Afghanistan is another can of worms. Obama had better think twice, three times before getting more deeply engaged militarily with the Taliban.
Neither the Brits nor the Soviet army could contain those ill-armed, mountainous tribes.
To date our Predator missile strikes probably have killed more innocents in Afghanistan and Pakistan than Al Qaeda or Taliban allies, thus creating more enemies against U.S. and NATO troops.
Meanwhile, Iraq has seen an uptick in violence, including the killing of five soldiers by one of our own due to shell shock – that good old World War I term we now call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome – for when a grunt gets his brains scrambled during the heat of battle.
It doesn’t end in Iraq. Soldiers and Marines bring those scrambled brains marching home.
William Rivers Pitt, a Truthout columnist, cites a number of cases:
– Two vets, ages 21 and 23, caught robbing two Iowa farmers, savagely beat them and tied them to a fence post. Their injuries included skull and facial fractures and a broken arm.
– A Tennessee vet, 25, kidnapped his girlfriend, forced her to drive to an ATM, robbed her, took her home and raped her.
– A 20-year-old man on a 1 a.m. beer run in Las Vegas, wearing a long black coat with an assault rifle underneath, shot and killed another man and woman in an alley.
The list is legion.
What also bugs GIs in Iraq and when they return home is water – clear, cool water.
“We were rationed two bottles of water a day,” Army Staff Sgt. Dustin Robey told Jeremy Ragalski a reporter for KHOU-TV in Houston
Not enough.
“You’ll see guys throw up, you’ll see them pass out,” he said.
It started early in the war, Robey said; he and others are still paying the price. Soldiers were given only the equivalent of half a gallon of water a day to survive while dodging bullets in blistering heat that reached 130 degrees. He would sometimes run out while on missions.
According to Fort Bragg documents water losses can reach 15 liters, or four gallons a day per soldier in dessert conditions. A 1957 Army field manual says you need a minimum of one gallon a day to survive.
Rogalski says the soldiers were forced to improvise, even to steal.
“We were inside a house, I’d stick my head under a faucet and drink,” Robey said. But it would be untreated. “We had a rash of dysentery go through my company. I’d say 50 to 60 guys got it.”
“Water buffaloes,” storage trucks supposed to bring purified water to troops in the field, were one option even though the water was so heavily treated with chemicals ” no one could keep it down.”
There was one supply of potable, bottled water: the Baghdad International Airport. To get there, the soldiers had to travel the deadly airport road where they found water in the hands of civilian contractors who were supposed to be distributing it to the soldiers.
They raided the pallets of bottled water.
“It really hit me the day I was with my commander and we’re stealing water,” Robey said.
Dr. Stephen Fadem, who teaches at the Veterans Administration, says, “If soldiers … are not getting adequate water that needs to be taken seriously.”
In the short term, he said, one could collapse; in the long term, they could end up with kidney injury.”
And the showers are often dirty, according to Sgt. Casey J. Carter, who was told by his superiors it “was none of his f…… concern.”
Robey says he’s passed hundreds of kidney stones since returning from Iraq.
“It feels like someone’s stabbing you in the side over and over again. I take 26 different types of pills a day.”
The Army has forced him to retire and slashed his pay. His family faces foreclosure and has moved in with relatives.
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