The cultural divide between me and the soldiers was grand canyon-like. They are marines trained to kill. There's a lot of testosterone and some talk about the supremacy of the white man.
Meanwhile, I spent the day writing up interviews I'd had with some Iraqis. I got teary-eyed at my desk as I wrote about a an ex-soldier wounded in the Iran-Iraq War who did a puppet show for the Iraqi children at a kindergarten we support. He was this deep-voiced guy with meat hooks for hands. He told me later he'd never held a puppet before in his life. "It gave me great pleasure to make the children happy since I had such a sad childhood myself."
It's going to be a tough on the outside, healing child on the inside kind of story. Corny? You had to meet the guy.
So in the last scene of the GKill episode, these marine kids come across some defecting Iraqi soldiers trudging through the desert, and they treat them badly--pour out their meager ration of water, steal from them, force them to the ground, mock them...
I felt like I was watching invaders attacking my neighbors. It was extremely offensive. The Iraqis were more familiar to me.
Yet the kids were familiar to me, obviously. They're Americans for god's sake.
I know TV is not reality. But dehumanization and cruelty to others is apparently a natural ingredient of war, no matter the justification.
It made me feel naive in my little aid-worker bubble.
People sometimes wonder how I can bring my children into such a dangerous part of the world. But my world, the people we know and hang with, the expats and internationally-minded nationals, are of the same peace-loving, diversity-celebrating mindset that we are. We're all globe-huggin humanitarians.
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