Always Insane

Semper fou
July 2, 2006
by James Alexander Thom

It’s more than half a century since I wore the green fatigues, but once a Marine, always a Marine.

Or, Semper Fi.

What’s a faithful old Marine to think about the news that a squad of Marines will be tried for the massacre of two dozen innocent Iraqis in a town called Haditha?

What I think about it is that I’m heartsick that it happened, and I’m mad as hell at the scheming fools who put those Marines and the Iraqi victims in that crazy situation.

“Crazy,” in French, is “fou.” In Scottish, “fou” means drunk.”

Semper Fou. That’s my revised Marine motto. Either fou is appropriate; I remember we got drunk any time we could. As for crazy, Let me just come out and say it:

To train a sane person to do what a Marine must do, you have to brainwash much of the sanity and the humanity out of him.

You must make him so obedient to authority that he’s willing to die on command.

You have to obliterate that key religious Commandment: Thou shalt not kill...

Now, thanks to the wizardry of our Crusader-in-Chief, those terrorists have moved their training camps to Iraq, where they’ve got our guys surrounded. The last George who managed a tactic that stupid was George Custer. (Unlike George W, Custer led the troops in, instead of sending them.)

After news of the Haditha massacre broke (that is, leaked out from its cover-up), Marine General Peter Pace demurred that it wasn’t Marine training that made those Marines murder those civilians.

Respectfully, general, the hell it wasn’t!

Put yourself in the boots of those Marines: There you are, trained to the eyeballs for the madness of war. Semper Fou, trapped in that trashed, gritty, Fort Apache burg in the desert. Most everybody in the country hates you for invading and wrecking their country, so you can’t stroll into town to flirt with Iraqi girls in a bar. But every few hours it’s your duty to go out among the hostiles and remind them who’s boss in their country: Donald Rumsfeld.

You know they don’t like that, so you’re expecting a blast or a bullet at every corner. It’s 114 degrees and you’re encased in heavy clothes and armor and loaded down with ammo and gear. You haven’t had a good night’s sleep in six months, and the damned Iraqis aren’t grateful for the great gift of Christian capitalist democracy you’re trying to bestow upon them.

You’re frustrated and scared and mad and your trigger finger is twitchy; this is the third tour of duty your unit has served in this mess, and you’re like a hot grenade with the pin pulled, and God help any hadji who messes with you and your buddies.

Then BAM! Your best friend becomes a one-legged, one-armed fountain of blood right before your eyes, and so you do what you’ve been trained to do – start killing everybody in sight who isn’t a Marine.

If you go berserk, that’s bad enough. If you go on killing methodically in a controlled act of vengeance, that’s a massacre, and you must be put on trial for murder...

Whether or not that squad of Marines goes on trial for murder, there’s another squad of Americans who should. Their names include Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Ledeen, Tenet, etc. Many of them make a big deal out of being Christian Soldiers, though they never were personally seen marching off to war. They calculated to start an unprovoked war, where real soldiers and Marines have to throw their own bodies and souls into the inferno.

Those high-placed connivers are the ones to put on trial. They’re responsible for the destruction of a country and the death of thousands, and for young American soldiers hitching along on prosthetic limbs or waking up quaking from traumatic nightmares...

While our best are being misused in a civil war they precipitated but don't understand, Avedon notes:

...The fight against terrorism is not being fought. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Bush is much closer to the bin Laden family than he is to ordinary Americans, but Bush is not fighting terrorism. The Republicans don't care about protecting our country from terrorism. They aren't merely "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," they are the gang that isn't even interested in the target.

The main$tream media won't touch that one, Avedon.

Why not? Because the main$tream is pretty much owned by the same people making money off of the endless war against Terra.

The other factor that stops them from connecting the dots that outline the administration's lack of a desire to resolve this war: once you realize the war isn't really being fought, it isn't far to the realization that the people we are fighting have been set up.

Then you're off on the slippery slope, observing facts you'd closed your eyes to since 2000. You move towards the position that Bu$hCo let 9-11 happen. Once there, you really begin to look at things differently.

If you keep looking, you finally begin to realize they made it happen. Being the bunglers they are, they couldn't realize the ramifications of their action. Nor could they completely control the emergent conspiracy that acted out on that day.

Commander Bunnypants had that deer-in-the-headlights look on 9-11 for a good reason. It's the look of a practiced criminal at the wheel of a getaway car with bad brakes and a large bag of cash in the back. After all, skyscapers fell that hadn't even been hit by airplanes.

So basically there's no profit for Cheneyburton-Bu$hCo in observing that the target isn't what they're shooting at. Gasoline will soon be $100 a barrel, and business is booming.

Literally. Semper fou, Mr. Thom. Always crazy.