ugh. what a sick song.

The song is disturbing.... I wonder if the person who wrote it actually has any combat experience.

I ran into a guy I used to party with in college. He joined the army a few years back (at age 35!) and we talked for a long time. He didn't really want to talk about the politics of the war but he really wanted to talk about his experience at an emotional level. The first thing is that the stress level is unimaginable. He was in Iraq and as he put it "you have to assume that everyone is hostile and wants to kill you. Even your interpreter and other "friendlies." You basically have to be prepared to fight to the death at the drop of a dime while not provoking an unnecessary confrontation for days on end.

He talked about driving after coming back to the U.S. He said that he notices every piece of garbage on the highway because he had to notice these things in Iraq. If a coke bottle is on the side of the road that wasn't there yesterday but is there today it may be a roadside bomb.

Just having normal civilian social interactions is a chore since so much of everyday interaction is frivolous small talk which is hard to get accustomed to after being in war.

I raise this stuff not so that we feel sorry for the U.S. military but because I think that we have to take the task of winning them over pretty seriously. If you start the conversation with a political condemnation of the war, the soldier is unlikely to hear you. Most likely they will assume that you don't really know what you are talking about. (One of my less circumspect friends kept interjecting "of course people are hostile and want to kill you! you are invading their country" etc, But our soldier friend just repeated: "I am not talking about that")

The main thing is that he is afraid. I am not saying that this soldier is a coward, he is going back-- he overcomes his fear (which is courage), but unless you are pyschopathic (like the lyrics of this song) any soldier going to Iraq or Afghanistan is going to be afraid. But, it takes some patient probing to get them to reveal their fear.

If the anti-war movement is going to have any success with soldiers I think we need to have a better understanding of their psychology and consciousness.

Keith wrote:

<blockquote>'If the anti-war movement is going to have any success with soldiers I think we need to have a better understanding of their psychology and consciousness.'</blockquote>

Oh yes, I know that consciousness and that psychology very well. In conversation with guys like your college friend I always start, by asking questions like what is your MOS (military occupational speciality), a code of two numbers and a letter.

For Army guys codes like 11 Bravo (B) and 19 Delta (D) will tell you that he is a combat arms soldier that is in the shit every day risking his life. Then I ask about his unit and where he was stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't ask when he is going back because everybody does and no one likes to be reminded.

Because I am older I ask him if they still use the term 'remf' (pronounced remp) which means <em>rear echelon motherfucker</em> - support troops who almost always go home with all their arms and legs. I don't ask about the racist terms used to describe Afghans and Iraqis which American military culture always generates in third world combat zones.

With all the preliminaries out of the way I then ask if he believes that the lying politicians and greedy fucking business vultures are concerned at all whether he or any of his brothers lives or dies. I ask that and then I say because if they do, this must be a different country than the one I carried a rifle for. Things must have really changed since the years I lived with men whose bodies and souls were destroyed in someone else's country for the benefit of the arrogant rich. That's who the real remf's are and they just get wealthier on the blood of everyone that gets wasted.

Of course I am usually drinking when I say these things and I don't really care is it pisses them off. The funny thing is that it never does.

There are things worth fighting for, to risk one's life for, and to kill for if necessary. One of the burdens of serving the empire is the haunting knowledge of how utterly meaningless it really is to die for the assholes that profit (politically or economically) from these wars. It is a fear that most can keep at bay through all the military rituals and the pervasive racism that sees every Iraqi and every Afghan as the enemy. There are some songs that speak to that fear and raise questions about the propaganda that says it is all worthwhile. This is the best current one I know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBCiYBMuuxQ&amp;safety_mode=true&amp;persist_safety_mode=1&amp;safe=active

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBCiYBMuuxQ&amp;feature=related

I'm glad to read the responses I've read so far. There was some really good information from both Keith and Stiofan.

Here's a good song from K'naan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMuG0QwKwlQ

this cool.....

be carefule the american econmy is down now the war is begens now ho targets the america,i have vision china targets the future

I think it would be helpful when posting stuff like this to give a bit of context. Looking this up on Youtube, I see over 3 million views with overwhelmingly positive reviews and comments. Whether the songwriter has seen combat or not, he is certainly representing a common attitude.

I found it interesting to watch this with the sound off. For a song about "warriors", the visuals are overwhelmingly about hardware fetishism, which strikes me as an unconscious sign of weakness -- what kind of warriors boast about their expensive weaponry? Not the kind Homer wrote about. It's also interesting how few black faces you see (only one featured that I could see, and a few incidental ones in group shots).

It seems like it would be easy to swap out the audio with some funny parody lyrics along the lines of "the white warriors with overpriced weapons who needed 500 guys to kill Saddam's sons and grandson and 10 years to shoot an unarmed old man in his bed", post it on Youtube, and watch people go ballistic (hopefully not literally). Make it a Kasama project and I bet your traffic will go way up

One thing to keep in mind about the Youtube comments being overwhelmingly positive: the uploader of the video simply removes intelligent critical comments that call in into question. I tested out this theory myself by leaving some very civil but thought provoking comments, mirroring some of the points raised above, and guess what? Comments removed! This will skew the appearance of reality away from actual reality, so we can't put too much stock in the balance of pro/con comments on the site.

Most of the comments left here are from the children bred of cowards that General Patton spoke of.