Irregular Army by Matt Kennard

Author:Matt Kennard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Outsiders

GREEN CARD SOLDIERS

The only for sure way of gaining citizenship through military service in the United States armed services is to die.

Marco Amador, filmmaker, 20101

In late March 2003, the month the invasion of Iraq got underway, America received news of its first battlefield casualties. It was a stark wake-up call for the country and brought home the tragic human costs of war. “The violence of the war against Iraq made its way to small towns . . . when residents learned that one of the first military victims was someone they knew,” wrote the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time.2 The soldiers fell while carrying out one of the early objectives of the invasion plan—to secure the port city Umm Qasr in the south of Iraq. In older times a sleepy fishing village, it had been turned into a military port after the Iraqi Revolution of 1958 because of its strategic proximity to Iran and Kuwait. US Marines advanced from Kuwait as the invasion got underway, taking the port surprisingly quickly. But they then had to spend days securing it against what a British commander called “heavy resistance.” “We were told Umm Qasr wasn’t too bad, then we get reports of dug-in Iraqi infantry, it was hair-raising,” said one platoon sergeant, Marc Montez.3 One of the soldiers in his platoon who was trying to hold back Iraqi resistance was Lance Corporal José Antonio Gutierrez, First Marine Division, who had arrived in Kuwait just two months before aboard the USS Rushmore. In a major firefight on March 21, he became America’s first casualty in the war, shot fatally in the chest by a fellow soldier, in a so-called “friendly fire” incident.

Except Lance Corporal Gutierrez wasn’t an American casualty at all—the twenty-four-year-old was, in fact, Guatemalan, an orphan who had travelled 2,000 miles and crossed two borders illegally for his crack at the American dream. In death, there was no one in small-town America to mourn him, and his dream of becoming a US citizen was realized only posthumously. He had given his life for a country that was not even his own, a sacrifice made even more poignant considering the tragic history of US military involvement in his native country—which had destroyed his own family. Gutierrez was born in the small Guatemalan village of Escuintla at the height of the country’s brutal civil war, which had raged from 1960 to the middle of the 1990s, and for which the US government and military establishment were in large part responsible. Before 1944, the Guatemalan elite composed 2 percent of the population but had control of more than 60 percent of the land, according to historian Walter LaFeber.4 “The poorest 50 percent of the population owned only 3 percent of the land but depended on [it] for their food,” while half the population were indigenous and earned less than $100 a year while being subjected to brutal and harsh discrimination by the ruling elite.5 The country’s corrupt dictatorship was overthrown in 1944 by

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