4 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, February 17, 2004 OPINION 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 opinion. michigandaily.com tothedaily@michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JORDAN SCHRADER Editor in Chief JASON Z. PESICK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE I was just as surprised as the Yankee fans and the Boston Red Sox fans when I opened up my paper today." - President Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers, on the recent trade ofAlex Rodriguez as reported by The Associated Press. l ff// R ID & t.' i ~ ).till) Itll AN . \, Aa~nhih~t., COLIN DALY THE MICHIGAN DALY To know war is to know Lucifer JESS PISKOR JOIN THE PISKOR 4 lashback, summer 2002: I'm working on a construction crew repairing an old cot- tage. It's lunchtime and we sit and talk, passing the time. Two of my co- workers are Vietnam veterans and they compare movies about the war. According to Russ, the Private Pyle scenes in Full Metal Jacket perfectly cap- ture the feeling of boot camp. Talk of movies quickly turns to talk of real experi- ences. Bob drove a re-supply truck between bases - he never saw much combat. He tells stories about how they would come back from town supplied with food, boxes full of black-market heroin and once, a Vietnamese prostitute who was passed around camp and kept hidden in a locker during the day when they were working. Russ cuts in, "We had this cute little girl and my buddy was fucking her and he looks down and he's all covered in blood. There were stories about Viet Cong among the girls so he freaks out because he thinks she's done something to him and starts stab- bing her with his combat knife. We're all lined up outside waiting our turn and we hear her screaming and run in and pull him off her. Turns out she was having her peri- od." Russ doesn't say what happened to the girl. Another afternoon: "We would go into a village looking for the enemy. The rule was if they ran toward us we shoot because they might havebombs. If-they run from us, then they must be enemies, so we shoot. If they don't run at all, then we don't shoot. But the enemy knows this and so of course they don't always run. We would come in with this big tear gas gun that could shoot a bunch of tear gas grenades one after another. We'd fire a bunch of them into the village. Then they would all run." "We had this new officer come in to command us - straight out of military school. He led us into trouble and we did- n't like him - he didn't know how Viet- nam worked, and he was going to get us killed, so we fragged him (threw a grenade into his tent at night, killing him)." End flashback. Russ and Bob's stories shocked me because they came from people I knew and respected - they were horrible stories coming out of the mouths of people I worked with. I still have trouble with my boss nonchalantly telling me he killed innocent people. But then again, it was Vietnam. Vietnam, that horrible war where the most horrible things ever happened. Vietnam, that sweaty jungle where civi- lization failed and humanity fled. Vietnam, that war where men broke down and no rules applied. Sure, Vietnam was a no-holds-barred war with atrocities on both sides. But the Vietnam War was not exceptional: Vietnam was not worse than any other war - it was just better reported. Every other war had just as many atrocities, as many people who went insane, or woke up at night clutching at a rifle. We like to think of wars today as gen- tler and cleaner. We like to think of them not as war but as peacekeeping missions or as Operation Iraqi Freedom. We like to forget that the experiences of the soldiers in Vietnam are the rule of all war, not the exception. Now the troops are starting to come home from Iraq. As of Feb. 16, according to CNN, 542 U.S. soldiers have already returned in caskets. Another 3,000 are wounded. Soon 100,000 troops will be rotated home. Sun- day's New York Times Magazine features a story about the wounded troops. They can't sleep. They find no solace with their spouses. Our soldiers are coming home perma- nently injured and forever mentally scarred. The soldiers have undergone numerous operations and await expensive prosthetic arms. They sit in counseling sessions and relay tips about which anti- depressants and sleeping pills to use. One soldier takes two sleeping pills, drinks two six-packs every night and still can't sleep. Another heard a banged garbage can out- side one night, mistook it for an attack, grabbed his rifle and raced around the block looking for an enemy. These people will carry Iraq with them forever. We send young men - and now women - younger than I to secure hostile fire zones and to suppress the enemy and to enforce the peace, and we forget that that means remaining on hair-trigger alert, that it means being mistrustful of everyone, that it means sacrificing humanity in order to survive and that it means killing. When we stop to carry out the task of counting the wounded, we should always remember that war, and the struggle to sur- vive in a battlefield, is a process that destroys both the person on the receiving end of a bullet and the person pulling the trigger. Piskor can be reached at jpiskor@umich.edu LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Union event shows BAMN brand of activism is 'uncivil, uninformed' TO THE DAILY, Last year, the University's lawyers con- vinced the U.S. Supreme Court that by pro- moting racial diversity among the student body, the University broadens the "market- place of ideas" available to campus and thus makes itself a richer educational institution. Furthermore, they argued that because race- conscious admissions policies serve an edu- cational