Ex-Marine
Ross Caputi says American soldiers should take "ownership" of the war in Iraq
that was one long atrocity.
It's
no wonder, he says, that so many returning soldiers are overwhelmed by guilt at
what they have done, with a higher rate of suicides than in any previous
American war.
"People do not go home and want to kill themselves because
they've been helping Iraqis," says Ross Caputi. "They go home and want to kill
themselves because they've committed atrocities."
Ross
Caputi now campaigns for justice for the city of Fallujah, which as a Marine he
helped to destroy in 2004, when thousands of civilians were killed and 200,000
driven from their homes. stopwar.org.uk
According
to a "scientific study of violent Iraqi deaths caused by the U.S.-led invasion"
conducted by the Just Foreign Policy, nearly 1,500,000 Iraqis have lost their
lives to the war. The number is at least 10 times greater than most estimates
cited in the U.S. media. Iraq's
anti-corruption board revealed in December 2007 that there were five million
Iraqi orphans as reported by official government statistics.
Alternet.org Military
suicides have increased since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
according to a Center for a New American Security Suicide report. In the fiscal
year 2009 alone, 1,868 veterans of these wars have made suicide attempts,
according to armytimes.com. The
VA estimates that about 18 veterans commit suicide every
day. In
2010, more than 134,000 people made calls to the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline. Of those callers, 61 percent identified themselves as veterans.
News.medill
SM/HJ
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