thedrifter
12-30-06, 01:06 PM
War and Civilians: A Few Swiftian Modest Proposals and Random Musings at Year’s End
Suki Falconberg
December 29, 2006
Atrocities are the norm during wartime. So are civilian casualties. In the twentieth century, women and children comprised 80% of all wartime deaths. Yet when U.S. Marines allegedly kill a handful of unarmed civilians as, for example, in the Haditha incident in Iraq, it makes the cover of Time magazine. It is a peculiar human mindset: note the death of a few and blank out the millions.
Can making war and moral behavior co-exist? Probably not. Train men to kill, and behave savagely, and they will. I always wonder why we act surprised and outraged when civilian casualties, like those at Haditha, happen? I would ask: Why punish these Marines for what we have trained them to do? If Jarhead is any indication of the savagery military training inculcates, then it’s evident our soldiers are not going to behave like well-behaved tea-party participants when faced with an elusive enemy, in Iraq, trying to kill them. It is also evident that the stresses of war will cause savagery in men.
Instead of pretending morals in wartime are possible, let us simply celebrate how brutal the male can be. This celebration would be a window into a reality we rarely acknowledge, a reality that is the true picture of war. Not the fake one inherent in pretending men at war can behave morally. Not the hypocritical one inherent in showcasing a few dead civilians in Haditha, yet ignoring the inevitable savagery of men at war. Why have we singled out this one incident, Haditha? Are we looking at a phenomenon similar to My Lai, that 'one' atrocity in Vietnam? In retrospect, we now know that My Lai was only one of many such incidents.
We make Marines so we can worship tough, muscled commandos, warrior gods. We don’t create this species of the male for his morals. Besides, I sympathize with these men if they act a little crazy and wipe out a few hamlets or housefuls of civilians. I mean, it’s not as if they’re in Iraq for some noble reason, like to defend freedom or promote human rights. Frustration must run high in men engaged in an utterly useless, futile war. It happened in Vietnam, too—that even greater exercise in atrocity, stupidity, and misinformation. Guys got crazy. Killed and pillaged and ravaged. Compared to ones in Vietnam, the Marines in Iraq are behaving with the height of civility.
Some of their leisure-time activities in that other Age of Insanity included throwing beer bottles at the heads of Amerasian beggar kids trying to eat out of their garbage cans. They would bet on who could kill a kid. It was good target practice, and it served another purpose—rid the landscape of the ‘evidence’ that the men had been fraternizing with the bodies of the indigenous females. Read Caputo’s Spoils of War for a rousing account of this ‘killing-two-gooks-with-one-beer-bottle’ recreational activity.
“Core warrior values” figured heavily in that other war, too. The upholding of high ethical standards. Caputo tells of a Marine in Vietnam who fell in love with a prostitute and wanted to marry her. His buddies soon set him straight. They all raped her, to show him she was garbage. Men at war. There is strong evidence that this is their core value of behavior, not the fake, glossed-over one we see on CNN every night.
“Ethical standards”—a military given? Caputo says the soldiers force fed explosives to village dogs so they could watch them blow up, from the inside out.
I hope the Marines in Iraq aren’t hurting any dogs. We know they are raping, but we don’t know how much since only one incident has come to light, that of the 14-year old girl allegedly gang raped and then killed in March 2006. We don’t know if our soldiers have raped women prisoners since the journalists don’t mention this sort of thing. Neither, apprarently, do Iraqi women, since to be raped in their culture is beyond shame. When it happens, the women are very reluctant to report this insupportable indignity. (Even in my country, the USA, girls are reluctant to report rape attacks since the American court system spends most of its energy trying to discredit the victim.)
On the other hand, I suspect Iraq is a low-rape war since the women are so hard to get at. The women are kept sequestered, and swaddled heavily in clothes—they look like they’re wrapped in yards of big sheets. Not easy to strip, and get at, for rape purposes. Vietnam was a lot easier. All those flimsy little pajama outfits—guys could just rip them off with one gesture, and mount. And the girls were so tiny, didn’t even need to break a sweat while holding them down. The Iraqi women look pretty big, closer to Caucasian size.
