DICK'S ESSAYS ON THE HEROES AND THE WARS

NORTHWEST ARKANSAS TIMES SERIES OF SOLDIER PROFILES-- AND ALTERNATIVES

DICK’S 3 LETTERS INSPIRED BY NAT’S SERIES ON COMBAT HEROES, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF COMPOSITION

#1 sent to OMNI’s list

TO OMNI MEMBERS AND FRIENDS 12-19-09

On Sunday, November 8, 2009, one of the owners of the Northwest Arkansas Times, Warren Stephens, introduced the first in “a 54-part series that tells the stories of heroism and bravery by the men and women in the United States Armed Forces.” He declared himself “privileged and humbled” by these stories of citizen and professional soldiers who “have left the safety of home and family…to serve their country with distinction” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why tell these stories now? In the merger of the Stephens and Hussman media, we were told that the Times and similar newspapers would focus on local events. These stories are about soldiers around the nation and written by reporters in Stephens Media. But this policy was jettisoned apparently because Mr. Stephens fears that in the “political rhetoric” and “prolonged military engagements” such heroism will be “lost.” He wishes to “thank them,” and he pledges “to continue to detail American sacrifice and bravery until the last soldier comes home. Truly, they are the heroes among us.”

How might we respond? Hyperpatriotic glorification of soldiers and cant have always been twin essentials to conquest and empire, and they deserve close examination regarding these two wars also. But for the moment, let us trace a different history.

The United States has a different history of valor--the history of the brave citizens who oppose their own nation’s illegal wars. Mr. Stephens, give us this history. The birthdays of two such persons are next week.

DECEMBER

I. F. Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989). I. F. Stone's Weekly which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century". In 1964, using evidence drawn from a close reading and analysis of published accounts, Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. During the 1960s, Stone continued to criticize the Vietnam War.

A. J. Muste was born on December 25, 1885. Over his life he worked with such organizations as Fellowship of Reconciliation, Congress of Racial Equality, and War Resisters League. War resistance was a chief focus, including the Vietnam War. Shortly before his death he traveled to North Vietnam with a delegation of clergy to meet with Ho Chi Minh. .

Further reading (see OMNI’s library).

STONE: Hundreds of articles originally published in the Weekly were later republished in The I.F. Stone's Weekly Reader (1973), and in three volumes of a six-volume compendium of Stone's writings called A Nonconformist History of Our Times (1989).

MUSTE: The Essays of A. J. Muste, ed. Nat Hentoff.

Related USA:

Murray Polner and Thomas Woods Jr., eds. We Who Dared to Say No To War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now.

Olga Bonfiglio, Heroes of a Different Stripe: How One Town Responded to the War in Iraq. (Recipient of an OMNI PeaceWriting Award 2007).

Related World:

Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict.

Michael True, Justice Seekers, Peace Makers and To Construct Peace: 30 More Justice Seekers, Peace Makers (mainly US).

#2 published in FFW, January 28, 2010

DICK’S RESPONSE TO REPORT on Lt. Col. Thomas Gukeisen, using Finkel’s The Good Soldier 12-30

“We Are Winning: Two Wars, Two Colonels, and a General” by Dick Bennett, Fayetteville Free Weekly (January 28, 2010)

The importance of replying to the glorification of warriors and war in the profiles initiated by Warren Stephens in the Stephens chain of newspapers seems clear to me. “…on this Sunday before Veterans Day 2009, the newspapers and Web sites of Stephens Media are privileged and humbled to begin a 54-part series that tells the stories of heroism and bravery by the men and women in the United States Armed Forces.” And beginning on January 18, 2010, the Stephens Media commenced 12 additional Salutes to American Valor.

But any reply is complicated in the US National Security State by official and popular dislike of even seeming to criticize “the troops” in the middle of a war. It is difficult even to ask, why does our society so easily accept the killing of young men in wars? Why do people believe that the death of young men, particularly in wars of questionable legality and morality, is acceptable? Of course, with the U. S. engaged virtually in permanent war ever since Pearl Harbor, now fighting two wars (combining Afghanistan and Pakistan) and beginning a third front in Yemen, and a “surge” in the Afghan war, little time or opportunity has existed when the troops were not engaged that would allow pondering critical questions.

My first response was to suggest in a letter to friends what Stephens’ 54 page-one, snap-shot, adrenaline-charged war stories signify for a country whose leaders deny being militaristic or imperial, and who make the killings and woundings sacredly patriotic through glorious medals: Medal of Honor, the Silver Star. In that writing I called upon Mr. Stephens to publish an alternative series of page-one profiles about nonviolent U. S. peacemakers, naming two prominent opponents of war whose birthdays were approaching.

My second approach here compares a smiling, cheerleading newspaper report of a US battalion commander in Afghanistan to the equally optimistic US battalion commander central to a new book about the Iraq war, but the book adds contexts of experiences over a period of eighteen months necessary for understanding and evaluation. General Petraeus appears in both stories, and again the contexts provide all the difference. .

I. Lt. Colonel Gukeisen in Afghanistan

AP writer Denis Gray tells about Lt. Colonel Thomas Gukeisen’s (and General Petraeus’) success in counterinsurgent warfare (COIN) in Afghanistan.

Combat, his commanding officer says, is based upon good information and killing the enemy (eradicating “Taliban” fighters”: I enclose “Taliban” in quotation marks because they are no unity but rather Pashtun tribesmen resisting occupation for numerous reasons, from the victims of invader ignorance, insensitivity, and violence to advocates of extreme sharia law, and some mujahideen linked to al-Qaeda) ). COIN, in contrast, involves changing hearts and minds, a phrase familiar from the Viet Nam War. Gukeisen describes it as “graduate level warfare,” the soldier as innovative “scholar and statesman” able to think outside the box.”

Higher ups in U. S. Afghan military command all the way to General Petraeus, liking his 600 soldiers’ fighting expertise and his COIN ideas, gave him $850,000 in small bills for such jobs as building schools and buying rugs for mosques.

