YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU.

[Dog]

Friday, August 04, 2006
Rosebud #4
The Education of Private Rowe


The New York Times has a cover headline today saying “Iraq Could Slide Into Civil War.” That’s an interesting word for it, “slide,” considering we invaded this country without provocation and have been occupying it ever since. “Slide” brings to mind something natural or inevitable, like a mudslide.
The question is, who’s standing under it?
It made me think of a conversation I had over Memorial Day weekend with Korey Rowe, the producer of Loose Change, the 9/11 documentary that’s become an Internet sensation. (Tens of millions have seen it on Google Video, where it’s been in the Top 100 for months; it can also be viewed at www.loosechange911.com.)
Between 2001 and 2004, Rowe, now 23, served in the Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the 101st Airborne, 187th Infantry, known as the “Rakkasans” (Japanese for “falling umbrellas,” from World War II). He started out as a “grunt” and then became a specialist in communications; says he’s good with radios.
We spoke in Oneonta, the small college town in upstate New York where Rowe and Dylan Avery, 22, Loose Change’s director, grew up. We sat on folding chairs in the field behind the house they share with Jason Bermas, 26, their friend and co-researcher on the movie.
It was hot and humid out, and as we spoke, these big hairy, black caterpillars kept crawling up our feet and legs. The backyard had an infestation which I’m told has been resolved by the unseasonably torrential rains that came later. (I wondered briefly about calling this blog “Strange Weather,” instead of “Rosebud,” as in, “Strange weather we’re having, isn’t it?”)
Before I met Rowe, I’d Googled him and found this clip on him from the Oneonta Daily Star, dated July 23, 2002: “’Terrorism has to be dealt with’: Soldier recounts service.”
Rowe had told the paper, “Sept. 11 was something that directly affected every person in the U.S. We had to go over there and get the terrorists.”
I wondered how that young man had become this young man now sitting before me—an anti-war, 9/11 truth activist, still sporting the biceps he said he’d picked up in the military.
“They give you shots and then the next week you’re like”—he looked at the biceps quizzically—“’I didn’t have these a week ago,” he said, recounting his days in basic training in the Army. “If you’re gonna have your soldiers at war you wanna have them in peak condition.”
There wasn’t any war, then, August, 2001. Rowe had joined up at 18, at what he said was “a dark time in my life. I was being a stupid kid, not doing anything productive.” One day, he said, when he was “sitting out in someone’s front yard,” skipping school, a recruiter “with a lazy eye” drove up and asked him, “What are doing out here on a beautiful day like this?” and then, “What are you thinking of doing after high school?”
Three weeks after he was shipped out to Ft. Bening, Georgia, 9/11 happened.
“We woke up like any other day, we get outside in formation,” said Rowe. “They march us into the TV room, don’t say anything, show us the news. Turn it off.” That was all.
“Some people were excited, jumping around,” he said. “‘We’re going to war!’ I wanted to know more information. I was going crazy. They wouldn’t tell me anything. I was asking the drill sergeants, going right up to ‘em, I didn’t even care, I was like, ‘Look, what’s going on?’ You’re not told what’s going on in the outside world. We were just training to go to war now.
“I would sneak out of the barracks and walk to get a USA Today,” he said. “I didn’t know anything—all I knew was we got attacked and supposedly Osama bin Laden did it. At this point I believed everything.
“For the first week of basic training, you sit in a room like this”— face forward, hands folded, at attention. “They show you slides with the words like, ‘Loyalty,’ ‘Duty,’ ‘Respect,’ ‘Honor,’ ‘Selfless Service,’ ‘Integrity,’ ‘Personal Courage.’ They show you slide after slide after slide. I mean, it was twacked. It was brainwashing. You’re sitting there shot full of drugs, with your shaved head.”
On January 14, 2002, Rowe was a plane to Kandahar. “Sleeping at night with these hell-hole creatures all over the place—camel spiders,” he said, making a face. “They hit you with a numbing agent and you wake up missing chunk of your leg.” He didn’t like the desert.
“For the first two weeks we were just putting up tents, doing details,” he said. “We weren’t really doing much of anything. It was like the whole invasion of Afghanistan was just for the cameras. We sat in foxholes, watched the Superbowl. Then we got video games. Then we got TVs. Then we had the Hooters girls come over. We were hanging out, buying whiskey from the locals.
“Two weeks before going home,” he said, “they told us, ‘Guys, we got one last thing to do.’ We were supposed to clear a terrorist training camp of terrorist activity. CNN was recording the whole process. Or maybe it was Fox News. We got used to photo ops. We’d scream at each other, ‘Photo op!’”
