The Ultimate Betrayal
Zinn, Howard
The Ultimate Betrayal By Howard Zinn Illustration by David Page Icannot get out of my mind the photo that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on December 30, alongside a story by...
...It is a bitter legacy...
...Another father in Baltimore, whose son, Kendall Waters-Bey, a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps, was killed, held up a photo of his son for the news cameras, and said: "President Bush, you took my only son away from me...
...An article last July in The Christian Science Monitor quotes an officer in the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq as saying: "Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom...
...It continues at the expense of the sick, the children, the elderly, the homeless, the unemployed, wiping out the expectations after the fall of the Soviet Union that there would be a "peace dividend" to bring prosperity to all...
...military would be greeted with flowers as liberators have disintegrated as soldiers die almost every day in a deadly guerrilla warfare that tells the GIs they are not wanted in Iraq...
...The newspapers on December 30 reported that 477 American GIs had died in the war...
...The Ultimate Betrayal By Howard Zinn Illustration by David Page Icannot get out of my mind the photo that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on December 30, alongside a story by Jeffrey Gettleman...
...He was doing his job," his mother said...
...It showed a young man sitting on a chair facing a class of sixth graders in Blairsville, Pennsylvania...
...She started to cry...
...In a sense, the novel was asking, and now the returned veterans are asking, that we don't forget...
...Why his eyes...
...This government has betrayed the hopes of the world for peace...
...The United States had sprayed huge parts of Vietnam with the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, resulting for the Vietnamese in hundreds of thousands of deaths, lingering cancers, birth defects...
...The returning soldiers of World War I, many of them crippled and shell-shocked, were hit hard, barely a dozen years after the end of the war, by the Depression...
...The quick Thanksgiving visit of Bush to Iraq, much ballyhooed in the press, was seen differently by an army nurse in Landstuhl, Germany, where casualties from the war are treated...
...The United States government was proud that, although perhaps 100,000 Iraqis had died in the Gulf War of 1991, there were only 148 American battle casualties...
...What it has concealed from the public is that 206,000 veterans of that war filed claims with the VA for injuries and illnesses...
...The case was brought by 15,000 veterans and their relatives...
...He was killed on April 4, 2003, in a battle around Baghdad airport...
...Of course, they and their families are not the only ones betrayed...
...They set up tents across the Potomac from the capital and demanded that Congress pay the bonuses it had promised...
...The list of betrayals is long...
...They wanted only to forget him...
...However, a suit against Dow Chemical and other manufacturers of the defoliant was settled out of court for $180 million...
...They all do, all nineteen in the ward that day, some missing limbs, eyes, or worse...
...His father, sitting at his bedside, said: "Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing...
...But what is not usually reported is that for every death there are four or five men and women seriously wounded...
...When he came out of a coma in an Army Medical Center five weeks later, he could not see...
...The Iraqi people, promised freedom from tyranny, saw their country, already devastated by two wars and twelve years of sanctions, attacked by the most powerful military machine in history...
...The Pentagon proudly announced a campaign of "shock and awe," which left 10,000 or more Iraqi men, women, and children dead, and many thousands more maimed...
...Young men-boys, in fact-were enticed into the Revolutionary Army of the Founding Fathers by the grand words of the Declaration of Independence...
...I spent it at the hospital taking care of a young West Point lieutenant wounded in Iraq...
...As for Jeremy Feldbusch, blinded in the war, his hometown of Blairsville, an old coal mining town of 3,600, held a parade for him, and the mayor honored him...
...When, after the war, farmers in Western Massachusetts, many of them veterans, rebelled against the foreclosures of their farms, they were put down by armed force...
...Instead, the army was called out, and they were fired on, tear-gassed, dispersed...
...Unemployed, their families hungry, they descended on Washington-20,000 of them, from every part of the country...
...And yes, we come back to the ultimate betrayal, the betrayal of the young, sent to war with grandiose promises and lying words about freedom and democracy, about duty and patriotism...
...In one terrible moment he saw the whole thing," Trumbo writes...
...We are not historically literate enough to remember that these promises, those lies, started far back in the country's past...
...But they do not respond...
...Two weeks later, he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, but he still could not see...
...But it makes me mad that this whole war was sold to the American public and to the soldiers as something it wasn't...