Why pretend rape is some exception during wartime? The alleged rape-murder of the 14-year-old Iraqi girl (whose name was Abir) by American soldiers spawned a New York Times article (August 7, 2006) about atrocities against civilians in Vietnam that went unpunished. It said that newly released archives report 15 substantiated cases of sexual assault by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Fifteen? Fifteen?! Fifteen???!!! During 10 years of American occupation???? It might seem like some kind of beyond ridiculous understatement, but that number appears ludicrously low—beyond ludicrously low. Vets I spoke to during and after the war said that rape was a daily occurrence. The paltry ‘official’ ones recorded are nothing beside the real numbers. “By the hundreds, everyday, maybe by the thousands” was the consensus of men who had been there (and either participated in, or witnessed, the attacks).
That girls were raped in Vietnam seems too obvious for comment. I wonder why the military is now kindly informing us of this ‘fact’? Since they are ‘embarrassed’ by the alleged rape of Abir, why are they even bothering to rake up Vietnam? According to the article, Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns (a Vietnam vet himself) was in favor of keeping the Vietnam records secret, but now thinks they should be disclosed because “we can’t change current practices unless we acknowledge the past.” So, this ‘official’ soldier cared nothing for the ravaging of the girls while it was going on. Since he was on the spot, he must have seen the savagery. Back then, he did nothing about it. Now that the military has been caught with its alleged pants down in Iraq, he is being forced to actually admit that this was not the only rape ever committed by our soldiers? And, if he is so concerned with changing soldierly behavior, why didn’t he pull the men off the Vietnamese girls 40 years ago?
My answer would be that soldiers aren’t really supposed to care about these sorts of things. Women raped, damaged, prostituted, pregnant with GI babies, 100,000 or more Amerasian children left fatherless after Vietnam—all of this sort of activity is simply trivial compared to the true world of the warrior; and he is the center of our media war attention, not the many helpless women and children he destroys, physically and psychologically. Our whole media circus is a huge, cloudy, hypocritical lie, as it spouts ideas about ethical standards and moral values. Like some big squid curtain of black ink.
An interesting sidenote: after the big Pentagonal release of the Vietnam archives, they took them back. Covered them up again. Un-released them, so the public can no longer have access to their big truth: that all of 15 times, during the 10-year sexual carnage atrocity we call Vietnam, women were raped. Apparently that number would seem so startlingly high, given the moral values and unbreakable ethical standards of our military men, that the American public, and all the American journalists, would faint dead away at the mere thought: 15 girls assaulted by American soldiers. Never. It just couldn’t happen! Not with their ‘core warrior ethical moral standard values,’ or whatever lying bunch of words these journalists and military spokesmen string together to blanket the raw reality of rape.
There have also been reports, not well publicized, that our men are raping our women soldiers in Iraq. If the military wanted to face the sexual frustration problem over there, I supposed they could traffic in a bunch of those blonde Eastern European girls. These girls are being trafficked by the truckload to every place else in the world—why not to Iraq? They’ll arrive already broken in, completely seasoned from beatings, starvation, torture and terror. Ready to install in a tent. Place for the guys to release all their wartime frustration. Is she not every American boy’s dream—a docile blonde, completely passive, completely available.
There is precedent for trafficking in sex disposal-sites ( called prostitutes) for our boys: one long-time theory is that men at war will rape ‘good’ girls unless ‘bad’ girls are made available to them. In Iraq, are there any ‘bad’ girls being made available? I wonder if Iraqi girls--hungry, needing to engage in wartime sex for food, like millions have done before them in all the others war men have made—I wonder can these Iraqi girls become prostitutes? Would their men kill them before letting them indulge in this “shame” (society’s italics, not mine)? In Asia, the body-for-sale has kept many a war-torn girl and her family, many a destitute mother and her children, from starving. It is perhaps a shame that Iraqi girls cannot sell themselves as freely as Asian ones have done to our soldiers—hunger is terrifying and these poor Iraqi girls cannot even assuage it by bartering their bodies.
