Wings of a Bird

WWII vet departs on his final mission - Robert Jamieson, Seattle P-I columnist
MOST 18-year-olds will never have to see dead guy after dead guy, day after day.
Most will never know the feeling of refusing friends out of fear a new pal will be slain by a sniper's bullet and the grief will be unbearable.
This is life in war, and while such fears could describe U.S. soldiers now in Iraq, they arise from the war experiences of World War II vets whose bravery and sacrifices too easily slip away in our blinkand-you'll-miss-it modern age.
So, it's a good thing Al was a keeper of such memories.
...
Fresh-faced and 18, he signed up for the Navy for the same reasons many young people today do: money. His father had skipped out. His brother had polio. His mother had five mouths to feed.
Weddle was assigned to the USS Tangier, moored stern to stern with the USS Utah, in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. He had just put on his dress whites that day when alarms sounded.
"Then I just saw flames. The Utah was getting torpedoed," Weddle told me. "I saw the red meatball" -- the red insignia from the Japanese flag painted on enemy planes. "You could see the Japanese pilots right as they flew over. Face to face."
...
His heart gave out at 84. As medics wheeled him to a waiting ambulance Saturday, he blew his wife a kiss and started to regale them with stories about Pearl Harbor. ...

Labels: grief, war

In pictures: E Timor's angel of mercy - BBC News
Since East Timor's independence in 2002, factional fighting has wracked the country and driven thousands from their homes.
Many have fled to Sister Guillermina's convent in Dili.
Sister Guillermina is a university lecturer, but spends much of her time running the camp for people sheltered in the Canossian Sisters of Charity convent.
Tom Greenwood photographed and interviewed the nun known for rescuing people caught up in fighting and stepping in to reason with violent gang members.
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In September 2006, rival gangs surrounded the convent for five days, throwing rocks over the walls. They targeted it for sheltering people from both sides.
Sister Guillermina convinced them to stop.
"I locked the gate. I shouted: 'Please stop stoning because Sister Guillermina is coming'. I am amazed that my voice is so strong at certain times."
She approached the leaders first and then the boys individually. "In times of crisis I kiss and embrace thousands of boys."
Working for peace is dangerous, even for nuns. Sister Guillermina has had a knife held to her neck 11 times and a gun pointed to her head three times. "The first time I was scared but then I got used to it."
...
Sister Guillermina calls being a nun "a great blessing. I am free to save everyone without preference." ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

2 Soldiers Who Wrote Op-Ed Died in Iraq - A.P.
Two sergeants who helped write a New York Times op-ed article sharply critical of the Pentagon's assessment of the Iraq war were killed in a Baghdad crash this week, and one grieving mother wants the Army to explain their deaths.
"I want to know all the details of how he died. I want to know the truth," said Olga Capetillo, whose 28-year-old son, Sgt. Omar Mora, died Monday along with six other soldiers and two detainees. "I don't understand how so many people could die in that accident. How could it be so bad?"
Mora and co-author Sgt. Yance T. Gray, 26, of Ismay, Mont., died Monday when their truck veered off an elevated highway in western Baghdad and fell about 30 feet, the military said. The single-vehicle crash also wounded 11 other soldiers and a detainee.
The military made no mention of hostile fire.
Since writing the critical Aug. 19 article with six other active duty U.S. soldiers, she said Mora had seemed increasingly depressed and withdrawn.
"I said to him: 'Son, I don't want you to have problems because of this. Hopefully, nothing will happen,'" said Capetillo, speaking in Spanish in the midst of grief so raw and inconsolable it seemed to reverberate around her. ...

Labels: war

American confesses to Dutch axe murder over Iraq war - Reuters
A former member of the U.S. Air Force has confessed to axing a Dutch student to death in a random attack to protest against Dutch support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, prosecutors and Dutch media said on Wednesday.
...
Hartmann, a U.S. citizen, first sought out a Dutch soldier in the southern Dutch city of Roosendaal, but could not find one and turned his axe on a student waiting for a train on a platform at the city's station ...

