Hart Viges: 'You can't wash your hands when they're covered in blood'

[cal04]

My name is Hart Viges. September 11 happened. Next day I was in the recruiting office. I thought that was the way I could make a difference in the world for the better. So I went to infantry school and jump school and I arrived with my unit of the 82nd Airborne Division. I was deployed to Kuwait in February 2003. We drove into Iraq because Third Infantry Division was ahead of schedule, and so I didn't need to jump into Baghdad airport.

As we drove into Samawa to secure their supplies my mortar platoon dropped numerous rounds on this town. I watched Kiowa attack helicopters fire Hellfire missile after Hellfire missile. I saw a C130 Spectre gunship ... it will level a town. It had belt-fed artillery rounds pounding with these super-Gatling guns. I don't know how many innocents I killed with my mortar rounds. I have my imagination to pick at for that one. But I clearly remember the call-out over the radio saying "Green light on all taxi-cabs. The enemy is using them for transportation".

One of our snipers called back on the radio saying "Excuse me but did I hear that order correctly? Green light on all taxi cabs?" "Roger that soldier. You'd better start buckling up." All of a sudden the city just blew up. Didn't matter if there was an innocent in the taxi-cab - we laid a mortar round on it, snipers opened up.
Next was Fallujah. We went in without a shot. But Charlie Company decided they were going to take over a school for the area of operations. Protesters would come saying "Please get out of our school. Our children need this school. We need education".

They turned them down. They came back, about 40 to 50 people. Some have the bright idea of shooting AK-47s up in the air. Well a couple of rounds fell into the school ... They laid waste to that group of people. Then we went to Baghdad. And I had days that I don't want to remember. I try to forget. Days where we'd take contractors out to a water treatment plant outside of Baghdad.

rest of the article
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article314745.ece

[RoyGBiv]

1. I have no words...

[TayTay]

2. And for what?

The London Observer, Mov 18, 1822

"It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the contient of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighborhood of Lepzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granularly state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands."

-- From Chris Hedges book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, paperback edition, page 31

[Tsiyu]

3. If we could only send **. Cheney, Rummie, Condi

- and the rest of the bloodthirsty warmongers in this administration - through the same hell this soldier has seen.

If I were to pray for anything right now, with any hope that that prayer would be heard, i would pray for these Repukes and all who support and aid and abet the motherfuckers to live through Katrina in the Superdome and Iraq in this moment in time.

Let them taste the suffering they cause and create and sustain with such abandon.