Iraq War Grief Daily Witness (photo) Day 272

13 Comments

1. 

   RubDMC on March 21, 2006 at 1:33 pm

   

   Click on the candle to copy the image into your own comment (you can leave it on my server), and/or rate this one – not for mojo, but to leave a small mark after taking this moment.

   ” I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
   from Dirge Without Music
   by Edna St. Vincent Millay

   Thank you for making Iraq War Grief Daily Witness a Koufax Award Finalist for Best Series in 2005.

2. 

   dada on March 21, 2006 at 1:48 pm

   

   [Peacehttp://www.rmpjc.org/}

3. 

   Damnit Janet on March 21, 2006 at 1:58 pm

   RubDMC, sadly there are more photos of dead babies… Ghandi has a diary regarding the horror that happened on the 15th in Iraq. Just babies… shot in their pajamas and bedding.

   My husband saw them and he’s now going to be marching and walking.

4. 

   shermanesqe on March 21, 2006 at 2:13 pm

   

5. 

   ask on March 21, 2006 at 3:01 pm

   
   Iraq reconstruction ‘has stalled’

6. 

   cotterperson on March 21, 2006 at 3:15 pm

   

   Thank you, Rub. It was an honor to vote for your series.

7. 

   jimstaro on March 21, 2006 at 5:33 pm

   
   Light A Candle For
   Peace, Tolerance, Understanding
   and For The Children – Innocence Lost!

   Published on Monday, March 20, 2006 by The Nation and Reposted at Common Dreams

   by Christian Parenti

   A column of American military veterans of wars in Iraq, Vietnam and points in between, as well as parents and families of soldiers, marched into New Orleans Sunday chanting radical cadences and flying a 1776 version of the American flag.
   Young Iraq vets led the column of roughly 250 through the grey wrecked landscape, many wearing their desert camouflage uniforms, with upside-down American flag patches on their shoulders, sporting shades, beards, kaffeeas, and chests full metals. At night and along the roads the conversation frequently turns to PTSD, poverty, depleted uranium-caused cancer, unpaid student loans, Ramadi, Tikrtit, IEDs and the intense camaraderie of this new movement.

   Older veterans, mostly from the Vietnam war, who helped a younger generation of soldiers to launch Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) are still as angry as they were thirty years ago, but their once-youthful anger and grief has been tempered by a generation of struggle. And it is upon this platform that the young Iraq vets are now building their piece of the movement.
   “Our motto is that never again will one generation of veterans turn their back on another,” said Dave Cline a long-time activist and early member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

   The column spent the six days prior to arriving in New Orleans tromping and caravanning from Mobile, Alabama through the devastation that is, still, the Gulf Coast. Along the way the vets and their supporters left teams to help “muck out” some of the trashed homes along the small towns of the Gulf Coast. But the protest’s larger aim was to make the connections between the devastation here and the ruin of Iraq. The protesters say corruption, incompetence and inhumanity mark both.
   “All the money that is going to Iraq could be going down here,” says former Army sniper and IVAW member Garrett Reppenhagen.

   According to the IVAW, the invasion and occupation of Iraq could cost $2.65 trillion. Other numbers mentioned along the march were the more than 2,400 American troops and 100,000 Iraqis killed.

   At times the connections between Iraq and the Gulf Coast became all too real, or even surreal. The ruined homes, lack of water and sporadic electricity along the way reminded many vets of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan that some had left only months before.

   “In Gulfport I heard a pop or a snap and looked back and one of my guys took a knee,” said Navy corps and combat vet Charles Anderson, referring to the common military position of kneeling on one knee in preparation for action. “I went back to him, put my hand on him and told him: ‘It’s OK, we’re in Mississippi now.’ “

   On Thursday, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, the marchers were camped deep in the wrecked bayou country east of New Orleans and the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain. In a clearing by a brackish creek, among a forest of dry, ashen-colored, half-toppled pine trees, the vets listened to the stories of local residents who spoke from a small plywood stage about the horrors of the storm and the abandonment that followed. Bereft of state or federal aid, many of the people there were still in bare survival mode.

