Rubicon with Sean Griobhtha
[excerpted chapter from the book X Rubicon]
Posting this now was influenced by Common Dreams. While they rightly detail the illegal Zionist military regime’s (they have no constitution and the “country” is run by military law, and has been since 1948) killing of civilians and war crimes, they have also called out the US for its war crimes. However, most reporting on this latter subject only discusses issues back to ~9/11. But this is a failure of collective memory, what we are supposed to be teaching our kids, in that it allows an idea of US war crimes as a more recent phenomenon. US war crimes, atrocities, and killing of civilian populations goes back to the founding of the so-called republic, and accelerated exponentially after the supposed end of WW2. Even reporting on more recent atrocities, the abuse of the CIA and the murder of socialist leaders and those attempting to defend their rights, cultures, and lives against capitalist hegemony leads readers to believe that this is only recent activity. Just as reporters have forgotten John Pilger’s expose of locking soldiers and civilians in shipping containers and firing unceasingly until they are all dead, the chapter below provided for your edification, details deaths that you would be likely to dismiss, as a one-off. But these things have always gone on, not least because reporters fail to take their 1st Amendment privileges seriously, along with their Constitutional duty to inform the population. What’s taking place in Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, and more under instigation and/or support of the United States, has taken place over and over and again, and again, and again, and again. You can’t make correction if you ignore the track record.
I’m not sure I can adequately express to you the inherent pain, shame, and guilt, nor the felt stupidity of naivete, nor the egregious lack of a fully developed biological braking system. I participated in this mission (along with 17 more). All I can say for myself I’ve said, but this summary quote will get you started:
“This writing is a mea culpa, an admittance of guilt. It is the repentance that making amends demands. I AM guilty of the evil I have committed and in which I’ve participated. To get you started, I admit your guilt for you, so that you spend less time asking why. Read on and you’ll understand what this means.”
Nuns
#16 [of 18] – June 1981 [originally published May 2022]
“Blood red stains on habits black,
Fell before my roving eye,
Hands uplifted to their god,
Now in blood mud dirt they lie.”
Nuns of El Salvador – Rubicon
El Salvador. Oligarch families formed the power in El Salvador under the auspices of the US, and military leaders trained by US forces and the SOA exacted rule. In the ‘70s, liberation theology took hold with a vengeance for the people to attempt to hold on to their land, homes, and villages which oligarchs and US interests wanted to control or own. There was, of course, an opposition based on socialist ideas. Roman Catholic Arch-Bishop Oscar Romero was the most outspoken critic of the regime and US support of that regime. US President Jimmy Carter, spewing the usual anti-communist rhetoric vowed in Oval Office conversations to squash any and all socialist sentiments in Central America. He complained about Romero to Zbignew Brzezinski, who in a recorded call to the Vatican demanded that they silence Romero, “or we will”. Low and behold, in March 1980, in a country practically guided by the CIA, Arch-Bishop Romero was murdered while officiating [in a hospital chapel funeral] in front of his congregation. Nuns of all orders were helping the people and rebels with humanitarian support, because the oppression was that strong, and evil reigned in a civil war of the Haves seeking to have more.
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Another convoy was to be destroyed, consisting of ~30 heavy trucks filled with weapons, ammunition, explosives, and personnel, and ~15 support vehicles, mostly all terrain vehicles with machine guns bolted in the bed or rear area, a few maintenance vehicles for the larger trucks, and a small fuel tanker. The rebels controlled the mountain areas, and moved these things around to avoid detection. The CIA received information of the move and I was ordered along with Wicked Wanda and Big Ben to destroy this convoy. After reviewing imagery and times, I conferred with the pilots and picked the best location for an ambush trap, along a high mountain road which left no room to maneuver or escape.
A troop helicopter dropped me with gear and supplies (explosives) on top of a hill opposite the road the convoy would be on. In the middle, between the hill and road, was a fairly deep ravine, with serious drops on the road side. I positioned myself on this hill across the main ravine ~100 yards away from, and with equidistant view of, the road.
At the location of the ambush the road wound slowly back and forth around ravine drops with an extreme slope above and an extreme drop-off below. This section wound like this for ~2km, enough room for all vehicles to fit in the trap. Wicked Wanda and Big Ben marked my location via radio signal to avoid firing there, because from 20,000 feet away, everything on infrared camera looks like target blips. A shallow bridge-like connection led from my side to an area in the front of the road trap. Previous to the convoy’s arrival I used charges to fell trees across the road at the front of the trap, well before the connection spot. I then laid RC mines at various distances down the road.
