Tag: Ross Caputi

An Honorable Marine

Posted on by kathiemm
Ross Caputi in Iraq.

by Kathie MM

He doesn’t know it (yet), but on this Veteran’s Day, I am honoring a particular veteran, a former Marine, Ross Caputi, for his enduring courage.

It takes courage for anyone, in or out of military uniform, to face death, injury, terror, loss. It takes an extra dose of courage to speak out when you recognize that you have been duped by your government, tricked into participating in an unjustifiable bloodbath.

In November 2014, Ross provided a veteran’s perspective on Veteran’s Day: Inconvenient memories: Veteran’s Day 2014.” The message of that essay, excerpted here, is as crucial as ever.

“Most Americans believe Veterans Day is a day of remembrance; in reality, it’s generally a day of forgetting.

On Veterans Day, people applaud as veterans march in parades, wearing their medals and fancy uniforms. People who have never seen or smelt war’s rotting corpses bask in an atmosphere of pride and patriotism, suppressing inconvenient memories of hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq, millions in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Korea, and so on throughout our nation’s short and bloody history….

On Veterans Day, we are called upon to remember America’s wars, sanitized of the harm they brought to countless victims around the world, and abstracted from their historical and political context. We are asked to support our veterans while forgetting the reality of what they participated in…. But my experience as a Marine in Iraq [see series on engaging peace starting in May 2012] has forever changed the way I look at war and the way I feel about being a veteran.

Let’s change the way we celebrate Veterans Day. Let’s make it a day of learning, not forgetting. Let’s be sympathetic to the ways veterans have suffered without ignoring the suffering of civilian victims. Let’s teach and learn about the wars in which our veterans have participated…. Let’s end the reflexive support for popular mythology, the jingoism, the cheer leading, and the forgetting. Let’s refuse to encourage the next generation to follow in the footsteps of today’s veterans.”

Note from Kathie MM:  Amen.

Ross is the founding director of the Justice for Fallujah Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah

 

Unjustifiable wars and moral imperatives: Another veteran speaks out

Posted on by kathiemm
Ross Caputi in Iraq.

by Michael J. Corgan

I am writing in response to the recent post on anti-war veteran activist, Ross Caputi.  I don’t consider myself a pacifist since I believe there will always be those who choose to resort to war for little or no good reason and others of us must deal with them.

However, sometimes we  ourselves are the ones who resort to war for little or no good reason; those of us who were in the military as a profession have a particular moral responsibility to speak out.

Like my longtime colleague Andy Bacevich, I am a service academy graduate and served several tours in wars whose justification was uncertain at best. Like him, I am most concerned about our propensity to get into wars for which there was no justification: Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898,  Woodrow Wilson’s  Latin American invasions, Granada and Panama in 1982, Iraq in 2003, to name just the clearest cases.

At the Naval War College in the late 1970s we began the study of Thucydides and Clausewitz to try to determine why we, a supposed 1st-rate military power lost  to North Vietnam, a supposed 4th-rate military power.

From Thucydides one learns how easily the arrogance of power leads to foolish and disastrous military adventures in which many are killed for no worthy aim. From Clausewitz a more important lesson: know when to quit when you are not going to ‘win.’

What prompts my concern now is our war in Afghanistan, the longest war in our history.  According to New York Times interviews with commanders there,  we are farther from ‘winning’ than ever.

According to international law, we probably had justification for going to war after the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11; that group operated with either the acquiescence of the Taliban or the inability of the Taliban to prevent  use of their country as an operations base for the attackers. However, after 14 years, what is our justification for continuing a war that kills civilians and is no closer to being concluded than it ever was?

Five hundred years ago,  Mongols couldn’t control the land. Two hundred years ago,  the British began their futile attempt to control it. Then, in the last century, the Russians also failed. All that resulted was a lot of people dead.

Now, in our arrogance, we think we can create a stable country. How can we be effective nation builders when we are foreigners, don’t speak any of the languages, and are infidels. It  isn’t working. Meanwhile people who want no part of either side are dying. There needs to be a solution to problems in that unhappy land but we and our war aren’t providing it even with all our incredible precision weapons and dropping of the largest conventional bomb ever.

The only right thing to do is to extract ourselves and admit the final answer, if there is one, will be attained by those who live there. The moral imperative is that we must go home.

