A challenge for Obama: Iraq
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One of the challenges new President Obama will face is how to manage the ongoing war in Iraq. In ‘Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan — Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations,’ Iraq Veterans Against the War speak out about their experiences there. The book is taken from live testimony — at Winter Soldier events — of soldiers who started out enthusiastic but eventually found themselves opposed to the war. Their perspective, just one take on the war, is notable for its sense of committment that turns to regret and loss.
Logan Laituri, a medic and forward observer from New Jersey, served in Iraq in 2004-05. He was part of a patrol that came across a U.S. convoy that had had an accident; Laituri found a soldier trapped under the wrecked Humvee who was judged to be too far gone for help. The badly injured man held on for 90 minutes as others around him were attended to; he died later on the way to a clinic. Laituri says:
For some reason that hit me pretty hard. For nine nights I didn’t sleep. I realized that there’s a great possibility that he had died hearing everybody around him and knowing that nobody was coming to his aid. In the tents at night, in the pitch dark, I couldn’t stop thinking about how it felt being trapped under a Humvee and possibly not being able to catch a breath and cry for help. And then I realized that, despite all the Iraqi bodies I had seen throughout Iraq, it was an American soldier that made me disturbed. I still wrestle with that. What does that mean? That I saw these dead Iraqis, but it took an American soldier, someone my own race and creed and skin color, to wake me up out of slumber.
Michael Prysner, from Tampa, Fla., served in 2003-04. His early assignments included removing Iraqis from their homes; later, he became an interrogator.
I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame.... We were told we were fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war. I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families thrown into the street in this country, in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away, they are right here at home, and if we can organize and fight, we can stop this war... and we can create a better world.
Today may have seen the largest inaugural celebration ever, but our soldiers are still at war in Iraq. And figuring out how to best manage that difficult war will be only one of Obama’s many new responsibilities.
— Carolyn Kellogg
