From The Village Voice: "Dead-Check in Falluja" by Evan Wright

One thing military officials are not saying is that the behavior
of the Marine in the video closely conforms to training that is fairly
standard in some units. Marines call executing wounded combatants
"dead-checking."

"They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms," an
enlisted Marine recently returned from Iraq told me. "You put two
bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a
room where guys are wounded you might not know if they're alive or
dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye
with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being
dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet
in the brain. You do this to keep the momentum going when you're
flowing through a building. You don't want a guy popping up behind you
and shooting you."

Horrifying? Yes, but there's no mistaking that these young soldiers
-- and they are young in the Marines -- are bearing the emotional
scars.

There were other times when the enlisted men in the unit fell into
violent quarrels with others whom they felt were too aggressive and
risked civilian lives. In one instance, enlisted men nearly came to
blows with an officer whom they accused of firing a weapon into a house
that they believed contained civilians. Despite their concern, terrible
mistakes were made. I was standing next to a 22-year-old Marine from
the Humvee I rode in when he fired his machine gun prematurely at a
civilian car approaching a roadblock, striking the driver, an unarmed
man, in the eye. The unit was subsequently ordered to drive past the
car without rendering aid. I sat next to the gunner as we crept past,
listening to the dying man gasp for breath. The gunner didn't talk for
the next three days. A few days earlier, the youngest Marine on the
team had shot a 12-year-old boy four times in the chest with his
machine gun, mistakenly thinking a stick the boy had been carrying was
a weapon. When the mother and grandmother of the boy later dragged him
to the Marines' lines seeking medical aid, the sergeant who led the
team dropped down in front of the mother and cried.

Wright's article is a must-read for anyone the least bit curious as to what's really happening on the ground in Iraq. The piece ends with one commentary on our society from the perspective of experience:

Another Marine in the unit I followed—a Democrat's dream, he returned
home from fighting in Falluja in time to vote for Kerry—added,
"Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of
evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the
reality of war, that it's a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a
subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars. You have to
become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the
mosque was just someone who didn't get hit in the right place the first
time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if
I'd been there. If the American public doesn't like the violence of
war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

I don't know if this leaves us much to be thankful
for. But personally I find it reassuring that our soldiers, sent
on such a mission of horror and questionable goals, have managed somehow to hang on to
their humanity. May they all come home soon and safe. And may this bloodbath over -- what? -- come to an end soon.
[Thanks to Meteor Blades (and Red Dan, who posted it first on the Kos.)

I'm certainly not telling this audience anything new about the wonders of
the Internet world except to say that when I meet someone who is not part of
it, I see as wide a gulf as if that personal were unable to write or read.

And this has nothing to do with intelligence. My experience: I agreed to
help an intelligent individual with a screenplay based on fact. He had an
interesting concept in mind for some time and is well read on World War Two and
the subject matter. In the span of less that a day, I had more data,
information, photographs, transcripts and historic records than he had
available and knew the subject matter better than he.

My advantaged, other than being on the other side of the digital
divide, was that I knew how to google. With Firefox I am able to churn
out data by the bushel basket full.

An undergraduate paper that might have taken me a month of solid research
time can be hammered out in a week - probably less - and with better data and
more time to reflect on it. Moreover, primary source material is more readily
accessible. For example, in the screenplay the action takes place historically
and not in the United States. Part of it is at an airbase on an atoll.

In virtual space, I went to the atoll in Quicktime, wandered all over it,
saw the old airbase, the shore emplacements, now rusty, looked across the
horizon with a real cam and from old paintings and historic photos in less than
an hour had it "down" what the airmen lived like. The idea that these fliers or their crews
went to a local watering hole the manner that the 8th Air Force guys do in "Memphis Bell" or
"Hanover Street" would be historically
inaccurate. These guys were isolated and how!

