The Monster Within III

Last year about this time and previous to that I wrote about the monster within that threatens America when soldiers return from Iraq. In my previous post, I mentioned the threat posed by racist Aryan Nation types. As this article from CBS News suggests, though, the threat also comes from inner city, established gangs.

Not only will these gangs pose a threat to those in the military but they will use the techniques and military training they have acquired to train their cohorts back in the states. I wonder whether police chiefs around the country are having nightmares about this issue yet? Or will they wake up to the issue, as America continues to do with so many issues related to this war. Read more!

Worm in the Heart (Contd)

Several months back I suggested that a danger lurking inside the Iraq "war" campaign is the rise in extreme Right and Racist elements in US society. The Aryan Nation and Tim McVeigh are standard icons of this danger, what I call "worm in the heart" and the "monster within." Should they gain military training, I suggested, the danger to US society will grow exponentially.

In those earlier postings I suggested that gang members as well will infiltrate the military, gain combat training, and return to the homeland with more than just PTSD on their minds. Now, it seems that those warnings are bearing fruit as military recruiters go after these unsavory groups to meet the miltary's demand for "boots on the ground."

As attrition, death, injury, and burnout take their toll on the troops in Iraq, we can expect more of these retrograde elemnts in American society to learn more military tactics and indifference to death and suffering and bring those virtues home with them. ...

According to the NYTimes:

An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.

The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance's "military unit coordinator."

"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "

He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."

Who knows, maybe we will soon have a phrase to equal the noxious "going postal." How about "saddam's revenge" or maybe "Fallujah Follies"? Not very catchy, I know. But you get the picture.

And from several years ago already:

Photographed carrying a terrified, half-naked Iraqi child to safety in March of 2003, Army Spc. Joseph Dwyer, of Mount Sinai, was on front pages across the country, a potent symbol of American heroism.

Friday morning, Dwyer, 29, was arrested in El Paso, Texas, after a three-hour standoff in which he fired a 9-millimeter handgun in his apartment.

Dwyer's family says he's suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and that he's fallen through the cracks of the Army mental health system since he returned two years ago to Fort Bliss, Texas, from his tour of duty as a medic in Iraq.

Lest we forget, these men and women were people of character and integrated personalities before they faced the terror of warfare:

James Jenkins left Hamilton for the Marines in 2001 as a solid young man and citizen, his family and a former coach say. He was a Nottingham High School graduate, a star wrestler and talked of turning his military training into a career with the U.S. Secret Service.

But something went terribly wrong.

By all accounts, Jenkins was an excellent Marine. He'd served two tours of duty in Iraq with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. And of the many awards that were pinned on his uniform, one was a Bronze Star with a combat V for valor.

But the James Jenkins whose picture was plastered all over the news in the San Diego area two weeks ago was described as an AWOL soldier who'd gone on a violent crime spree with a stolen gun.

He'd robbed, kidnapped and even tried to sexually assault a woman he had carjacked at gunpoint. Police said he was considered armed and dangerous - and possibly suicidal.

Related Links

• Three Suicides in Special Forces Unit Raise Questions About the Attitude Toward Stress

Read more!

The Worm in the Heart of America

The extremist right is the sleeping worm in the heart of the American dream. The reason why we haven't heard much from them is because, perhaps, many are in Iraq fighting the terrorists and "sand n******s". When they return, who knows how much they will have learned from enemy and friend alike. Remember, Timothy McVeigh became a rightists _after_ he returned from Iraq1. Iraq1 itself was the womb from which his resentment and anger were born. How many McVeighs will Iraq2 spawn?

In the topic of the "monster within" I have already noted how many returning vets are suffering from numerous psychological spiritual wounds. Some have committed suicide--but, as Shakespeare noted, the suicide and the murderer are two sides of the same coin.

War creates people who are wrecked spiritually and emotionally. In certain personality types, such as the McVeigh types, this can be a witch's brew that has lead (in McVeigh's case) and may lead to in the future to cases of home-grown terorists of the right.

McVeigh is an isolated case--the social and economic circumstances are similar today as they were when he was hatching his plot.I belive the place I heard the information was on 60 Minutes or some such show. Consider the following:

"In a well-publicized case in 1997, two former members of the US army's élite 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, James N. Burmeister 2nd and Malcolm Wright Jr., were convicted of killing a black couple in North Carolina in 1995. The prosecutors maintained that the attack was racially motivated and that the two perpetrators were neo-Nazi skinheads. According to The New York Times of May 3, 1997, the "killings led Army Secretary Togo D. West Jr. to initiate a worldwide inquiry into extremist activity in the [army's] ranks." The piece went on to report that the "inquiry found little evidence of overt racism, but it led to discharges of 22 soldiers…who were found to have participated actively in extremist activity." "

I once heard a security expert at a nuclear weapons lab say that they are more concerned about people from within the US energy community perpetrating a terrorist act than they are about foreign extremists. The threat from the US extremist right is just as lethal as from any Islmaic jihadists.

Mixed in with the types of traumatic experiences that they will undergo in Iraq, as well as the facts on the ground in America relating to jobs and social change, the chances of more than one Tim McVeigh perpetrating another act as in OK city is probable.

For a poetic exploration of this monster within, I offer the following:

The Martyr

They said God's work
was war in the oil fields
when refineries blacked out
the sun, and I killed three
men with one shot to save
democracy. Gog Magog
armored in silicon chips
and cybernetic efficiency
squashed the child I was
to fight in the sand
when the enemy retreated
down that road of burned
out tanks and human waste.

Back home, a war hero, I
couldn't even find work
and slept on my father's couch.
And I cried for days when Gog's
Jack-booted goons stormed
Waco and burned those children
alive. From that sacrifice
of innocents I rose
like a phoenix whose
own blood is vengeance.
I drove down that highway
of the black sun in Arizona
with the plan hot
in my head, and the end
of Gog fueling the engine.
Eye for an eye, rotten
tooth versus the new teeth
of revolution that will
rip from the belly
of Gog's whore
the money lenders
and bankers who profane
freedom's temple,
in whose name I killed
to keep clean.
When the van ripped Gog's
belly like a ten-bit whore,
blood wiped out blood,
revenge wrought reward.

Let them broadcast
my death to the world,
if they dare, cowards
with the blood children
on their hands.
Let them sell
advertising for
Wall Street
and Comet cleanser.
I am pure now,
I am my soul's
master, captain of fate.

The tally sheet of the just
is not who you kill
but how justly you kill.
There's no rebirth
without pain, no peace
but what's bought
at the end of a gun.
If you want pity,
don't look at me.
I'm the prodigal son,
come home again to clean
the stables and set
the account books right. Read more!