   A local man named Raymond Couture broke down in tears as he told his story of finding thirty-four corpses in a local nursing home. “They ain’t done nothing for us here yet, so I know they ain’t done nothing for them people in Iraq.” Then the vets and military families spoke. Tina Garnanez, a young Navajo, lesbian and vet, spoke of her experiences in Iraq. She described the track record of lies, broken promises and rising violence in Iraq as mirroring the history of broken treaties, genocide and poverty that shape reservation life in the United States.
   Dinner in the broken forest was alligator gumbo; the IVAW kids partied out and then slept under the stars.

   Later, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Demond Mullins, who returned from heavy combat in Iraq only five months ago, looked out at the ravaged, filthy wreckage in a quiet fury. “I can’t believe this. This is worse than Baghdad. What my country has become sickens me.”

   The march from Mobile to New Orleans marks a new stage in organizing among Iraq veterans and thus a new stage for the peace movement. A year ago IVAW was, in reality, mostly just a good idea and a small speakers bureau. Now it is a real organization and a key piece in the larger coalition of groups like Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out that make up the heart of peace movement.

   Christian Parenti, a frequent contributor to The Nation on international affairs, is the author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press).

   ~~~~~~~~~~

   I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
   Dwight D. Eisenhower
   US general & Republican politician (1890 – 1969)
   ~~~~~~~~~~~

   “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” Frederick Douglass
   ~~~~~~~~~~~

   “Never again shall one generation of veterans abandon another.”

   • 

     jimstaro on March 21, 2006 at 8:19 pm

     {Audio Link Isn’t Up Yet, save and try later to listen to Wyatt’s own words}

     HONOR ROLL POEM

     March 21, 2006

     Wyatt Prunty, who served in the Vietnam war, was inspired to write a poem based on the NewsHour’s Honor Roll of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

     

     The poem is called: “The Returning Dead.”

     The Returning Dead
     Each night I make a drink and wait for them
     They have become the day’s concluding news,
     Installments from a world without anthems
     Or children, unfocusing eyes

     A question that repeatedly rejects
     My easy terms. They are ones who believed
     And acted in the narrow and select
     Ways handed them, while ordinary lives

     Ran on without interruption
     Or bad pictures, as though nothing had changed
     Change is the one unanswerable question
     Of these faces. The world can rearrange

     Itself repeatedly, but these remain
     The same, silent in everything they lack;
     That’s what they’ve come to, in places with names
     Like Afghanistan, Iraq,

     And this is the way it happens: the words
     Are old – mother, father, home – and will catch
     Surrounding currents in the slow absurd
     Descending will of any river etched

     Out of a landscape history refines
     To myth. The TV blanks between
     Segments, but every static face defines
     Itself, holds stubbornly its private scene…

     Fixed, publicly, as we are led
     Back to that little negative whose lack
     Is each of us, staring the staring dead,
     Leaning, sometimes like grief itself; then straightening back.
     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     The ‘HONOR ROLL’ {Link Also At Poem Site}:

     This is a Silent Honor Roll shown on the PBS ‘News Hour’, now Almost Daily, that was started at the Beginning!

     

     As of Today, 3-21-06 there are 58 Pages with 5 ‘Honor Roll’ links per page!

     If you take the Time to View ‘ALL’ the Pages/Photo’s and Information Instill This Thought Into Each American Military Face You See, ‘Try and Picture 30, 40, 50, 60 or More Iraqi Faces, Children-Women-Men, Killed for Each Of These Faces You Are Looking At’

     • 

       jimstaro on March 21, 2006 at 8:59 pm

       Audio Link To Listen To Wyatt’s Own Words

8. 

   BrendaStewart on March 21, 2006 at 10:14 pm

   

   Just peace for all the killing…

9. 

   scribe on March 21, 2006 at 10:46 pm

   sometimes
   words fail
   and only heartbeats
   can convey
   so deep a wish
   for peace

10. 

    alohaleezy on March 21, 2006 at 11:04 pm

    Today Bush starting blaming the media for not showing all the good that is happening in Iraq. There are only two words left to describe this man Mother Fucker!

    • 

      RubDMC on March 22, 2006 at 5:47 am

      “Calling out motherfuckers for fucking their mothers is as brutally truthful as politics gets.” (6/9/2005)