two little boys
by elrock on jul 2, 2003, 18:34
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| two little boys |
i was a bit unsure of how i might behave when asked to accompany my girlfriend and her little sister to meet a couple of u.s. marines who were in sydney on a stop over on their way home to the us via hawaii, i issued commands to kick me if i verbally harassed them. all of my usual angst to yanks dissolved when two teenagers who hadn't started shaving where at the meeting place. damn both of them looked like they'll break if i gave them a manly slap on the back, how could these two be accounted for the innocent iraqis killed by the u.s. forces?
a single decision to join the u.s. army, one that both of them readily admitted that they regretted. a classic "my friend and i joined together but he pulled out". innocence broken, realities of experiencing the non-televised horrors of a one-sided war tinted their eyes. a concreted resolve that it was too late now to stop that one decision made but both would leave in an instance, if they could. the beautiful australian women definitely reinforced those dreams, a drawn focus settled in their eyes.
they spoke of "razing" techniques used in their training, aimed to make them react in conflict situations with anger, i had images of bullies harassing younger kids. conversations continued revealing abusive techniques to insure their obedience's, stories of officers spilling stuff just to make lower ranks clean it up. is this really how you treat humans, they are trained not to question basic human morals "we just do as we are told", even when ordered to kill. i have spoken to people about the natural instincts of humans to wonder, question, create and resolve. here were two kids without a wrinkle, forced to stop instinct and they were very aware of it, dreaming of the time four to five years in the future when their term was up and missing their families.
many stories were told, the amount of bombshells littering the ground (the majority of the bullets and shells are depleted uranium-238 which is proven to be extremely radioactive), hungry people begging for food, their superiors giving them orders to ransack buildings and to take anything as souvenirs. one of the proud marines was going to sell his iraq offices uniform on ebay (how quaint).
the media portrayed iraqis pillaging their national assets, not many mentioned u.s. marines gathering knickknacks for their lounges. on the media track, the two young chaps said that the soldiers nicknamed the bbc the "british propaganda company" and how far removed the reporting by cbs and the rest of the u.s. media was from the truth. when i asked what they thought the war was for "oh we needed to capture their oil" was the answer. even though i knew that it was sickening to hear it and it changed my opinion that the citizens of the u.s. are so polluted by their media that they couldn't think for themselves or was it a few burnt glowing iraqi corpses that changed their minds.
“weapons of mass destruction, we just don't want anyone else to have them", said the intelligent nineteen year old u.s. marine.
please comment in the citizens forum
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