An Open Letter to US Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq

I thugged around in eight different
places in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where I pointed
guns at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American foreign
policies ­ policies controlled, then as now, by the rich.

In the course of that career,
I heard everything you have heard and felt everything you have
felt about "loyalty."

Tricky thing, loyalty.

Nowadays, when I talk with
some of you, or when I hear conversations recorded with you,
I hear many who have very serious reservations about these wars
of occupation. I had more than reservations from the get-go about
Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed them as hard as I could,
and so did millions of other people around the world.

But that brain-dead piece of
shit in the White House who is legally your boss, and all his
handlers, starting with Vice President Dick "Halliburton"
Cheney they sent you to do this thing anyway.

They talked themselves into
believing this would be ­ and these are their words ­
a cakewalk. They surrounded
themselves exclusively with others who echoed what was already
in their minds; and they
punished and villified and isolated anyone who told them
what they didn’t want to hear. Because they
made up their minds to conduct these invasions years ago,
and with the attacks of September 11 ­ in which Iraq’s role
was exactly nothing­ they figured now was their chance to
conduct the re-disposition of the old Cold War military into
their new plan to build permanent
bases in Southwest Asia.

Since they’d made up their
minds, they didn’t want to hear anything except rosy scenarios
for their plans, because these reptile-minded, preppy gangsters
are like spoiled children who can’t abide anyone fucking up their
toy-emperor fantasies.

But when those fantasies did
get fucked up, by the realities they ran so hard to escape, they
continued to pursue their grim agenda in spite of the mounting
consequences, because they don’t pay those consequences.

If I had my way, we would issue
the whole shriveled, manicured lot of them their assault rifles,
put them aboard an Air Force transport, tighten the leg straps
on their static line parachutes, and boot their sorry asses out
from 800 feet right over the middle of Ramadi ­ where they
could drop their harnesses in the street and explain democracy
to the locals.

But that’s just ranting, because
I do so despise them. I hate people who get away with shit just
because they have money and power. And I hate people who sacrifice
the lives of others to amplify or protect that power.

But I’m not telling you anything.
You all already know by now what generation after generation
has learned the hard way. When the rich start their wars, it’s
not the rich that get sent to fight them. Yeah, a few go get
their time as part of putting together a political career, but
we know who does the heavy lifting.

And in these conversations
that many of you have with me and thousands of other people,
we hear you say ­ more and more often now ­ that you
know this war is wrong, but that you have to "do your job,"
because you are loyal to your buddies; because you feel that
you have to back them up; and because if you don’t go, someone
else will have to. And I respect that sentiment.

But I have to challenge this
loyalty thing, and I do it out of respect for you, and because
I care about you, and because my own son is back there for his
second go-around.

A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta,
who recently returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an
organization called Iraq Veterans
Against the War, recently told me, "My platoon sergeant
tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and when we
resisted, he threatened us with punishment. He told us that’the
Geneva Convention doesn’t exist in Iraq, and that is in writing
at the Brigade level.’"

You all know that this is bullshit,
and if you didn’t know, let me give you a news flash about some
­ not all, but some ­ military lifers; and this is coming
from a military lifer. Some of them are dumber than dog shit.
Some of them say things when they don’t have the foggiest fucking
idea what they are talking about. Some of them will say any goddamn
thing to get you to do what they want you to do.

But then again, there was a
memorandum that came down that suggested the Geneva Conventions
were void in Iraq. It didn’t come from the Brigade level, though;
it came
from fucking George W. Bush’s office. And it’s a lie. That’s
why they sat there in front of Congress before they made the
author of that memo into the Attorney General of the United States
­ get your head around that­ and denied that they meant
it.

But it is a lie.

You do not have to follow illegal
orders EVER, under any circumstances, and you ARE bound by International
Law. You should also be bound by what you know is right, by your
sense of plain common decency.

One of the ways they will get
you to do things that you will not want to live with for the
rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one
of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And "what happens in
Iraq stays in Iraq." This is one of the many ways they take
that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control
you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law
and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is
right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own
peace of mind for the rest of your life.

And I’m telling you that you
do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.