How much soldiers suffer is a prevalent theme of warfare. Personally, I don’t really feel too sorry for these guys since I think that men like to make war. Gives them a chance to play with their phallic toys. All those rifles, knives, bayonets, submarines, torpedoes, missiles, bombs, whatever—every single one of them crafted in the shape of that weapon a man carries between his legs.
Rape, one of the essentials of wartime. It may be a ‘core warrior value’ but what it lacks is ‘sporting’ values. What’s the challenge of overpowering some unarmed civilian women, match-thin from malnourishment? I think the soldiers would have more fun raping each other. A fully-loaded fellow soldier—now that’s an opponent worthy of a rapist. Add some danger to the endeavor. Could get those nuts and berries and twigs blown off if you wave them threateningly in the wind, at one of your buddies.
I have a solution to end the civilian casualties: Isolate all the male combatants, maybe off in the middle of the Gobi desert, and let them have fun out there playing with their phallic toys and slaughtering each other. This would leave all the non-combatants, the women and children, out of the line of fire.
Except for the G.I. Jane’s. But any woman who wants to fight has to sign a disclaimer that she won’t whine if she’s raped. Part of the job description for female soldiers—Standard Issue Military Rape, expect it. I have no patience with those wimp women soldiers (actually sailors, to be accurate) at Tailhook. All upset at having to run a little gauntlet or two. All flustered over a tidbit of ‘sexual harassment.’ Tailhook took place at a Las Vegas hotel. Sex was on the menu. Strippers and prostitutes were being treated crudely and roughed up all over the place. Did the female soldiers expect the men to all of sudden shift gears, treat them with tea-party politeness, while they were hooting at bare boobs, and screwing bought bodies?
I also have a solution for stopping wartime rape. Film it as it is happening, and show it every night on CNN, wherever the conflict area: Iraq, the Congo, Darfur. Wartime rape is the Cinderella stepchild of all these battlegrounds--ignored, hidden, glossed over. Let us show the world the raw misery on the girl’s contorted face, as she is violated. It will, maybe, touch the somnolent indifference of all the complacent viewers who assume war is great and noble and that nothing terrible ever happens to women in war zones.
Of course, this sets up some ethical problems for the journalists—do you help the screaming girl or do you just record her agony? I don’t have an answer for this one.
In the case of the American soldiers mentioned above, if they did hurt and kill the young Iraqi girl, what if a journalist had filmed the entire episode, everything from her violation, to her murder? This might stir up a ruffle of outrage and maybe even some questioning—are other American soldiers also raping over there?
How would I know?—no journalist ever tells me about this particular ‘deed of misconduct.’ (Note the overly polite phrasing, as if the men were involved in a bit of illicit fun over a beer.) We Americans can’t know if rape has happened only once in Iraq, or zero times, or many thousands upon thousands of times, as it did in Vietnam.
I urge journalists covering all conflicts—Iraq, Darfur, the Congo, Israel’s ongoing battles—to regularly film rape and to blazon the woman’s agony across the CNN screen, night after night after night. Give wartime the rape the coverage it has never received, and badly needs, to wake up the world to its existence.
(I always used to wonder, when Christiane Amanpoure was covering Bosnia, why she didn’t talk about the rape camps and Muslim women being stripped and staked to the ground. Serbs climbed on while other Serbs watched, and some of this was videotaped. At least we have this one record of rape agony. We need more. Why was Ms. Amanpoure not highlighting this ravaging of other women?)
The only problem I see arising is that the nighttime CNN rape films might be mistaken for a new form of pornography. You’d have to be careful to label it—‘actual gang rape and murder of a woman by (American, Serbian, Congolese, whatever) soldiers’ rather than ‘snuff film gang rape and murder of a woman,’ etc.
It’s worth a try, this filming of the ravaging while it happens. I don’t see anyone else making any helpful suggestions about the tradition of wartime rape.
