“Call me, maybe” face-off: US troops vs. UK Royal Engineers, in Afghanistan

I was part of the civilian anti-war movement that supported and worked with large groups of active duty GIs opposed to the Vietnam war. Those GI groups – GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace and others nationwide – unleashed a torrent of antiwar newspapers like “Counterpoint, Fed Up, the Lewis-McChord Free Press, and G.I. Voice from Fort Lewis Army Base and McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma; the unit newsletters B Troop News and First of the Worst, from Fort Lewis; Sacstrated and Co-Ambulation from Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, WA; Puget Sound Sound Off from Bremerton Naval Yard on the Washington peninsula; and Yah-Hoh, published out of Fort Lewis by a
group of radical Native American servicemen.” antiwar.http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/gi_papers.shtml

There were other groups and underground papers on bases all across the world. Together they changed the character of the US military, which became openly political, defiantly antiwar and then insubordinate.

The huge size of the antiwar movement, the growth of the GI antiwar movement in Vietnam and the
heroism and intransigence of the Vietnamese led to rising levels of mutinous incidents from large numbers of fraggings to a marked “screw the orders, go slow and save lives” attitude that disrupted Pentagon in Vietnam. That was what finally forced Nixon and his armies into a humiliating retreat.

Iraq and Afghanistan are different. They’re volunteers, many joining to escape the violence of poverty and unemployment and are victims like the civilians they murder. Many of them, instead of taking out their rage fragging officers take it out on innocent civilians, including the murder of chilling numbers of children, perhaps emulating the racist mass murder of children by Bill Clinton and his embargo of food, medicine and sanitary supplies.

I’m all for encouraging GI’s to get out asap and discouraging anyone else from joining Murder Inc., but I fail to see the point of doing anything that would make them not look like what they are. They are viscous foreign invaders inflicting massive causalities on civilians, and that includes medical staff and ‘community’ relations workers. And they are themselves victims of Obama’s criminal, racist wars from Libya and Palestine to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I see these videos and at first they make me laugh but then I start to cry if I think that these are the kids we send off to die and destroy in some stupid little f..ked up war.