Iraq

Got a phone call from my brother today. He's heading to Iraq, leaving this afternoon. He's working for a "contractor." How sad. He's been wanting to get into the action for some time. He's 55. Well at least he should be relatively safe. He claims that he won't be leaving the airport area in Baghdad (for a year?).

I'm not sure what he does (I think that he would have to kill me if he told me).

I have been opposed to this war from the beginning. He has never met a war he didn't like. Still he is my brother and I am concerned about his well being. I do hope he isn't harmed. Hopefully, he won't do much harm.

I should say that I have been opposed to all our colonial wars, since I was discharged in 1968. Like General Butler, I had no original thought while I was in uniform. Well that isn't exactly true. In Thailand we had a lot of time to read and the base library had several of Bernard Fall's books. Reading those I got a real education about Vietnam. Seeing the kind of living conditions the people of Thailand had, I began to wonder just why we were trying to protect those conditions and keep them from changing.

Let's face it I was a little naive and I really didn't understand the vast capitalist/colonial and neo-colonial conspiracy. Of course, I'm not sure it is really a conspiracy if it's out in the open. But like most Americans I was never given the kind of information from our news media that would allow me to analyze what we were doing. That's pretty sad, given that the media were much better then.