Ellie
Suki Falconberg
December 29, 2006
Atrocities are the norm during wartime. So are civilian casualties. In the twentieth century, women and children comprised 80% of all wartime deaths. Yet when U.S. Marines allegedly kill a handful of unarmed civilians as, for example, in the Haditha incident in Iraq, it makes the cover of Time magazine. It is a peculiar human mindset: note the death of a few and blank out the millions.
Can making war and moral behavior co-exist? Probably not. Train men to kill, and behave savagely, and they will. I always wonder why we act surprised and outraged when civilian casualties, like those at Haditha, happen? I would ask: Why punish these Marines for what we have trained them to do? If Jarhead is any indication of the savagery military training inculcates, then it’s evident our soldiers are not going to behave like well-behaved tea-party participants when faced with an elusive enemy, in Iraq, trying to kill them. It is also evident that the stresses of war will cause savagery in men.
Instead of pretending morals in wartime are possible, let us simply celebrate how brutal the male can be. This celebration would be a window into a reality we rarely acknowledge, a reality that is the true picture of war. Not the fake one inherent in pretending men at war can behave morally. Not the hypocritical one inherent in showcasing a few dead civilians in Haditha, yet ignoring the inevitable savagery of men at war. Why have we singled out this one incident, Haditha? Are we looking at a phenomenon similar to My Lai, that 'one' atrocity in Vietnam? In retrospect, we now know that My Lai was only one of many such incidents.
We make Marines so we can worship tough, muscled commandos, warrior gods. We don’t create this species of the male for his morals. Besides, I sympathize with these men if they act a little crazy and wipe out a few hamlets or housefuls of civilians. I mean, it’s not as if they’re in Iraq for some noble reason, like to defend freedom or promote human rights. Frustration must run high in men engaged in an utterly useless, futile war. It happened in Vietnam, too—that even greater exercise in atrocity, stupidity, and misinformation. Guys got crazy. Killed and pillaged and ravaged. Compared to ones in Vietnam, the Marines in Iraq are behaving with the height of civility.
Some of their leisure-time activities in that other Age of Insanity included throwing beer bottles at the heads of Amerasian beggar kids trying to eat out of their garbage cans. They would bet on who could kill a kid. It was good target practice, and it served another purpose—rid the landscape of the ‘evidence’ that the men had been fraternizing with the bodies of the indigenous females. Read Caputo’s Spoils of War for a rousing account of this ‘killing-two-gooks-with-one-beer-bottle’ recreational activity.
“Core warrior values” figured heavily in that other war, too. The upholding of high ethical standards. Caputo tells of a Marine in Vietnam who fell in love with a prostitute and wanted to marry her. His buddies soon set him straight. They all raped her, to show him she was garbage. Men at war. There is strong evidence that this is their core value of behavior, not the fake, glossed-over one we see on CNN every night.
“Ethical standards”—a military given? Caputo says the soldiers force fed explosives to village dogs so they could watch them blow up, from the inside out.
I hope the Marines in Iraq aren’t hurting any dogs. We know they are raping, but we don’t know how much since only one incident has come to light, that of the 14-year old girl allegedly gang raped and then killed in March 2006. We don’t know if our soldiers have raped women prisoners since the journalists don’t mention this sort of thing. Neither, apprarently, do Iraqi women, since to be raped in their culture is beyond shame. When it happens, the women are very reluctant to report this insupportable indignity. (Even in my country, the USA, girls are reluctant to report rape attacks since the American court system spends most of its energy trying to discredit the victim.)
On the other hand, I suspect Iraq is a low-rape war since the women are so hard to get at. The women are kept sequestered, and swaddled heavily in clothes—they look like they’re wrapped in yards of big sheets. Not easy to strip, and get at, for rape purposes. Vietnam was a lot easier. All those flimsy little pajama outfits—guys could just rip them off with one gesture, and mount. And the girls were so tiny, didn’t even need to break a sweat while holding them down. The Iraqi women look pretty big, closer to Caucasian size.