Labels: murder, war

Journey's end for a paralyzed soldier - Seattle P-I
Capt. Drew Jensen almost lived long enough to see his fellow soldiers from the 3rd Stryker Brigade come home.
Jensen, a West Point graduate, was shot in the neck and paralyzed in May. On Friday, doctors and his family followed his wishes and turned off life support at the Puget Sound VA hospital.
...
Jensen was on his second deployment as a mortar platoon leader when a sniper's bullet struck him in the neck during an insurgent attack in Baqouba, Iraq. Jensen was wounded as he tried to help a fellow soldier who was pinned behind a vehicle after a bomb explosion, according to e-mail updates sent to friends and family by his wife.
One of Jensen's last actions in life was to look out for other wounded soldiers at the VA Hospital in Seattle. Before his death, he designated that a $10,000 fund established in his name should go to help offset the housing costs of other families who travel far to be near their wounded loved one's bedside.
...
Jensen fought to regain as much function as he could. He was transferred to the Puget Sound VA on June 1.
"It was a great day when I walked in, and Drew announced he had been cleared to swallow water," his wife wrote in an update.
Doctors at the VA were also able to adjust his ventilator so he could use his own voice when he spoke, which freed up their communication.
"We usually read his lips and while perfecting this talent may help with my future career as a spy, I much prefer to hear his voice," she wrote. ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

"Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq" - HBO.com
In a war that has left more than 25,000 wounded, ALIVE DAY MEMORIES: HOME FROM IRAQ looks at a new generation of veterans. Executive Producer James Gandolfini interviews ten Soldiers and Marines who reveal their feelings on their future, their severe disabilities and their devotion to America. The documentary surveys the physical and emotional cost of war through memories of their "alive day," the day they narrowly escaped death in Iraq.
[The Web site has photos and stories of each of the soldiers profiled.]
...
I'll never forget that conversation when he'd leave early in the morning with these rocks in a backpack, and I said to him, Where are you going with all those rocks? And the irony of it is that he at that time had said, "Mom, you know, we have to be prepared in case we have to carry out one of our boys," and in the end he ended up getting carried out.
---
From the Seattle P-I article about the series: "Marine Lance Cpl. Michael Jernigan was blinded during a mission, an injury that cost the 28-year-old his marriage. He wears a constant reminder of both disasters in his single glass eye, in which he has embedded the diamonds from his wedding band set.
Army Spc. Crystal Davis, 23, had her right leg amputated below the knee. Every bone from her knee down in her left leg was shattered. The documentary takes her to what was a major turning point in her life, the first night she was able to dance again. ..."

Labels: karma, war

Marine gunned down unarmed men, witness says - N.Y. Times
A Marine sergeant offered gruesome testimony on Friday against a former squad leader charged with killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Haditha nearly two years ago, suggesting that the defendant, Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, was predisposed to violence, carried it out ruthlessly and sought to cover it up.
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Dela Cruz testified that Wuterich shot five unarmed men as they stood behind a car, some with their hands interlocked behind their heads in a surrender posture, in the moments after the bomb exploded.
He also said Wuterich fired more rounds into the bodies of all five men as they lay dead or dying near the car, a short distance from the attack.
Wuterich has said he shot the five men, but only after they ran away, which he believed constituted a hostile act that allowed him to use deadly force.
Dela Cruz told prosecutors that a week before the Haditha episode, Wuterich had reacted to an earlier roadside bombing by telling him and other Marines in the unit, "If we ever get hit again, we should kill everybody in that area." ...

