooklyn, New York, Perry O’Brien is explaining the difference between the “book way” and the “real way”, and the significance of the “three-stomp signal” that is used to differentiate between the two.

“If someone is giving a briefing and they stomp their foot three times after what they are saying, it means ‘disregard what I just said’. For instance, ‘Make every effort to avoid civilian property damage,’ stomp stomp stomp – [means] ignore that. The idea is that when you get back [from combat], anything that you did the book way can be spoken about – but not what was done the real way.”

It isn’t just between the book way and the real way, he says; it’s become between the honourable way and the immoral way.

Perhaps even more tragic is that now, for many, these lines have blurred. “People join the military wanting to be honourable. They follow a code of conduct – they have to. It’s what separates them from mercenaries.”

The common denominator that links all of these veterans’ stories is a profound disillusionment about the war. All of these soldiers signed up with a belief that what they were doing was noble. Despite the lessons of Vietnam, or maybe because of them, they wanted to participate.

“The book way was we treat everyone the same…” Perry smiles and taps his foot three times. “You are ordered to do things that are clear violations of our conscience and what we know to be moral. It’s not even what’s prescribed by the Geneva conventions. It’s what every human being knows to be right and wrong. We’re asked to do things that violate that and told it’s about the war, but you can never tell anyone because we need to protect them from that.

“I think that certainly it’s our duty to protect American civilians from the physical reality of wars. That’s our goal. To prevent the American public from having to participate in war and get hurt and put their lives at risk. That’s what we volunteer to do.

“But I don’t think we’re protecting America if we’re not telling our stories and keeping what we do secret.”