“An Opinion That Counts”
by LCPL Jonathan R. Gill, USMC, April 2004, Minneapolis, MN

Not to sound arrogant, self-centered, or self-righteous, but I was there and I know what I saw. And most of you, readers, were not there, and did not see what I saw, nor do you know what you saw on your screens. So, take my opinion still as an opinion, but an opinion from one who saw, who did, from one who was there.

That said, I will state my opinion as plainly as possible, so as not to confuse anyone by the things I share: I believe with all my heart that liberating the Iraqi people was the right thing to do. I believe with all my heart that Saddam Hussein was (and probably still is) an evil man, even if he is a tyrant no longer (thanks to us). I believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Saddam Hussein had but did not use weapons of mass destruction, which I will back up later on. I believe that WMD’s or not, we ought to have done what we did and are doing. I believe these things because I know what I saw.

I could spend all my time telling you how manipulative our news media is, how they intentionally and unintentionally form your opinions by what they choose to cover and how they choose to cover it. It is no secret, except perhaps to the blissfully ignorant, that the majority of the news media is left-wing, anti-Bush, and generally or even ultra-liberal. In Europe, this is also the case, but people there expect it to be biased, and watch the news as one would read an editorial, gleaning what truth they can from an opinion column. Here, we expect to receive honest truth, unbiased and uninfluenced by interpretations and opinions. That is just not possible, but we eat up what we see on television so mindlessly, that the news media has an incredible influence on the overall opinions of the majority of Americans, right-wing, left-wing, or in between. Everyone watches the news.

That being said, I can obviously only form my opinion off of (1) my system of morals, ethics, and beliefs, and (2) my own experiences. And for everyone reading, they can only form their opinions off of their beliefs and what they have been told about my (and others’) experiences. Other soldiers and Marines could very well have seen an entirely different part of the war than I did, and formed opposing opinions. I know some have. I know others that already opposed Bush, and our time over there only steeled their resentment of his policies and plans. As for me, what I saw was life-changing, and will forever be a part of world history and my own history.

I was there as part of a USMC Military Police Company, working on movement control and civilian traffic control. I had some of the most contact with civilians, as I had to run checkpoints that directed all traffic coming or going, military or civilian. (So as not to discredit those I was with, every time I say “I” did something, I mean that “we” did it – I did nothing alone there.) From the very start, even before the war, I knew that the Iraqi people were waiting for us to come. While we were still in Kuwait, Iraqis that had fled their country years before were now helping us to understand their culture, and told us what their friends and families were saying about the impending American invasion. They were saying, “Are they really going to come this time? Are they really going to save us from Saddam Hussein? Are they going to finish the job?” They have very vivid memories of 1991, when we told them to rise up against Saddam, and then, at the UN’s request, withdrew from Iraq instead of backing them up. Saddam squelched their rebellion quickly and violently, using chemical and biological agents (of “mass destruction”) on his own people. They were worried that we would leave them before the job was done again. We got many of the same questions once we were inside Iraq. The poor Shiites of the southern areas, whom had risen and been crushed years before, and whom Saddam had kept in utter poverty since – these were the happiest to see us rolling through. I recall questioning a man whom we suspected to be Iraqi military. We suspected him to be military (and not just a local farmer) because…he was wearing boots. I remember how it hit me as I was guarding him: “we suspect him because he actually has something on his feet.” He turned out to just be a local farmer who had acquired the boots a few years before, and upon further inspection, the boots were 3-4 sizes too big for him anyway.

Once in Baghdad, we discovered how much they too were controlled by their news media (or, as we are willing to put it, “propaganda” – as if we don’t have our own propaganda juggernaut). Iraqis would come up to us and ask us, “Are there more Americans here? Are you really here in Baghdad?” They were being told, even that moment and that day, that we would never make it to Baghdad, that we were not making progress, that we were “slow as donkeys”. Yet here we were in front of them. I answered, “We’re ALL here, baby!” Once I could assure them of this, there was dancing in the streets.

Throughout our time, about ninety percent (90%) of the Iraqis I came into contact with (even military deserters) were glad to see us. The soldiers were poorly fed, and most of the civilians were even poorer, thanks to Saddam Hussein. The idea that this tyrant that had ruled them for 25 years was now no longer a threat was a surreal joy for them. They showed their appreciation in any way they could. I have a picture of an old man showing us a school textbook from when he was in grade school in the 1950’s (or thereabouts). It had pictures of the area on the Tigris where we were standing, and everything was lush and green, the water was blue – a far cry from the disease and pollution-ridden water before us, a result of Saddam’s push for industry without thought to the state of the environment. Not even the locals would touch the water (though I have pictures of some ignorant soldiers swimming in it). The old man, with hand signals and the help of one young boy who knew some English, said to us, “Thanks to you, Iraq will be like this again someday.” He ended up giving us the book (a history or social sciences book). Other families that passed by daily during the two weeks we were at that position began to get to know us as well. In the morning, they would make trips to the store and give us bags of flatbread, a wonderful Middle Eastern specialty. In the evenings, we had several occasions where different families cooked us chicken soup. We liked it so much, we paid one man to cook it again for us another night. He said he would have gladly done it for free, but that the dollar we gave him allowed him to buy the chicken needed for the soup.

