War Post

The war needs its fighters. As much as some fighters increasingly seem to need the war, touting their 60 kills ("It’s like hearing classical music playing in my head.") or threatening other soldiers after the murder of Iraqis ("If you say anything, I’ll kill you."), there are mothers in the America following their sons and daughters to Iraq. The AP is picking up the worst frequencies from Iraq, war fans might say, and of course so many of the soldiers over there, haggard and stressed, just want to come home, after finally securing that road or building that hospital.

Steven Green just wanted to go home alive, though he went to Iraq because he wanted to kill people. It was the morbid boredom of Iraq, he says, that got to him. "I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza.’"

Laurie-Ann Fuca, the Tucson mother in boot camp, is going to be a medic, which is a good thing. It doesn’t look like we need more killers.  

The photo is by Robert Capa, "Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936."

I sat under a porch on the morning of the 4th of July in Massachusetts, watching an annual parade go by in the sun. Like lots of people in the Northeast, I began the holiday looking at the New York Times front page story of a scraggly former Army private being escorted out of jail in North Carolina. Steven D. Green was convicted July 3rd of raping and killing an Iraqi woman and her family four months ago, and in the past few days the story was expanded, opening some questions: was the rape victim 25, as Army documents originally said, or 20 (other US officials), or 16 (town officials in Mahmudiya, Iraq), or 14 (a neighbor in Mahmudiya); if her younger sister was 10, or younger; how often the young woman had been harassed at nearby checkpoints by other American soldiers before Private Green locked himself in a room with her in her family’s home in Mahmudiya; and, if the recent June capture, torture and killing of two American soldiers who were serving in Green’s company were retaliation for the rape of the young woman and the murder of her and her family (minus her brothers, who were all at school that day). One of the things that is clear now, at least, is that the soldiers were drunk driving their Humvee out of the base, and when they entered the house.

The headline of the Times July 5th story, "Inquiry Into Iraq Killing Focuses on Supervision of Soldiers," was maybe a litle understated. As with the current Haditha investigation, the military and the White House have given tepid commentary on Green, keeping up a sort of theater of detachment, which will eventually lead, we’re told, to punishment. We know, after all, President Bush believes "that 99.9 percent of our men and women in uniform are performing their jobs honorably and skillfully and they deserve our full appreciation and gratitude," thanks to one of his spokesman.

Full Apprecaition. Gratitude. Praise the men and women whose fight we know little about. Praise them, trumpeted by the Army in combat photographs that rotate on the front page of its official website:

An amputee running with a beaming President.

An imposing cannon on the top of a Humvee before a no-shit, sun-shaded soldier, with his trigger finger.

And, in a photo posted last December (now removed from the site, as far as I can tell, but mentioned today by the Times David S. Cloud), an Army private preparing "to blast a lock off the gate of an abandoned home during a search of homes" in the town of Mullah Fayed. Ignore the fact that that private was Steven Green.