...After fifty million died in the Second World War, the United Nations was set up, as its charter promised, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...
...But they found themselves mistreated, in rags and without boots, while their officers lived in luxury and merchants were making war profits...
...George Bush was eager to send young men and women half a world away into the heart of another nation...
...She sent out an e-mail: "My 'Bush Thanksgiving' was a little different...
...The betrayal of GIs and veterans continues in the so-called war on terrorism...
...The people of the United States have been betrayed, because with the Cold War over and "the threat of communism" no longer able to justify the stealing of trillions of the public's tax dollars for the military budget, that theft of the national wealth continues...
...It's too bad Bush didn't add us to his holiday agenda...
...The black soldiers who joined the Union Army and were decisive in the victory came home to poverty and racism...
...When he pressed his fists into his eyes and rocked his head back and forth he looked like a little boy...
...Is this not the ultimate betrayal of our young by our government...
...One father, in Escondido, California, Fernando Suarez del Solar, told reporters that his son, a lance corporal in the Marines, had died for "Bush's oil...
...It is a long story, the betrayal of the very ones sent to kill and die in wars...
...American GIs were also exposed in great numbers, and tens of thousands, pointing to sickness, to birth defects in their children, asked the Veterans Administration for help...
...Sergeant Feldbuschs mother, Charlene Feldbusch, who, along with his father, virtually lived at his bedside for two months, one day saw a young woman soldier crawling past her in the corridor...
...Their families very often understand this before their sons and daughters do, and remonstrate with them before they go off Ruth Aitken did so with her son, an Army captain, telling him it was a war for oil, while he insisted he was protecting the country from terrorists...
...Thousands mutinied, and some were executed by order of General Washington...
...In the years since that war, 8,300 veterans have died, and 160,000 claims for disability have been recognized by the VA...
...Thousands deserted in the Mexican War, and in the Civil War there was deep resentment that the rich could buy their way out of service, and that financiers like J. P. Morgan were profiting as the bodies piled up on the battlefields...
...Next to him was a woman...
...Later she told Gettleman, "Do you know how many times I walked up and down those hallways and saw those people without arms or legs and thought: Why couldn't this be my son...
...She was there to help him because he is blind...
...Howard Zinn, the author of "A Peoples History of the United States, " is a columnist for The Progressive...
...He finally learns how to communicate, by tapping Morse code letters with his head, and asks the authorities to take him to schoolrooms everywhere, to show the children what war is like...
...The term "seriously wounded" does not begin to convey the horror...
...Bush's State of the Union address, while going through the usual motions of thanking those serving in Iraq, continued his policy of ignoring the thousands who have come back wounded, in a war that is becoming increasingly unpopular...
...Perhaps it was to wipe out that ugly memory, or perhaps it was the glow accompanying the great victory over fascism, but the veterans of World War II received a GI Bill of Rights- free college education, low interest home mortgages, life insurance...
...As the government pours hundreds of billions into war, it has no money to take care of the Vietnam veterans who are homeless, who linger in VA hospitals, who suffer from mental disorders, and who commit suicide in shocking numbers...
...The men said the same, but you'll never read that in the paper...
...That was Jeremy Feld-busch, twenty-four years old, a sergeant in the Army Rangers, who was guarding a dam along the Euphrates River on April 3, 2003, when a shell exploded 100 feet away and shrapnel tore into his face...
...When soldiers realize this, they rebel...
...Not the teacher of the class, but the young fellow's mother...
...And those who come back alive, but blind or without arms or legs, find that the Bush Administration is cutting funds for veterans...
...The Vietnam War veterans, on the other hand, came home to find that the same government that had sent them into an immoral and fruitless war, leaving so many of them wounded in body and mind, now wanted to forget about them...
...And even though they have fearsome weapons, they are still vulnerable to guerrilla attacks that have left so many of them blinded and crippled...
...She had no legs, and her three-year-old son was trailing behind...
...But the government denied responsibility...
...I thought of the blinded, armless, legless soldier in Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun, who, lying on his hospital cot, unable to speak or hear, remembers when his hometown gave him a send-off, with speeches about fighting for liberty and democracy...
...The promises that the U.S...
Vol. 68 • April 2004 • No. 4