Why pretend rape is some exception during wartime? The alleged rape-murder of the 14-year-old Iraqi girl (whose name was Abir) by American soldiers spawned a New York Times article (August 7, 2006) about atrocities against civilians in Vietnam that went unpunished. It said that newly released archives report 15 substantiated cases of sexual assault by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Fifteen? Fifteen?! Fifteen???!!! During 10 years of American occupation???? It might seem like some kind of beyond ridiculous understatement, but that number appears ludicrously low—beyond ludicrously low. Vets I spoke to during and after the war said that rape was a daily occurrence. The paltry ‘official’ ones recorded are nothing beside the real numbers. “By the hundreds, everyday, maybe by the thousands” was the consensus of men who had been there (and either participated in, or witnessed, the attacks).
That girls were raped in Vietnam seems too obvious for comment. I wonder why the military is now kindly informing us of this ‘fact’? Since they are ‘embarrassed’ by the alleged rape of Abir, why are they even bothering to rake up Vietnam? According to the article, Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns (a Vietnam vet himself) was in favor of keeping the Vietnam records secret, but now thinks they should be disclosed because “we can’t change current practices unless we acknowledge the past.” So, this ‘official’ soldier cared nothing for the ravaging of the girls while it was going on. Since he was on the spot, he must have seen the savagery. Back then, he did nothing about it. Now that the military has been caught with its alleged pants down in Iraq, he is being forced to actually admit that this was not the only rape ever committed by our soldiers? And, if he is so concerned with changing soldierly behavior, why didn’t he pull the men off the Vietnamese girls 40 years ago?
My answer would be that soldiers aren’t really supposed to care about these sorts of things. Women raped, damaged, prostituted, pregnant with GI babies, 100,000 or more Amerasian children left fatherless after Vietnam—all of this sort of activity is simply trivial compared to the true world of the warrior; and he is the center of our media war attention, not the many helpless women and children he destroys, physically and psychologically. Our whole media circus is a huge, cloudy, hypocritical lie, as it spouts ideas about ethical standards and moral values. Like some big squid curtain of black ink.
An interesting sidenote: after the big Pentagonal release of the Vietnam archives, they took them back. Covered them up again. Un-released them, so the public can no longer have access to their big truth: that all of 15 times, during the 10-year sexual carnage atrocity we call Vietnam, women were raped. Apparently that number would seem so startlingly high, given the moral values and unbreakable ethical standards of our military men, that the American public, and all the American journalists, would faint dead away at the mere thought: 15 girls assaulted by American soldiers. Never. It just couldn’t happen! Not with their ‘core warrior ethical moral standard values,’ or whatever lying bunch of words these journalists and military spokesmen string together to blanket the raw reality of rape.
There have also been reports, not well publicized, that our men are raping our women soldiers in Iraq. If the military wanted to face the sexual frustration problem over there, I supposed they could traffic in a bunch of those blonde Eastern European girls. These girls are being trafficked by the truckload to every place else in the world—why not to Iraq? They’ll arrive already broken in, completely seasoned from beatings, starvation, torture and terror. Ready to install in a tent. Place for the guys to release all their wartime frustration. Is she not every American boy’s dream—a docile blonde, completely passive, completely available.
There is precedent for trafficking in sex disposal-sites ( called prostitutes) for our boys: one long-time theory is that men at war will rape ‘good’ girls unless ‘bad’ girls are made available to them. In Iraq, are there any ‘bad’ girls being made available? I wonder if Iraqi girls--hungry, needing to engage in wartime sex for food, like millions have done before them in all the others war men have made—I wonder can these Iraqi girls become prostitutes? Would their men kill them before letting them indulge in this “shame” (society’s italics, not mine)? In Asia, the body-for-sale has kept many a war-torn girl and her family, many a destitute mother and her children, from starving. It is perhaps a shame that Iraqi girls cannot sell themselves as freely as Asian ones have done to our soldiers—hunger is terrifying and these poor Iraqi girls cannot even assuage it by bartering their bodies.