This was the reception we received from MOST of the Iraqis we saw, whether they were Shiites from the southern rural areas, or Sunnis from Baghdad, or even a few non-Muslims, dressed in “westerner” clothing. I will be quite honest and say that there were plenty of people that were harmed, injured, suffered property damage or loss, or were otherwise inconvenienced by the war. All people are in a war. There were a few that constantly glared at us, a few that truly hated us, a few that were truly grieved that we had come, most often because they had lost family members in the bombing or other fighting. The most consistently unhappy (though harmless) people we encountered were those who were inconvenienced in their commute to work. Perhaps no one told them that there was a war going on, but they still thought themselves important enough to try to drive around the ridiculously long line of cars in front of them, making up some excuse as to why they should get to cross the bridge (our main objective of traffic control) before everyone else. We told most of them that they were not special, and made them go to the end of the line. A few did indeed have a serious reason (such as an injured person in the backseat), and we let them go across, but the most common one we heard (probably due to their limited English) was “my baby!” We told them that we figured that “their baby” was 25 years old and lived across town, and that was no excuse to go before anyone else!

So, those were the most “annoying” people we encountered. Their culture is very aggressive, and their newfound freedoms of only a few days or weeks were having interesting effects, as they would on any human beings in such a situation. When not controlled, many would act in a “mob mentality”, whether it be looting everything that looked nice (a large source of loss for Iraqi business owners) because no one was stopping them, or protesting whatever they felt like protesting (since they had not been allowed to protest before), or whatever the flavor of the week was. This still goes on, as shown quite consistently by our “reliable” news media. Most of the fighting going on does not go on from retaliations for personal injuries or damages, but because their opinions, like Americans’, are being influenced by whomever they allow to influence them. The fact that this Shiite leader that is telling Iraqis to target Americans has been made an outlaw is a good thing. He is just one person influencing the current opinions and (violent) actions today. They are just as susceptible to mob mentality and opinion shift as any other human being, including and especially Americans.

We encountered the most resistance from Iraqis that were members of a particular group of Saddam loyalists, usually in their mid-twenties, who were idealists trained in terrorism. They would ride around in small pickups, doing drive-by shootings or bombings, or whatever they could accomplish before being eliminated. They could come from anywhere (they were even present in the middle of nowhere in the southern regions), and as with any terrorist, they don’t “fight fair”. We had one such loyalist attack our position on a suicide mission, using a 9mm pistol. No one in my team was harmed (one Marine’s vest stopped a bullet, while another bullet grazed his forehead), but it put us on our toes to say the least. That Iraqi lost his life at our hands, and we have no problem with that. It is the grim reality of necessity, and you cannot tell me that he would have been an upstanding citizen if war had not torn his country. We interrogated his brother, and found a note in his apartment that said, “Today the slaughter begins.” There are such things as evildoers in this world, and war, though not preferable, is necessary at times. This man believed he would be rewarded by Allah – what he found was a failed suicide mission. Later that day, the mob mentality was again apparent when Iraqis, most of whom had not seen the incident occur, gathered in protest at dusk and burned a building. Even so, the next day, the majority of people who saw us were still glad to see us.

I have, of course, kept up with whatever news I can since I left Iraq. I have had to depend on our news sources to tell me what’s happening, and how awful it is that Americans are losing their lives for Iraqis that don’t appreciate us, and how much like Viet Nam this is becoming, and how we’ll never accomplish what we set out to do there, and how we should never have gone in the first place, and how no weapons of mass destruction have been found and therefore Bush and Rice and Powell are liars liars pants on fires… Yes, I’ve heard everything you have. I know it’s all we have here, and unless you go there yourself, you have to listen to the drivel in this manner.

