Military brass leaves rank-and-file soldiers to die

Commanders remove valuable resources ahead of attack,
then abandon soldiers

By Matt Wedemeyer

The author is a member of March Forward!, an organization of veterans and service members who stand against war and racism.

A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee requested in July a new investigation into an attack on a U.S. Army outpost in Afghanistan last summer. The details of the incident further illustrate that the young men and women forced to kill and die in the Pentagon’s criminal wars are nothing more than cannon fodder to their commanding officers.

Senator James Webb (D-Va.) has asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to conduct a formal examination of a July 13, 2008, assault on a U.S. Army outpost in Wanat, Afghanistan. At that time, the attack was the deadliest for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in nearly three years. Out of 45 soldiers stationed at the outpost, nine were killed and 27 were wounded, a 75 percent casualty rate that had not occurred since the Vietnam War.

The Pentagon’s investigation of the incident predictably absolved all commanding officers of any wrongdoing and has come under sharp criticism. Even some members within the military hierarchy dismissed it as a whitewash and subsequently commissioned military historian Douglas Cubbison from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to provide a real analysis of the incident.

Cubbison’s report states that soldiers were insufficiently supplied with basic necessities, including water and sandbags, and repeatedly complained of being placed in an unnecessarily dangerous situation.

Further inflaming an already volatile situation, days prior to the assault, a U.S. helicopter attack killed all Afghan medical personnel at a nearby clinic, infuriating the local population. The Pentagon casually dismissed the massacre as a regrettable mistake and simply added the victims to its growing list of “collateral damage.”

Platoon leader Lt. Jonathon P. Brostrom, one of the nine killed in the assault, notified senior leaders well in advance that he suspected an imminent attack in retaliation for the killing of the Afghan medical personnel. Commanders from Bagram air base responded by withdrawing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets from the area, leaving the remaining soldiers even more vulnerable to potential attacks.

“After I read the report, I was sick to my stomach,” said Jonathon’s father, David, a retired army colonel who first made Senator Webb aware of the report’s existence. (Washington Post, July 24)

This incident and countless others like it demonstrate that the U.S. ruling class’s incessant calls to “support the troops” are nothing but cynical rhetoric designed to manipulate the population into believing that the welfare of enlisted soldiers is a priority.

Rank-and-file soldiers are nothing but cannon fodder for wars and occupations that serve only the needs of U.S. capital. The Pentagon brass does not care whether enlisted soldiers live or die, provided the strategic objectives determined by the war planners in Washington are met.

March Forward! demands that poor and working-class young people in the United States no longer be sent to kill and die for the profit of multinational corporations. We demand that the U.S. government pay reparations to all countries invaded and occupied to address the countless injustices U.S. soldiers have been forced to take part in.

We have nothing to gain from these wars that only serve the interests of the rich.

This is not our war!
MarchForward.org