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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn ("In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."). --HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The stars hath turned in the heavens once more: Mighty Cthulhu stirs. His dreams reacheth forth, communing with those with ears to hear. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! His thoughts trample down along the pathways of thy mind; thou knowest His footprints, each of which is a wound...

Tuesday, November 09, 2004





On a more somber note...

The last time Marines went into Fallujah it was a humanitarian disaster. Drastically outnumbered on a mission dictated from--but not supported by--the White House, the Marines resorted to some pretty rough tactics:

We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you?




There is only one hospital in Fallujah. If you're an injured civilian, you have to cross one of two long bridges to get to it. Last time, Marine snipers made it clear that that wasn't an option:

We load the ambulance with disinfectant, needles, bandages, food and water and set off, equipped this time with loudspeakers, pull up to a street corner and get out. The hospital is to the right, quite a way off; the marines are to the left. Four of us in blue paper smocks walk out, hands up, calling out that we’re a relief team, trying to deliver supplies to the hospital.

There’s no response and we walk slowly towards the hospital. We need the ambulance with us because there’s more stuff than we can carry, so we call out that we’re going to bring an ambulance with us, that we’ll walk and the ambulance will follow. The nose of the ambulance edges out into the street, shiny and new, brought in to replace the ones destroyed by sniper fire.

Shots rip down the street, two bangs and a zipping noise uncomfortably close. The ambulance springs back into the side road like it’s on a piece of elastic and we dart into the yard of the corner house, out through the side gate so we’re back beside the vehicle.




This isn't to say that the insurgents in Fallujah are misunderstood patriots just defending their homes; they are mostly foreign thugs, bent on Taliban-like oppression of the local populace, as well as murdering whatever Americans that they can find. Their nature forces the Marines to respond in kind, even if that means drilling an ambulance driver center-mass "just in case".

I just wanted to point out what happened last time we went to Fallujah: The carnage, misery, and suffering of the civilian populace caught in the crossfire. And remember that all of this is brought to you by ShrubCo™: Slaughtering civilians in defiance of the UN because Saddam Hussein didn't have WMD in defiance of the UN.

Posted by: Great Cthulhu / <$BlogItemDateTime $>
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