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★阿修羅♪
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ロシア経由ルモンド占領監視：イラク米兵は疲労と怒り表明し帰国日の目標なしに米メディア封鎖を批判。
http://www1.iraqwar.ru/iraq-read_article.php?articleId=14192&lang=en
American soldiers express weariness and anger
02.08.2003 [20:07]
July 29th, 2003
Relief which never comes, unclear missions, soldiers killed every day : a large number of the 145,000 men deployed in Iraq are beginning to ask questions about their presence there. For its part, central command is concentrating on the hunt for Saddam Hussein.
Sergeant Menendez is an angry man. Furious with the American authorities, frustrated with his job in Baghdad, tired of staying here interminably without knowing when it is that he will be able to return to his home in Orlando, Florida. This Non-Commissioned officer of the American National Guard, a force composed of reservists who, on a voluntary basis, agreed to undergo military training for one weekend
every month, never imagined he was in for such a long deployment in Iraq. “We were supposed to go home as soon as the war was over,” he complains.
But the constraints and hazards of a soldier’s life, reservist or not, have decreed otherwise. Since May, Al and a hundred other National Guardsmen have been stuck in the giant Baghdad conference centre which, since the fall of Baghdad on the 9th of April, has become one of the operating centres of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The civil administration of the occupation authority arranges most of
American “proconsul” Paul Bremer’s press initiatives here. Al and his men have the task of guarding this strategic location, situated not far from Saddam’s former palace which has been transformed, in its turn, into the CPA headquarters.
Sergeant Menendez and his men arrived in Jordan on February 16th, before the war. After a series of missions in Iraq, they reached Baghdad in May. Without knowing, exactly, what it was they were supposed to be doing. “At the beginning, no one knew what our job was. The units we
were attached to kept telling us : ‘We don’t need you! ‘ One day we wanted to buy a few things from a canteen but they made it quite clear that it was reserved for air force personnel only… Nice!”
“Like Zombies”
Since then, things haven’t improved. Three weeks ago, while they were patrolling the university, one of Menendez’s men was gunned down in cold blood. “I’ll never trust an Iraqi again,” he confesses now. “One of my boys got himself killed by a guy who, while he was smiling, pulled out a gun and shot him. Now, whenever I’m out on patrol, I watch everything, and I keep my back to the wall!” Not only does he have trouble getting over this death, but the sergeant feels that he’s up against the indifference of the military command. “No one has given us any indication of when we’ll be allowed to go home. It’s like no one gives a
damn about us!”
Even worse, the governor of Florida, who happens to be the brother of President George Bush, hasn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to his “boys” deployed in Iraq. “I believe that the politicians just don’t care about what’s happening to us. Even when the soldier in my unit was killed, Governor Bush didn’t have the courtesy to send one word of regret…”
Al Menendez, 37 years old, married with two children, veteran of the Kuwait liberation of 1991, is a landscape architect in Orlando. Before leaving, he had three contracts in progress. Now, he’s lost two. And his frustration, he says, is shared by his colleagues, all of whom have left family and career back in Florida.
“The morale of the men is very low. I’m an NCO so I’m not supposed to share my feelings with them, but sometimes I see them walking around like zombies. That doesn’t mean they’re not doing their job but you can tell they’re sick of it.”
However much he claims not to trust the Iraqis, the sergeant expresses pity for them having to live “in the same crap they were in before the war.” “I can understand why they’re protesting against us, when they do it peacefully, “ he adds. ”I sometimes wonder if we’re doing the right thing here. When you think that our soldiers are being killed every day!” Al admits that, sometimes, the soldiers lose their cool and behave rudely towards the Iraqis : “ What do you expect? It’s nearly 50 degrees. We’re sweating under helmets, body armour. We’re up to our eyeballs in gear. And, in front of us, we’ve got these civilians who just won’t stop moaning, starting endless arguments. Anyone would lose it.”
Another National Guard soldier, a warrant officer, is more relaxed. “I feel that I’m doing something useful here because I’m in the middle of a historical situation and one day I’ll be able to tell my children about it as a first hand witness. The fact is, we played a part in overthrowing an evil dictator!” But the warrant officer’s dreams are disturbed. The other night he had a dream in which he was up against
several Iraqi fighters armed with Kalashnikovs. “In my dream, I shot them and killed them all. Then I was being judged in front of a tribunal and the judges were all dressed like the Ku Klux Klan! I’m sure Sigmund Freud would have something to say about that, eh?” he jokes.
Anger is growing too among many of the full-time soldiers. Notably the 3rd Infantry Division, based in Falluja, to the west of Baghdad. In this region, at least one American dies every day in attacks launched by Saddam Hussein loyalists.
“Collectively, the soldiers have just had enough. Their morale is at rock bottom. I’ve already met about a hundred like that,” says one American army journalist. Especially when they were told that, instead of being relieved in September, as they had been promised, they would have to stay on indefinitely. The other day, one of them even declared in front of ABC cameras that “Donald Rumsfeld “ ﾐ the American secretary of defence ﾐ “should resign.” Recently, another confided to AFP that Iraq was “a hellzone.”
MEDIA DAMAGE
“I’ve decided to let the soldiers breathe a little as far as their
relations with the press are concerned, to take the pressure off them,” declares Captain James Brownlee to Le Monde, 24th July. Brownlee is a public relations officer with the second brigade of the 3rd division, based at the entrance to Falluja. “There’s too much external interference in the base,” he explains. Subtext : too many journalists are listening to too many soldiers expressing frustration.
But Captain Brownlee won’t admit that of course. “The press is not allowed to speak to the soldiers until further notice. That’s it. Don’t forget we’re in a place where our men could get killed any day!” In the United States, the first amendment to the constitution doesn’t permit the press being denied access to the military in this way. But there’s more than one way of justifying such a ban for operational reasons. Obviously, the American military command has decided to limit the media damage.
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=306
Источник: Le Monde Via Occupation Watch
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