But allow me touch on a touchy subject: WMD’s. I will approach the subject logically, since my opinion does not matter any more than anyone else’s – only fact matters here: were there weapons or weren’t there? Opinion enters when we ask whether it mattered if he did or not, although it is a fact that it was used as a reason to go to war. Let me tell you some facts, and apply logic. It is a fact that Saddam HAD those weapons at one point in time. It is a fact that he was not afraid to use them, even on his own people. It is a fact that this was a while ago. It is a fact that because we feared their use again, each of us had chemical protection equipment in the form of a charcoal-lined suit, a gas mask, and medications to inject in case of exposure. It is also a fact that every single Iraqi soldier, and every military installment that we came across ALSO had every one of these pieces of equipment. It is a fact that Iraq has a lot of sand, as does just about every country surrounding it, some of which were allies of Iraq. It is a fact that entire planes and trucks were found completely buried in the sand, discovered only when a sandstorm blew the top layer off of them. It is a fact that these were buried in a hurry, as they were spotted by our spy planes at one point, and then were suddenly gone before the war started. Now that you have some facts, let us apply logic. What would you do if you were an evil dictator? If you were being accused by the world’s superpower of having weapons of mass destruction that you did indeed have at one time (whether or not you had them now), and you had been resisting inspectors for a long time, how would you convince the world that you no longer had them? Using them would of course be foolish, especially if you were unlikely to beat the enemy by doing so. Even so, since it could be an option, you may as well equip your own men with the equipment to protect themselves from those weapons. Not every man in your army may be important enough to have enough food, but as long as he can still shoot a gun when the enemy is screaming with pain, he is an effective part. So, this is what you do – you give each man his own gas mask and chemical weapon protection kit. There, that base is covered. Now, the bigger issue – what to do with the weapons that you’ve been hiding from the inspectors? Hmm…we have a lot of sand, that’s where we buried our planes and some trucks, we could do that. It would certainly take them a long time to find, even with their advanced satellite technology. So long, in fact, that the enemy’s country may lose faith that you actually had them in the first place, whether or not you’re still alive. You grin, the shrewd politician that you are – if the world and the enemy’s own country loses faith, you have won no matter the outcome of the physical battle. Also, an option for ridding yourself of these weapons and programs would be to transport them to an ally nation that would keep silent about it. Syria’s been pretty cool lately, and Jordan’s not a terrible neighbor. Heck, anyone that the U.S. won’t mess with or suspect would be just fine and dandy…

Hopefully you are beginning to see with your own brains just how easy it is to pull one over on the American people. Just because we haven’t found WMD’s yet, and the administration is being pressured into “admitting” that there “may not be any”, does not mean that there aren’t any, nor ever were any since the mid-1990s. The evidence points towards the possibility that there were indeed weapons that were well-hidden and never used. The fact that every soldier had the same protection that we had so carefully been equipped with, even when not every soldier was properly fed, supports the intelligence gathered that Saddam had even intended to use them. The fact that he didn’t could either be because he went into hiding too soon to give the order, or he chose not to for political reasons that would benefit him later. These evidences, of course, are not ever shown on your trusty news media. These logical answers are never suggested, only more and more questions. Questions that divide our country so much that we forget to support our own troops, we forget that these men MUST believe what they are fighting for, not because they have been told to, but because their lives depend on their attitudes every day. I am not here to call everyone to unity, but to intelligence. Not to give you an opinion, but information that has been hidden from you. Not to evoke your emotion, but your logical thought. I am here to shake from your ears the tainted news coverage, and tell it like it is, the way I saw it and did it there on the other side of the world. Everything I see on the news now, however horrifying and terrible, I see in light of where I have already been, and what I have already seen. I do resent certain Iraqis that once supported us, who are now jumping on the bandwagon of terrorism and killing more troops. I am especially appalled at the violence towards innocent civilian contractors, people who are trying to help rebuild their country for them.

I feel betrayed in some ways, yes. I resent some attitudes, certainly. But this does not mean that I jump on our own bandwagon of political resentment. I do not draw the conclusion that our left-wing, anti-Bush news media wants me to draw. I do not believe in the slightest that liberating the people of Iraq was wrong to do, nor that eliminating Saddam Hussein as a threat to the region and to free peoples everywhere was wrong. I do not even believe that the weapons weren’t there, but I also don’t believe that that was even a primary reason to go into Iraq. I think that no matter what the reasons given for the war, the main reason that matters is that millions of people have been oppressed for 25 years, and setting them free and setting up democracy in such a country will ultimately benefit everyone involved. It will benefit the Middle East, because their ways of doing things reared its ugly head on September 11 – the head of a long-stewing hatred for the U.S. and all western culture. This war was not (at all) about oil, nor was it about weapons of mass destruction (entirely), nor about terrorism (entirely). This war was about creating a safer, better Middle East, one that can fit with this new world, one that can prosper in its own rite without always being the center for violence, turmoil, and yes, terrorism. They do not have to become Americans, westerners, or even thank us outright for setting them free. They can show their gratitude by becoming civilized, getting over the initial shock of being “free”. They can begin by learning to get along without killing each other, and without Big Brother Hussein watching them from his high horse.

I do not ask for more than this, but I know that regardless of the outcome, I did what was right. I aided a suffering people, whose suffering I saw with my own eyes, whose gratitude I heard with my own ears and tasted with my own tongue, and whose culture I touched with my own hands and experienced with my whole intellect. I was only one man who was there, but I was still one man who was there.



PART II - "Intelligence, Intelligence, and Reality"

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