cheech

Introductory note - I go into serious stuff about war towards the end. I don't wanna make you all bummed without some, well, warning.

So there's a new reference dept head...and it's not me. However, it IS a name from my past, someone who worked in Fairfax Libraries, and I believe she's a techie, knows a lot about computers. That would kick so much ass!
I have to stress-- this is not a disappointment for me. I'm glad to get more experience as a Librarian I, and to work under someone more experienced rather than to take more than, maybe, I can handle right now.

My new hero is this guy: dear_raed.blogspot.com
This is a blog by a guy calling himself "Salam Pax". I found out about this reading Yahoo news today. He's in Baghdad, reporting on what he sees. I read the last week's entries this morning, and I very nearly cried, right there onthe workdesk. I had many bad feelings about things going on with the war, but when he writes the part about how Iraqi news reports when B52s are taking off, so he knows they'll be hitting the area in 6 hours...something about that really hits me.
Then I was feeling guilty that I wasn't more emotional about braveliltoaster's friends; they of course are in danger too, being sent over. Obviously, I felt horrible about that...but as much as I feel bad to hear about military personnel being hurt and killed, there is something even more horrible to me about people, in a city, any city in the world in any war, being bombed. Saddam was a force they had no power over (there was nobody else up for election, obviously) and now they have no power over our military intervention, they just have to wait and see if they'll be bombed.

I was looking at more military books at work...oh, I neglected to mention...let me start with the other thing I saw at work a couple days ago...so I've been weeding our military books. I saw a book called "The Commandos". I opened it up, and the picture section had all these leaflets that were dropped on Iraq during the 1991 war. I wish I had a webpage and scanner; they're quite odd, and leave me with ahhh mixed emotions.
There is a "surrender" one with a cartoon of an Iraqi giving up to a soldier in front of US, British and French flags. The Allied soldier is supposed to look friendly, holding out his hands, but I swear to god it looks like he's gritting his teeth! They have a thought balloon over the Iraqi; he's thinking about his family...it's so tragic, yet comic the way it's drawn because the guy, in his family portrait, looks like Saddam. The text tells how to properly surrender, how to hold your gun, empty the clip, etc, and the last line is "You will be transferred into the hands of your Arab brothers as soon as possible. Welcome." Hmmm, so which Arab country are they proposing the guy retire to; Kuwait? Jordan? Iran? And if he surrendered, with Saddam in power still at war's end who's to say what would happen to his family? I dunno if Iraq was on top of those things like Russia once was with defectors, but still...
There's another that is short and sweet; shows a B52 bombing and says that's what's gonna happen to the leaflet position tomorrow. I mean, on the one hand it's humanitarian "We're gonna bomb here; leave"; on the other hand, I'm sure it wasn't up to the soldiers. It can't be much easier for an Iraqi to desert than any other army...
The last one sounds like an advertisement for the BLU-82 bomb. It has a crude line-drawing of a bomb and says "Flee and live or stay and die!" on the front, and on the back: "You have just experienced the most powerful conventional bomb in the war. It has more explosive power than 20 SCUD missiles. You will be bombed again soon. Kuwait will be free from aggression. Flee south and you will be treated fairly. You cannot hide." There's a LOT of different ideas going on in that one...
You could argue that it's more humane to bomb after warning about bombing, and this indeed was when Iraq was the aggressor, but still, like I said, surrender was no easy option to Iraqi soldiers, or any soldiers.

So the books I was looking at today had Air Force history in them. I was looking at WW2 stuff. It had posters bristling with anti-Asian racial hatred and Nash-Kelvinator magazine ads promising that there factory workers were working with determination and "hatred" against the Japanese while building airplane parts. I then turned to a page of Japanese civilians who were killed in bombing raids. On one page there were people still intact and clothed, the text suggesting that they had been asphixiated in oxygen-sucking firebombing, while on the next page there was no mistaking how the two people had died. They had been burnt to ash. One was a woman face down...next to her, hands and feet still raised in the air for eternity, was an infant....