Dear Editor,

Some time ago, I read where a British TV station was going to show, briefly, graphic footage of two British soldiers killed in Iraq. Such scenes are extremely unpleasant, but I daresay that if people would much more often see the human butchery we call war, in all its bloody gruesomeness, they would literally scream at their leaders to stop it.

Scenes of mutilated bodies don’t sit well with any glamourised notion of war and so such photos are seldom published. During the Vietnam War, when one magazine ran a picture of a decapitated soldier, people got sick to the stomach.

I hate to say this, but maybe we should start showing shattered limbs, faces shot off, and other gory images. I “hear” you shout, “Stop already”, but I’ve not even started on the psychological and emotional damage and then, too, these are only words, not photos or TV clips, and a far cry from the moans, the gore, the stench, and the utter agony of the battlefield itself.

Anyone who thinks that soldiers give their lives for their country is badly mistaken; those precious lives are brutally wrested from them. People who clamour and push for war, manufacturers and dealers of arms who help create war, politicians who are ever ready to send young people to war, religious people who loudly proclaim so-called Just and Holy War theories, or even those who simply accept war as inevitable, seldom see the horror of it. They need to see it at its worst.

Stan Penner

Box 53

Landmark, MB Canada