232: The Real Story
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From WBE's East Chicago, South American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. My academy sergeant put me on a deployment roster to go to the Middle East and I was told to go to a pre-deployment brief. This guy is a Lance Corporal from the Marines' 8th Communication Battalion at Cantlaw, June, North Carolina. At his pre-deployment briefing, to go overseas for whatever is going to happen next to any rock, there were maybe 300 Marines. You know, foreign cheers, there was a projection screen being used to show us the plan of attack. Okay, we're going to be landing and then we're going to travel here to be wearing this type of gear. They also taught us about Saddam Hussein's military, how much he has. And after that, this other speaker came out speaking about the Arab culture. He was a sergeant and how the Marine Corps works, per se. This guy is not specializing in Arab culture. You know, he was probably asked to do a course on Arab culture two weeks prior to the situation. He did some research, per se, and then, you know, gave the class. In the class, the sergeant explained what Arabs eat, that it gets to 140 degrees in the desert, the different ethnic groups. Then he said to us, "When you go over there, make sure you do not shake an Arab with your left hand." And we're almost, you know, you know why. So he says, "And the reason is because over in Iraq, over in the Middle East, they wiped their asses with their left hand because they don't have any toilet paper." As I'm standing there and people like, you know, I could see people's faces and they were like, "Indiscussed." They're like, "Oh man, wow, that's just nasty." This Marine told us that he thought the only reason the sergeant said that was to make the soldiers think that Arabs are disgusting, to make them hate. Who knows? Honestly, who knows? We checked into it and it's true, lots of people in Iraq and Pakistan and lots of other countries near there do not use toilet paper, people wash their hands. But that sergeant really might have been trying to teach them how to be sensitive to local customs, just didn't do the very best job of it. Once there's a war going on, everyone is suspicious of the information they're getting. Nothing is trustworthy. When a war is over, it's still hard to tell what the truth was. For instance, the number of Iraqi deaths in the Persian Gulf War back in 1991, you know? No one knows. Just after the war, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency made a very rough estimate of 100,000. The British government says 30,000, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee estimated 9,000, the PBS show frontline estimated maybe 27,000. Well, today on our program, we bring you three stories, each one from a different war, each one trying to get to the real true story behind that war, like one of our show, Jar Heads. In that act, a Marine reminds us just how scary it was to fight against Saddam Hussein the last time around if you weren't just watching on TV. Act two, what's the truth good for anyway? An aquachist, the question, if Israelis looked back at their war of independence and decided that maybe they shared some blame for Palestinians having no country, would it change anything?
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