Combining effective combat with counterintelligence measures, Lt. Col. Gukeisen was developing “security bubbles,” in which life can improve and will, he hopes, draw in “the rest of the districts.” As the result of his methods, Gukeisen claims, “nearly half of the 400,000” of three districts and half of one in his area of operations (AO) “are within the bubble,” and violence of all kinds “dropped by 60 percent while intelligence from locals about the insurgents has soared by 80 percent.”

Lt. Col. Gukeisan, though he “looks forward to being back with his wife and…son” after two tours, is also “reluctant to leave things uncompleted” and would “’like to be here another year.’”

Sounds promising, but let’s inquire a bit. Is his success, “success”? Is the rosy picture convincing?
He omits the facts of Afghan life. Despite the billions spent fighting in Afghanistan, the quality of Afghan life has not improved: For examples, more than a quarter of Afghan children die before the age of five; life expectancy for women is just over 43 years, and for men under 43; 87% of Afghans have no access to clean water; infant mortality is the third highest in the world; 70% of the population is undernourished. And if you supported the war because you thought it would improve the lives of women, and your mind was not changed by the statistics just given, read A Woman Among Warlords by Malali Joya, who argues that the invasion and occupation have worsened the lives of women, and the surge will only magnify their suffering.

Gray omits UN data on civilian deaths, that numerous commentators consider the main cause of Afghan resistance.. The United Nations says more civilians were killed in 2009 than any other year since the US-led invasion of 2001. According to the UN mission in Afghanistan, over 2,400 died in 2009, a 14 percent increase from 2008. “Taliban”-linked attacks accounted for the “vast majority” of the casualties, a “Taliban” responding to the foreign occupation. Also, a report showed 3,000 civilians died in violent attacks in Pakistan last year as the result of the Pakistan army’s major assaults on large areas of its own country in response to U. S. demands and paid for by the U.S..

He omits the frightening and debilitating effects of brutal military culture and war on insecure and aggressive young men trained to kill. In On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society about Vietnam War veterans, Dave Grossman, Lt. Col. (Ret.) presents three important hypotheses: 1) That humans possess the reluctance to kill their own kind; 2) that this reluctance can be systematically broken down by use of standard conditioning techniques (basic training); and 3) that the reaction of "normal" (e.g., non-psychopathic) soldiers to having killed in close combat can be best understood as a series of stages. This systematic examination of the individual soldier's behavior leads to a series of useful explanations for a variety of phenomena, such as the high rate of post traumatic stress disorders among veterans and the climbing rate of aggravated assault.

A recent, intense insight into these consequences is provided by the book, Murder in Baker Company (and the film, independent of the book, In the Valley of Elah). The book reveals the four young men who were likely the murderers of their fellow soldier as scarred by war and two of them as victims of both the effects of war and socio-economic factors beyond their control, including their company’s participation in the April 2003 Midtown Massacre in Baghdad, where US troops gunned down more than 100 supposed enemy combatants, many of them unarmed and likely civilians.

And he omits the reality of the country-wide growing insurgency.
Finally, Gray depends mostly upon Lt. Colonel Gukeisen’s testimony. There seems no reason to doubt his veracity beyond the normal desire to look good to superiors. But we can wonder how he reached his statistics of 60 and 80 percent. And the Colonel himself-doesn’t know whether his COIN methods can be a model for the rest of Afghanistan. ‘Each [Area of Operation]…is different.’” Also, we can wish the reporter had probed the Colonel’s graduate level knowledge of the purported success of the “security bubbles” in counterinsurgency history, by which towns and cities are secured and the countryside abandoned to the insurgents. For example, Barbara Bick in her book on the rise of the “Taliban” refers to the northernAfghan city of Faizabad during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan defended by 6,000 Soviet troops but ultimately abandoned to the Afghans. Bick describes the Afghans as “ultimately unconquerable.” And recalling the failure of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan reminds us that the Afghans who received Lt. Col. Gukeisen’s $850,000 were those “who turn against the Taliban”; that is, mainly those who cooperate with the US and turn against their fellow Pashtuns who oppose the occupation enough to actively resist it, or in the Colonel’s estimate, nearly half the people in three districts of his AO and half in the fourth. That is, the gifts may have only superficial results. And reflect a moment upon the possible corruption that might result from the availability, if not to Gukeisen and his officers then to others, of three-quarters of a million dollars in small bills, even for an upright officer like Gukeisen.

But analysis of Gray’s article advances us only a little toward understanding the real nature of the “success” of the occupation. A book written about the Iraq occupation, however, provides the contexts needed. Are we winning?

II. Lt. Colonel Kauzlarich in Iraq

The questions raised by Gray’s account of apparently the best battalion-size counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan in 2009 are multiplied when one reads the book-length story of a similar operation in Iraq in 2007, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, whose commander, Lt. Col. Kauzlarich, is very like Lt. Col. Gukeisen. When we first meet him, Kauzlarich is equally confident and optimistic. His favorite, frequently repeated words are: “It’s all good” and “We’re winning.” He is physically brave, conscientious, and intellectually innovative. But whereas Gukeisen and his Afghan war appear simple, rational, and orderly (combat is using reliable intelligence to kill the enemy), Kauzlarich and his Iraqi war and world are violent, fearful, complicated, multi-layered, in motion, and unhinging. We see him in the many contexts of his commander role--from the horrendous violence of unpredictable combat to his relations with Iraqis to reflections on counterinsurgency. Interspersed with mortar attacks on their base, the IED bombs and EFP projectiles against their vehicles on patrol, the snipers, we learn what he thinks of himself, and what his subordinates think of him (“lost Kauz”). Inside the killing zone patrols and mortar and bomb attacks on his base, Kauzlarich is far from the tidy, ostensible progress of Gukeisen as described from the outside by reporter Gray.

The juxtaposition of shifting contexts is a chief method by which Finkel reveals his character. Gradually, as experiences multiply and unfold, General Petraeus’ static, recruiting poster boy Gukeisen becomes the real life Kauzlarich, and as success becomes “success” we discover the gulf between Washington’s view of the war and the soldiers’ experience of it. And we experience too the gap between Kauzlarich’s belief in winning, progress, and ultimate good and the experience of combat and the Iraqis he intends to protect within his armed bubble, to develop with his own caches of cash, and to train into a new army. ..