He went back to his story about his final mission there: “I see Special Forces up the road, down the road, watching our back. We’re not really doing anything. ‘Go clear the valley,’ they say. ‘Move move MOVE!’ CNN’s already up at the valley, so they’ve got a good shot of us coming up the road like a * movie.
“‘See that cave?’ they tell us. ‘Go clear that, make sure nobody’s in there.’
“I’m like, you gotta be * me. I can tell you there’s nobody in there, ‘cause there’s nobody there.
“We got these huge packs on our backs, bins of ammo duct-taped to our legs. I get up there, I look in the hole. And there’s a * Slim Jim wrapper in the hole where Special Forces had come and hung out the day before knowing that the whole thing was clear now.
“Everyone is pissed. We been here six months and we haven’t done anything. So they’re like, ‘O.K. Let’s spendex the ammo.’ Awesome.
“‘Spendex’ means burn it, shoot it, blow everything up.
“They’re like, ‘See that cave?’ We brought 700 pounds of C-4 with us, so we blew up a cave and guess who videotaped it? CNN. We’re shooting rounds all over the place.
“A few months later I got the videotape of what they broadcast: ‘The Battle of the Rakkasans.’ We fought terrorists.”
After being sent back to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, for more “training cycles”—“They train you in the woods,” he said, “and they train you to fight Vietnam but you’re not going to Vietnam, you’re going to Iraq”—he got a leave, and came home briefly to Oneonta.
“I saw my buddy Jason, this long-haired hippie guy [not Bermas] and we went to see Fahrenheit 911,” he said. “Dylan [Avery] had started to talk to me about some of this stuff”—over the phone, at night, from Afghanistan—“but I didn’t believe it. I was like, there’s no * way. It’s like, things are wrong, but they’re not that wrong.
“Then I went and I saw Fahrenheit 911—and I don’t like Michael Moore, and I don’t like his documentary”—because he felt it didn’t go far enough in exposing the truth of 9/11, he told me later—“but so much of it made sense to me because I was in Afghanistan and I saw the build-up. I saw the media spin. And he just made me ask myself, like, what if the Bushes are in bed with the Bin Ladens? Who’s to say that they’re not? I don’t know anything about this.
“And it *’ freaked me out,” he said. “Jason was like, ‘Dude, don’t let that get to you, it’s just a bunch of stupid bs, man,’ he’s like, ‘Michael Moore’s a retard.’ And I was like, yeah, Michael Moore’s a retard, man, but you don’t know how much of that made sense to me. I was like, I did that, I was part of that, and I didn’t even know it. And from there, I was like, holy *.
He got back to Ft. Campbell “and I mean I’m not doing good at this point,” he said. “I am not happy. I’m not a happy soldier. I’m just pissed off and they won’t let me do any research, I can’t get to a computer. There’s no news. They feed you the news through AFN, the Armed Forces Network and the Army Times. There’s no way of getting any independent media.”
On March 20, 2003, Rowe was deployed for the mission known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”—the invasion of Iraq.
He said, “I’m sitting on the border of Iraq when it’s all sinking in.
“So we invade," he said. "I ride across the border on the back of a truck for 15 hours, across the desert. We were driving across the * border. It was crazy.
“This huge * desert, flat as hell, you can seriously almost see the curve of the earth, and these trucks, tanks, bulldozers, huge fuel trucks, hundreds and thousands of them everywhere, everywhere you see. This whole thing is so beautifully done it could have been a *’ movie. It should have been. It was, essentially.
“And we’re getting these threats of incoming, because sure enough, we were right there with CNN again. These alarms are going off. ‘Missiles are going off!’ they’re saying. There weren’t any missiles.
“They didn’t have any missiles to shoot at us. But there’s these huge alarms going off and we had to go put on our gas masks and hide in these concrete pillars; it was * ridiculous. I mean, imagine the footage you could get from these CNN b******. I could prove so much. I could prove so much if I could get my hands on their footage.
“I don’t know if they really knew what was going on all the time,” he said. “Reporters are just as retarded as soldiers.”
Rowe was in Iraq for a year. “I * that country up,” he said bitterly. “I mean, I went from the southern point, drove on a truck all the way through it and blew up everything in my path. I mean, we killed people; we blew up buildings; it was war.
“Driving down the road, I got an Apache in front of me, he’s blowing up tanks, a few seconds later I’m driving past the tank and there’s a guy burning, leaning out of the tank trying to escape, his face is burning flesh. It’s war.
“We went through all the way to Baghdad. And there I got the nice privilege of sitting in the waiting room of Medical City,” a hospital, “which is where all the children come through with no arms and no legs.” His face twisted with anger.