Labels: war

Former Uganda child soldier is building a future - A.P.
At 12, Lucy Aol was clutching an assault rifle and preparing to ambush government soldiers. At 13, a rebel commander a decade older made her his wife. At 16, she was a mother.
At 21, fresh-faced and beaming in a clean T-shirt and neatly braided hair, Aol is studying environmental health at college in Uganda's capital, and planning to use her knowledge to improve the health of her war-battered nation.
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Aol was 12 when she was abducted by a feared Ugandan rebel group, forced to walk hundreds of miles to a base in neighboring southern Sudan and taught to use a gun.
"We were used like slaves," Aol said, staring at the wall of the cramped student dormitory at Kampala's Mulago Medical College. "We used to work in the fields or collect firewood from 7 in the morning until 5 in the evening and we were given no food. If you made a mistake or refused, they would beat us ... the three girls who were taken from my village with me were beaten to death."
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Children are easily manipulated and can be groomed to obey instructions unquestioningly. Child-protection workers cite numerous tactics used by ruthless commanders to coerce their young captives into obedience. For example, in Sierra Leone, child soldiers were given a cocktail of gunpowder and cocaine before battle. ... [They] tell of oil being smeared on young fighters to make them believe they are bulletproof.
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At 13 Aol was made the third wife of an LRA commander. She says she suffered "sexual abuse" and was regularly beaten by her older cowives. ...

Labels: war

From executive suite to Baghdad’s slums - MSNBC
Reactivated Army reservist starts charity to help impoverished Iraqi kids
... Deierlein and the other soldiers in his civil affairs unit weren’t usually charged with providing security in one of the world’s most dangerous cities. They were in Baghdad to help restore the most basic infrastructure, such as garbage collection. It wasn’t going well.
But amid the chaos, they had found a way to make a small difference — by doing what they could to help the city’s most impoverished residents.
...
Deierlein didn’t have to be in that filthy Baghdad neighborhood. When the Army reached back into his life in October 2005, he was well past his eight-year service obligation to the military. A senior-level advertising executive, he lived in a trendy Manhattan apartment and had a share house in the Hamptons. He was engaged to marry a beautiful airline pilot. He owned a tuxedo and wore it often. He hadn’t worn an Army uniform in 12 years.
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The Army provided thousands of bags of food and bottles of water to the people of Iraq, but Deierlein decided to go further. Shaken by the malnourished, desperately poor children he saw, he asked loved ones and well-wishers back home who wanted to send him care packages to send supplies for Iraqi kids instead. ...

Labels: war

Pilots shot down in Iraq tell of dramatic escape - Washington Post
Comrades rescue ambushed officers
... It was also the opening salvo of what participants described as a dramatic ordeal of combat and survival, with two Army pilots crash-landing their aircraft, taking cover in neck-high water and reeds in a canal, avoiding insurgent fire, and dashing to a helicopter that lifted them to safety.
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Burrows waded into knee-deep water, stepped off a steep underwater embankment and started sinking into the mud. Weighed down by his armor, he thought he would drown. As the water reached his neck, he hit firm ground. Cianfrini was in up to his chin.
The pilots had planned to cross the canal to reach a field on the other side, but the mud made it hard for them to move. Moments later, they realized that being stuck probably kept them alive: Insurgents were waiting on the opposite side.
About 15 or 20 insurgents with AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons then converged on both sides of the canal and started firing at the pilots.
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The Apache [helicopter] had only two seats. Cianfrini took one, while one of the Apache pilots, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Micah Johnson, strapped himself onto the exterior of the helicopter. Burrows used his survival vest to strap in on the other side.
Soaking and covered with mud, Burrows held onto the handgrip on the outside of the Apache, as it lifted off and headed back to base at 120 mph, buffeting him hard with the wind. ...

Labels: karma, war

Baby boy born five days after father's death in Iraq - Seattle P-I
... Five days after her husband, Joel, a Fort Lewis soldier, was killed in Iraq, [19-year-old Alia ] Dahl gave birth to their first child.
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Her ordeal, however, was compounded last week when a thief stole her car and everything inside. Albuquerque residents were furious, said Bernalillo (N.M.) County Sheriff Darren White.
"I can't tell you how angry I was at this low-life creep who did this," White said by phone Friday.
"The community has really felt strong about righting this wrong. Alia's life had been turned upside down and to add to it having her car stolen -- that was enough to put the community over the edge."
Dahl's water broke Thursday night just after deputies recovered her 1988 Honda Civic. It was damaged, with parts torn out. Dahl wasn't concerned with that. Also gone: a baby quilt made by a grandmother, photos of her husband and a CD of their favorite songs he had made for her before he left.
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White said the response from the community was electric. More than $30,000 had been collected for the fund by Friday. "I've probably been offered 15 cars," White said. "The hallway outside my office looks like I had a baby shower; (it's) covered in baby supplies, diapers, wipes and clothes." ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

