‘Don’t frame me!’ pleads a US soldier

Folks, I know that in the end I am dispensable.  I know this because I knew that I was dispensable at the very beginning too.  The rich don’t fight. The poor do.  They must.  The children of those who make the big bucks from selling weapons (of mass destruction and otherwise) don’t fight.  Not in the trenches anyway.  One or two exception, sure, but by and large it’s the poor folks kids who get to kill and get killed.  Dispensable.  Remember the word.

Call me soldier. Call me US soldier.  You can call me any name you like. Robert Bales if you wish.  It does not matter.  What matters is that Amnesty International has said that the military of my country is guilty of systematically covering up or disregarding abundant and compelling evidence of war crimes, torture and unlawful killings in Afghanistan.  Forget the cover-up and disregarding of evidence.  I know.  That’s my job – not the ‘knowing’ of it but the ‘doing’.  Not news to me and since I have a JD it’s not news to those who came up with the JD.  It’s what we are required to do.

I know that Amnesty International can throw all the evidence gathered but nothing will come out of it to those who sent us to Afghanistan, those who ordered us to do what we did and those who ‘covered up’.  My country owns the United Nations, alright?  Nothing will happen to the USA. No sanctions will be imposed. No UN investigation.  Indeed, the matter won’t get even a half decent run in the mainstream media.  Bucks and guns add up to a lot of insurance.  The people referred to above are covered.  Barack Obama said ‘We’ve tortured some folks’.  That’s confession.  He said it about the Bush years, but he knows, I know and the whole world knows that other folks were tortured and summarily executed post 2008.  That confession didn’t make waves.  Didn’t make a ripple even.   Bases covered.  

Whenever there’s a slip and we get caught, you can rest assured that Washington will pin it down not on policy, strategy or guidebook for the men and women in fatigues but on me going berserk.  Hillary said famously not too long ago, ‘this is not who we are!’ whereas she damn well knows that THIS IS WHO WE ARE.  ‘We’ meaning of course the USA, its foreign policy, its military operations, its command structure, my JD and poor ‘ol me carrying out orders.  That’s all WHO WE ARE.  But that line is important.  It absolves everyone.  Except me. 

Like I said, I am not worried about my country. I am worried about myself.  No, I am not worried about being hauled up, queried, found guilty etc.  I am worried about my reputation.  If you, as suggested, called me Robert Bales, you would be ‘in the know’.

The guy did what was expected of him.  That was what he was and that was what the USA is.  No contradiction there.  Someone wrote about him thus:

You went postal in Kandahar

and that’s not new, we know

for what’s a dozen-or-so

after Hiroshima and Nagasaki

and the sanity-driven blood-rush

that turned cities into rubble

territories into cemeteries

governments into puppets?

My problem is that they’ll say about me.  They’ll say, like they said of Bales, that I was traumatized, ‘apparently deranged’ or worse, call me a ‘rogue soldier’ who ‘went on rampage’ and committed ‘an act of madness’.  I am none of those things and did nothing of the kind.  If I am traumatized, deranged or am a rogue then so is Barack.  I was and am perfectly sane, sober, in complete control of my faculties and am certainly not a rogue.  Honest through and through.  I am Clinton (and now Kerry), toe for toe, leg for leg, heart for heart; I am Barack , every senator and every congressman; I am US Foreign Policy and Military Strategy, agent and plan, executer and execution, through and through.

I just don’t want to be singled out.  I am ‘part and parcel’.  I am a soldier of US Army.  I don’t want to be named and shamed.  I don’t want to be framed. 

*All this in a parallel universe, let's not forget.