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My father was in the U.S. Air Force in World War II when it was still the Army Air Corps. He was operations officer for the First Air Commandos in Burma. Years later, when I was boy, I can still remember sitting in the back seat of our car with our big black poodle, while my father drove us somewhere, my mother beside him and the two of them singing hauntingly the first verse of the old Army Air Corps song that began:
"Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun;
Here they come, zooming to meet our thunder, at 'em, boys, give'er the gun!
Down we dive, spouting our flame from under, off with one helleva roar,
We live in fame or go down in flame, hey! Nothing'll stop the Army Air Corps""
Then they would both add this lilting half-line not from the song (but probably not at all their creation either):
-- except the women""
No, in a world in which a woman can now become a four-star general in the U.S. military, that line would no longer be acceptable. Still, it remains strangely stuck in my head all these decades later. It came to my mind again when I read Nick Turse's latest piece and thought about the ghostly war our military and the CIA have been conducting across significant parts of this planet for two decades. After all, the first reported CIA drone killings were in Yemen on November 3, 2002, a country where, almost 20 years later, after the deaths of perhaps 400,000 people, there is finally a truce in the most brutal war on Earth (Ukraine aside).
As Turse suggests today, what a grim record of civilian deaths, including significant numbers of children, lies behind this country's never-ending global drone war. What a grim tale of an only partially recorded, seldom newsworthy nightmare it is, affecting so many people from Asia across the Greater Middle East and deep into Africa. And not just other people either. Only recently, New York Times reporter Dave Philipps offered a devastating account of a group far closer to home who have also been deeply affected by those phantom airstrikes, all too often killing civilian men, women, and children: the drone operators themselves working in "endless shifts in a forever war." They are, of course, not in the air themselves, but on the ground, often thousands of miles distant from the planes they're "piloting," so the U.S. military doesn't even consider them in "combat." They've had no choice, however, but to watch by video as whole families died from the Hellfire missiles and other munitions they released and, often enough, they evidently find themselves devastated by the experience. As Philipps put it, "Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said, people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears. Others attempted suicide. And the military failed to recognize the full impact."
One drone sensor operator described the experience this way:
"A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial. People often think that this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them, there is no reset button."
Thinking about my own childhood and Turse's piece today, I couldn't help imagining my parents once again in that car (myself in the back seat), singing that song, but this time ending it not with "except the women" but, in dirge-like voices, "including the children." How truly sad it is. Tom
The Civilian Deaths You Haven't Heard About
Casualties of America's Never-Ending Global War on Terror
By Nick Turse
Madogaz Musa Abdullah still remembers the phone call. But what came next was a blur. He drove for hours, deep into the Libyan desert, speeding toward the border with Algeria. His mind buckled, his thoughts reeled, and more than three years later, he's still not certain how he made that six-hour journey.
The call was about his younger brother, Nasser, who, as he told me, was more than a sibling to him. He was also a close friend. Nasser was polite and caring. He loved music, sang, and played the guitar. Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Bob Marley were his favorites.
Abdullah finally found Nasser near the village of Al Awaynat. Or, rather, he found all that remained of him. Nasser and 10 others from their village of Ubari had been riding in three SUVs that were now burnt-out hunks of metal. The 11 men had been incinerated. Abdullah knew one of those charred corpses was his brother, but he was at a loss to identify which one.
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