Part of the plot has to do with the Americans obeying seemingly lawful
orders and it is easy to put dialogue about Pitcairn's Island in their mouths
and how they would stick with Bligh if they knew that mutiny would end them up
on a rock.I pictured the atoll far different - a plush tropical isle like Hawaii or Bali Hai out of "South Pacific," but less than an hour later, there it was and it was barren and windswept.But this was not the only find in the trove I was able to get the real names of the historic players. Real photos of real people. Crew muster sheets showing rank, date of birth, and if the individuals was still living. Most were killed in action. It took me 90-minutes and I had some ship crews in an XL format and able to do sorts that helped me with the history.One noted historian tells us the attack at sea, the central event, happened under a full moon. But the US Naval observatory records tell us it was only two days past the new moon. The writer in the 1980's probably did not have the time or resources to quickly check that one. Nor was the sea perfectly flat as he wrote so poetically, it was force 3 trade winds which meant it was relatively calm, but the seas were hardly flat.Another example, my spell checker did not recognize "Bali Hai," but googling it revealed 161,000 hits making it a good bet I got it right.What I find unendingly fascinating is that since starting using the internet (in 1980, when it was still ARPNET) how far, even in a matter of months, this resource is growing. I would have needed a good sized University Library to do this before and might have had to take a trip or two overseas and spent a massive amount of time in transcription to get this far. In three weeks I have gotten to a place in the script that would have taken six months and cost thousands of dollars. Now, 45-minutes into the plot, and using maps and dates, I know where all the players were and how they converged on the action and even what the rooms looked like and what the players actually wore. It is real to me and writing about it feels as if I am standing just off stage as the events sweep through history.

Technically it's not even Thanksgiving yet and I've been wearing my
winter coats for three weeks now. I've scraped the windshield more than
a few times, and shovelled the deck only today. Can I believe the
holidays are here already?Seems like only yesterday I was
carving up pumpkins and dressing up like a witch. (Some would say it
was a true reflection of my character.) My old-school camera hasn't
even yielded its chemically-preserved images of my niece in the
princess outfit that was creepily reminiscent of Jon-Benet, and already
the turkey is upon us. Isn't there some rule against having more than
one holiday per roll of film?Meanwhile, my new UPS has arrived,
so now I can fire up the beast, the equine/bovine nonlinear editing
system that has been my workhorse and cash cow over recent times. (No,
sorry, FCP on my laptop just doesn't cut it.) I was glad to see it boot
up, spinning through the ram check, launching the scsi tools and coming
to live without a hiccup. I was a bit nervous, what with the way the
old battery backup system just crapped out on me with a sickening
bleating alarm.And so life goes back to semi-normal, writing,
editing, coding, hopping around the net and having basically no social
life. I really need to move.I spent part of this afternoon
installing a WYSIWYG editing module on the site, and this is the first
post using it. We'll see if it is stable enough. Happy Thanksgiving!

I know what a Metro is. A metro lives in a metropolitan area like Superman who lives in Metropolis. Metros live near "stuff." There are movies, and plays, and clubs. There are galleries. There are nice places to eat. The place is diverse.

The Neocons (New Confederates?) are more scattered and don't venture into Metro strongholds like New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, or even Atlanta because these places make them uncomfortable. And I sort of know what a Neocon is, having lived in the rural South for a while.

They aren't bad people, just scared. They know everyone and they know how things work. They are practical people.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a forward to a book called "Our Time is Now," about 1960's radical kids. In it he says that high school students are told they should graduate and go to college and get prepared for the real world. And so many folks go to college and end up in a Metro mindset for a campus dropped into a small Southern town will Metrofy its citizens.

Yet, after we leave college, unless we stay in a metro stronghold, the world is like high school because it is run by those who either never went Metro or who found the Metro way to be, ultimately, alien.

There is an interesting statistic that's floating around. I am not sure of the source, but it sure is funny.

Glittering Eye picked up on my post on the Dems and noted:

too many of the disparate interest groups that form the backbone of today's Democratic Party have lost their moorings. When the NOW lined up behind Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal it suggested that their agenda had ceased being better lives and decent treatment for women in society and the workplace and had become unwavering support for Democrat politicians.