Not only did General Petraeus visit Gukeisen’s sector, but also did Gen. McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, and US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. Liking what they heard, they gave him truckloads of cash. And by Gray’s report, all did seem good; they did seem to be winning. Lt. Col. Gukeisen wanted a third tour. And Kauzlarich?

Lt. Col. Kauzlarich received money too, lots of it, from money to buy trash cans to big money for a sewage system. One of the comic cultural contrasts of the story, within the over-arching narrative of frequent peril, occurs when Kauzlarich tries to explain to the local civil manager the purpose of garbage cans. The man counters every suggestion with a story about the conditions of life there or the cultural traditions that made the colonel’s suggestion futile. But more often, Kauzlarich encountered people who wanted the money for their own use—to buy a car, to buy a pistol, paint, walls, electricity, TVs. He was frequently exasperated, particularly since so many projects were sidetracked, but persistent..

And General Petraeus also visited Lt. Col. Kauzlarich’s area of operation. And like Lt. Col. Gukeisen, he described his achievements and especially his plans to the General. Of course, neither said anything about failures. “One leadership lesson he’d absorbed well was the importance of knowing what to leave out of a conversation. There was no point, for instance, in describing the three dying faces of one battle” or “the weird search on the roadway for the correct number of severed limbs.” Keep the eye on the ball of victory. Don’t talk about the killed, wounded, wrecked. Tell about improvements. Praise the past week free of combat. Select his words carefully: congratulate the people of his area “on a job well done as far as security goes,” instead of more accurately saying: congratulate the people “for not trying to kill him and his soldiers for seven entire days in a row.” Tell the General “who had mesmerized Washington” how, “without seeming to brag,” his soldiers were using covert information-gathering technologies and its own “fusion-cell” to track insurgents down (good intelligence to kill the enemy, though not demonstrated in Finkel’s narrative). Tell General Petraeus (sitting only inches away) about his growing relationship with the District Council (not corroborated) and with one colonel of the Iraqi National Police (a fact). Tell him of his hopes to finish the $30 million sewer system (stalled by corruption) and to develop an adult literacy program in local schools (even though many schools had been ransacked and closed) to reduce the 50% illiteracy (although he could not monitor the $82,500 project because “participants said they feared being killed if Americans were present”).

And Gen. Petraeus was pleased: “’Great. That’s super.’” And after more self-congratulatory reports (the protection of fuel stations from insurgent control) he said: “’Well, you guys keep up the terrific work,’” posed for photographs, put his arm around Kauzlarich’s shoulders (who “looked the happiest he’d looked in a long time”), and flew off in his helicopter.

Immediately, Kauzlarich welcomes new troops to replace his killed and wounded. It was “the good day,” he said, ‘It’s all good.’”

And then he hears a great explosion, in the direction of the fuel stations. A call comes in that the platoon guarding the station was returning with wounded. At the aid station, he finds one Humvee destroyed by an EFP projectile, two soldiers crying, and another kicking another Humvee, “’Fucking war,’” says Kauzlarich, following a trail of blood inside. Joshua Reeves, twenty-six years old, in the “failing moments of his life,” “wasn’t breathing, his eyes weren’t moving, his left foot was gone, his back side was ripped open, his face had turned gray, his stomach was filling with blood,” and then his buddies sent word that he had learned that day that his wife “had just given birth to their first child.”

“’Jesus,’ Kauzlarich replies, ”his eyes filling with tears as he watched another soldier dying in front of him.”

The good General Petraeus fulfilled his reputation as a motivator. Back at his office, Kauzlarich had received an e-mail: “’Your many initiatives, such as securing the gas stations,’” and so on listing the colonel’s accomplishments. “’You guys are making big progress.’”

How could Lt. Col. Kauzlarich reply (“as another platoon of soldiers moved into sleeplessness, and a new mother in the United States still waited for [his] phone call”)? He began: “’It was our pleasure,” the General’s visit “’an absolute highlight of our deployment thus far.’” He paused. “’Unfortunately,’” he typed, as Finkel ends the chapter: “in the truth of that one word, a bad day came to an end.”

And in the ironical truth of the visit of General Petraeus and the death of Joshua Reeves, we glimpse some of the most important realities of wars completely missed by the patriotic, antiseptic newspaper article “Some credit Petraeus,” writes Gray admiringly, “with having helped to foster the new breed of officers to tackle counterinsurgency.” In July of 2007 President Bush had said, “I’m optimistic. We’ll succeed unless we lose our nerve.” In September of 2007 the President declared to the nation: “’We’re kicking ass.’” In fact it is a war of horrifying wounds. According to Dr. Glasser, “amputations are well over eight percent of those wounded—numbers not seen since our Civil War.” And “the number of traumatic head injuries is well over thirty percent of those wounded.”

By the end of The Good Soldiers, still optimistic Lt. Col. Kauzlarich had learned, however, something about “success.” Despite the one million killed Iraqis, the four million displaced, the hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows, 50 to 70% unemployment, the infrastructure devastated, as he rose up in the helicopter that was to carry him away from Iraq, he shut his eyes: “They had won. He was sure of it. They were the difference. It was all good. But he had seen enough.”

Note on Finkel’s Sources and Methods

Finkel spent eight months closely with the battalion in Iraq, and interviewed the wounded at their various hospitals in the US. He doesn’t claim to have been present at every scene he describes, but when he was not, “the details, descriptions, and dialogue” were verified. Everyone who talked with him knew it was on the record.

References

Bick, Barbara. Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Feminist Press, 2009.

Dawar, Rasool. “20 Killed in Pakistan Tribal Area.” ADG (Jan. 18, 2010).

Finkel, David. The Good Soldiers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Gamel, Kim. “Afghan Civilian Deaths Up in ’09.” ADG (Jan. 14, 2010.

Glasser , Ronald J., M.D. Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq. Braziller, 2009.

Gray, Denis. “U. S. Army Maverick Part of a New Breed.” ADG (12-20-09) 2A.

