It was a pretty good day today. I got to be with my boys for the day. We listened to music, drove around and did some errands, ordered some Thai takeaway.
We had electricity and food. We had everything we needed. No one came to kill us or hurt us.
Not everyone was as lucky.
The court documents, quoting one of the soldiers involved, say Green took the girl’s parents and her five-year-old sister into another room and shot them dead.
‘Green came to the bedroom door and told everyone, “I just killed them. They’re all dead”‘, said FBI Special Agent Gregor Ahlers, who is investigating the murders.
Green and another soldier then raped the girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza. Green is said to have shot her in the head and chest with her father’s AK-47 assault rifle, which he kept to protect his family, and set her body on fire in an apparent attempt to hide the crime.
I haven’t felt right since reading about that a couple of days ago. Everything I’ve been doing has felt trivial and empty. I feel vaguely guilty for eating, which is nuts. I felt horrible buying petrol.
I’m not used to this. Usually war and violence are so far away that these stories feel like they come from a different time as well as place. But I keep thinking about the little 5-year-old girl. What must she have thought in those last moments of her life? Did the soldier kill her first, or did she have to watch her mom and dad die? How would I react if it happened to me? How would I try to comfort Youngest Boy, now only 7?
I have no idea what it’s like for American soldiers over in Iraq, but I can imagine that it’s an awful situation. Subduing a whole country just isn’t possible with the numbers of troops that Rumsfeld has sent in. And when people cycle out, there aren’t enough to replace them. The only way to keep it going is to lower the bar for entry. What this incident shows me that the bar is now low enough to accommodate psychopaths. Add in some nazis to give the situation a philosophical bent, and you’ve got a real problem — in Iraq for as long as the war lasts, and in the USA when it’s time to bring them back.
Tomorrow we’ll probably watch a DVD in safety and comfort.
11 July 2006 at 8:28 pm
Ive been protesting since before the war started and I got 7 die hard republicans to vote for Kerry in the last election. I’ve been supporting anti war politicians and man the anti war rally in Olympia every Friday. I still feel a horrible guilt when I read these stories and wonder what else I could be doing.
13 July 2006 at 3:51 am
Caring sucks. I guess to motivate us or something. I don’t know. You just keep trying to balance the scales, when someone does something awful you do something good. It won’t fix the thing you originally cared about or make you feel any better, of course. But maybe someone else will benefit.