To start off, the video itself is confusing. It is supposed to be. I was trying to confuse the viewers, make them agitated, and make them angry so that maybe, for a minute, they could feel like the men coming back from an illegal occupation run by war criminals for the benefit of the oil industry, the deep state, and the military industrial complex.
The footage running in the background of this video is roughly 4 minutes of highlights from an average hour spent at a checkpoint near Fallujah in 2004 during the US preparation to commit genocide on that city using chemical weapons. If you think anything I wrote in the preceding sentence has not been completely documented, proven, and accepted as history by the rest of the world, please go to the Internet Archive and look up “Shake and Bake” in past issues of the US Army Artillery magazine*.
I chose these 4 minutes because they highlight the absolute insanity US soldiers were ordered to engage in nearly every day they were occupying that country as well as Afghanistan.
The event begins with a bus slowly approaching a checkpoint. The soldiers open fire on the bus and continue firing as civilians try to escape both the gunfire and the rapidly growing inferno inside the bus, caused by depleted uranium ammunition going pyrophic as it passed through metal and bone. Some do make it out of the bus and are shot down attempting to find cover near a fence. The ones inside die from their injuries and the flames, but at least one of the people shot down outside, is still breathing, so the soldiers rush to the survivor, carefully pick him up and carry him a little ways away from the fire and wreckage. They then spend the next few minutes frantically trying to save the dying man’s life by giving him emergency medical treatment. The footage never really shows the end result, but it ends with the soldiers taking up their former positions and preparing to attack the next vehicle or pedestrian unfortunate enough to come near them.
Try to imagine that madness, - Day in and day out, your job is to murder anyone approaching a hole in a fence that you have been ordered to secure. In the highly unlikely event of anyone surviving the initial violence, you are allowed to do everything possible to save your victim. You then pour your heart and soul into trying to undue the damage you have done to an innocent person, but most likely fail every time. This would be an hourly activity for you.
How many days of this could you handle before you turned your weapon on yourself? I don’t know if I could even do one and thank God I have never been forced to find out. (Honestly, I do know what I would do because I’ve spent the last 20 years haunted by the possibility of this scenario. I’d frag the person giving me the order to shoot the civilians and if I lived long enough, I’d frag anyone supporting them, replacing them, and above them, for as long as I could. )
The other parts of the video are blurry, poorly shot footage from music festivals and Burning Man. I intermix these in spots to try to convey the insanity of living in the world of war and then coming back home, broken and incapable of going back to being the person you were before enlisting. Additionally, the words that overlay the screen during those breaks contain the symptoms of PTSD and are not on the screen long enough for a person to read them all. That is also intentional and meant to make the viewer even more uncomfortable. Why? Well, none of us should be comfortable while those war crimes are being carried out in our names, with our funding and support.
The song is an original written by Soren Lambson, performed and recorded by the band Today, of which Soren was the front man at the time. I believe the lyrics are self explanatory of my reason for using it. Just shut your eyes and listen to the song once through and you will understand why it fits the video so well.
The other unique features of the video are the scrolling words going across the screen from right to left. Those words were written by Specialist Douglas Barber and were originally contained within his suicide note. He tried his best to reintegrate back into society, but as he explains eloquently in his last written words, he simply could not.
To this day, I believe that every person in this country should be forced to read his note, just to get an inkling of why the words “War is Hell” and “War is a racket “ are more than just cliches. They are true descriptions of war and it should be the last thing any of us supports or allows our governments to engage in. War hurts everyone involved, both the living and the dead and the survivors are never the lucky ones.
I did speak to Barber’s family, especially his sister whom he was closest to and received their permission to use his words in this way. They hoped that maybe some good could come from them and that maybe his death would not be in vain. I still hold the same hopes.
*There is an article in the summer 2005 US Army Artillery magazine that contains a fully detailed multipage description of those war crimes, written by the officers of an Army Artillery unit who fought alongside the much more prevalent Marine artillery units during the November 2004 genocide of Fallujah. (A city with a population of half a million people, all of which were civilians. Some of which had made the grave error of attempting to protect their families and their homes from foreign murderers engaged in an illegal invasion and occupation of their country. The excuses given by the invaders for their actions were known at the time to be a pack of lies and in the time since, have only ever accumulated more inculpatory evidence and proof of their malicious deceit.)
The army unit recounts how impressed they were by the Marines’ usage of a tactic called “Shake and Bake”, wherein they shell an area of a city with heavy explosives making sure to break as many windows, crack open as many walls, and destroy as many ground level doors in all of the target buildings as possible. Once broken open satisfactorily for their purpose, they switch ammo and begin saturating the area with white phosphorous, which is claimed to be a battlefield illuminant. That lie fails due to this tactic only ever being used during daylight hours. The white phosphorous or “Whiskey or Willy Pete” as it is referred to by the US combatants, glows at night which would lessen its efficacy and lethality as a chemical weapon since that would cause the human population of the area to recognize it for what it was and attempt to evade the clouds blowing through the open windows and doors of their homes.