“The Ground Truth,” documentary depicting how war leaves behind a trail of broken bodies and minds.

Gusterson, Hugh and Catherine Besteman, eds. The Insecure American. U Calif. P, 2009. USA as a culture of fear.

Hiatt, Fred. “Soldiers Stories Tell Truth of War.” ADG (12-22-09) 5B. Rev. of Finkel.

Kovic, Ron. “The Forgotten Wounded of Iraq.” PeaceWork (Dec. 2006/January 2007).

Lyderson, Kari. “A Military Murder.” In These Times (Feb. 2010).

McCain, Cilla. Murder in Baker Company: How Four American Soldiers Killed One of Their Own. Chicago Review P, 2010. The movie In the Valley of Elah (2009) was about the same events.

Reid, Robert and Rahim Faiez. “Karzai Foiled in 2nd Try to Fill Cabinet.” ADG (Jan. 17, 2010). “…the insurgency grows more virulent.”

--Shah, Amir. “Kabul Embassy District Hit by Rocket.” ADG (Jan. 16, 2010).

Stephens, Warren. “’Valor’ Relates Tales of Heroism,” Northwest Arkansas Times (Nov. 8, 2009).

“Taliban Attacks Paralyze Kabul.” ADG (Jan. 19, 2010).

“Yemen Strike Kills 87, Sheik Reports.” ADG (9-18-09). Government planes, financed by the U. S., killed mostly women and children as part of its campaign to stamp out the 5-year Shiite rebellion.

#3 RECOGNIZING U.S. HEROISM

Courage in Combat, Band of Brothers

On Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009, Warren Stephens of Stephens Media originated a series of articles entitled “Saluting American Valor.” He explained how amazed he had been by reading an account of a War II veteran’s combat exploits, earning the soldier a Silver and a Bronze star. The idea struck him then to tell “the stories of heroism and bravery by the men and women in the United States Armed Forces.” from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “All have left the safety of home and family, often more than once, to serve their country with distinction,” and “in their moment of truth, displayed a selfless bravery in combat that most simply cannot comprehend.”

The format of the articles, written by diverse people from around the country, most of them journalists, follows three parts: I. Narrative of the event for which the soldier, sailor, or airman received the commendation; II. A summary of biography, the valorous act, where he or she is now, and why each joined the military; and III. An explanation of the award: Medal of Honor, Silver Star, and so on.

These fifty-four soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and on Jan. ?? he commenced a second series of 12 profiles) took great risks in carrying out their orders and responsibilities.

Army gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch, despite severe wounds from a rocket-propelled grenade explosion, ensured the safe return of his tank and crew. Silver Star.

USAF airman Nicole O’Hara and another airman killed six Iraqi insurgents to defeat an ambush attempt. Bronze Star.

Army Sgt. Alvin Shell Jr. ran through fire to save a sergeant from flames, suffering third-degree burns himself. Bronze Star.

All of these brave fifty-four displayed extraordinary physical courage and selflessness, six of whom were killed and received the Medal of Honor. All rightly deserve Mr. Stephens’ approval of their physical bravery.

But several profoundly essential realities are missing. These stories and these medals celebrate only an intense, adrenaline-filled moment in each man or woman’s life. I am reminded of Mark Brown, author of Blackhawk Down, describing Ranger staff sergeant John Stebbins, during the firefight in Mogadishu, October 3, 1993, going “berserk in battle, repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire to defend his position until he was injured and literally pulled to safety. He was awarded the silver star.

Such berserk derangements, especially if repeated, have physical and mental consequences. Soldiers must live the rest of their lives with these consequences. And there are tens of thousands of them.

Ronald Glasser, M.D., has studied the wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan (Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq). Those not returned to duty within a week (excluding PTSD) now number over fifty thousand. Physical injuries combined with TBI and PTSD puts the number of casualties at well over a hundred thousand and those numbers are growing. Amputations are well over eight percent of those wounded—numbers not seen since our Civil War. The number of traumatic head injuries is well over thirty percent of those wounded.

According to The Three Trillion Dollar War, the ultimate cost of Iraq and Afghan wars will be three to five trillion dollars that includes 500 billion for disability benefits and another 700 billion for medical care for the wounded and injured. And the wars are expanding to Pakistan and Yemen, and already included the global, misconceived, endless “War on Terrorism.”

From Glasser: The real "body count" of this war is not only our dead, but our wounded. The real risk to our troops is no longer the numbers of dead but the numbers ending up on orthopedic wards and neurosurgical units.

And a comment about his book: “Americans who believe that the human cost of Iraq can be measured primarily by body bags, need to read ‘Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq.’”

What about the rest of their lives? What about the real John Stebbins? 99.9 percent of what makes up his life is missing. Perhaps the rest of his life will constitute his heroic life much more than this frenzied moment.

A case can and ought to be made that true valor is exhibited by those who struggle for the rest of their lives with physical and mental wounds. Instead of exalting soldiers for a physically heroic moment in their lives, the result of Stephens’s profiles is to diminish the soldiers, by reducing them to one day or a few hours, when they and their tens of thousands of fellow soldiers have lives left to live with the remembered violence. If so, then the profiles function, even for the killed Medal of Honor winners, whatever was Mr. Stephens’ intention, more as exciting, adventurous military recruiting stories than as doorways into the understanding of lifetime valor.

But if he could not understand this distinction, because he was headlong promoting violence and wars as a chief instrument of foreign policy, another aspect to the page-one series ought to have been within his grasp, because it reflects at least (not his profession, since he is not a journalist but an investor) his ownership of newspapers.

I refer to the series of profiles as an egregious expression of thoughtless grassroots militarism. It is thoughtless because he plunged into the glorification of his admired individuals without even asking whether their valor served law and morality. Were they risking their lives and killing other people on the solid ground of U.S. and international law and the best ethics of their nation and religion? Did he not know? Did he not care? If the answer to both questions is not, then we must protest his abuse of power. An ignorant publisher or one indifferent to law and morality cannot serve the public good.

