New Contract (page 2)

JeffT

Yeru, thank you. I'm glad we have guys like you around.

talesin

Congratulations, Yeru. I'm happy for you.

tal

little witch

Lay off the sauce Logans...

Yeru didnt start this one....You have been looking for political confrontaion tonight as I have witnessed. This is not the post for it...

Start your own thread, don't hijack someone elses.

Steve Lowry

I'm almost fifty years old and there are at least three things that I know I am proud of:

I never called a soldier a 'baby killer' during the Vietnam War era, when it was in vogue to do so.

I never called a cop a ?pig? back in the sixties and seventies, when it was the cool thing to do and most of my friends did.

And I never called a black person a ?nigger? (possibly the ugliest word in the English language), although I was raised by a racist and that was a word commonly used in my house as I grew up.

While there are things that I have done in this life that I'm not especially proud of I guess, I'm proud who I am and the stand(s) that I have taken through the years.

Thank you for serving your country Yerusalyim.

Steve

Eyebrow2

Yeru,

Good for you! I am glad to read that what you are getting paid to do something that means so much to you.

My sister was in for 20 years, and has a pension now, and while she is not rich, it is decent. She was in the Air Force, and I think she stayed in it so long because it was the only really stabile thing in her life (bad marriages...etc.)

The military definately is not for everyone...I think I would suck at, I really do, but I do respect those that join and actually make it work.

I knew a few kids in high school that joined to get away from home...not always bad in of itself, but they did not take advantage of what they could have learned there, so a couple got booted out, and the others came out feeling like they had wasted their time. And then I know a few others that went, one had a definate goal of what he wanted to do, another had no idea but wanted to see what it had to offer. Both of these guys really put their heart into their experience and became good solidiers, and seemed quite happy the last time I saw them.

I don't agree with many things that the military is asked to do. But I learned one thing during the Gulf War..that it was just as important for people to voice their support for the troops as it is to voice opposition over military actions. A lot of the things I am hearing about Iraq right now disturbs me, but I would never tell a solider when he got home that he was wrong.

SixofNine

Congrats on the contract Yeru.

Since you mentioned it, I have to take issue with your comment about vietnam. I think Robert McNamara and all other experts on the subject would take issue as well. I agree with you that the modern army is far more professional and disciplined and concerned with the rule of law than the army of the 60's.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why." Robert McNamara

Free Fire ZonesBy Lewis M. Simons

In the mid-1960s, when I was covering the war in Vietnam for the Associated Press, U.S. commanders were issued wallet-size cards bearing the warning to ?use your firepower with care and discrimination, particularly in populated areas.? Often, these cards ended up in a pocket of a pair of tropical fatigues, where they remained, ignored, for the duration of the bearer?s tour of duty. The intention of the Department of Defense in issuing the cards was to help prevent jittery U.S. soldiers from mistakenly, or intentionally, declaring a suspect village a ?free fire zone,? then destroying it and its residents. All too often, postmortem investigations revealed that such zones had been peaceful and should not have been assaulted. This type of incident with its attendant hostile publicity?My Lai was perhaps the most infamous, if not necessarily the most egregious?was a recurring nightmare of the military high command and a succession of U.S. administrations.

But the cards only served to accent official naiveté. In reality, U.S. troops in Vietnam seldom knew with any certainty which villages were friendly, siding with the Americans and their Saigon-based allies, and which supported the Hanoi-backed Viet Cong Communist guerrillas.

The practice of establishing free fire zones was instituted because many villages in what was then South Vietnam willingly provided safe haven to Viet Cong fighters. Some, by contrast, were forcibly occupied by marauding bands of guerrillas, who used the villages for cover. Many more were devotedly anti-Communist. Yet, the American forces often had fundamental difficulty in distinguishing among any of these villagers. The fact that the guerrillas commonly dressed in black cotton pajama-style outfits, like those worn by most Vietnamese peasants, served only to heighten the confusion.

But despite the GIs? confusion, international law enjoins armies to avoid targeting any but military objectives and assures protection to civilians, in almost any circumstance. Free fire zones as defined by Department of Defense doctrine and the rules of engagement are a severe violation of the laws of war for two reasons. First, they violate the rule against direct attack of civilians by presuming that after civilians are warned to vacate a zone, then anyone still present may lawfully be attacked. The rule prohibiting direct attacks on civilians provides no basis for a party to a conflict to shift the burden by declaring a whole zone to be ?civilian free.? And second, they violate the rule against indiscriminate attack by presuming without justification in the law that warning civilians to leave eliminates the legal requirements to discriminate in targeting its weapons.

Where the protection of the Geneva Conventions does not provide a mantle to civilians is when they take ?a direct part in hostilities.? There were, of course, occasions when Vietnamese civilians directly attacked U.S. troops, but those which drew the attention of news reporters were overwhelmingly those in which a village was labeled a free fire zone and innocent lives were taken in outbursts of indiscriminate fire and brutality.

Faced with this negative coverage and with severe difficulty in enforcing international laws limiting the imposition of free fire zones, as well as other elements of the rules of engagement, the Pentagon over time added more directives to its pocket cards: a village could not be bombed without warning even if American troops had received fire from within it; a village known to be Communist could be attacked only if its inhabitants were warned in advance; only once civilians had been removed could a village be declared a free fire zone and shelled at will.

According to an article by Maj. Mark S. Martens of the U.S. Army?s Judge Advocate-General?s Corps and a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, Oxford University, and Harvard Law School, all these rules were ?radically ineffective.? Often they were simply ignored. In some cases, illiterate peasants couldn?t understand leaflets dropped to warn them that their villages would soon become a free fire zone. In other cases, hurried, forcible evacuations left large numbers of defenseless civilians behind, to be killed by bombing, shelling, small arms assaults, or burning. ?The only good village,? went one bit of cynical GI wisdom, ?is a burned village.?
Ineffective efforts to rein in the GIs? propensity to create free fire zones in Vietnam resulted in a sense among many Vietnamese as well as Americans that U.S. forces were undisciplined. More important, perhaps, the widely touted grand plan to capture the ?hearts and minds? of the Vietnamese was immeasurably diminished by the perception?let alone the outbreaks of reality?that Americans did not value Vietnamese lives.

Toward the end of the 1960s, the term free fire zone itself was dropped from the U.S. military lexicon in no small part because that doctrine embraced actions that the United States today would regard as illegal. Subsequent U.S. military manuals and rules of engagement, whether for ground, air, or naval forces, tend to track quite closely with the central principle of international humanitarian law on civilian immunity and the prohibition on the targeting of civilians.

New Contract

Yerusalyim

JeffT

logansrun

gypsywildone

talesin

Nathan Natas

little witch

Steve Lowry

Eyebrow2

SixofNine

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