Epilogue
To show how much has changed in the last 20 years, here is an article about the events in Fallujah that was originally posted, one year after the genocide took place, on the website Daily Kos, a far left forum run by progressives and socialists, all firmly in the Democrat party at the time and representative of the DNC platform at that time.
Wed Nov 09, 2005 at 05:03:24 PM PDT
(From the diaries -- kos)
Written by Hunter
In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete.
"Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."
-- The Independent, US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah
"WP [i.e., white phosphorus rounds] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."
-- Field Artillery Magazine, via Steven D
I think we need to take a step back from the newest Fallujah revelations. There's been a lot of confusion over what is or isn't a "chemical weapon" vs. an "incendiary"; what aspects of the Geneva conventions the United States is or is not signatory to; and whether or not the United States is still bound by rules of warfare that they are not direct signatories to.
Allow me to try to clear things up, if I can.
Hunter's diary :: ::
First, I think it should be a stated goal of United States policy to not melt the skin off of children.
As a natural corollary to this goal, I think the United States should avoid dropping munitions on civilian neighborhoods which, as a side effect, melt the skin off of children. You can call them "chemical weapons" if you must, or far more preferably by the more proper name of "incendiaries". The munitions may or may not precisely melt the skin off of children by setting them on fire; they do melt the skin off of children, however, through robust oxidation of said skin on said children, which is indeed colloquially known as "burning". But let's try to avoid, for now, the debate over the scientific phenomenon of exactly how the skin is melted, burned, or caramelized off of the aforementioned children. I feel quite confident that others have put more thought into the matter of how to melt the skin off of children than I have, and will trust their judgment on the matter.
Now, I know that we may be melting the skin off of children in order to give them freedom, or to prevent Saddam Hussein from possibly melting the skins off of those children at some future date. These are good and noble things to bring children, especially the ones who have not been killed by melting their skin.
I know, as well, that we do not drop "chemical weapons" on Iraq. We may, in the course of fighting insurgents in civilian neighborhoods, drop "incendiaries" or other airborne weaponry which may melt the skins off of children as an accidental side effect of illuminating their neighborhoods or melting the skins off their neighbors. In that this still can be classified as melting the skins off of children, I feel comfortable in stating that the United States should not condone the practice. (This may mean, when fighting in civilian neighborhoods, we take nuanced steps to avoid melting the skin off of children, such as not dropping munitions that melt the skin off of children.)
And I know it is true, there is some confusion over whether the United States was a signatory to the Do Not Melt The Skin Off Of Children part of the Geneva conventions, and whether or not that means we are permitted to melt the skin off of children, or merely are silent on the whole issue of melting the skin off of children.
But all that aside, there are very good reasons, even in a time of war, not to melt the skin off of children.
First, because the insurgency will inevitably be hardened by tales of American forces melting the skin off of children.
Second, because the civilian population will harbor considerable resentment towards Americans for melting the skin off of their children.
Third, BECAUSE IT FUCKING MELTS THE SKIN OFF OF CHILDREN.
And, unless Saddam Hussein had a brigade or two consisting of six year olds, we can presume that children, like perhaps nine tenths or more of their immediate families, are civilians.
These are, admittedly, nuanced points. "But Hunter", I can hear many Americans say, "isn't it a natural byproduct of a war of preemption, er, I mean liberation, to melt the skin off of children?"
Why yes, yes it is. Melting the skin off of children is an inevitable part of urban warfare, which is one of the reasons that most military planners and foreign policy leaders prefer to avoid putting themselves in positions where melting the skin off of children comes into play. George Herbert Walker Bush, when contemplating whether or not to engage in the urban warfare that would, in all likelihood, melt the skin off of children by exposing United States forces to a situation where city defenders would be interspersed with those said civilians, chose the course of not putting his forces in a position where melting the skin off of children would prove necessary.
In any event, street fighting in neighborhoods where there are, indeed, children -- as is evidenced by their skin, lying over there -- may or may not be a wise military decision. But it is certainly true that the whole child-melting decision, pro or con, should be treated with some gravity, and perhaps methods of combat which do not melt the skin off of children should be considered.
Because melting the skin off of children, as it turns out, is a very good way to turn the opinion of the American population against a war in general:
So in conclusion, I am going to come out, to the continuing consternation of Rush Limbaugh and pro-war supporters everywhere, as being anti-children-melting, as a matter of general policy.
Furthermore, I would suggest to the President of the United States that if you find yourself in the position where your on-the-ground forces find melting the skin off of children to be the preferable of all available options, your military outlook is well and truly fucked, and you might perhaps start considering alternative means of stabilizing the country.
Thank you for your time.
