“I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, ‘A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi… You know, so what?’… [Only when we got home] in… meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then.”
Specialist Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry. In Baquba for a year beginning February 2004
“I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people. The only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with, and everybody else be damned.”
Sergeant Ben Flanders, 28, National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, 172nd Mountain Infantry. In Balad for 11 months beginning March 2004
Interviews with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of brutality in Iraq
(Via Antiwar.com)
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“With one part of my mind I thought the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like there are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.”
George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant
Thicket & Thorp 
wow…i cant believe there is someone willing to talk about their feelings of guilt and shame. i see the dehumanization of iraqis in order to massacre them (or at least desire to) all the time. very sad. especially as it comes from “christians” for the most part.
pb