Got another email message from my dentist who volunteered to do a tour in Iraq. The reasons for this are a whole other post….but there’s a lot to learn from someone who is actually there.
Last letter had a lot about the luxuries of the officer class – gyms galore, movieplexes, great food (lowly troops in tents around the zone get only two meals a day), swimming pools, contracted personal guards…. and oh, yes, increasing mortar attacks. But that’s war as we know it, and nothing in the email really surprised me… until one paragraph about those Filipinos, – you know, the ones deceived and brutalized into going to Iraq when they thought they were headed towards high paying jobs in Dubai?
Oh, you didn’t know?
The story goes back a year or so..so many have forgotten – if any ever knew….but here’s what my dentist, now a US Captain, wrote while giving a “tour” of the Green Zone:
I had the opportunity to visit some of the areas where the Filipino people live. These people are here to do our laundry and to clean our bathrooms and showers . They are very hard working people who have to live in very sad conditions.
They have been placed in little trailers that have small beds and they are not allowed to go out of their working places alone. They must be escorted back and forth from their work place to their ‘homes’ .and they must be at their gate by 10 o’clock. Filipinos have their own place to eat, travel in their own buses and they have no recreation or any other activities other than work and are not permitted to interact with others here.
That’s what triggered my memory. We had covered the story when it happened…. even had the Congressional testimony of the contractors who were part of the Kuwaiti company that made hundreds of millions on the Embassy construction deal….
Hell, they’re only Filipinos.
But if you care:
http://tvnewslies.org/tvnl/index.php/editorial/reggies-commentary/20-regs-thoughts/1099-our-forgotte
n-shame-in-the-green-zone
