Fresh Loaf

Mike Boettcher, a Peabody Award-winning journalist who’s covered conflicts in the Middle East and Africa for NBC News and CNN, is launching a Web venture called NoIgnoring. He’s channeling the ghost of Ernie Pyle and venturing off to Iraq and Afghanistan to tell soldiers’ stories from the warzones.

“We have 200,000 U.S. men and women in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. The U.S. has seemed to have forgotten about them. We talk about the war, but we’ve forgotten the soldiers and what they are doing,” Boettcher said.

He’s not traveling solo, either — Boettcher’s 21-year-old son Carlos will join him. The two plan to embed with the Fourth Infantry Division and mimic their tours — 15 months in the field, 18 days at home — and post blogs and video reports to the site. The reports will be free for television stations to post on their websites, Boettcher says.

According to various blog posts about the venture, father and son left in late May or June. Interesting fact: Boettcher filed one of the first reports for Ted Turner’s 24-hour news network.

Full disclosure: Boettcher is a friend of mine, but I haven’t spoken with him in months. I googled his name for kicks the other day and came across this news. I wish him and Carlos all the best and look forward to their work.

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In a way it’s the same old, same old on this fifth anniversary of our invasion of a largely defenseless nation for no reason other than lies concocted by the Bush regime. Dick Cheney (who dodged the draft during Vietnam, explaining he had “other priorities“) was in Iraq repeating the same old lies about 9/11 having something to do with our regime’s attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime. John McCain, one of the few neocon leaders who was not a draft or combat evader, was in Jordan, where he claimed Iran was training Al-Qaeda — and most networks (not all: MSNBC deserves a little applause) studiously downplayed his awful ignorance — the sort of stupidity that should resolve the question about whether he’s qualified to get the “3 a.m. phone call” (answer: no). And, of course, George Bush (who most certainly did go AWOL from his Air National Guard playboy squadron, a gig his dad’s friends engineered for him so he wouldn’t risk facing combat in Vietnam while John Kerry was most certainly deservedly earning medals for valor in the conflict), was claiming the war was really swell. Even our own neocon toady, Saxby Chambliss (who dodged the draft claiming bad knees, although that didn’t seem to deter him from playing football) was blustering that he’d be glad to face Democrat Jim Martin (who served as an Army lieutenant during Vietnam) in a debate on the war.

But at least there were some new voices — although the media went to great lengths to ignore them. Last month, I spoke to a group of veterans in Buckhead — Vets for Peace, Vietnam Vets Against the War, Iraq Veterans Against the War. The event was to promote the Iraq Winter Soldier hearings this week. My co-speaker was Doug Ament, from this generation of veterans that, as I and my fellow veterans did 40 years ago, learned imperial wars benefit no one except the powerful profiteers. Ament was an aide to the top U.S. political people in Baghdad — and was so horrified by what he saw that he resigned his officer’s commission and went back as a civilian to try to rebuild what he had helped destroy. He’s now a grad student at Emory.

The first Winter Soldier hearings were in 1971 and dispelled any illusions about the nobility of the Vietnam conflict. The second Winter Soldier event took place earlier this month. Nope, don’t bother looking for stories in the AJC. But you can find reports here and here.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Years since U.S. invasion of Iraq: 5

Total number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan: 7,284

American troops killed in Iraq: 3,987

American troops from Georgia killed in Iraq: 123

American troops from metro Atlanta killed in Iraq: 36

American troops from Georgia wounded in Iraq: 858

Youngest Georgian killed in Iraq: 19

Oldest Georgian killed in Iraq: 57

Sources: Military Times, Brookings Institution, U.S. Dept. of Defense, National Archives

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By Heather Gray

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was in Washington D.C. after arriving from Atlanta, Ga., the evening of Sept. 10. I was there for an agriculture meeting. On that fateful day I met colleagues from Arkansas and South Carolina for a breakfast meeting at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill. It was to be the start of a daylong session on sustainable agriculture with agriculture advocates and members of Congress. As we walked into Rayburn on the morning of 9/11, our world was transformed. It was a time when the best and worst in America rose to the surface.

Coming into Rayburn, we passed guards whose eyes were transfixed on the television. We asked what was happening. “A plane flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York,” they said. We thought it was a fluke–an error of some sort by a misguided plane. We looked briefly at the television and then continued to the cafeteria in the basement where we met two of our friends. There were not a lot of people in the cafeteria at the time, but those who were there already seemed rather bleak. People were on their cell phones and not looking directly at anyone. Then we heard that the second World Trade tower had been struck, and we knew that something orchestrated and sinister was at play.

Suddenly, there was an announcement in the cafeteria that Rayburn was being evacuated. We joined the throng of employees who rushed out of Rayburn and the surrounding buildings. A few hundred yards from Rayburn we heard what sounded like a bomb — everyone around me bolted and then ran faster from the scene. I looked back to see that the sound was likely from military jets that were already flying over the city and breaking the sound barrier as they flew close to the buildings. (more…)

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