Buried Alive

by Bruce Patterson

When I returned from Vietnam, I never got the chance to re-connect with my generation, the now politically dominant "Baby Boomers." Everybody knows you when they send you off to war. But when you come back you are just another stranger. What you have seen and done, the lessons you've learned, the glimpse you've taken into the heartless heart — it's all Chinese to them. Even if they cared, they had no way of knowing. They had no way of even imagining what it had been like walking in your boots. Worse yet, you could no longer imagine what it'd be like to again be walking in theirs.

More or less, it's always been like that with returning combat veterans. You get home from war an ice cube, a psychological wreck or, if you have vast reserves of will power, pretending that you'd never been gone. The last group, the bare majority of vets, is not necessarily the most fortunate. Sometimes, years after their return and for no apparent reason, they break all at once. They might hurt somebody and get locked up or simply collapse into a deep dark pit they cannot climb out of. More likely — I watched this happening with my dad's generation of WW2 vets — as they get elderly and they begin attempting to make their peace the old terrors start seeping up through their pores.

Some things are never lived down.

Nor are the ice cubes the lucky ones. They best fit back into mainstream society because they, like the average citizen, use "patriotism" as a cover for their inhumanity. Contrary to the evidence of their senses, the ideals of their Republic's founders and the moral teachings of the fathers of their religions, they regard themselves as Americans first and human beings second. Like extreme nationalists everywhere, when it comes to "defending" what they perceive to be their "national interests," they think they have a license to kill. No, a God-Given, sacred duty to kill and to keep on killing until they get what they think they want. At least 8,000 dead Iraqi civilians in the brief time since the Americans landed there — five million dead Indochinese before the Americans saw fit to leave there — just beads of water racing down the sides of ice cubes.

Now you might think knowing that all is well in the Kingdom, that the dead don't speak unless you listen, would be mighty comforting to an American veteran returning home from a foreign war. But sometimes it is they who are the most cursed. They re-integrate into society, marry, have sons and daughters, watch them grow and then they must bury them when they come back home in body bags from some new foreign war. Or, if their son or daughter returns walking on their own two feet, they must bury the child they once knew and loved and come to terms with an adult they are not sure they recognize.

Myself, I fit into the middle group. Here's how it works: the more intense the combat, the longer its duration, the more permanent psychological damage done to the individual soldier. That's the science and if the average citizen has never taken the time to think about it, the Pentagon has always known it. (The American Civil War produced uncounted thousands of young battlefield veterans who came home raving lunatics.)

Consider the plans the Pentagon now has for the GIs in combat in Iraq with the 173rd, 101st and 82nd Airbornes. I mention these outfits because I served with them and I know their traditions. They are among America's most elite killers and the longer they stay in Iraq, the more battles they fight, the more friends and pieces of friends they bag up, the better killers, the better survivors, the better instruments of "victory" they will become (you'd think). Traditionally, a field commander wouldn't trade one battle-hardened battalion for two battalions of raw recruits. Yet next spring the Pentagon plans to do just that except on a one-to-one ratio.

And when the survivors of these veteran outfits catch sight of their peach-faced replacements (National Guardsmen!) fresh in from the world they will see, as their fathers and grandfathers had seen, just more fresh meat for the grinder.

Now if you think that's a silly way for the Pentagon to go about minimizing GI casualties and so insuring the Commander-in-Chief's re-election, you miss the point.

* * *

What's this media bit about GIs getting "injured" over there in Iraq? Turn on the Nightly News and you hear, "Today in Iraq two American GIs were killed and four were injured when a roadside bomb..."

Well I've got news for these news people. When you fall down in the bathtub, that's getting injured. When you crash on the ski slope and break your leg, that's getting injured. But when a jag of shrapnel blows off your jaw, when a bullet shoots out your eyeballs, when an explosion blows away your hand, your leg, your balls or multiple body parts and sends them flying as mist, you've been wounded.

A good friend of mine got shot in the back with an AK-47. A single bullet in a single sonic boom of time cut his spinal cord in two pieces and he lost the use of the lower half of his body. It was a fate considered to be worse than death until it happened to you. While you wished they just would have killed you and gotten it over with, since they didn't it had to have some meaning, there had to be some reason for you to go on. And so you chose to live, on the chance that you'd eventually find out what that reason was.

