Word: conscripts
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...relative peace, to living under foreign occupation, in fear, poverty, civil war and terror? Under blatantly false and illegal pretenses, the U.S. invaded a country that had not attacked it or its allies. About 40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, not to mention untold thousands of Iraqi conscript soldiers; the Americans are too arrogant to even keep count, publishing only their own fatalities. The reference to the "liberator" would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. Nils Wetterlind Singapore The investigation of the Haditha incident should also include the actions of Iraqis. Those killed may have watched...
...just like us, why should they have so much more than we do? There may be a sense that celebrities need to atone, if not for their sins, then for those of their industry. At the Witness benefit, former child soldier Ishmael Beah talked about his experience as a conscript in Sierra Leone's civil war. To keep the troops, as young as 7 years old, hopped up for battle, their officers gave them intoxicants--marijuana, cocaine and, he says, "war movies, like Rambo: First Blood Part...
Yamashita's script is much more relentlessly cruel. In essence, the Japanese officers compelled the bravery (and suicide) of their troops at gunpoint. Only the Japanese commander, Lieut. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (a mysterious historical figure who fascinates Eastwood), and a fictional conscript, Saigo, whose fate Yamashita intertwines with his commanding officer's, demonstrate anything like humanity as a Westerner might understand it. The lieutenant general, educated in part in the U.S., is respectful of its national spirit (and industrial might) and believes that a live soldier, capable of carrying on the fight, is infinitely more valuable than a dead...
...military, and it's not a lot of fun. The discipline can be intense: earlier this year, a whistle-blower accused a captain of ordering his troops to dip their fingers into a dirty toilet bowl and then stick them in their mouths. In June, a young conscript stationed near the DMZ allegedly threw a live grenade into a tent full of sleeping comrades and sprayed it with his K-1 semiautomatic, killing eight. It's still unclear what caused the incident-his court-martial started last week-but civic groups have complained for years about grim conditions and high...
...acclaim and popularity in the East bloc as well as the West and provided unfailing moral guideposts for his countrymen; of complications of arteriosclerosis; in Hürtgenwald, West Germany. Brought up in a deeply religious Roman Catholic family resistant to Nazism, he served six years as a Wehrmacht conscript on both fronts. He emerged as a pacifist and foe of all establishments, governmental, religious and bureaucratic, and began writing novels of protest against war (The Train Was on Time, 1949; Adam, Where Art Thou, 1951), then went on to describe and deride the materialistic, dehumanizing postwar society in such works...