Maine Owl

The struggle vets returning from often multiple tours face just begins when they get home. That is discussed in devastating detail in an hour-long talk given a couple of months ago by Aaron Glantz and broadcast recently by University of California television. UCTV is available locally if you have Dish Network. There will be several re-broadcasts over this coming weekend. Or, just watch the full program on YouTube:


Author Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq during 2003-05. His book, The War Comes Home, is the first systematically "to document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan."

Here are two quotes readers of this blog and its precursors may remember:

The Owl, March 2003: This war will perhaps be the worst cynical betrayal of the fighting men and women in the military in U.S. history. The American people need to know that it is only the peace movement that truly supports the troops. The only troop support that means a damn thing is stopping the war in the first place. This is a strong statement given the experience of Vietnam and the first Gulf War, but I believe that this is true. Our troops will be thrown into a battlefield where they will be exposed to deadly toxins. The deleterious effects on our troops and the Iraqi population of extensive use of depleted uranium munitions in the first Gulf War is only now coming to light. The new war will feature a ten-fold increase in the release of these toxins. A great deal of information on the suffering of our own veterans may be found at this website: http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/.

The imperialism of Bush and his lieutenants is a BETRAYAL of the troops and the American people, while they engender a false image that American troops do not care about human life. This image of our troops as storm troopers enforcing imperial policy, like it or not, will take a quantum leap in currency after an attack on Iraq. We will have lost any remaining legitimacy we have in using our military might against actual terrorists (not that I agree this has been the U.S. aim at any point, but post-9/11 legitimacy in the eyes of the world will have been squandered totally). None of this weight do I want our great country, our troops, and all of our people to have to bear.

This one perhaps gets to the issues vets would soon face even more poignantly:

Stan Goff, Orono, Maine, November 2005: I don't think any of us want to get to the point where we can clearly demonstrate that Iraq is Vietnam. We don?t need another wall with 58,000 more names on it. We don't need another generation that melts down in the face of this war. And we're already seeing it happen?.Some of us who have lived to my age, or maybe even a little older--we were so hopeful that this would never happen again--that we would never do this to another generation of young people?. And we're doing it right now,? you know,? we're doing it right now. We're killing 'em, we're maiming 'em, we're sending 'em home crazy. And we're not doing anything for 'em when they get back. It's the same thing again.

There is no credit taken here for predicting the future. If anything, the picture Aaron Glantz paints is far more devastating than any of us predicted.

But now President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates are escalating the war in Afghanistan and want an expansion of the Army by 30,000 troops. Very little is happening to resist. Our peace groups are engaged in some protest planning, but it's very, very quiet so far. It is hard to engage protest against a president in whom many folks want to believe, even though they steadfastly were anti-Bush. Meanwhile, the stories of escalation and civilian killing on one end and despair of vets on the other are afterthoughts on the news, if they are reported at all.