Something to learn from Winter Soldiers

One rule I have in my house, among many, is that there is always something to learn. If you open your mind, set aside your own opinion long enough to hear what someone is saying, there is always something to learn. This is one more of those cases.

It is the Winter Soldiers who have been trying to get the attention from the media for very long time, offering the lessons. It is also the reason why so few have reported on any of this.

Thu May 15, 5:35 PM ET



The Nation -- Over the past two months since this year's Winter Soldier event, a parade of luminaries has gone before Congress to testify about the Iraq War: distinguished generals, cabinet secretaries and various think-tank dignitaries. One group, however, has been conspicuously absent from the conversation: soldiers.

Today, Iraq Veterans Against the War sought to remedy that, in a packed, three-hour forum on Capitol Hill in which the Congressional Progressive Caucus invited over a dozen veterans, gravely suited, to share their experiences. "We pretty much know what the Americans we sent did to Iraq," Rep. Lee told the crowd. "What we don't really know is what Iraq has done to them. That's why we're here today. To bear witness to their truth."

The following are just some things we need to learn from and then do something about.

Beneath it all ran a palpable theme: intense disappointment in a government that failed to provide for them.
"My M-16 was made in the 1970s.
There weren't enough night goggles to go around.
The line for psychologists is almost a year long," said Kochergin.
"If there's no care for the Marines, what care can there be for the people of Iraq?"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20080515/cm_thenation/917321275

M-16? We have not replaced them since 1970?

Goggles? Not enough to go around so they could see at night?

Psychologist? So few of them the men and women needing them have to wait a year to get help?

How is any of this possible? Is all of this true and how much more don't we know about? We knew there were not enough mental health workers in Iraq and we knew there were not enough Chaplains to go around either. But how is this possible that it is this bad and no one knew how bad it was?

U.S. Sergeant Refuses to Go to Iraq: "This Occupation is Unconstitutional and Illegal"
By Karin Zeitvogel, Middle East Online. Posted May 16, 2008.
On Capitol Hill yesterday, an American soldier named Matthis Chiroux publicly announced his refusal to deploy to Iraq.

"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation… I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.

The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.

Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told a half-dozen US lawmakers and scores of people who packed into a small hearing room of "lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis."

He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq, to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.

Goldsmith said he had "self-medicated" for several months to treat the wounds of the war.

Another soldier said he had to boost his dosage of medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia -- two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq -- before testifying.

Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the psychological traumas of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

A group of veterans sitting in the hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades' testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.

Almost to a man, the soldiers who testified denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.

Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking U.S. officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of U.S. contractors.
go here for more
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/85612/

Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith another face of PTSD

March 17, 2008
The War That Never Ends
Iraq Veterans Against the War’s ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings revealed the awful truths of the occupation and the ongoing struggle for those who have returned home.
By Jacob Wheeler

Last Memorial Day, Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith tried to kill himself. He had just been stop-lossed along with 80,000 other soldiers as part of the surge of U.S. forces to be sent to Iraq in the Bush administration’s last-ditch attempt at victory. Goldsmith already suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), though Veterans Affairs (VA) refused to diagnose him. His contract with the army was almost up, and he couldn’t bear the thought of an 18-month deployment.

Like the dozens of disgruntled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who testified at the Iraq Veterans Against the War’s (IVAW) emotional and groundbreaking “Winter Soldier” hearings, held from March 13-16 at the National Labor College near Washington D.C., Goldsmith had enlisted as a proud American eager to defend his country and trusting of the government that would send him into battle. Goldsmith hails from Long Island, and a day after watching smoke pour out of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, he had told friends that he “wanted to kill everyone in the Middle East.”

Goldsmith arrived in the sprawling ghetto of Baghdad’s Sadr City at age 19. He admits to following the command of his superiors and taking photos of unearthed dead bodies, more as war trophies than as evidence. “The images of dead bodies are burned into my memory,” Goldsmith said. His unit harassed the local population, and stopped cars, even as someone’s wife was going into labor in the back seat. And one day he trained his weapon on a six-year-old Iraqi boy pointing a stick at him as if it were an AK-47. “We were so desensitized. … The U.S. government put me in that position,” he said. “It took a lot of thinking not to kill the boy that day.”

Veterans like Kristofer Goldsmith discovered first-hand how the government sent them ill-prepared into a war under false pretenses, changed their rules of engagement with every deployment, brainwashed them into dehumanizing the Iraqi population, and brought them home without adequate means of caring for those for whom the war still rages on.
go here for the rest
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3585/