Interview with Evan Wright author of “Generation Kill”...speaking of Oliver North and atrocities
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http://firedoglake.com/2008/09/08/ollie-north-rides-again-%e2%80%93-to-an-afghan-massacre/#comment-1620824
...speaking of Oliver North and atrocities
For instance, there’s a story in there about a Marine reserve unit
that was handing out porn to these Iraqi children, and an elder came
out from the village who was really upset by this. The kids ran off,
but one of them, through a translator said “Uh-oh, that old man is
really mad at you, he’s going to get a rocket launcher and attack you
because you are corrupting our morals,” and the old guy walked out
with this rusty old rocket launcher tube, and the reservist marines
panicked and they launched twenty-six Mark-19, 40-millimeter grenade
rounds. They completely missed the old man, because they were
reservists and they hadn’t been trained properly, and they dropped
them all on this little hamlet. A Mark-19 round, a single one, is a
devastating weapon to drop into a mud hut village. They dropped 26 of
these in there. Also, Oliver North, who was working for Fox News as a
correspondent was nearby and ran up and was trying to film it, and
word was he picked up a weapon and was trying to shoot into the hamlet
also. I heard this story—and this is one of the few things in my book
that I didn’t witness—and I said this cannot be true. So I went and I
interviewed between 15 and 20 participants, including the gunner who
actually dropped the rounds on the village. Everybody corroborated it.
So yea, there’s some outrageous stuff in the book but it’s all true.
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Iraq With 'Generation Kill': An Interview with Evan Wright
Evan Wright spent two months living with twenty-three marines from
First Recon, the elite unit who spearheaded the invasion of Iraq. In
magazine articles and his book Generation Kill , Wright chronicled
the triumphs and horrors physical, moral, emotional, and spiritual
that these marines endured. We talked to him about his experience of
the Iraq War, and the human costs of just wars.
By Angelo Matera
Evan Wright, author of "Generation Kill"
[To read an excerpt from Evan Wright's book, Generation Kill, click
here]
GODSPY: Why did you name the book Generation Kill?
Evan Wright: There were a couple of reasons. The first reason had to
do with a book called On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, which
showed that in past generations only 15 to 20% of combat infantry were
willing to fire their weapons. After the first ambush we were in, Lt.
Fick and I were discussing this book and how today s guys have no
problem firing their weapons. For instance, Fick remarked after a
firefight, "Did you see what they did to that town, they fucking
destroyed it. Cpl. Trombley, the machine gunner who was next to me in
that ambush, he d even been sort of ecstatic, comparing it to Grand
Theft Auto, the video game.
I think that the problem with American society is we don t really
understand what war is. Our understanding of it is too sanitized.
The other reason was more important to me. For the past decade we ve
been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom
Brokaw s book about the men who fought in World War II, and a lot of
people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to
remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home
and kissing his fiancé. They ve forgotten that war is about killing. I
really think it s important as a society to be reminded of this,
because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn
t serve in Viet Nam. Many of them protested it. But now they re grown
up, and as they ve gotten older I think many of them have grown tired
of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they
ve started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war.
I never read Tom Brokaw s book, but if you go back and look at the
actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut who
wrote Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their
contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about
it, there s no romance at all. In fact, a lot of their work is very
anti-war. So Generation Kill is a play on that myth, because what war
is really about is killing. It s not about anything else, really, for
the guys, or for the participants on the ground.
My book also goes into how soldiers kill civilians, they wound
civilians, and you know, we forget how the people who fought in World
War II were doing the same things. They were shooting women and
children by accident, and of course, our governments were bombing
women and children, civilian populations. In that respect it s also an
ironic title. It s a title that works against itself because it
implies that it s really easy for these guys the marines I was with to
kill. And at first it did seem easy for them to kill, but as the book
goes on you see guys like Sergeant Colbert Ice Man breaking down and
being really affected by these deaths. So that s the title.
It s interesting that you mention the book On Killing by Dave Grossman
because I wanted to read a quote about it to you: Stressing that
human beings have a powerful, innate resistance to the taking of life,
Grossman examines the techniques developed by the military to overcome
that aversion. In the book Grossman makes the case that the military
is ignoring the post-traumatic effects of killing on soldiers. Do you
have any sense whether this is true?
Well, as an empiricist, I have to say that, personally, I ve only seen
the guys a year after combat. But the question implies that it s the
military s responsibility to deal with post-traumatic stress, and I
would argue that it s society s responsibility. Now that these guys
have fought, is the military itself really responsible for everything
that happens to a veteran after he s discharged? I don t know. Of
course they minimize it, because the military s not going to tell
these guys Hey go out there and do your job and kill, and by the way
we just have to warn you, you might be screwed up for the rest of your
life. They re not going to do that.
I think we as a society are content to remain isolated from the
military, which is part of the beauty of an all-volunteer army, from
the standpoint of empire-building, because we as consumer-citizens don
t have to worry about these issues. If there are problems with the
military, it s their problem, not ours, because that s how we conceive
of war. We re really alienated from the people who fight wars. They re
almost a separate class. Then we get angry when we hear reports of
people getting affected by war, and we say, well, they d better take
care of theirs. But we forget that it s our society that suffers when
they suffer.
CONTINUED > >
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