I’m grateful to my friend, Flimsy Sanity,[1] for introducing me to Sergeant Gray. Sergeant Gray was the subject of a program on American RadioWorks recently, entitled, “What Killed Sergeant Gray.”[2]
Sergeant Gray was a young man who grew up wanting only to be in the military. He eventually joined up and was sent to Iraq in 2003. After a tour of duty that lasted a year, he returned home to America, physically uninjured. After a short time at home, he was sent to Alaska for retraining. While there, he took his own life.
The program asks, “What killed Sergeant Gray.” It fails, in my opinion, to reach any firm conclusions.
So, I’ll tell you what killed Sergeant Gray, or, if not this Sergeant Gray, then another, more anonymous Sergeant Gray, now lying dead in Arlington, or some other convenient place of disposal.
America killed Sergeant Gray. From a small child he wanted to be a soldier. Why? Because he was fed on heroism and patriotism, and the glory of being in the military. He grew up hearing about “heroes”. It became his life. He didn’t just want to enlist for a few years – he was in for the duration. Then he went to war. He quickly discovered that all his life he’d been lied to. There was no heroism; there was no glory, and the patriotism was false, because his war held no relevance to ‘fighting for his country’. His war didn’t consist of the glorious battles he’d dreamed of as a child. Instead he was forced to debase and torture other human beings, kill civilians, behave like an ugly barbarian.
How often does one hear the stories of men home from war, sitting forever on the front porch, eyes glazed, distant: “He never talks of the war – he just sits for hours staring across the street.”
War only serves one purpose: to teach men – real men – of the great lie they’ve been fed. Others never learn, or, if they do are too afraid to admit that what they were told to believe all their lives was a great untruth.
Sergeant Gray grew up inside a bubble of glory and patriotism, inflated by Hollywood fiction, video gore, and the insincere ramblings of political misfits seeking cannon fodder. He was taught war games in kindergarten; saluted the flag in first grade; watched Black Hawk Down fifteen times during high school.
Then he went to war.
Sergeant Gray could have ended up on his front porch, glazed, distant; lost to the awful conundrums wrecking his life, tormenting his mind, destroying his soul. It’s hard for any man to come to terms with the truth – that everything he’d ever believed, sworn to uphold, was prepared to sacrifice his life for, was worth less than a barrel of rotten apples.
Sergeant Gray didn’t spend his life sat endlessly on the front porch staring across the street. He died a lonely, suicidal death with a plastic bag over his head. Sergeant Gray had learned the ultimate lesson war has to offer. In many ways it’s the only lesson of war worth learning. Sadly, for many like Sergeant Gray, they learn it too late.
War is not glory; it’s not heroism, it’s not even patriotic. There are no heroes in war, we just let our media make them up afterward. War is a lesson in barbarity; it’s a test of the depths of depravity to which human beings can sink. It makes a mockery of patriotism, flags waving, and all the contrived rigmarole that passes for nationalistic pride.
The psych-docs will say Sergeant Gray suffered from PTSD, or mental breakdown, or something else with a long, fancy-sounding, name. It’s more professional than admitting he died of a broken heart. Broken because the country he loved lied to him his whole life, then sent him to war in Iraq and brutally exposed him to the truth.
It didn’t have to be Sergeant Gray, it could have been any young man.
It didn’t have to be Iraq; it could have been any war.
After all, for once let’s face the truth, they are all the same.
In memory of the millions like Sergeant Gray whose lives have been wasted in politicians’ wars, take a few minutes to listen while Eric Bogle sings of “Willie McBride”.
Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”[1]
How ugly Adolf Hitler appears today, yet, in his time he too was considered physically attractive. Like Sarah Palin, he used his guile to win over people who should really have known better. Some folks are truly gullible.
On November 4th, America will learn how many gullible citizens it really has.
Blogging pal, Al Devito, at “Vineyard Views” is right to consider a subscription to the German magazine, Der Spiegal, a worthwhile investment. It’s standard of journalism is usually excellent, and hits hard at the heart of matters the US media are often loathe to touch.
Two recent articles are particularly worthy of note. The first, a rather lengthy essay, entitled, “America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role” is linked to by the Vineyard and contains some, almost amusing, world leaders’ views of the final decline of George W Bush while at his last UN General Assembly meeting.
Here’s a snippet to whet the appetite:
There are days when all it takes is a single speech to illustrate the decline of a world power. A face can speak volumes, as can the speaker’s tone of voice, the speech itself or the audience’s reaction. Kings and queens have clung to the past before and humiliated themselves in public, but this time it was merely a United States president.
Or what is left of him.
George W. Bush has grown old, erratic and rosy in the eight years of his presidency. Little remains of his combativeness or his enthusiasm for physical fitness. On this sunny Tuesday morning in New York, even his hair seemed messy and unkempt, his blue suit a little baggy around the shoulders, as Bush stepped onto the stage, for the eighth time, at the United Nations General Assembly.
He talked about terrorism and terrorist regimes, and about governments that allegedly support terror. He failed to notice that the delegates sitting in front of and below him were shaking their heads, smiling and whispering, or if he did notice, he was no longer capable of reacting. The US president gave a speech similar to the ones he gave in 2004 and 2007, mentioning the word “terror” 32 times in 22 minutes. At the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations, George W. Bush was the only one still talking about terror and not about the topic that currently has the rest of the world’s attention. [The global economic crisis ~ RJA]
“Absurd, absurd, absurd,” said one German diplomat. A French woman called him “yesterday’s man” over coffee on the East River. There is another way to put it, too: Bush was a laughing stock in the gray corridors of the UN.