In some extenuation, his unexamined assumption equating all moments of physical bravery with law and justice finds wide acceptance, which is maybe why he also assumed he would be praised for the series and the newspaper would expand its circulation. For example, Bella Vista displays an expensive memorial to all soldiers and all U. S. wars, turning upside down the questionable legality and morality of the over forty interventions and invasions committed by the U. S. since 1945.

In my 1989 monograph, Grassroots Militarism, I describe the myriad expressions of militarism in Washington County, Arkansas. Even without military industries, violence and militarism were conditioning forces throughout the county (the county does now have military industry, for the Pentagon has sought to spread its increasing money to all counties).

I included examples of mainstream media acceptance or advocacy of violence and war. Stephens has ratcheted up this endorsement significantly.

And Washington County, Arkansas, reinforces Washington, D. C. The danger of this local acceptance of militarization is that it ensures what the military-industrial complex has already purchased. For example, the media watch group, FAIR, during the first 10 months of 2009 examined the opinion columns appearing in the Washington Post and the New York Times regarding what should be US Afghanistan policy. Of the 67 columns published in the WP, 61 supported a continued war, opposed by six anti-war. Of the 43 columns in the NYT, 36 supported the war, with seven opposed. Debate did occur on the op-ed pages of both newspapers, but over whether to escalate or pursue an alternative war strategy. Argument for withdrawal was silenced. That was the precise situation in Congress.

DISCUSS THE ABSENCE OF STUDY AND DISCUSS IN THE GOOD SOLDIERS

Heroes of a Different Kind: Moral Valor

Good Soldier Valor

David Finkel in The Good Soldiers shows how to portray the fuller life of soldiers in combat and thereby the truth of heroism as physical becomes moral valor.

Finkel was allowed to study and record the actions of one battalion of soldiers in Iraq for 18 months . What he discovered and with what skill he told their stories will surely bring another prize to the author. Week after week, the soldiers obeyed orders to patrol their area of operations, a violent part of Baghdad. Many were killed or wounded by sniper, IED bomb, EFP projectile, hand grenade, mortar. The combat scenes Finkel describes are horrendous but also more complicated and conflicted, more adequately human, because, in contrast to Stephens’ profiles of valor, they showed the men not only close-up in the minutes of one engagement, but, most importantly, afterward.

For example, in a single street battle, an IED bomb punctures PFC Gajdos’ brain, one of Atchley’s eyes was blown out, and Johnson’s hand was blown off. Sgt. Gietz goes berserk. He breaks an innocent observer’s jaw, then shoots at people firing from a rooftop, “seeing one individual’s head just, it was weird, like a pink mist come out the back of his head…and inside my head I was like, ‘Great. One down.’” But my point is not the terrifying events that crowd together in these moments, but the fact that these atrocious events continued for their 18 months, and despite these dreadful woundings and killings that they remembered seeing afterward again and again, they continued to obey orders to patrol with intrepidity almost up to the day of their departure from Baghdad. This is physical valor par excellence.

But apparently Finkel did not encounter in those 18 months any soldier who questioned or even thought—examined--the purpose of the violence. For example, to Martin Luther King, Jr., it became clear that the right to sit next to whites at a lunch counter was useless without the funds for a meal, and the funds would never be available to the poor so long as the nation’s leaders squandered money and resources in illegal and immoral wars. In all those months, apparently, not one soldier, despite the ease with which many justified the invasion, occupation, and killing in the cause of “freedom,” ever got close to King’s thoughts.

Valor of the Wounded

Some left before the end of the tour, flown back to Fort Riley, where they began, or to the Army’s severe burns and surgery center in Amarillo. At Riley the Ranger Ball brought many together. Sgt. Emory, shot in the head in Kamaliyah, came in his wheelchair, struggled to stand, his posture lopsided, his left arm quivering, his head misshapen, his speech slurred, his memory hazy, but he stood. Joe Mixson was there (and later at Amarillo), drunk, clothed in underwear, bow tie, and clean bandages over his stumps, spinning around on the dance floor in his wheelchair with a U.S. flag attached to the back, screaming “Thank you, Colonel K!” They would be at Amarillo, along with another good soldier with a foot blown up and amputated, another with shrapnel in the groin. And David Crookston was there, burned over the entirety of his body. On the worst day, his blood pressure plummeted, his organs began shutting down, he was in septic shock, and he was unconscious, but he did not die then. Duncan “kept finding ways not to die,” his mother said. His battalion commander, Lt. Col. Kauzlarich, visited to bring medals—the Combat Infantryman Badge, the Army Commendation Medal--, but there was no place to put them. He died died in the presence of mother and wife.

Valor to PTSD

The physically wounded of torn flesh are also psychologically damaged. For others, the physical wounds are not discernible by scars or missing body parts. Seeing and remembering the burnings and dismemberments were scarifying for all, but too much for a few, especially in a second or third tour. Sgt. Schumann was in his third deployment, had been there 34 months, and he was one of the battalion’s “very best soldiers.” But he could not stand it any longer. It was the seeing that doomed him. “His war had become unbearable. He was seeing over and over his first kill disappearing into a mud puddle, looking at him as he sank. He was seeing a house that had just been obliterated by gunfire, a gate slowly opening and wide-eyed little girl about the age of his daughter peering out….He was still tasting Sergeant Emory’s blood. He needed to go home.” (185). And home meant being “loaded up wth antidepressant medication, and anti-anxiety medication, and anti-panic medication…and something else for the impotence that had developed from all of the medications, until finally his wife mentioned that he was turning into a zombie” (270-1).

Family Valor

Nor are all of the heroes wounded soldiers. Their loved ones seeking to care for them deserve a series for valor. Duncan Crookston, nineteen years old, is almost the equivalent of the torso in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. Just about everything burned off. But his mother Lee and his young, new wife Meaghun were with him every day, and every day a crisis. Other relatives had visited their wounded, but Lee and Meaghun had stayed and every day had tended him, while nights they called and wrote home to Duncan’s supporters. Even a kids’ football team dedicated their season to him, and had a photo taken of them yelling “Freedom!” for him to see one day. His mother wrote of his last night, when they allowed him a “‘good death’…for a young man who fought so hard and long.’” Still patriotic for the war, for his “good death” she ends with the moral that “’evil is worth fighting,’” because good people exist, and Duncan was one of the good.

