BY STAN GOFF
This hasn't been an easy time for US President George Bush and his killer clowns. It hasn't been an easy time for a lot of so-called liberals either. An anti-war movement has come onto the scene, and not just any anti-war movement.
It is now the fastest growing and broadest international movement of its type in history. It involves anarcho-kids, "olde tyme" lefties and pacifists to be sure, but it also involves soccer mums, Black preachers, Italian dock workers, women who write books, nerds, doctors, Indian garment workers, Nigerian intellectuals, Brazilian coffee pickers, Japanese students, Haitian peasants, Filipino street cleaners — every-damn-body!
And that's not all. Lots of them are picking up bad language. When I hear a 60-year-old school teacher using words like "imperialism", I know that something is going on, and those who wanted every one of the rest of us to just go along with the program, including weak-kneed red-baiting liberals, have become alarmed. There's a very dangerous consciousness that is emerging in the face of our would-be fascists.
So now they have pulled out the last trick in the bag, the one that is supposed to silence us for good: "We have to support the troops!". This is the mother of all social policing strategies to stifle criticism of our naked emperors.
It goes: we must close ranks and support our president, who is after all the commander-in-chief of the armed forces (that is our sons and daughters, our sisters and brothers, our spouses and sweethearts), because without that support, our (enter name of your loved one in the military here) will not be adequately filled with our spirit of support to effectively defend themselves, whereupon lack of said spirit will result in US casualties, which makes all of us who withhold said spirit complicit in killing and wounding US troops, and therefore are traitors.
Grenada
Let me explain something, by way of a war story.
In 1983, I took part in the US invasion of Grenada. Aside from being an incompetent operation, it was also one that no-one in the United States even knew about until it was pretty much over. Hey, it doesn't take long to conquer a country that is on a 16-kilometre-wide island with fewer than 90,000 people (even if it was planned by idiots).
When the American people were informed that its treasure and youth were being risked to secure the global nutmeg supply, over 99% of them wouldn't have been able tell you where Grenada was. We who conducted the operation had committed it to memory less than 40 hours earlier.
The invasion was ordered, in part, to take advantage of internal turmoil in Grenada to install a new pro-US government. Mainly, however, its aim was to flex a little US muscle after 258 Marines were killed by a car bomb only days earlier in Beirut, whereupon the US expeditionary force in Lebanon was unceremoniously withdrawn.
Like a bully who gets his tail kicked, US President Ronald Reagan and co. had to beat someone smaller down to save face.
The whole thing suddenly became a "rescue mission" when someone stumbled over a low-rent offshore medical diploma mill full of US students and Reagan's staff cranked up the propaganda machine. None of us involved in Operation Urgent Fury (I'm not joking, it was called that) had even known the damn thing was there.
The first hour of the operation was an old-fashioned country ass-whuppin'. We were on the receiving end. We were forced to defend ourselves.
But we didn't have the "support" of the American people, because as far as they knew, we were all still home, cheating on our spouses in Fayetteville, North Carolina. America woke up scratching its head, trying to figure out why Reagan had just invaded a Spanish city named after a Ford compact sedan.
When the helicopter I was riding on with 15 other people reached the island, we were greeted with small arms fire before we even crossed the first mangrove swamp, and it got worse fast. By the time we reached out "target" — Richmond Hill Prison — where we were going to "liberate" prisoners who weren't there, we already had had four people shot.
As we hovered over the prison, deciding whether or not to slide down ropes into Grenada's drunk tank, machine-gun fire poured through both doors and stitched up the belly of the fuselage from below. By the time we left, having decided not to put up with this any longer, seven members of our group were wounded and most of the rest of us were having our clothes shot off.
In all this mayhem and confusion, while we (the US Army's most elite, whitest forces) were being spanked by skinny Black folks from Grenada and equally dark Cuban construction workers, I can honestly say that I didn't give a flying fuck about what anyone in the US might be thinking, or how much supportive spirit they might be psychically channelling my way to cuddle up against.
I didn't stop to consider that many of my countrymen and countrywomen made jokes about our commander-in-chief once co-starring with a chimpanzee, or how that might seem unsupportive.
I was extremely busy using a K-bar knife to cut the jammed harness off a wounded door gunner to lay his pale, shocky ass on the helicopter floor while I commandeered his portside machine gun to hose down some of our most persistent assailants across the valley.
Nothing I did would have changed one iota, even had the entire population of the US gathered naked at Stonehenge to chant supportive mantras directed at our precise geographic coordinates.
Red herring
Nothing we do or don't do here will have any impact on what the troops do in Iraq in the coming days either. The support the troops thing is a mystifying old red herring. What our new fascists really want us to do is shut the fuck up; what we really want is for the troops to come home.
And shutting up is exactly what I'm not going to do.
What if I'd have been cut down in Grenada at the ripe old age of 32? Would it have accomplished a damn thing worthwhile? In retrospect, I have had the opportunity — an opportunity associated with my ability to breathe — to learn just how cynical these military adventures are.
The best thing we can do for our sons and daughters and sisters and brothers and spouses and sweethearts is to tell the damn truth. What is endangering them is a right-wing, racist, military/security state that is attempting to protect the power of the powerful by plundering other people, and using soldiers to do it.
Goddamn George W Bush and everyone like him! I will not be a chauvinist who advocates victory in an illegal war where our people and the people of Iraq are the cannon fodder and the victims. I do not want our children to die. And I do not want them to kill other people's children. This is not a fucking football game!
If we want to support the troops, we'll do it by encouraging them to think, and when necessary, disobey. Since Freedom Road talked me into doing this column, we have heard from soldiers and their families. They are thinking. They are asking questions. Many are beginning to suspect they've been had, and that behind all this high-flown mendacity coming out of the White House briefing room is a gangster's errand of plunder with our children as its unwitting tools.
If we want to support the real troops, the real people, instead of the abstraction, we'll keep connecting the dots for them, as this column attempts to do, and as the anti-war movement needs to do.
If we start to send care packages full of books to the troops, that would be supportive. They need something to fill the long, boring days ahead, after the current mess is made. I can think of many titles. I'm sure others can, too.
[Stan Goff was a US special forces soldier for more than two decades, seeing combat in Vietnam, Grenada and Haiti. His regular column, "Military Matters" appears at .]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, April 2, 2003.
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