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Choosig to Do Damage - Iraq, Three Years After
Posted by Kevin

War is hell:

“I just want to clean my gun,” police reported the father of two saying. He’d started with a beer that summer evening and then moved on to four tumblers of Jack Daniel’s and Coke. Then he demanded his 9 mm Makarov.

“It’s not here, Bill,” Wendy recalls saying. The relief that the 40-year-old woman felt at having her husband return from Iraq nine months earlier had dissolved in his dark moods and the growing realization that he could hurt himself. Wendy was worried enough to have taken Bill’s old pistol from its bedroom hiding place, wrapped it in a plastic bag and shoved it under the back deck.

“Give me the gun,” he barked again. He smacked the electric fan, sending it skittering across the floor. Sammy’s little sister, Maggie, 10, started to cry. Their dad never hit anyone or anything.

Suddenly, Bill grabbed his wife’s left wrist. The girls screamed.

Wendy snatched the telephone, dialing 9-1-1 and crying out for help “Now!” Minutes later, Hillsboro police pounded across the freshly stained porch to the front door.

Bill slammed out the back. The Oregon Army National Guardsman limped across the large and well-used backyard. He passed the girls’ tiny playhouse and his prized garden of tomatoes, beans and corn, now weed-choked and abandoned. He headed to his motorcycle shed as he had every summer day since returning from Iraq, barricading himself behind a wall of head-busting heavy metal music and the stale smell of alcohol.

As police officers stood before the barbecue grill and lawn chairs, Bill “appeared to be in a trance and remembering the events in Iraq.” He didn’t want to be ambushed, they said in their official report, by them - or the Iraqis. Then, as police watched, Sgt. Stout pulled out his cell phone and called in help.
… e wanted the gun, he finally told an officer, because it made him feel safe. “You don’t know what happened in Iraq,” he said, growing agitated. Police moved in with handcuffs. Then Bill Stout, the father who sent flowers to his daughters’ classrooms every Valentine’s Day, the stand-up neighbor and gentle husband, was booked on two counts of felony assault.

Wendy Stout cried at Hallmark commercials, but she watched dry-eyed as police led her husband past her. “Don’t look,” she recalls saying to her daughters.

But Samantha and her sister could not help themselves. Maggie’s anguish carried across the green grass as the strongest man in their world hunched in the patrol car.

“Daddy is crying,” she sobbed. “Daddy is crying.”

(via Steve Gilliard)

and not just for the soldiers:

“We have a car coming,” someone called out as we entered an intersection. We could see the car about a 100 meters away. The car continued coming; I couldn’t see it anymore from my perch but could hear its engine now, a high whine that sounded more like acceleration than slowing down. It was maybe 50 yards away now.

“Stop that car!” someone shouted out, seemingly simultaneously with someone firing what sounded like warning shots - a staccato, measured burst. The car continued coming. And then, perhaps less than a second later, a cacophony of fire, shots rattling off in a chaotic, overlapping din. The car entered the intersection on its momentum and still shots were penetrating it and slicing it. Finally, the shooting stopped, the car drifted listlessly, clearly no longer being steered, and came to a rest on a curb. Soldiers began to approach it warily.

The sound of children crying came from the car. I walked up to the car and a teenaged girl with her head covered emerged from the back, wailing and gesturing wildly. After her came a boy, tumbling onto the ground from the seat, already leaving a pool of blood.

“Civilians!” someone shouted, and soldiers ran up. More children - it ended up being six all told - started emerging, crying, their faces mottled with blood in long streaks. The troops carried them all off to a nearby sidewalk.

… Meanwhile, the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their wounds or trying to comfort them. The Army’s translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting, “Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home”

The war in Iraq was a war of choice. Bush chose, despite the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with either 9/11 or al-Queda and was not a threat to the safety of the United States, to invade the country, topple its government, and replace it with one of our liking. It was an incredibly stupid thing to do. War changes things in unpredictable ways. The families of the civilians that die in wars do not look kindly upon the people they hold responsible for those deaths. Wars tear apart the fabric of society and leave nothing to replace them. The aftermath of such violence is the natural breeding ground of anarchy, sectarian violence, and the rise of warlords and other strongmen. Violence radicalizes a population through the sheer weight of blood, cutting off options, marginalizing moderates, and proving true the worst case scenarios. The problem with Bush’s little adventure in the desert is not that they ran it poorly, though they did. The problem is that they believed they could sculpt a nation with a bullet and a bomb.

The rest of us will be paying for that stupidity for a long, long time to come. I get spam once or twice a week telling me that I should pray for Bush. Perhaps, but I think that the soldiers and the civilians in Iraq could use the help more. I prefer to spend my prays on more useful things than continued good fortune for the worst President of my life. Praying that American soldiers and foreign civilians are never again subjected to the whims of vainglorious morons like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush.

Think Progress has a timeline of the Iraq War in all its awful glory here.

March 20th, 2006 Iraq | 13 comments