It used to be that you were dead if you got gut shot, though it nearly always took a while for you to die. What was so bad about getting gut shot wasn't just the excruciating pain — the pain wasn't so intense once shock set in, but knowing that you were indisputably dead — that death was dragging you by the feet through the mud and you were helpless.

But getting gut shot doesn't always mean getting killed anymore. In 1968 I spent three and a half months in military hospitals and I saw lots of guys who'd survived getting gut shot. In Letterman Hospital in San Francisco there was an entire ward filled with young Americans boys who'd been partially disemboweled by bullets or shrapnel and then "surgically repaired." In the worst cases they would be incontinent, impotent and in nearly constant pain, forever unable to work or to live actively, but at least they had lives ahead of them.

I've never understood how a people who make such a gaudy show of their reverence for the GIs who have made "the ultimate sacrifice" in overseas war can take the wounded in those same wars and make them invisible. If you are a disabled veteran sometimes your only friend is the Veterans Administration and sometimes and in some ways the VA isn't such a friend. GIs killed in action are buried dead — you they bury alive.

Isn't it interesting that the corporate media keep a daily tally of the total number of GIs killed in Iraq but they never mention the growing population of wounded? A GI's blood is barely dry in the Iraqi sand and already he's been made invisible to the folks back home. It took me six months of reading newspapers, listening to the radio and watching the news on my satellite TV before I finally spotted a full, official accounting of total US casualties in Iraq (and since then I haven't seen an update). As of November 16th, 417 GIs had been killed. As of October 30th, 1,967 had been wounded in combat and another 6,861 had been "evacuated" for medical reasons "unrelated to combat."

That's over 9,200 total US casualties thus far in Iraq and isn't it amazing how a huge number like that can just up and disappear? And isn't it amazing how the media spokesmen for those who instigated this war can embed such a big, communist-style lie into so "straight forward" a list?

Like, what's this 6,861 American casualties "unrelated to combat" bullshit? Are we in the mother country to believe that all of those GIs fell down in the bathtub or broke their legs on ski slopes?

So far in Iraq at least 16 GIs have committed suicide. Are their deaths "unrelated to combat"? To get the real answer we'd have to interview their parents, their brothers and sisters, their old girl and boy friends, the kids they grew up with, the teachers who knew them.

We could start by asking a mother, "Watching your daughter growing up, Mrs. Jones, did she seem like a potential suicide to you? Did she ever let on that there was something amiss in her life? Did you notice any signs?"

When I was in the bush a kid in my outfit dropped dead of heat stroke. During the dry season in those steam bath tropics, though they rarely died, all the time GIs were falling out because of the heat. Anyway, this kid's face turned beet red, his eyes rolled back and — splat — he was smashed under the weight of his 60 pound rucksack.

While he wasn't killed as the result of hostile fire, all of us around him knew he'd died in action.

Given the crackling scorpion heat of the Iraqi desert, the total weight of the gold plated equipment they were forced to carry, their dark-past-dark, seven times 16-hour workloads and the well documented failure of the Pentagon to ensure that they had adequate daily rations of fresh water, I have no doubt that a significant percentage of those 6,861 GI casualties in Iraq "unrelated to combat" had to do with how those young volunteers had been treated. How, almost literally, they'd been worked to death.

It doesn't take a great leap of the imagination to understand that hungry soldiers in a foreign land will take food from wherever they can find it. When I was in Vietnam and I saw "friendly" Vietnamese civilians I instantly thought, "Food!" Whatever soggy US dollars I was carrying were useless next to the fresh bread, the pastries or whatever else somebody could fetch for me to devour.

Eating fresh baked village bread, trying to add some meat to my bones, I got dysentery so bad that, without modern medicine and the nearly constant attentions of enlisted girl nurses, I would have died. And, I guess, my death would have gone down to causes "unrelated to combat."

Since it is a well established fact that American GIs during their "March to Baghdad" were at times forced to outrun their supply lines, I have no doubt that a significant percentage of those who were medivaced for reasons "unrelated to combat" had been poisoned by Iraqi food.

