S.O.U.L.S Troop Drive Dulls Gravity of War (written for the Suffolk Journal)

Yet more allegations of U.S. military abuse against the poor people of the world have surfaced, this time via the hard, dedicatory work of Afghan-based human-rights organizations. According to the Washington Post, an Afghan human rights commission claimed last Saturday (4/14/07) that a platoon of U.S. Marines “open[ed] fire on pedestrians and civilian vehicles along a 10-mile stretch of road and kill[ed] 12 people--including a 4-year-old girl, a 1-year-old boy and three elderly villagers.” Imagine if any of these victims were your brother, sister, mother or father; would you continue to allow such flagrant abuses of a civilian population go unanswered (or send their killers trinkets?)

But in the U.S. we are cultured to mythologize the military, deify “the commander-in-chief,” and in what can best be described as Durkhiemian delusional hysteria, support the base enforcer of U.S. imperial aggression, the grunt U.S. soldier--regardless of any pain and suffering innocent populations must consequentially endure. Unlike those in the U.S. military, the Afghani and Iraqi civilian killed, maimed and/or otherwise abused by the forceful and violent actions of U.S. soldiers had no choice in their circumstance. They didn’t enlist for their suffering. They don’t receive lucrative pay, college loans and discounted tuition, or find a place in which they can “be all that [they] can be” in these testosterone-driven epics. Their rewards are dead relatives--killed violently, or (at best) unending stress and hardships. Let us be very clear on one simple fact: the U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are violent ones, the scale to which is lost on the apologists of these exploits.

Therefore the question for you and I is very simple, do we support those who knowingly engage in conduct that is wrong, despite what sad, soppy narratives these offenders might use to attenuate their offenses? Should we support (in even the most seemingly trivial methods) those who are used as instruments of terror on a distant and historically abused people? The best way to illustrate this question while avoiding the reactionary, knee-jerk biased defense such a question arouses is to use a like example (which might have its own set of countervailing cultural biases.) Would it have been acceptable, for example, for a hypothetical Berliner to demonstrate sympathy for the basic grunt soldier serving in the Nazi Wehrmacht that was used to siege Leningrad for 29 months during WWII, a siege that resulted in the death of 800,000 civilians? I’m sure times were tough for the poor German farm boy suddenly caught-up in the zeitgeist of the then frenzied, fascist state—and a number of sympathetic excuses could be imagined for his defense, but the fact that he contributed to the unnecessary and quite excruciating deaths of innocent civilians who bore no malfeasance against him was a morally inexcusable act. What’s more, those who sympathetically (and hypothetically) sent him well wishes (such as tobacco-based products) rather than disapproval and protest are also culpable to his crimes. Accordingly, using elementary ethical guidelines, we may ask if S.O.U.L.S’ “troop drive” is morally defendable regardless of whatever loose, lofty rhetoric its acronym echoes?

If the U.S. military occupies Iraq and Afghanistan and causes needless destruction to life there, are we to, as Mr. Eng suggests, ignore this fact and send cheap gifts to these criminals anyway? Would we feel as comfortable to a canned food drive for al-Qaida, whose members also must spend months apart from their families? Would we unquestionably assume an apolitical stance for an “officer-drive” to benefit the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney King beatings? There is a greater moral question to the organizations we unassumingly choose to support (even in nonessential ways) or whose very existence we are indifferent to.

A canned-food drive therefore can be interpreted as a demonstration of support for the mission of the troops. All one has to do is fill-in the natural syntax of the ideological underpinning for their actions, i.e., “support our troops”…(kill Iraqis? maim civilians? occupy a foreign country under false pretexts?) What are we asked to support? There continued endangerment of innocent civilians? What did the urbane Berliner support when he or she sent their sons to slaughter Eastern Europe? What did the citizens of Tokyo, Japan support in 1937 when they sent their sons to butcher Chinese in Nanjing? What did the Bostonian of 1864 support when the U.S. military annihilated Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children encamped along the Sand Creek in Southern Colorado? Even indifference bears a collective guilt--at least that’s what the U.S. military told the residence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in late-1945 and the people of Dresden earlier that year.

We assume guilt by the actions or our governments, especially when those governments are democratic regimes, regardless of who we did or didn’t vote for. It is our civic duty, therefore, to question and protest the use of the U.S. military—not to endorse its actions through canned-food drives. “War is hell,” as William Tecumseh Sherman clearly put it while burning down Georgia on his “march to the sea;” it is a violent, collective act of barbarism committed by disillusioned, aggressive youth trained to kill and destroy other human beings. We need to demonstrate more responsibility and forethought with the way in which we relate with organizations (e.g., the U.S. military) and their composing elements (e.g., the U.S. soldier) that reap so much destruction and unnecessary suffering on those least deserving of it, and we can begin by not supporting these criminals on our campus through canned-food drives.