Three hundred members of the Duluth Air National Guard’s 148th Fighter Wing are being sent into the war zone in Afghanistan, for two months starting in August, according to a news release from Col. Frank Stokes, the commander. One can only hope that the announcement will be rescinded and our neighbors and friends allowed to spend the summer at home.
According to a Wing Commander news release, the Air Guard members will give “close-air support to ground troops.” Sadly, this phrase is a terrible euphemism for bombing and rocketing human beings where they live. Acronyms also help thicken the fog of war, and so in the Air Guard’s news release about its new mission – called “Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses, DEAD” – the reader was actually told it is supposed pronounced “deed.”
Sugar-coated or mispronounced words always play a large part in government efforts to win public support for invading and occupying other countries, because the very idea of armed aggression and military take overs of other countries is generally considered abhorrent.  One Guard Tech. Sgt. reportedly said her conduct in Afghanistan “will be a great learning and training experience….” No, Virginia, you will not be training. You’ve been getting that at home. It would only be great if your orders were cancelled and you were not threatened by the elite, U.S.-trained Afghan police who shot and killed three British soldiers in southern Afghanistan last Sunday – not to mention the rest of the Afghan population that want the U.S. military to leave.
There are less than 100 Al-Qaida fighters left in Afghanistan, so the world wonders: Whose enemy air defenses are being bombed by our neighborhood Guard volunteers? And don’t there continue to be an awful lot of mistakes, accidents and errors that have caused thousands of wrongful civilian casualties?
On May 7 this year, a U.S. airstrike wrongly killed six from one family -- the mother and five of her children. The U.S. military spokesman Col. Stewart Upton said curtly, “We expressed regret over the incident, and we’re investigating to determine how this happened.” Well Col., it happened because the United States is bombing Afghan villages from jet fighters. The only way to bring an end to this sort of atrocity is to stop kidding ourselves about what’s being done and to halt the bombing.
Yet the kidding never ends. Fighter Squadron Commander Lt. Col Chris Blomquist told the Duluth News Tribune that he is “looking forward to helping the troops on the ground.” This boosterism is a morale builder perhaps, but only if the hellish destruction caused by U.S. bombs can be denied or obscured. And if helping ground troops is truly the Guard’s mission, the question is begged, Help the troops do exactly what?
U.S. troops conducted a ghastly night time raid two years ago that rightfully shocked the world. After gunning down three women – two of them pregnant – a local police chief, and a prosecutor (again, all from the same family), the soldiers attempted to cover up their actions. The Times of London reported that Afghan investigators determined that our Special Operations commandos had not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.” These troops need psychiatric help hot air support.
The Air Guard could truly help by ferrying them all back home, something that the public must demand more loudly and more clearly than ever. The Guards’ indirect but terrible duties are in need of immediate cancellation, and the occupation must be replaced by civil negotiations over war reparations for damages done.
There used to be less self-delusion about wartime. In his second inaugural address March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln said, “Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”
-- John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nonprofit nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group, and edits its Quarterly.