The New Face of Warfare - book review from The Nation
In his book Innocents Lost, Jimmie Briggs recounts picking up the New York Times one morning. Opening the newspaper, he was confronted by a disturbing image--a large photograph of a young Liberian kneeling and howling on a city street, his face contorted with rage as he pointed a gun at the photographer who had captured his image. This was no child's play: The gun was real--an automatic rifle almost as big as the boy himself. As Briggs remembers, however, "More chilling than the weapon he held was what he wore on his back: a pink teddy-bear backpack, a telling symbol of his lost youth." [see the photo at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4791597]
...
In Colombia, Briggs speaks to Gueso, a 16-year-old fighting with one of the government's paramilitary militias in Medellín, northwest of the country. By the age of 8, Gueso had already learned how to use his first weapon, a .38 pistol. Within hardly a year, he had killed his first victim: "I stabbed a guy in the neck," he boasts cheerfully to Briggs. Wired on cocaine and alcohol during the interview, he keeps saying to Briggs, "Sometimes I feel like killing." Like most of the children who join rebel or paramilitary forces in Colombia, Gueso became involved with the paramilitaries largely as a result of poverty, lack of education and unemployment. "I'm not afraid to die, but I'm afraid to die so young," he tells Briggs. "You can't think about the future here, because the future is a coffin." The tragedy is that for children like Gueso, the future is a coffin whether or not they become child soldiers.
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In Sri Lanka, Briggs meets Sebastiana Figerardo, a widow and the mother of seven children, the youngest of whom was Ida, a girl who joined the Tamil Tigers at the age of 17 after two of her brothers were murdered by government-aligned militias. While the Tamil Tigers are one of the few armed groups that prohibit sexual relations among their members, Ida was fated for an end of devastating sexual violence. After serving four years as a Tiger guerrilla, she decided to surrender to the government and go home. Assured by government security officers that no harm would come to her from the police or state-aligned forces, she returned. Within months, however, five masked men arrived early one morning at the family house. A neighbor who saw the men before putting on their masks identified them as government soldiers from a local army camp. The soldiers beat, gagged and tied Sebastiana, her other children and grandchildren, and dragged them to the courtyard in front of the house. They then turned to Ida. As the vicious assault on her daughter commenced only a few feet away, Sebastiana managed to free her hands and feet, and ran screaming to the local police station, begging the police to come and help. "We cannot come now," they replied calmly. "You need to go home." By the time Sebastiana returned home, her daughter was dead. An autopsy would show that she had been repeatedly raped, shot in the genitals and mutilated. Faced with the horrific murder of her third child, Sebastiana tells Briggs simply, "I have lost all faith in human beings." The five soldiers who carried out the assault have still not been brought to justice. ...

Labels: war

E-Mails Reveal a Fallen Soldier's Story - U.S. News & World Report
[The entire piece is worth reading; here's an excerpt]
... Later in the day, the Iraqi police, who were family members of the destroyed body, began to drink heavily and one of them (Ali) started shooting randomly into the crowded traffic circle below the castle. We watched as he killed a 17 yr. old girl, a 7 yr. old girl and a 28 yr. old male. We could not intervene as this was happening for very complex reasons. This has been one of the most horrific days of my entire 34 yrs. of living on this earth ... I am stupefied and stand in tragic awe in the face of this carnage, what could I possibly say? Where was God today?

