America's Imperial Wars: We Need to See the Horrors

When I was a 17-year-old kid in my senior year of high school, I didn't think much about Vietnam. It was 1967, the war was raging, but I didn't personally know anyone who was over there; Tet hadn't happened yet. If anything, the excitement of jungle warfare attracted my interest more than anything (I had a .22 cal rifle, and liked to go off in the woods and shoot at things, often, I'll admit, imagining it was an armed enemy.)

But then I had to do a major project in my humanities program and I chose the Vietnam War. As I started researching this paper, which was supposed to be a multimedia presentation, I ran across a series of photos of civilian victims of American napalm bombing. These victims, often, were women and children -- even babies.

The project opened my eyes to something that had never occurred to me: my country's army was killing civilians. And it wasn't just killing them. It was killing them, and maiming them, in ways that were almost unimaginable in their horror: napalm, phosphorus, anti-personnel bombs that threw out spinning flechettes that ripped through the flesh like tiny buzz saws. I learned that scientists, like what I at the time wanted to become, were actually working on projects to make these weapons even more lethal, for example, trying to make napalm more sticky so it would burn longer on exposed flesh.

By the time I had finished my project, I had actively joined the anti-war movement, and later that year, when I turned 18 and had to register for the draft, I made the decision that no way was I going to allow myself to participate in that war.

A key reason my -- and millions of other Americans' -- eyes were opened to what the U.S. was up to in Indochina was that the media at that time, at least by 1967, had begun to show Americans the reality of that war. I didn't have to look too hard to find the photos of napalm victims, or to read about the true nature of the weapons that our forces were using.

Today, while the Internet makes it possible to find similar information about the conflicts in the world in which the U.S. is participating, either as primary combatant or as the chief provider of arms, as in Gaza, one actually has to make a concerted effort to look for them. The corporate media that provides the information that most Americans simply receive passively on the evening news or at breakfast over coffee carefully avoid showing us most of the graphic horror inflicted by our military machine.

We may read the cold facts that the U.S. military, after initial denials, admits that its forces killed not four enemy combatants in an assault on a house in Afghanistan, but rather five civilians -- including a man, a female teacher, a 10-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy, and a tiny baby. But we don't see pictures of their shattered bodies, no doubt shredded by the high-powered automatic rifles typically used by American forces.

We may read about wedding parties that are bombed by American forces -- something that has happened with some frequency in both Iraq and Afghanistan -- where the death toll is tallied in dozens, but we are, as a rule, not provided with photos that would likely show bodies torn apart by anti-personnel bombs -- a favored weapon for such attacks on groups of supposed enemy "fighters." (A giveaway that such weapons are being used is a typically high death count with only a few wounded.)

Obviously one reason for this is that the U.S. military no longer gives U.S. journalists, including photo journalists, free reign on the battlefield. Those who travel with troops are under the control of those troops and generally aren't allowed to photograph the scenes of devastation, and sites of such "mishaps" are generally ruled off limits until the evidence has been cleared away.

But another reason is that the media themselves sanitize their pages and their broadcasts. It isn't just American dead that we don't get to see. It's the civilian dead -- at least if our guys do it. We are not spared gruesome images following attacks on civilians by Iraqi insurgent groups, or by Taliban forces in Afghanistan. But we don't get the same kind of photos when it's our forces doing the slaughtering. Because often the photos and video images do exist -- taken by foreign reporters who take the risk of going where the U.S. military doesn't want them.

No wonder that even today, most Americans oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan not because of sympathy with the long-suffering peoples of those two lands, but because of the hardships faced by our own forces, and the financial cost of the two wars.

For some real information on the horror that is being perpetrated on one of the poorest countries in the world by the greatest military power the world has ever known, check out the excellent work by Professor Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

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