I too was a bit put off by that. Personally, I felt the attacks on Clinton were appalling, and all that attention on that fling was a waste of money and time. (Is anyone here so well off she wouldn't find better use for those hundreds of millions of dollars spent on frivolous investigations of trivial matters?) But the fact that not one question of sexual harrassment was raised, not even by Rep. Hyde and friends, also was curious. Perhaps they knew they couldn't score points with talk of harrassment -- after all, that's a liberal concern, and they were posing for social conservatives -- so they went after the philanderer question (a topic on which Hyde and Gingrich were experts).gEye also picks up on QandO's complaints of the cold eye the press has given Condoleezza Rice since her being named as Secretary of State. QandO notes that 200 black clergy have stepped up to protest, and wonders:

Where is the NAACP on this? Where is Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH? I thought these organizations existed to stamp out the very sort of racist bigotry that is being used against Rice by the left.

Instead we are treated to the sound of crickets.

Apparently there’s a litmus test one has to pass before they can count on the NAACP or Rainbow/PUSH’s support.

You can’t just be the right color, you have to be of the right ideology. Otherwise, or so it seems, racism just isn’t that big of a deal to them.

Of course, right-thinking is not a new phenomenon. It gained real cache in the modern era with Communism, where you had to have the right thoughts (as opposed to Nazisim, where you had to have the right genetics). But that technique was co-opted by the right in the recent decades, and now it seems only if you're a social conservative do you have any "values."

I have not seen any racist treatment of Rice in the talk about her, but, being of European descent, I'm not the one to make any categorical statements on that. But come on, she's replacing an African American. This seems to be about something other than race.

I, too, have questions about her qualifications to be chief diplomat of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. What are her credentials, aside from being caught flat-footed on 9/11? From what I've heard, she does not like to socialize and is not big on social occasions, so hobnobbing with the leaders of the world might not come naturally. Some people are people people and some are ideas people. Does she have any diplomatic experience? Any negotiating experience? Those are real questions. (Of course, the media isn't big on real questions, and would probably find more interest if Rice fired her tailor. You know, they focus on the important stuff.)

As a moderate, Rice scares the shit out of me. I really have the sense that she doesn't know what she's doing. Her arrogance and condescending attitude towards the 9/11 Commission certainly didn't win my sympathy, let alone my understanding just where the heck she's coming from. With Powell, I may have disagreed with some of his policies, but there was no question, at least from me, as to his qualifications. Now we're losing the man who rebuilt the Army in the aftermath of Vietnam, and we're getting a neocon wonk who has had no small part in getting us mired in another Vietnam.

As an American, I'm hoping that she surprises us all. Some people just need that one break where they suddenly become who they're going to be. Lord knows we need some help in foreign affairs. As a woman, I'm pulling for her, just to represent us well. There are lots of women in leadership positions in organizations, small businesses, regional groups, etc., and there are lots of women in government, but there aren't a lot of women in leadership positions in government. There seems to be an attitude against accepting women in strong federal government administration positions. If Rice fails to gain the public trust, then that's a missed opportunity to get Americans used to the idea of female national leaders. And that's a tragic failing in our country. (Which is perhaps a topic for another post.)

-mediagirl

PS - Today is a red-letter day -- well, if you look at the archive calendar, all the days with new posts (beyond comments) are red-letter days -- but anyway, today, thanks to gEye, I got my first trackback. Now, I don't think I'm a dummy, and I've been in web development to varying degrees for some 10 years now. Yet I've had the hardest time understanding what trackback was all about. I mean I could understand the desire to trackback. It's cool to know someone else somewhere else picked up on something you wrote. But how did it work? Tonight I figured it out. All it took was that first ping, and then I saw. I only installed the feature, what, yesterday? So until I wrote this post, I had not seen that "URLs to ping" field before. Aha! That makes sense! Thanks gEye!