interest, the University has the intellectual freedom to choose to employ them. I personally find this a perfectly sensi- ble position, and I support affirmative action on these grounds. But Thursday night, BAMN caused me to have second thoughts (Gratz speaks at Union amidst massive protest, 02/12/04). Now, I've frequented the Michigan Union Reading Room for three years and have grown all but immune to the distractions one has to put up with reading in a public place. Thurs- day, however, I was simply blown away by a demonstration BAMN was holding - for some reason - directly outside the doors of the reading room. This demonstration, which consisted mostly of senseless yelling, went way beyond what any reasonable person would consider appropriate for a defense of academic freedom. Rather than fostering a "marketplace of ideas," BAMN was simply trying to yell out its political opponents, and in the process, kept every student in the reading room from getting any work done. BAMN needs to realize that the Universi- ty's brand of affirmative action is about educa- tion. Sure, social justice might also be served by affirmative action, but in the eyes of the Supreme Court, that's just a lucky coincidence; it would not be constitutional for the Universi- ty to have race-conscious admissions policies on such grounds alone. Affirmative action is meant to be an academic asset, not a distrac- tion, and BAMN would be advised to know that its strategy of uncivil and uninformed activism is only winning new supporters for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative every day - and if they keep up staging nasty protests outside the Union Reading Room, I just might be the next one. integrity? I find his comments concerning Students for a Democratic Society and Alan Haber not only insulting, but disturbing. First of all, Segall should get his facts right. SDS was not a socialist group, nor did it use "violent scare tactics." Groups such as the Weathermen broke away from SDS, and they used radical methods to persuade the U.S. gov- ernment to pull out of Vietnam, because- protests and endless stacks of body bags from both sides obviously weren't getting the point across. Second, SDS was first and foremost a group committed to participatory democ- racy, not socialism. The efforts of SDS and similar groups have created so many bene- fits for our generation that we tend to take their contributions for granted. Third, how can you label SDS as unimpor- tant, given that it helped spawn the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, the environ- mental movement and several other movements of the 1960s and '70s that have had profound positive effects on our lives? What this campus desperately needs right now is a student group such as SDS to harness the power of students en masse for positive and creative change. Attitudes such as Segall's only serve to disempower and disconnect students from the everyday events that seriously affect our lives. ABDURRAHMAN PASHA LSA senior SDS member No link between pro-Israeli and progressive movements TO THE DAILY: Samantha Woll, in her viewpoint (Strange bedfellows? Israel activism and V- Day, 02/12/04), does what the pro-Israeli lobby has been attempting to do for years: link Israel and pro-Israeli activism with progressive movements. Despite Woll's insistence, there is no connection. For a group like the American Movement for Israel to call itself and its cause progressive is an insult to the term itself. Within the next five years, Israel will consist of a minority of Jews ruling over a majority of Palestinian Arabs. These Palestinians have every single aspect of their lives completely controlled by.. the crn~i rmv, PnlPtiian tnc mare e e Israel in a "progressive" light, neglect all the above. They neglect the 70-plus United Nations resolutions Israel is currently in viola- tion of. They neglect the continued humiliation of Palestinian women and men and the contin- ued abuses of human rights committed by the occupying Israeli army. Sure, there are plenty of feminists within Israel. But events like AMI's Diag ploy aiming to link progressive causes with the Israeli cause is nothing but an attempt to wash over the reality that is Israel: a revival of the apartheid system. Israel has become the South Africa of today, and groups like AMI are doing their best to divert attention from this. AMI's presence on the Diag on Fri- day will be an insult to feminist activism and an insult to the student body as a whole. SALAH HUSSEINI LSA senior The writer is the president of the University chapter of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. Housing selection process needs to slow down To THE DAILY: Kudos to the Michigan Student Assembly for addressing off-campus housing problems (Students plan for housing advocacy, 02/12/04). When I began to work at the University two years ago, I was appalled to learn that students began signing leases for the fol- lowing school year as early as October. When I was a student here in the late '80s, we didn't even begin to think about where to live next year until we returned from winter break in January. We would spend the first few weeks of winter semester deciding who we would live with and then start looking for an apartment or house. Most students had leases by spring break. Somehow over the years, greedy landlords have pushed back the signing dates for next year's leases. I have seen many students stuck with bad housing situations because they were forced to make decisions before they were ready. Freshmen, in particular, need a semester to acclimate and get to know people before they are ready to decide who to live with and where. ROBERT LEVINE Alum Housing Dining Services employee I E