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06/28/2003 Archived Entry: "Shame."
Shame.
I can only imagine what the average Iraqi thinks of this.
I still do not know why it caught my eye, why I looked ahead when I did - but I glimpsed a dark shape lying in the middle of the road. The driver swerved to avoid it, braking sharply. As we passed I looked through window and caught sight of a body. Not the body of an animal, but the body of a child.
I asked the driver to stop, and we drove back. It was indeed the body of a young boy, his blood-soaked clothes scattered across the road. A few metres away, a girl is crying, screaming. She is inconsolable....
The girl is still crying - her name is Sabrina, she is 13 years old. She is barefoot and wears a ragged dress. She has dark eyes and long, brown hair.
She tells me how she saw her 11-year-old brother, Muhannad, had run up to an American military convoy trying to sell something to the soldiers, but was run over as he crossed the road.
The Americans did not stop.
Replies: somebody speaks up.
Your thread reminds me of stories I had heard about the behavior of US troops in Vietnam.
Tensions with Vietnamese civilians had reached such a low point, that some US soldiers riding in jeeps would lean out of their vehicles and punch any Vietnamese riding on bicycles that they passed on the road knocking them to the ground.
Winning their Hearts and Minds. Yep, that's analagous to a battered wife saying to the police "my husband beats me because he loves me."
Posted by Metropolitan99 @ 06/28/2003 09:55 PM NY