We learn nothing about the lives of Lee and Meaghun after Duncan’s death. At the hospital his mother apparently remains strong in her convictions of good and evil. But many spouses suffer from the equivalent of PTSD. Deborah Mullen, the wife of Adm. Mike Mullen, said that “military suicide-prevention efforts must also consider suicides among troops’ spouses. There’s another side to this and that’s family members who commit suicide.”

Courage of Different Kinds Speaking Truth to Power

The faithfulness of a mother and wife to their dying soldier leads us outward into other kinds of moral courage. Irshad Manji founded the Moral Courage Project to promote autonomy and critical thinking. Either you swallow the orthodoxy of your ethnic, ideological, professional, and national group or you’re deemed a traitor.
How did apartheid come to an end in South Africa? How has racial segregation been challenged in America? Through “moral courage” — the willingness to speak truth to power and risk backlash for a greater good. As Robert F. Kennedy told students at the University of Cape Town:

“Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet is it the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.” Irshad teaches her students: “When you exercise your unique voice, your community grows from talent that would otherwise be lost to self-censorship. Dare to develop individuality; it expands community.”

In contrast, military training instills the opposite of moral courage. The purpose of basic training is to mold group think, instant obedience, and readiness to kill. The Marine Rifle Creed says it most clearly. Here is a brief excerpt: “…I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I WILL….Before God, I swear this creed” The Creed’s last sentence inadvertently exposes the permanent war at its core: “So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!.” One marine commented, following combat in Iraq: “The purity of service had been corrupted by the diffuse definition of enemy and by the moral ambiguity of political language” (Busch).

Howard Zinn died January 27, 2010. He argued steadfastly that If we are ever to have a world without wars, a world of peace, justice, and environmental protection, we must replace the conditioning for violence and wars in our warfare state by the values of truthtelling, mutuality, cooperation, and friendship toward the peoples of the world. We would never create a peaceful world so long as we praised and awarded military activities. Mr. Stephens, his books challenge the values of violence you embrace and would force upon us page -one day after day. I challenge you to read those books—A People’s History of the United States, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train--and to report them for a balanced newspaper.

Military Resisters: Valor!

Fundamental to a peaceful society is truth. We must tell the full truth about heroes. The moment of truth of selfless bravery in a firefight? Yes. But consider: Heroes defined by a medal for a moment of physical courage know they are a reality greatly more. The medal, the handshake, the profile for the moment—the medal-winners soon know how inadequate are these gestures for the rest of their lives. That is why the heroes themselves and the society ostensibly benefiting from their valor need fullness

And this need to encompass the hero includes the alternatives to warriors-- nonviolent peacemakers, military resisters, military, government, and corporate whistleblowers, and investigative reporters. Especially for them, because while power works ceaselessly to hide the worst in its warriors—from No Gun Ri to My Lai to Falujah, and even the killing of its own, as with Pat Tillman--

It works just as hard to dilute dissenting heroes.

. Martin Luther King, Jr., is the great hero of civil rights? Yes, but he was an even greater hero in opposition to US aggressions and wars and to US capitalism’s deepening gap between rich and poor. Helen Keller is recognized as heroic, but few people know she was a Socialist leader and would not cross a picket line. In contrast, Teddy Roosevelt, celebrated for beginning the US park system, also praised the general who massacred civilians during the Spanish-American War, both of whom and the war Mark Twain denounced.

Enlistees know they may be ordered to war. But two problems arise. One is the matter of choice. A passage in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers acknowledges part of the difficulty: “They were soldiers whose choices had ended when they had signed contracts and taken their oaths.” But had they actually chosen? That is, had they had an abundance or variety of alternatives? Had they the power to choose freely? Or was their choice of the military because of a limited number of possibilities? Finkel continues: “ Whether they had joined for reasons of patriotism, of romantic notions, to escape a broken home.., or out of economic need, their job now was to follow the orders of other soldiers who were following orders, too.” (83-85).

Stephens’ series offers some insight into the issue of choice, because each writer asks the question or attempts to answer the question: “Why he joined the Army?” In addition to the motives just listed, family tradition turns up often. That is, the motives do not reflect choice in the sense of reflection, but something habitual, automatic, or necessary.

The second problem is that some soldiers, after having enlisted, discover their war is illegal, as in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq. When given an order to perform an illegal action, members of the military are bound to refuse.

Under the supremacy clause of the United States Constitution, the president has the responsibility to abide by all international treaties which the US has signed. Centrally among these is the United Nations Charter, violation of which is a breach of the president’s oath to carry out the laws of the land. Article Two of the U. N. Charter requires the leaders of all member states to “refrain…from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state….” (Boyle)

Neither of these countries had attacked the U. S.. The center for planning the 2001 attack on the Trade Center in New York City was Hamburg, Ger., and the perpetrators were mainly Saudis. The invasion of Iraq was based entirely upon spurious claims and fake evidence. Both invasions were illegal acts of aggression, which is a war crime. Some soldiers know or learn this, and because they do, some of them refuse to fight and kill.

In June 2006, Army First Lt. Ehren Watada was the first U. S. military officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq. He was not a pacifist, but he concluded that the President, Congress, and military leaders responsible for the Iraq war were a “threat to the Constitution,” which he had sworn to protect. To stand alone for the Constitution, against powerful custom and authority, against the disapprobation is his own “band of brothers,” required great courage and deserves respect. And Lt. Watada spoke for all men and women who join the military believing the civilian and military leaders will not put them in harm’s way except for the defense of the country. A few of the other service men and women who possessed the courage of their convictions and spoke the truth, no matter the consequences, and refused further to fight are: Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes, Sergeant Kevin Benderman. Mr. Stephens, give these men the honor they deserve.

Other Government Resisters

During the Vietnam War, dissent to official policies was so strong within the State Department that it created a “dissent channel” for opposing viewpoints. Career employees throughout the government also tried to change the Bush administration’s war policies, but without success.