How much soldiers suffer is a prevalent theme of warfare. Personally, I don’t really feel too sorry for these guys since I think that men like to make war. Gives them a chance to play with their phallic toys. All those rifles, knives, bayonets, submarines, torpedoes, missiles, bombs, whatever—every single one of them crafted in the shape of that weapon a man carries between his legs.
Rape, one of the essentials of wartime. It may be a ‘core warrior value’ but what it lacks is ‘sporting’ values. What’s the challenge of overpowering some unarmed civilian women, match-thin from malnourishment? I think the soldiers would have more fun raping each other. A fully-loaded fellow soldier—now that’s an opponent worthy of a rapist. Add some danger to the endeavor. Could get those nuts and berries and twigs blown off if you wave them threateningly in the wind, at one of your buddies.
I have a solution to end the civilian casualties: Isolate all the male combatants, maybe off in the middle of the Gobi desert, and let them have fun out there playing with their phallic toys and slaughtering each other. This would leave all the non-combatants, the women and children, out of the line of fire.
Except for the G.I. Jane’s. But any woman who wants to fight has to sign a disclaimer that she won’t whine if she’s raped. Part of the job description for female soldiers—Standard Issue Military Rape, expect it. I have no patience with those wimp women soldiers (actually sailors, to be accurate) at Tailhook. All upset at having to run a little gauntlet or two. All flustered over a tidbit of ‘sexual harassment.’ Tailhook took place at a Las Vegas hotel. Sex was on the menu. Strippers and prostitutes were being treated crudely and roughed up all over the place. Did the female soldiers expect the men to all of sudden shift gears, treat them with tea-party politeness, while they were hooting at bare boobs, and screwing bought bodies?
I also have a solution for stopping wartime rape. Film it as it is happening, and show it every night on CNN, wherever the conflict area: Iraq, the Congo, Darfur. Wartime rape is the Cinderella stepchild of all these battlegrounds--ignored, hidden, glossed over. Let us show the world the raw misery on the girl’s contorted face, as she is violated. It will, maybe, touch the somnolent indifference of all the complacent viewers who assume war is great and noble and that nothing terrible ever happens to women in war zones.
Of course, this sets up some ethical problems for the journalists—do you help the screaming girl or do you just record her agony? I don’t have an answer for this one.
In the case of the American soldiers mentioned above, if they did hurt and kill the young Iraqi girl, what if a journalist had filmed the entire episode, everything from her violation, to her murder? This might stir up a ruffle of outrage and maybe even some questioning—are other American soldiers also raping over there?
How would I know?—no journalist ever tells me about this particular ‘deed of misconduct.’ (Note the overly polite phrasing, as if the men were involved in a bit of illicit fun over a beer.) We Americans can’t know if rape has happened only once in Iraq, or zero times, or many thousands upon thousands of times, as it did in Vietnam.
I urge journalists covering all conflicts—Iraq, Darfur, the Congo, Israel’s ongoing battles—to regularly film rape and to blazon the woman’s agony across the CNN screen, night after night after night. Give wartime the rape the coverage it has never received, and badly needs, to wake up the world to its existence.
(I always used to wonder, when Christiane Amanpoure was covering Bosnia, why she didn’t talk about the rape camps and Muslim women being stripped and staked to the ground. Serbs climbed on while other Serbs watched, and some of this was videotaped. At least we have this one record of rape agony. We need more. Why was Ms. Amanpoure not highlighting this ravaging of other women?)
The only problem I see arising is that the nighttime CNN rape films might be mistaken for a new form of pornography. You’d have to be careful to label it—‘actual gang rape and murder of a woman by (American, Serbian, Congolese, whatever) soldiers’ rather than ‘snuff film gang rape and murder of a woman,’ etc.
It’s worth a try, this filming of the ravaging while it happens. I don’t see anyone else making any helpful suggestions about the tradition of wartime rape.
Ellie