About halfway into that panel, I lost my objectivity. The stories they were telling about the breakdown of the Rules of Engagement (ROE) they learned while training at boot camp, or on a military base “back home”, were the same stories of ROE breakdown as what I had heard from my son. I began sobbing with cameras and notepad in hand, and couldn’t stop. The photographs they were showing on the 5 viewing screens of bloodied bodies torn apart by close gunfire, 50 cal. machine guns, rocket launchers, and every other damn weapon our great military industrial complex has created, were all too familiar to me. When my son returned home from both war zones, he was eager to share his stories and pictures.
I could not fathom my son, who I raised to be a Catholic, took him to Sunday school, where he received communion and confirmation, had not only been a participant in such horrors, but had pictures to prove it. I immediately told him that I would not listen to his stories or look at those pictures. He could speak with his father. My response may seem to many as being hard on my son, who only wanted to unload what he was feeling on his mother. But I couldn’t come to terms with it then, and now.
Watching and listening to the testimony made me very ill. Here were these young men and women, handsomely dressed, some wearing medals, talking about ROE in a war zone, which started out following the manual, and dwindled into what Jason Hurd called “Operation Fan & Fury.” This is when you shot anyone who is in your area that is holding a cell phone, carrying anything, whether it is groceries, and a shovel, carrying a white flag, holding binoculars, or just looking a bit suspicious to the particular soldier or marine that is on watch. And the orders were “take ‘em out!” The Rules of Engagement, as stated by Garrett Rapenhagen were “a joke and disgrace, and ever changing.”
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_elaine_b_080317_winter_soldier_2008_3a.htm
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