On the beaten path

Soldiers must uphold America’s constitution — it’d be tough to justify Iraq on those grounds — and they have to obey “lawful” orders.

Consider that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, but an empire’s policy inspired it, and Saudi Arabia had more ties to the tragedy in 2001 than any other country; the president’s family has business ties with Saudi Arabian royalty, and Iraq has its share of oil; and Halliburton, a company with ridiculously strong ties to Dick Cheney, is raking profits over the remains of innocent Iraqi men, women and children
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Suddenly, the order to invade a sovereign nation doesn’t seem lawful anymore. In fact, it seems there’s a bucket of conflicts of interest at the White House, and the only positive that has come from what is now a bloody civil war is corporate profits.

The negatives are soldiers, forced to leave behind families, bearing witness to gruesome atrocities and losing their lives. If they return alive, some are disfigured and missing limbs, and many are wrecked psychologically.

I’ve been unfortunate enough to witness firsthand the tragic results of such psychological and physical horrors.

When I served in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, I befriended a Vietnam vet who couldn’t work, 100-percent psychologically disabled. He would sit on his sweat-stained couch in a smoke-filled living room, a pair of tweezers on the coffee table to remove slivers of shrapnel rising to the surface of his skin as blisters on his beer belly.

I worked under supervisors at Fort Riley who served in Desert Storm under orders of our president’s father. It remains unexplained what happened to them, though there are many theories.
But theories matter little to adults who sweat profusely, suffer memory loss, are often overly fatigued and have children who are physically and intellectually far behind their peers. These soldiers don’t want theories, they want somebody to repair what happened to them.

Yet, these brave men and women march on; soldiers like Sgt. First Class Thomas Nunn, who told a New York Times reporter, “The way I look at it, you get bent out of shape about stuff you can do something about.”

I wonder as I write this, will Sgt. Nunn return home alive and in one piece?

Meanwhile, profits pour in, the war machine fills its belly, and the glaring consequences are thousands of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of murdered Iraqi civilians.

E-mail Stephen Bartlett at:
sbartlett@pressrepublican.com