american-holocaust

EPILOGUE 253using screwdrivers to kill termites because it's a guerrilla war and we cannotuse bigger weapons. We have to get the right balance of termite killers to getrid of the termites without wrecking the house. 18Taking their cue from the general's dehumanization of the Southeast Asian"gooks" and "slopes" and "clinks," in a war that reduced the human deadon the enemy side to "body counts," American troops in Vietnam removedand saved Vietnamese body parts as keepsakes of their tours of duty, justas their fathers had done in World War Two. Vietnam, the soldiers said,was "Indian Country" (General Maxwell Taylor himself referred to theVietnamese opposition as "Indians" in his Congressional testimony on thewar), and the people who lived in Indian country "infested" it, accordingto official government language. The Vietnamese may have been human,but as the U.S. Embassy's Public Affairs Officer, John Mecklin, put it, theirminds were the equivalent of "the shriveled leg of a polio victim," their"power of reason . . . only slightly beyond the level of an American sixyearold." 19 Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes could not have saidit better.And then, another two decades later still, in another part of the world,as American tanks by the hundreds rolled over and buried alive any humansthat were in their path, the approved term for dead Iraqi womenand children became "collateral damage." Even well before the war withIraq broke out, the U.S. Air Force's 77th Tactical Fighter Squadron producedand distributed a songbook describing what they planned to do ontheir inevitable Middle East assignments. Here is the only sample that ispublishable:Phantom flyers in the sky,Persian-pukes prepare to die,Rolling in with snake and nape,Allah creates but we cremate. 20The rest of the book's verses are a melange of sadism and obscenity, mostof them employing personifications of entire Arabic and Islamic peoples asracially inferior, maggot-infested women whose mass destruction by theAmericans is equated with brutal, violent sex. During the brief duration ofthe war itself, American pilots referred to the killing of unarmed, retreatingenemy soldiers as a "turkey shoot," and compared the Iraqi peopleotherwiseknown as "ragheads"-to "cockroaches" running for cover whenallied planes appeared overhead. Graffiti on bombs slung under the wingsof American aircraft labeled them as "Mrs. Saddam's sex toy" and "asuppository for Saddam," while the American field commander subsequentlyadmitted in a television interview that he wished he had been ableto complete his job: "We could have completely dosed the door and made