“And their families are just going crazy, just going crazy. I mean, old man after old man sitting down that could talk English to me saying, ‘Soldier, what are you doing? Why are you doing this to us?’
“I was like, ‘Man, it’s my job, this is what I do, I don’t want to do this, I don’t have a choice.’
“I just sat there and guarded the E.R. and made sure things didn’t go crazy. I’m sitting there and these distraught fathers whose kids have died are explaining to me how things were gonna go and—to the ‘t’ of how they’re going—explaining how the U.S. invasion is only going to get worse and worse and worse.
“The Iraqis know it. I mean, you can ask ‘em. I’ve sat down and asked them, ‘Why do you think we’re here?’ And always, the first *’ thing out of any Iraqi’s mouth is: ‘Oil.’”
A caterpillar crawled up his leg. He picked it off and flung it hard into the yard.
“We did patrols through Baghdad,” he said, “relieved the Marines so they could push farther north. We invaded Al Hillah. That was a pretty big media spin, flying down the road in tanks, 45-miles-an-hour—Bradleys—ripping off e-turns, just shooting 50-gallon *’ planes flying overhead, buildings exploding, fallin’ on themselves and going through people’s front yards and clearing their houses and running from one building to another that’s on fire.
Here’s how it was, he said: “This building’s on fire, I gotta run across the *’ street, there’s people shooting down the *’ street, I got my team of four. There’s four of us running around Al Hillah, * going crazy everywhere, I’m screaming, ‘Get out of that *’ building and clear it!’, guys are running out of the building as it’s on fire, shooting at us. We run across the street, trying to break this door down, chasin’ ‘em, shooting ‘em, going through the whole city; it’s just so hot. I got an infestation of worms on my feet, it hurts to walk, I had no socks; we were down to a bottle of water a day. We were suckin’, suckin’ bad and then the * got heavy….
“We pushed north to Mosul,” he said. “This was great: I had gotten into a fight with one of my sergeants so he took my ammo and my gun so I had to ride around Baghdad with no armor and no gun for like a week. Then I had to drive a Humvee while everybody else flew straight up from Baghdad through Mosul out to Sinjar with no armor and no gun.
“He was psycho, he wanted to kill me.
When he got back from Iraq, he said, “I was psychologically done. I didn’t even want to wake up in the morning. I didn’t care about anything.”
I asked if any of his friends had died. “Yeah, I lost my squad leader,” he said. “I lost one of my r.t.o.’s.” He looked away; he was crying; there was a long pause. “But, uh—” His voice cracked. He gave a long sigh.
He said, “There is no Private Rowe anymore. That character is way, way in the past. And if they drag me back kicking and screaming I’m gonna give ‘em hell every minute.”
He could be called back at any time.
He said, “We’re killing innocent people every day. Innocent people are getting killed every day on both sides, on all sides; there is no ‘sides’ anymore. It’s all death. It’s unnecessary and it’s utterly, utterly worthless.
“We are spending so much money in that * country and we’re not getting anything back but higher gas prices, political turmoil, unjust people in government, and hatred toward us and the whole world destabilized.
“Our economy, our country is so—* if we don’t do something really soon,” he said. “We are so screwed that I can’t even imagine.
“That’s their country,” he said. “We are nothing to them. We’re Americans. We’re just somebody with money and fancy guns invading their nation.
“I’m not surprised they’re shooting at us. If someone invaded me, paratrooped out of that sky into my backyard, we would have a problem. And they call them terrorists for that.
“Some people in this country are so blind,” he said. “They’re so willing to accept anything that they are told. They’ll release a video where there’s no plane going into the Pentagon and say that it shows a plane hitting the Pentagon and people will actually believe it. It’s exactly the same kind of brainwashing that they do in the Army.”
I asked him what he thought would happen with Loose Change, and the 9/11 truth movement, which some are calling “the new Left.” “First they laugh at us, then they attack us, then we’re gonna win. A very smart man said that,” said Rowe.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.” —Mahatma Gandhi.
“And that’s exactly what’s happening now,” he said. “We will win. People will know and knowledge is power.”
Later I spoke to his father, Tom, a local contractor. “He said, “I’m proud of him. I just hope he doesn’t get himself in trouble.”
“From President Bush on down through his advisers,” said the New York Times today, “a more sober assessment of the situation in Iraq has been presented by the administration, with officials stressing the difficulty of counterinsurgency as well as the importance of preventing Iraq from descending into chaos and becoming a haven for terrorists.”
posted by NancyJo at 2:09 PM

Original article:
http://nancyjosales.com/blog/2006/08/rosebud-4.html