Michael J, Corgan is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University.

American Sniper, Part 4

Posted on by kathiemm
U.S soldiers posing with beheaded Viet cong,
The above picture shows exactly what the brass want you to do in the Nam. The reason for printing this picture is not to put down G.I.’s but rather to illustrate the fact that the Army can really fuck over your mind if you let it. It’s up to you, you can put in your time just trying to make it back in one piece or you can become a psycho like the Lifer (E-6) in the picture who really digs this kind of shit. It’s your choice. Image is in the public domain.

by Guest Author Ross Caputi

As shown in the first three segments of my review of American Sniper, there are many well-documented facts, crucial to understanding the American presence in Iraq, but none of them come through in American Sniper. Instead, the plot is guided by Chris Kyle’s autobiography, in which his narration of his life story describes the Iraq war and occupation through the lens of a number of common, but false, beliefs—like, for example, that the people we were fighting against were evil because Islam taught them to kill Americans.

One scene shows Chris in a moral dilemma. He is on a rooftop with his sniper rifle, and through the scope he sees a woman walking with a young child next to her (presumably her son) as she carries a grenade toward a US patrol. Chris must either kill a mother and her child or leave his countrymen exposed to an attack.

In his autobiography, Chris says that this event happened in Nasiriya during the initial invasion. However, Clint Eastwood decided to situate this scene during the 2nd siege of Fallujah in 2004. Also, in the film the woman hands the grenade to her son and encourages him to rush at the US patrol, whereas in the book it is the woman who tries to throw the grenade. Did Clint Eastwood think that the woman’s involvement of her little son is a more representative portrayal of the Iraqi resistance? It’s not. These human-shield tactics were extremely rare and were only used by the most marginal and unpopular militias.

In the film, Chris kills both the woman and her son. Although visibly conflicted about what he felt obligated to do, he comments that, “that was evil like I ain’t never seen before.”

There is another moral dilemma in this scene that may not be obvious to American viewers: That woman had every right to attack the illegal, foreign invaders in her country, whether you agree with her tactics or not. We had no right to invade a sovereign nation, occupy it against the will of the majority of its citizens, and patrol their streets.

Author’s bio: Ross Caputi is a former Marine who participated in the 2nd Siege of Fallujah. Today he is on the Board of Directors of the Islah Reparations Project.  He is also the Director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah  Ross holds an MA in Linguistics and he is working on an MA in English Studies at Fitchburg State University. Read his blog here.

The first casualty of the last war, and the next war, and the next

Posted on by kathiemm

Aeschylus, an Ancient Greek writer of theatrical plays. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Greek writer and poet Aeschylus (525–456 BCE—a very long time ago!) proclaimed that “Truth is the first casualty of war.” Isn’t it just as true in the US as elsewhere that supporters of war try to prove they are in the right, and use lies and distortions to support their position?

And think of the advantages to the military-industrial-media complex of gaining support for a “war on terror” instead of a war only on the selected evil country of the moment.  Given our government’s policies, there are likely always to be a few terrorists around. What a swell way to guarantee a perpetual war with perpetual profits—in money and/or power.

In his Monday post, Dr. Anthony Marsella wrote passionately about how the power structure in the US has used Propaganda, Media Deception and Abuses, and Lies to convince Americans that being dragged along one path of violence after another is not only in their best interests but also the right thing to do.

Once the mainstream corporate media, a strong arm of the power structure, has planted misinformation in people’s minds, it can be a challenge to get those people to rethink their views. (Remember the expression “Don’t confuse me with facts. My mind is made up.”) For example, long after it was well established that Iraq did not have the weapons of mass destruction that were the purported reason for the 2003 US invasion, some people, especially conservatives, continued to insist that the weapons were there.

In order to override misinformation, lies, and propaganda, it is helpful to have the facts  communicated by people who are seen by their audience as having some credibility.  That is why the efforts of anti-war veteran activists to lead us from the path of war to the path of peace are so important.

 Check out the sites for:

Iraq Veterans Against War: http://www.ivaw.org/

Vietnam Veterans Against the War: http://www.vvaw.org/

Veterans for Peace: http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

 And, in particular, listen to this interview with Ross Caputi, a frequent contributor to this blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ZwuizScxw

 

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