They know that many ofyouknow
that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies about
weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds over New York
City and phony al Qaeda connections (and then when that fell
apart, you were there to deliver democracy at gunpoint). So they
know that many of you can’t stay committed to this violent occupation
out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington DC, who are
busy every day at home undermining the same Constitution you
swore to protect (from all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC).

They know that you know that
plenty of the officers are out there trying to get new fruit
salad medals on their Class-A uniforms, and bucking for promotion,
by risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they know
that they can’t rely on the loyalty of many of you to the chain
of command any more either.

Where do they have to go with
this, then, after all? What do they tell you?

"You get out there on
that Humvee, and face those IEDs ­ together, as loyal buddies."

"You get out there and
ransack people’s houses in the middle of the night, and make
their babies cry ­ together, as buddies."

"You get out there and
set up a road block without Arabic signs or interpreters and
get put into that situation where you are tense and don’t know,
and you shoot up that car and kill parents in front of their
children, and you have to live with that for the rest of your
lives ­ together, because you are loyal buddies."

"You get out there and
lose life, limb, or eyesight face mental and physical ailments
for the rest of your lives together, as an act of loyalty to
your buddies."

That’s the pressure you have
on you today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to
Iraq so someone else doesn’t take your place.

But let’s look at the bigger
picture here, and for that I’ll take you back to Vietnam, before
many of you were born. We heard this same bullshit then. Almost
verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing factors
was for getting us out of that war?

We quit being good soldiers.

The United States military
got to the point where it was no longer an effective fighting
force, because US
soldiers quit taking orders. It got to the point where an
officer who was using his men’s bodies to chase medals might
find himself on the wrong end of a Claymore mine. Now I’m not
advocating that again, and I hope we can stop this before it
goes that far.

The other thing many soldiers
did was become part of the political resistance at home. They
looked at this question of looking out for their buddies and
for fellow soldiers in the short term, but staying ina barbaric
and immoral war. And they realized that the best thing they could
do for their buddies ­ not as soldiers, but as human beings
­ was to
enlist in the opposition to the war and bring it to an end.

In the process, many of them
discovered that it took a lot more endurance and a lot more courage
to oppose the war than it did to demonstrate that macho bullshit
they were expected to display as they continued to do terrible
things to those other human beings whose country they occupied.

Here’s how you can exercise
a deeper loyalty to the troops there now, and to all those who
will continue to go as long as this obscenity continues:

Do everything you can to stop
the war.

Question every order, and base
those questions on the Geneva
Conventions and the Law
of Land Warfare. Let them see you keeping a detailed journal
of your experience. Send your stories home in letters. Open up
discussions about the legitimacy of the war when you are in your
billets, even if it does spark controversy. Spread around information
you get about the war from sources other than those loud-mouthed
news-mannequins on FOX. And email or mail your anonymous
membership in to Iraq Veterans Against the War. The link is at
the end of this letter.

The day this war stops and
they put the last of you on an airplane home, is when you will
never again have to smell that fresh-blood smell that stays in
your head for hours after you’ve loaded someone onto a stretcher
or rolled them into that big Ziploc bag. The day will come when
you all pull out, because this was a losing proposition from
the outset, but Bush
and his crew were too fucking stupid to know it.

The best thing is that this
war of occupation ends sooner than later, and ­ as an exercise
of loyalty to your own conscience, of loyalty to those who are
there and those who may go there, and loyalty to the principle
of human decency ­ you can find ways to hasten that day.
You can find ways to bring closer the day when the Iraqis can
get on about the business of taking control of their own destiny,
and you and your buddies can sleep in security and comfort in
your own homes, play with your children, make love with your
partners, and walk down familiar streets unencumbered by the
rattling luggage of war.

If bringing this day closer
for all of you is the goal, how much more loyal can you get?

Yours for walking unencumbered,

Stan Goff
US Army (Retired)

Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and
"Sex & War" which will be released approximately
December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His
blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org

I encourage troops to show
this to other troops. I encourage family members of troops to
print it out and send it to them in letters, or to paste it into
emails. I encourage troops and family members who are on military
reservations to make copies and place them everywhere you can
think of.

Web sites of interest to troops and their families:

www.bringthemhomenow.org
www.ivaw.net
www.veteransforpeace.org
www.mfso.org
www.girights.objector.org
www.occupationwatch.org
www.nlg.org/mltf