He often wrote about God in his E-mails home. He'd been a part-time pastor at a California Baptist church once, giving sermons on Wednesday nights. He'd knocked on the door of a church shortly after he met his wife in 1992. "I'd like to be saved," he'd said. In January, he asked his wife to send him a copy of the Koran, because he wanted to read about the Muslim faith. But in early March of this year, he told me that he'd stopped attending church. "I started studying philosophy and became an atheist," he said. "I'm still trying to contemplate God, but it is kind of hard here." Ten days later, on his birthday, he called home. "He was remarkably calm," recalled his father. "The things he has seen in war and the fact that he read so deeply in philosophical and theological issues led him to be often conflicted internally about God. He said that he reconciled his conflicts and that he was ready anytime God called him. Not the statement of an atheist."
...
[See also the sidebar links, including the link to a photo gallery]

Labels: war

Wounded soldiers a long-term legacy - A.P.
Staff Sgt. Lee Jones was riding in a Humvee when the blast from a roadside bomb enveloped the vehicle. He was badly burned on his face, hands, arms and feet, and he suffered a severe brain injury.
...
He suffered three strokes, seizures and several comas, and has a severe brain injury. One thumb had to be amputated, and he had many surgeries for burns that also damaged his nerves and caused muscle weakness, so now he must use a wheelchair.
...
If one thing could be better?
"My hands," he said, looking at the twisted, red masses of stiffened tissue that do not allow him to feed himself, shoot a basketball or hold his toddler daughter, Angel, born two months before he went to Iraq.
How does he cope?
Big smile. "Every day is a good day. Three died but me. Three died but me."

Labels: war

Family cares for a life nearly lost in Iraq - A.P.
He lies flat, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling, tubes and machines feeding him, breathing for him, keeping him alive. He cannot walk or talk, but he can grimace and cry. And he is fully aware of what has happened to him.
Four years ago almost to this day, Joseph Briseno Jr. was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests stole his vision and damaged his brain.
He is one of the most severely injured soldiers -- some think the most injured -- to survive.
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In December 2003, he went home, to Manassas Park, Va., where his parents, Joseph Sr. and Eva, quit their jobs to care for him.
"All our savings, all our money, was just emptied ... the 401(k)s, everything," said Joseph Briseno, who took a new job a year and a half ago to make ends meet. ... " my wife and I, we learned everything. We are the respiratory technician, we are the physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists ... his wound care nurse," Joseph Briseno said.
"It's a lot of work and it's hard, and some days are harder than the other days. But we don't take this as a burden for us because he's our son. We will do everything for him."
The family has help from VA-provided nurses, but not around the clock. Jay's mother and father often do overnight duty, making sure their son is turned every four hours so he does not develop bedsores, which can become infected and threaten his life.
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More recently, the Tampa staff tried to wean him from the respirator. This involved painstaking therapy to strengthen his diaphragm by placing weights on his belly and gradually increasing the air pressure on the machine to try to create resistance and muscle strength. So far, it hasn't worked. ...

Labels: war

Iraqi Youth Face Lasting Scars of War - Washington Post
Conflict's Psychological Impact on Children Is Immense, Experts Say
Marwa Hussein watched as gunmen stormed into her home and executed her parents. Afterward, her uncle brought her to the Alwiya Orphanage, a high-walled compound nestled in central Baghdad with a concrete yard for a playground. That was more than two years ago, and for 13-year-old Marwa, shy and thin with walnut-colored eyes and long brown hair, the memory of her parents' last moments is always with her.
"They were killed," she said, her voice trailing away as she sat on her narrow bed with pink sheets. Tears started to slide down her face. As social worker Maysoon Tahsin comforted her, other orphans in the room, where 12 girls sleep, watched solemnly.
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Today, toy weapons are among the best-selling items in local markets, and kids play among armored vehicles on streets where pickup trucks filled with masked gunmen are a common sight. On a recent day, a group of children was playing near a camouflage-colored Iraqi Humvee parked in Baghdad's upscale Karrada neighborhood. One boy clutched a thick stick and placed it on his right shoulder, as if he were handling a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. He aimed it at cars passing by, pretending to blow them up. Two soldiers pointed at the children and laughed. ...
On this morning, 4-year-old Muhammad Amar had a blank look on his soft, round face framed with curls of black hair. When mortar shells pummeled his street seven months ago, he was too terrified to cry. "He remained still, in shock. He froze," said his father, Amar Jabur, standing in the sunlit courtyard of Ibn Rushed. Muhammad is showing signs of epilepsy and had a mild seizure the night before.
Abdul Muhsin said he believes there could be a link between the explosions and the seizure, and recommended a brain scan to rule out other causes. At the very least, he said, the violence worsened the child's condition. ...