During the approach to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, three career Foreign Service officers resigned in protest. John Brady Kiesling, John Brown, and Ann Wright felt that their differences with the Bush Administration were so great as to leave them no alternative, and their true patriotism lay in opposition not obedience. Kiesling wrote: “Because we were loyal to the President and our careers, we failed the American people.” (Wright and Dixon).

Ann Wright thought the invasion of Afghanistan was justified under international law. But “Iraq had not done anything to us. Therefore, under international law—the Nuremberg Principles and the Geneva Conventions [D: And the UN Charter]—this would be a war of aggression, a war crime.” Furthermore, the US claim it was in danger from WMD was unfounded. And a preemptive attack would incite enemies against worldwide. The day before the bomging began, she cable her letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Within a few days she had received over 400 emails from SD colleagues congratulating her, Kiesling, and Brown.

Because Matthew Hoh, a Marine Captain who became a diplomat in Afghanistan, believed the Bush/Obama Afghan war to be utter folly—unwinnable and producing terrorism worldwide--, he resigned from the State Dept. in Oct. of 2010. “Hoh knew the malignancy of want behind the war. Eight years after the U.S. invasion and a third of trillion dollars spent [Dick: an underestimate, see Stiglitz and Bilmes], half the nation faces starvation on 45 cents a day, half the children die before five, and half the surviving young have no schools….He knew well the source of that scourge in the U.S.-installed Kabul regime, a kleptocracy of war- and drug-lords….” (Morris and Kenney).

Military Whistleblowers

Because democracy depends upon informed citizens, secrecy and censorship (especially self-censorship) need persistent, sharp resistance. We need insiders who will expose wrongdoing and reveal the truth. Fortunately, such individuals exist to give the public knowledge into the improper and illegal workings of corporations and government.

Another group of military who act on conscience is whistleblowers. Think of what we know because of them: the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, secret CIA “black site” detention facilities abroad. It takes courage to reveal wrongdoing in the military, for such acts of conscience generally produce anger, retribution, and even violence. Let’s take one example—revelations of the criminal acts committed by military personnel against prisoners at Abu Ghraib.. There ought to be a Star with Clusters for Spc. Joe Darby, Capt. Ian Fishback, and Sgt. Samuel Provance, Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been tortured to death. Their testimony contradicts completely the official report of the deaths.

Other Government Whistleblowers

Remember the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. He leaked records that exposed decades of deception—lies, cover-ups--that began and sustained the US involvement in Vietnam. Not only did he consider his actions patriotic in spirit but loyal to the Constitution and the rule of law. He contributed to ending the war. Mr. Stephens, give Mr. Ellsberg a Salute. Give all the government whistleblowers a series for their valorous defense of truth and the Constitution against law violation, fraud, waste, and incompetence..

As much as it takes for a soldier to blow the whistle, the same courage is required for civilian government employees. For rather than being honored, they are often retaliated against—accused of being psychotic, of seeking revenge, of disloyalty—and sometimes lose their jobs, houses, and relationships. One FBI agent who told his superiors their investigations of suspected terrorists violated wiretapping rules was maligned and his career ruined.

Congress passed laws to protect whistleblowers; for example, the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act, but many gaps and loopholes exist, and Whistleblowers remain at a disadvantage, are punished, and suffer anguish and despair. . Still they come forward, a testimony to the power of the individual conscience.

Ann Wright and Susan Dixon discuss seven whistleblowers in the U. S. government: Jesselyn Radack, Mary Ryan, Sibel Edmonds, Russell Tice, Coleen Rowley, Joseph Wilson. Tne seventh is Bunnatine Greenhouse, Senior Contracting Officer with the Army Corps of Engineers, who exposed corrupt behavior by the company and illegal relationships between Corps officials and Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Instead of being rewarded, she was demoted. She is now defending herself in the courts.

Mr. Stephens!

Reporters, Investigative Journalists

The great value of journalists to a culture of truth for a democracy is inestimable. The IRE Journal (Investigative Reporters and Editors) annually printed an article on selected books. Beginning in the Winter 2010 number, IREJ provides an online database of investigative and explanatory books written by US journalists, published in English. More than 250 books are listed from 2009. Go to: http://data.nicar.org/irejournal

One might think an owner of newspapers, even though Warren Stephens is not a journalist but an investor, would feel uneasy at glorifying armed violence so much and journalists and the journalist victims of violence so little. Since information, informed citizens, are essential to a democracy, and since so many of our leaders say we are in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend “freedom” and “progress,” reporters and editors who try to tell readers the truth about the invasion and occupation of these countries might conceivably be preeminent persons to Mr. Stephens.

Several media organizations record the deaths and woundings of journalists around the world. One is the Center for the Protection of Journalists

According to CPJ, the year 2009 witnessed the highest number of journalists ever recorded killed. Unprecedented violence in the Philippines in November, for example, drove the number of journalists killed in 2009 to a record number of 71. While 2010 has just begun, we are seeing a steady rate of fatal violence. In Afghanistan: two journalists were killed two weeks apart in roadside bomb attacks while embedded with soldiers. CPJ's annual book on freedom of the press, Attacks on the Press, tells the stories of journalists at risk throughout the world. Mr. Stephens does not lack sources of information.

Furthermore, CPJ advocates for killed and wounded journalists to ensure that their killers be tried and convicted and for the safety and well being of all those working towards a free press, local journalists and foreign correspondents alike.

How can Mr. Stephens so exalt so many soldiers for their sufferings and killings and (as far as I know) say nothing anywhere about the heroes of democratic information, the foundation of freedom?

I will end with one of our country’s greatest living journalist heroes—Helen Thomas. She asks the President why our military is in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why? Why did Abdulmutallab try to blow up that airplane? Why do so many people around the world hate U.S. policies so much they will resist our military occupations so fiercely even to suicide attacks?

But these are questions our Pentagon and our Presidents cannot answer because they cannot hear them. U.S. policies are not to be blamed, not to be questioned. Why is not the issue. Our soldiers did not suffer and die and struggle with wounds for imperial or delusory policies! But for “freedom.” “America stands with those who seek justice and progress.”