For thousands of years the commanders of invading armies have wondered at the mysterious plagues that have struck down so many of their soldiers that they were denied the conquest that was theirs due to their superior force of arms, their superior organization and the utter righteousness of their holy cause. Victory had been at their fingertips and yet it had slipped away from them because the instruments of their Glory, just before the moment of their Glory, all pulled up sick as dogs.

What so befuddled our grandpas has been explained by science. Every native population has built up immunities to the local viruses. Whereas the soldiers in an invading army have no such immunities and so they are helpless when the local viruses make their acquaintance.

So to the US casualties "unrelated to combat" who fell out because of dehydration and/or exhaustion, or who got deathly ill after eating native food, we can add another significant percentage who were "evacuated" because they had contracted illnesses that nobody back home had ever heard of or knew how to cure (re: "Gulf War Syndrome").

To all of the above we can add the kids who got medivaced because they could no longer endure the stabbing cramps in their knotted bellies. Any doctor who has worked in a field hospital in a war zone has seen any number of this kind of casualty. They arrive doubled-up in abdominal misery almost exactly as if they have dysentery. But after you've run the tests on them you discover that they come up clean. They are not faking it — their pain is real enough — but there's nothing infecting them, no harmful bug attacking them.

What they've got is called "the green shits." They have acutely nervous stomachs, you might say. They're way past the jitters but not yet to catatonia.

During WW2, within American infantry outfits engaged in heavy combat, roughly 20% of battlefield casualties were psychological. "Combat fatigue" was so common in the foxholes that nearly every infantry survivor of that war remembers at least one American boy who had broken like a twig.

Thus far in Iraq, how many American psychological casualties have been "evacuated?" How many young men and women who, for whatever reason, couldn't hold it together? While it's extremely doubtful that the number even approaches 20% of infantry casualties, it's worth remembering that our GIs in Iraq were not in the least bit psychologically prepared for sustained combat for the simple reason that they were told — promised — that there would be none. In fact, they had been told they'd be home by now. They were going to be welcomed as liberators, remember? Their mission accomplished, they were going to hand over Iraq to the Iraqis and return home all safe and sound.

Because few human emotions are as destructive to an individual's psychological well being as a powerful sense of having been betrayed by a loved one (GIs fighting in overseas wars love America intensely), I have no doubt that large numbers of GIs in Iraq have been "evacuated" because, apprehending the depth of their predicament, the degree to which they'd been sandbagged, they couldn't stand the shame.

As is inevitable in any invading army — but especially so in American invading armies — there is a fraction of the troops who rebel. Witness to the slaughter of innocents, they might suddenly understand the meaning of Jesus, turn around completely in their boots and drop their weapons. Or they might simply conclude that "the cause" is bullshit and be too proud and headstrong to kill and die for something they don't believe in and cannot believe in. Or maybe they've just grown to hate the military way of doing things so much that — if ever again they were going to fight a war — they'd never join an army before hand.

Whatever their rationale, officially they are cowards. After their Courts Martial they do one to five years at hard labor in Leavenworth Penitentiary and upon their release they are branded with a Dishonorable Discharge, forced to live out the rest of their days as internal exiles. Whatever you think of such types, they too are casualties of war.

* * *

When I hear baby boomer politicians, all high and mighty, rhapsodizing about the noble enterprise of war, the pride and the glory and the moral cleansing provided by blood sacrifice on the field of battle, I feel like I'm trapped in a crazy man's time warp.

Here's President Bush telling me (meaning I and not he, mine and not his) that I must fight on because our national honor, our international prestige and credibility, our strategic interests — aye, even our precious national security — all ride on whether or not "we" can achieve military victory in Iraq.

The source of America's greatness, Bush reminds me, is our people's selfless yearning to bring democracy to the oppressed, justice to the exploited and know-how to the natives. "We" are at war in Iraq because it is our sacred responsibility as the undisputed Leaders of the Free World and the armed Guarantors of World Peace. As Americans it is our Manifest Destiny to be in Iraq, our white man's burden, our duty to the one and only true God — our God.

As if you, the American GI, had enlisted in the US military in order to be mutilated in the service of the Iraqis.