Tuesday March 19, 2013 marks ten years since George Walker Bush, our 43rd President, launched an invasion into Iraq on March 19th 2003.
At the time, I thought this can’t be happening, I sent a letter the day before to the corporate CEO of the company I was working for and said I will not be in tomorrow, People will be dying and I will be in the streets opposing the war. If this means I’m fired, then so be it. I will not, cannot, act as if this is just like any other day.
I am a Viet Nam veteran that failed to see what war really meant. At age 19 I hadn’t the courage to resist the draft as so many others did. I walked into a hell that has occupied my mind ever since. War is a sickness, a disease, a plague on this world, originating in the poisoned minds of arrogant, racist, greedy, power hungry monsters we call “Captains of Industry” and our “Elected Officials”.
War is their whip to keep the rabble in their place, lest they rise up and free themselves and the rest of the world from their grip that crushes men, women, children and even babies. Their armies are not to protect the homeland but to instill fear at home and abroad. Speak out of turn, criticize their domestic and/or foreign policy and you will be given a “Sophie’s Choice”. Choose poverty and jail or join the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force or National Guard.
Choose the military and you will get three meals a day, a roof over your head and the spoils of war will be yours -- sex (rape if you like, a weapon war these days) drugs, money and most of all the ability of the gods’ to hold life and death in your hands. They don’t tell you that if you survive it comes with a price. You may lose life or limb, you might suffer brain damage and not even know your own name, but even if you survive physically, you will never sleep again, at least not without the aid of drugs, prescribed or not. Your life will be like mine, haunted by the memory of participating in a horror so vile, that you will wake up shaking with fear for you own soul, even if you know you never directly killed anyone. Why? Because you know you aided the killing, the massacres, the rapes, the tortures, just because you were there. Yes, you were there, but you are no guiltier than the rest of society who sent you and then went about their day as if it were any other day. They who now turn their backs on you when look for work, who don’t understand you and who fear you.
Ten years ago, you were lied to and those who lied made a profit through the Military Industrial Complex that has its tentacles in every fiber of our economy. It is a cancer that will eventually kill everything on this planet because it has no conscience, no concern for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our very economy depends on it. The war on terrorism is a sham, a sleight of hand, an invisible hand that reaches into your pockets and steals your children’s future. You have indentured you daughters and sons to work off an endless debt servicing the masters’ killing machine. The country you swore to protect has been swindled as millions lay dead, dying, starving or in ruin.
Enough is enough!
Not another Ten Years, not another Year, nor a Day more of war.
No more Viet Nams, Afghanistans or Iraqs. No more WAR!
It is time to free yourself and the world; all you have to lose are your chains.
Dan Shea is a Viet Nam Veteran, Marine 1968, Agent Orange Survivor, former Veterans For Peace Board member and currently serving on the Core Committee of the Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign. Dan is a poet and visual artist, making art to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.