But Helen Thomas persists: What causes terrorism? And our leaders reply: evil bin Laden and al-Qaeda. But why? Al-Qaeda offers “nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death.” But what does the U.S. vision offer, with its direct killing of at least 288,000 Muslims during the last 30 years (Findley), its unprovoked invasion of Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, and four million displaced? What is the real motivation of Muslim anger? Why do so many hate us? (McGovern). Who are the suicide bombers? She knows that that almost all bombings occur in countries occupied by foreign troops, and the bombings cease when the troops leave. (Findley).

Mr. Stephens, why are your newspapers glorifying the valor of military invasion and occupation violence instead of examining the underlying causes of the violence and praising the journalists who risk their lives to discover the truth?

Conclusion

Medal-winning soldiers in combat, wounded soldiers returned home, relatives of the wounded, military and other government resisters, military and other government whistleblowers, and journalists, all possess degrees of physical or moral valor. May the owners and employees of our media reflect about the differences and provide their readers and viewers models for the future, of the kind of nation we wish to build.

And of course many, many other kinds of valorous people exist to the benefit of the world.

SOURCES

--Alford, C. Fred. Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power.

--Bacevich, Andrew. The New American Militarism: How Americans are seduced by War.

--Bennett, James R. Grassroots Militarism: A Model for Community Research. Center on War and the Child, 1989.

Bleifus, Joel. “Editorial: Obama’s ‘Ben Tre Logic.’” In These Times (January 2010).

--Blum, William. Rogue State and Killing Hope.

--Boudreau, Tyler. Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine. See his article “To Kill or Not to Kill,” The Progressive (Feb. 2009), 30-32. “To master one’s reluctance to take life, one must stop revering life so much, particularly that of an enemy. This unseemly dimension of war…was almost universally taken for granted within the Marine Corps.” In military desensitization training “the enemy’s death is meant to be regarded with indifference and sometimes with amusement.”

-- Mark Bowden. Rev. of The Mystery of Courage by William Ian Miller, in Policy Review (Feb./March 2001). http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3484036.html

-- Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killling in 20th CenturyWarfare. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War

-- Boyle, Francis. Protesting Power. Rev. Ground Zero (July 2008), “The Origins of International Law” by Sister Jackie Hudson, OP. The post-WWII trials held in Nuremberg brought war crime charges against individual Germans. Individuals were held accountable for their crimes during war, and “just obeying orders” was denied as an excuse.

--Busch, Benjamin. ”Bearing Arms: The Serious Boy at War.” Harper’s Magazine (Feb. 2009).

--Carroll, James. House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.

--The Committee to Protect Journalists.

--Derian, James Der. Virtuous War: Mappi9ng the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.

--Findley, Paul. How President Obama Can Earn His Nobel Peace Prize.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs” (March 2010).

--Finkel, David. The Good Soldiers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

--Ronald J. Glasser, M.D. Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq.

-- Michael Glueck, “New Wounds,” Orange County Business Journal, April 24, 2006 (on Glasser).
--Grossman, Dave, Lt. Col. (Ret.). On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. From Library Journal:Grossman (psychology, West Point) presents three important hypotheses: 1) That humans possess the reluctance to kill their own kind; 2) that this reluctance can be systematically broken down by use of standard conditioning techniques; and 3) that the reaction of "normal" (e.g., non-psychopathic) soldiers to having killed in close combat can be best understood as a series of "stages" similar to the ubiquitous Kubler-Ross stages of reaction to life-threatening disease. While some of the evidence to support his theories have been previously presented by military historians (most notably, John Keegan), this systematic examination of the individual soldier's behavior, like all good scientific theory making, leads to a series of useful explanations for a variety of phenomena, such as the high rate of post traumatic stress disorders among Vietnam veterans, why the rate of aggravated assault continues to climb, and why civilian populations that have endured heavy bombing in warfare do not have high incidents of mental illness. This important book deserves a wide readership.

--On Combat, The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman with Loren Christensen. PPCT Research Publications, 2004. This book explores in detail what physically and mentally happens to most people when confronted with a deadly threat. Both authors have written previous books dealing with this subject. This collaboration brings together the best both have to offer.

--Johnson, Chalmers. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

--MacNair, Rachel and Stephen Zunes. Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War.

Praeger/Greenwood, 2008. Advert. in The Progressive (Sept. 2008). “…right-to-lifers would be more effective if they also opposed other forms of killing, and the same is true for peace and justice movements.”

--McGovern, Ray. “’Why?’ Answering Helen Thomas.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (March 2010).

--Moats, Lillian. The Letter from Death. Three Arts P, 2009. Includes the facts and history of the natural aversion of soldiers to killing. Wars can’t be blamed on “human nature.”

--Irshad Manji. Moral Courage Project. http://www.moralcourage.com/about/

-- William Ian Miller. The Mystery of Courage. Harvard UP, 2001.

--Morris, Roger and George Kenney. “A Diplomatic Casualty of War.” In These Times (Jan. 2010). Hoh rsigned from State Dept. because the Afghan war is utter folly—unwinnable and producing terrorism worldwide.

“Deborah Mullen.” ADG (1-14-10) 1A.

--Sniegoski, Stephen. The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel (2003) and The Transparent Cabal (2009), explain what motivated the US supporters of war with a country that never attacked us and posed little threat to the U.S.

--Soldiers of Conscience documentary film. 2007. “When is it right to kill? In the midst of war, is it right to refuse? Eight U.S. soldiers, some who have killed and some who said no, reveal their inner moral dilemmas in "Soldiers of Conscience." Made with official permission of the U.S. Army,

--Solomon, Norman. War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

--Stiglitz, Joseph and Linda Bilmes. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Norton, 2008. The Iraq and Afghan wars actually may cost $5 trillion if all related costs are included, especially the long-term care of the wounded.

--Wright, Ann, Col. (Ret.) and Susan Dixon. Dissent: Voices of Conscience, Government Insiders Speak Out Against the War in Iraq. Koa, 2008. Daniel Ellsberg wishes this book was in “every personal computer in the Pentagon, the White House, State department, NSA, CIA, and FBI.”

back home