"I don't know how many innocents I killed with my mortar rounds. I have my imagination to pick at for that one. But I clearly remember the call-out over the radio saying 'Green light on all taxi-cabs. The enemy is using them for transportation'.
"One of our snipers called back on the radio saying 'Excuse me but did I hear that order correctly? Green light on all taxi cabs?' 'Roger that soldier. You'd better start buckling up.' All of a sudden the city just blew up."
This is an excerpt of an article detailing Hart Viges' tour in Iraq as a member of the 82nd Airborne. I don't know if it appeared in any newspaper here, in this country, because I extracted it from the Independent, a British newspaper, but it's excellent insight into experiences of our soldiers in Iraq. I highly recommend it.
If we're going to totally dominate a nation, bomb it back to the Stone Age, and vaporize innocent civilians indiscrimminately, then I think it's the responsibility of every American citizen to be a little more involved in what we're doing as a nation to people in other countries. Just forking over our income taxes to buy weapons and munitions to slaughter folks and then go about our unaffected and otherwise uninvolved lives by wondering who's going to kick the Vikings ass this Sunday or if we can get our precocious daughter into ballet lessons 6 months before her 5th birthday isn't good enough.
I think we owe it to the innocent victims we are massacring to at least read about it. A few seconds homage to these dead and maimed victims of U.S. policy isn't that much to sacrifice before we scan the sports page standings to see if Dale Earnhardt's moved up on Jeff Gordon.
(NOTE: Dada realizes the difficulty of his suggestion. Reading about war attrocities a nation commits when it doesn't publish that sort of thing is next to impossible. It takes great effort to uncover such stories. "Oh well, wonder who's going to kick the Vikings' asses this Sunday?")
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