When Even Our Soldiers Ask 'Why?' Shouldn't Our Boys be Home by Now?

Author: Wellington Lyons

"To save your world, you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?" W.H. Auden, wrote in his "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier."

Two more American soldiers were killed in Iraq on Oct. 19, when their patrol was ambushed by guerilla fighters brandishing rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. The attack occurred in Kirkuk, a predominantly Sunni city about 160 miles north of the capital.

A day earlier, two American soldiers were shot to death by Shiite gunmen in the holy city of Karbala while a homemade bomb took the lives of two more servicemen in the streets of Baghdad. In recent weeks, U.S. occupation forces have suffered an average of 22 attacks per day. The Iraqi people aren't welcoming us with open arms; they're resisting us in open warfare.

Our soldiers in the field are all too aware of this truth and are beginning to speak out against the cheerful propaganda disseminated by the Pentagon and the White House. Juan Castillo, a 21-year-old artillery man from Daytona Beach, Fla., was recently profiled by the New York Times in an article about the military's new furlough program. Specialist Castillo used this opportunity to share his thoughts on the war.

"It's madness ... We haven't found anything, no weapons of mass destruction, no Saddam, no nothing. And the people there hate us...We're conquerors to them. It wasn't supposed to be like that" (Oct. 15, 2003). How many people would say this war has been a success? How many of you would have supported this war had you seen through the Bush administration's prophesies of mushroom clouds and terrorist attacks, the alleged outcome of continued weapons inspections?

And how many of you, in all honesty, can say you still support the Bush administration's decision to go to war? It's clear that our soldiers don't, and they're the only ones in this game with anything at stake. Maybe it's time to listen to them.

Yes, Hussein is gone. But at what price? The $5 million being spent every hour by our government to occupy Iraq is not my deepest concern. Neither are the millions of dollars being reaped by the Bush administration's closest corporate cronies in the rebuilding effort. War is a racket. We all know that.

What I am concerned for is the safety and well being of American citizens, especially those whose lives are at risk right now, those who have been ordered and sent off to fight this war of aggression. It is not the responsibility of the armed services of this country to fight and die for the puppet democracy now in place in Iraq. My friends did not join the military to protect the rights and safety of Iraqi citizens, but the rights and safety of Americans.

The rights of Iraqis and the safety of Americans are, at best, tenuously connected. It is time to bring the troops home and grant the United Nations the power it so desperately needs to do its job. American soldiers are not trained to be nation builders, nor even peace keepers. Iraq's reconstruction will suffer as long as it is controlled by the Pentagon, and our soldiers will suffer too, the longer they remain occupiers in a hostile land.

In "Catch 22," Joseph Heller wrote, "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on." Our soldiers are confronted by the enemy on two fronts: in Iraq, the guerillas who attack them every day, and at home, by the war-mongering coward of a President who sent them to die in his place, fighting his imperial war. There is only one enemy which the citizens of this country can do anything about, and it is against him that our wrath must be directed.