Labels: war

US military pondered love not war - BBC News
The US military investigated building a "gay bomb", which would make enemy soldiers "sexually irresistible" to each other, government papers say.
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The plan for a so-called "love bomb" envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale. ...

Labels: war

Amid the Chaos of War, Gifts of Music - Washington Post
Thanks to Couple's Efforts, Troops in Iraq Get Instruments
... And that is how Sgt. Jason Low received an acoustic guitar from Steve Baker, a Vietnam veteran of modest means and powerful purpose. Baker and his wife, Barb, run Fergus Music, a shop here in a rural patch of Minnesota not far from the North Dakota line. Together, they have shipped more than 300 guitars, mandolins, harmonicas, drums and wind instruments to Iraq to ease the strain of the soldiering life.
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In 2004, his stepson, a soldier in Iraq, requested a guitar, so he sent one. The stepson's friend wanted one, so he dispatched another. Pretty soon, the requests were coming faster than the newly christened Operation Happy Note could respond. The waiting list is now more than 150 names long.
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"When I was in, nobody cared. I mean, Vietnam, my God," he said, recalling how some Americans swore at troops. "All I got was hooting and hollering, and I remember that to this day. There's no way I'm going to allow that to happen to these kids."
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After learning of Happy Note from an officer in his unit, he e-mailed the Bakers and quickly received an affirmative reply. He had to read it twice before it sank in. When the guitar arrived in a 3-foot-by-2-foot box, he considered it "satisfying and overwhelming that the kindness of the world has not diminished and people still care about us over here." ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

The Tortured Lives of Interrogators - Washington Post
Veterans of Iraq, N. Ireland and Mideast Share Stark Memories
In Iraq, when Tony Lagouranis interrogated suspects, fear was his friend, his weapon. He saw it seep, dark and shameful, through the crotch of a man's pants as a dog closed in, barking. He smelled it in prisoners' sweat, a smoky odor, like a pot of lentils burning. He had touched fear, too, felt it in their fingers, their chilled skin trembling.
... "I tortured people," said Lagouranis, 37, who was a military intelligence specialist in Iraq from January 2004 until January 2005. "You have to twist your mind up so much to justify doing that." Being an interrogator, Lagouranis discovered, can be torture.
At first, he was eager to try coercive techniques. ...
...
For Lagouranis, problems include "a creeping anxiety" on the train, he said. The 45-minute ride to Chicago's O'Hare airport "kills me." He feels as if he can't get out "until they let me out." Lagouranis's voice was boyish, but his face was gray. The evening deepened his 5 o'clock shadow and the puffy smudges under his eyes.
Not long ago in Iraq, he felt "absolute power," he said, over men kept in cages. Lagouranis had forced a grandfather to kneel all night in the cold and bombarded others in metal shipping containers with the tape of the self-help parody "Feel This Book: An Essential Guide to Self-Empowerment, Spiritual Supremacy, and Sexual Satisfaction," by comedians Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo. ("They hated it," Lagouranis recalled. "Like, 'Please! Just stop that voice!' ") ...

Labels: war

Many troops don't go to war: Half in military serve on home front - A.P.
Even as troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are serving longer and more often -- three, four, even five times -- roughly half of Americans in uniform have not been sent at all.
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By this spring, roughly 150,000 active duty soldiers, 85,000 sailors, 90,000 airmen and 65,000 Marines had gone more than once to Iraq, Afghanistan or surrounding countries. About half the total force had not deployed to either conflict, Defense Department figures show.
Fifty-three percent of the active duty Air Force and 50 percent of the Navy had not been to the wars, not surprising since the fighting is overwhelmingly on the ground.
Still, 45 percent of the Marines and 37 percent of Army forces had never been deployed. ...

Labels: karma, war