The American president has always had enemies in these hallways and offices at the UN building on First Avenue in Manhattan. The Iranians and Syrians despise the eternal American-Israeli coalition, while many others are tired of Bush’s Americans telling the world about the blessings of deregulated markets and establishing rules “that only apply to others,” says the diplomat from Berlin.
But the ridicule was a new thing. It marked the end of respect…….[1]
Der Spiegal runs another article in the same issue. It concerns the now almost forgotten conflict in Georgia/South Ossetia, when Russian forces moved into that nation to protect its citizens from the military of Georgia’s American-trained lawyer president, Mikhail Saakashvili.
A Sparrow Chat article on the Georgian crisis, entitled, “The Great Chess Game”, (August 11th, 2008) concluded that Georgia had attacked South Ossetia, intending to take back the province by force, only to be overwhelmed by the Russian army dashing to aid the majority of its citizens who make up the South Ossetian populace.
The action was considered calculated on Vladimir Putin’s part; a master chess move designed to draw a line in the sand over which NATO should never cross.
The article ended:
Saakashvili is almost certainly finished politically. South Ossetia will remain independent. Eventually, the conflict will calm down like an expired squib. Russia will retain its influence, the West retire to lick its wounded pride, and the great Soviet chess master will no doubt quietly gloat over his latest triumph.[2]
In the interim, the Western powers have moved heaven and earth to condemn the Russians for their actions, accusing them of deliberate aggression against their smaller neighbor. They’ve propped up Saakashvili, sent US gunboats to the area and flown in unnecessary aid, as props for a photo-opportunity, rather than to save the already well-fed Georgians.
It seems, though, the tide is now beginning to turn, and Georgian president Saakashvili may well be carried away on the ebb.
Der Spiegal:
“Today, we are all Georgians,” Republican presidential candidate John McCain declared. The neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan compared the Russian action with the Nazis’ 1938 invasion of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. And in a meeting with US Vice President Richard Cheney, Saakashvili was assured of Washington’s support for his most fervent wish: admission to NATO.
But now, five weeks after the end of the war in the Caucasus, the winds have shifted in America. Even Washington is beginning to suspect that Saakashvili, a friend and ally, could in fact be a gambler — someone who triggered the bloody five-day war and then told the West bold-faced lies. “The concerns about Russia have remained,” says Paul Sanders, an expert on Russia and the director of the conservative Nixon Center in Washington. His words reflect the continuing Western assessment that Russia’s military act of revenge against the tiny Caucasus nation Georgia was disproportionate, that Moscow violated international law by recognizing the separatist republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and, finally, that it used Georgia as a vehicle to showcase its imperial renaissance.
But then Saunders qualifies his statement: “More and more people are realizing that there are two sides in this conflict, and that Georgia was not as much a victim as a willing participant.”
It would appear that evidence has now established Saakashvili was lying when he accused Russia of an unprovoked attack. NATO investigations are beginning to uncover the truth.
Der Spiegal:
According to this [NATO] intelligence information, the Georgians amassed roughly 12,000 troops on the border with South Ossetia on the morning of Aug. 7. Seventy-five tanks and armored personnel carriers — a third of the Georgian military’s arsenal — were assembled near Gori. Saakashvili’s plan, apparently, was to advance to the Roki Tunnel in a 15-hour blitzkrieg and close the eye of the needle between the northern and southern Caucasus regions, effectively cutting off South Ossetia from Russia.
At 10:35 p.m. on Aug. 7, less than an hour before Russian tanks entered the Roki Tunnel, according to Saakashvili, Georgian forces began their artillery assault on Tskhinvali. The Georgians used 27 rocket launchers, including 152-millimeter guns, as well as cluster bombs. Three brigades began the nighttime assault……..
The [NATO] intelligence agencies conclude that the Russian army did not begin firing until 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 8, when it launched an SS-21 short-range ballistic missile on the city of Borzhomi, southwest of Gori. The missile apparently hit military and government bunker positions. Russian warplanes began their first attacks on the Georgian army a short time later. Suddenly the airwaves came to life, as did the Russian army.
Russian troops from North Ossetia did not begin marching through the Roki Tunnel until roughly 11 a.m. This sequence of events is now seen as evidence that Moscow did not act offensively, but merely reacted. Additional SS-21s were later moved to the south. The Russians deployed 5,500 troops to Gori and 7,000 to the border between Georgia and its second separatist region, Abkhazia. [my bold ~ RJA]
From this information, acquired by NATO intelligence, it is obvious that the Georgian forces attacked the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali nine hours before the Russian army fired one shot in retaliation. Any suggestion the Georgians were simply defending their territory is ludicrous. Saakashvili’s lies have come back to haunt him.
European leaders are now calling for an international investigation into the causes of this war. Saakashvili is worried.
Is he, as Sparrow Chat suggested, finished politically?
Der Spiegal:
Last week, the heads of Georgia’s two major political parties called for Saakashvili’s resignation and the establishment of a “government that is neither pro-Russian nor pro-American, but pro-Georgian.” In Moscow, former Georgian Deputy Interior Minister Temur Khachishzili, who spent years in prison for attempting to assassinate Saakashvili’s predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, is drumming up support for a change of government back home among the more than one million Georgians living in Russia.[3]
A question remains: if Sparrow Chat was able to deduce the true events of this war four days after its inception, why were Western political powers unable to do so, and so insistent on blaming Russia, in a political spat that brought the world to the brink of a new Cold War?
The answer, of course, is that they were well able to deduce the truth.
Which begs another question: why did they, like Saakashvili, choose to lie about it?
