also

In reference to my previous entry, about protestors back home demoralizing the troops or aiding our loss in Vietnam, I’d like to present a quote from a Stan Goff piece that was popularized in March 2002 during the invasion of Iraq. It’s still an excellent and amusing read, and this is just too perfect:

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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 over the first mangrove swamp, and it got worse fast. By the time we reached out “target,” Richmond Hill Prison, where we were gong to “liberate” prisoners that weren’t there, we already 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 shot, and most of the rest of us were having our clothes shot off.</p>

In all this mayhem and confusion, while we (the Army’s most elite, whitest forces) were being spanked by skinny Black folk 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 United States might be thinking, or how much supportive spirit they might be psychically channeling 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 United States gathered naked at Stonehenge to chant supportive mantras out to our precise geographic coordinates.

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.
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