The social consequences of violence
In his book Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War, Evan Wright speaks of the horrors that he winesses duing the camapign to "liberate " Bagdad. Every generation has to bear witness to the holocaust visited upon peoples and societies so that the world will remember what they saw and bear witness to their everlasting creator the sufferings they have seen. This war has not yet found a Bob Dylan or a Wilfred Owen, but an embedded journalist has borne witness and let us listen to him:
In the past sis weeks I have been on hand while this comparatively small unit of marines has killed quite a few people> I personally saw 3 civillians shot, one of them fatally with a bullet in the eye. These were the tip of the iceberg. The marines killed dozens, if not hundreds in combat through direct fire and through repeated, at times almost indiscriminate, artillery strikes. And no one will probably ever know how many died from the approxiamately 30,000 pounds of bombs First Recon ordered dropped from the aircraft.
These are words of a witness to the war: an Embedded journalist, from whose book I have taken the above passage.
The marines and other soldiers who kill Iraqis when they stry too close to the Green Zone or spry machine gun fire into a bus full of children, cannot be normal human beings after they return to civillian file. Such wanton killing will have its consequences on the social fabric of US life. Norman Mailer in hiis The Naked and the Dead spoke of a different war. He has not seen what is going on in Iraq today.. When the artllery shells fall on soft human bodies it sends out a splatter of burning flesh whose rancid smell can be addictive.
In fact, the recent announcement that the tour of duty of enlisted men will be extended has already led to mild muted protest. As days go by these voices will become more strident.