Helping the people
Do you believe that the soldiers that are in Kuwait or Iraq should be giving out water and food to the people of those countries? My first response to this was yes of course! But what if a soldier filled that water with something other than water? Than what is the US government responsible? So what should be done?
I was talking to my husband and he was saying that when he first came to Kuwait his orders were to give out water to the people as they accompanied convoys into Iraq. I thought that this was great. I am a firm believer that these are people and I think we should help our fellow-man when we see them in trouble. When I tell people Howie went to Abu Ghrab the first question that people ask is was he part of the horrid things the soldiers did out there. And my natural response is to get mad but then I simply explain Howie was there after all of that happened and he is not the kind of person to degrade another person like those soldiers did. Well back to the water thing a couple of weeks ago Howie told me that the higher-ups said that the soldiers could no longer pass out water to the locals. I asked him why. Well apparently one of the soldiers in his group did something stupid and now it is not allowed. I don’t think Howie wanted to tell me much more detail than that and I’m not sure I wanted to hear anymore than that.
So after this incident happened Howie unit went on more convoys and the all of the sudden got attacked. Mortars were going off in their direction. And since a lot more IED’s have been found. IED’s are improvised explosive devices. From my knowledge these are bombe that are hidden in the roads. Since some roads in Iraq are very poorly made, they have lots of potholes and so the insurgents place this IED’s into the potholes and as the convoy approaches the go off.
This is picture of the holes made by a mortar going off.
This is a video of an IED
So could it be that the people are sending a message. Think about some the people are very poor, they don’t even have homes, they may not have access to water and the Americans passing out bottled water to them was probably one of the biggest acts of compassion and now it’s gone. So I would imagine they are upset.
On the other hand if you are instructing troops to give out water to the locals and a dummy in the group does something stupid, you should do something about that. I would imagine the soldier had consequences for his actions as they are a bad image of the troops overall. I think that action is correct but I think that the troops should be able to go back to giving water to the civilians and my husband does too. I may be wrong that the attacks on his unit have to do with the troops not giving out water, but I think the it’s interesting that these attacks started only after they stopped passing the water out.
