" A picture is worth a thousand words." Often this sentiment is true. One picture can tell it all. Take the famous 1968 photo by Pulitzer Prize winner Eddie Adams. He's there in the moment when a South Vietnamese brigadier general summarily executes a North Vietnamese captain. The brigadier general's gun is pointed at the North Vietnamese's head. The camera captures the moment of impact. We witness the action and see, too, the expression of that action on the distorted face of the captain.
So much has gone wrong to come to this moment, in which we, the viewer, if we are thinking, question taking the side of the perpetrator"
I might have been drafted in 1971-- had I been male.
I was thinking of this quote and that image when I heard that The New Yorker had published 10 photos of the massacre at Haditha. I did a search to locate this issue of the magazine. In 2005, I would have been back from teaching in Ethiopia for almost two years. It was still a chaotic time for me.
I just left Tuscaloosa, Alabama where I taught at an HBC. Isolated and alone, it was my first time living in the American South. I had written for community newspapers but hadn't written op-eds yet. Focused on scholarly publications with a social justice bent, I, nonetheless, heard about the massacre at Haditha, and I put a halt to writing long enough to absorb the impact of that violence.
" The Haditha Massacre: Photos that the Military Didn't Want the World to See." November 19, 2005. I read the statement underneath the article's headline. "When the U. S. Marines killed twenty-four people in an Iraqi town, they also recorded the aftermath of their actions. For years, the military tried to keep these photos from the public."
I remembered images of dead bodies filling the broadcast news during the Vietnam War era, only interrupted by folks in my generation protesting that war. I became a news junkie and followed as much as possible on what was happening in Vietnam. One of my uncles was a draftee in the Korean War and another served 23-years in the Air Force. I was witness to the impact war had on returning Vets. It wasn't hard for me to understand that misguided beliefs instigate wars.
No child is born hating another child!
The protest of young activists around the world focuses on the genocide committed in Gaza. These young college students don't hate children they have never met! And yet the media and university campuses try to portray these young people as anti-democratic. Anti-American. The call for a ceasefire, for an end to the brutality, to the use of bombs exterminating whole families, to the devastation of agricultural industries as well as the Palestinian cultural inheritance, falls on deaf ears. Ignorance is bliss, so war in Gaza continues.
I've never been one to turn away from the truth, no matter how it's presented to me. So I wanted to see the photos. While I was searching for the article, I was still listening the news.
"' We will kill some of these folks who need to be killed.'"
The voice is that of a young American Marine, and he is saying how glad he was to have been there! Among those doing the killing! He, a Corporal Lucas McDonnell, a young man in 2005. Someone's son!
I locate the photos. They reflex back to me someone's rage and hatred. Bodies of children. Babies. Mothers. Bloodied. Mostly all, shot in the head. The last humans these men, women, and children saw were pointing military-style weapons-- at them!
Because they needed to be killed !
How does an American come to believe herself innocent ? Children aren't combat soldiers! They aren't threatening the lives of grown men. Are they? Perhaps, however, they do. Perhaps they threaten those men who don't recognize in themselves a connection to these people.
A three-year-old girl was the youngest victim, according to The Middle East Monitor (MEM), August 29, 2024. A seventy-six-year-old man, the oldest. Twenty-two others are killed that day. And somehow, these men, women, and children, civilians, needed to be killed?
These photos of the massacre at Haditha come after a long, 4-year battle waged by In the Dark's podcast reporting team. It was the longest "war-crime investigation" in US history. The team had to file a lawsuit against "the U. S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Central Command," writes Commondreams's Brett Wilkins.
The fictional Ruth Zardo in Anyone familiar with Louise Penny's novels and her fictional poet, Ruth Zardo, knows she has a saying, in which she asks, how does someone see fit to inflict so much abuse on others unless the individual experienced a similar abuse. "'Who hurt you, once, so far beyond repair that you would meet each overture with curling lip?'"
Some soldier used a red marker to desecrate the body of 5-year-old Zainab Younis Salim. The number "11" is written on her exposed back. She was just 5. And she did what? What did she do? She wasn't a citizen in the invading country.
Resisting US invasion, a group of terrorists set off a roadside bomb, according to Wilkins, and that "killed Miguel Terrazas, a popular lance corporal, and wounded two other Marines." But the young 5-year-old wasn't among the terrorists!
However, later, when Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich orders his men to kill, he tells them not to ask any questions. Just shoot and kill!
So it's Corp. McDonnell's words that ring so loudly for me. After all these years, here we are and there's a man bidding to reside as dictator of the US. And he, too, wants to kill. His henchmen, believers in his goodwill, and a photo op for others, will be told not to ask questions. Just kill! Sorrow is blissful.
"' Believe it or not, sooner or later, we will kill some of these folks, who need to be killed. And that's the beautiful thing about this world, it that there's always someone who needs to be killed. And we're the folks to do it.'"
In Gaza right now, the UN estimates that there are some 19,000 orphaned children. There are 1 million displaced children, according to UNICEF.
Who is responsible? Just the combatants?
Innocence is a myth! Time and time again, eventually, the truth will out.
We shouldn't capitulate. Shrug our shoulders and say, that's the way it is! We have the intelligence and are capable of showing compassion. We should ask ourselves, as Americans, what in us has been so abused that we, in turn, become blind to the humanity of others? When do we say, enough is enough to so many ugly words that produce so many ugly photos? When do we say enough is enough to the damaged human beings believing that others need killing?
None of this has to be this has to be this way. And we Americans in 2024 should know that by now!