At ~0030 the convoy had fully entered the trap and had to stop for the fallen trees, I exploded the road charges, then painted the lead truck with a laser which Wicked Wanda hit with its 40mm gun and proceeded onto the second truck. Simultaneously, Big Ben used its 105mm Howitzer to destroy the road to the rear, then began hitting the trucks from that end. On this occasion, in addition to my M-16 with scope, I took a sniper rifle. As trucks, cargo, and personnel were destroyed by alternating 105mm and 40mm cannon fire, and repeated bursts of twin 20mm Gatling guns, rebel personnel were attempting to flee. Some attempted climbing up to no avail, with 20mm rounds or my sniper rifle picking them off. Some attempted going down, only to meet the same fate or simply fell to their death. Some saw my flash and fired in my direction, and I heard rounds wizz by, but was alright by changing locations. Many were attempting to traverse the road, explosions, and burning wreckage to get out the ends, only to meet their death by 20mm rounds or sniper fire.
After 15-20 minutes the constant firing ceased, and after ~40 minutes all firing ceased, and Wicked Wanda and Big Ben left the target area. They still detected live human targets, not moving, but they had to go. I had additional orders from the CIA – no survivors to tell about the gunship attack, and I was to check the road and trucks to ensure that all weapons, ammunition, and people had been destroyed – euphemistically named by the CIA, Clean Up. I really despised this part of the mission. It’s easy enough to locate intact weapons and ammunition boxes, toss a grenade and destroy it; but its quite another to search for survivors and kill them. There were a few who were only slightly wounded and still wanted to fight. Who wouldn’t? But there were some who were conscious and expected mercy, a hospital, medical attention. But while in a declared conflict the US still doesn’t follow rules of humane treatment, in undeclared conflicts, especially run by the CIA, no such rules apply. The CIA officer in charge of this mission, who I had worked with many times, declared that you could kill whoever you wanted and as many as you wanted, so long as it fulfilled the orders, the US wasn’t implicated, and it didn’t interfere with the Agenda.
I started at the front of the road and approached the first truck. It had a gaping hole blown through its engine compartment and the cargo area was a burning splintered wreck. Bodies lay everywhere, torn to shreds by shrapnel, exploding 20mm or 40mm rounds, just blown apart, burned by explosion or tracer rounds, or half vaporized by 105mm shells. I found a few trucks with cargo areas still intact, and tossed in grenades. I found rebels alive and mangled so badly that shooting them in the head was their best blessing at that point; and there were, as always, a few who feigned being wounded or dead and tried to escape, to no avail.
When you carefully wend your way through such a mess, being careful and watchful for enemies who may fire on you, you naturally crawl or get on your hands and knees. The day had been dry. The road had been relatively dry. However, common to these convoys in an ambush trap, that many bodies bleeding out in such a confined area had turned much of the ground into mud made with blood. You would find yourself standing in puddles of blood up to your ankles, crawling through blood, kneeling in blood… and you could smell it – an overwhelming metallic smell that reeked of iron.
I also found what I had feared; what I thought I saw through my scope… nuns. Nuns in headdress and work clothes. Out of ~400 rebels, I counted 30 nuns and/or novices. They were all unarmed. They were grouped together, many with hands clasped in prayer, holes torn through their bodies and heads, some with a single sniper wound. From a distance, I could think, “Was that a nun?” But immediately it would seem impossible that there would be nuns. I couldn’t really tell, so I kept firing.
Nuns had been supplying humanitarian aid to villages throughout the country under threat and terrorism of the government – food, medical attention, etc... Often they traveled with rebel convoys to new locations to assist the people and provide succor. This raised so many doubts and questions in my mind about what we were doing there, about the morality of what we were doing. I wasn’t being religious, but I wondered why women who wanted peace in the world would be so convicted to help in an obvious civil war. I started to ask myself what the rebels were fighting for, instead of accepting the word of my commanders, especially the CIA.
Having finished what can only be described as macabre clean up, I returned to my hill location. I called for the Combat Talon, and they dropped a Fulton Recovery Unit. I donned the harness and let up the balloon, and they yanked me off that hill and pulled me in, and I thought how badly those rebels would have liked this for an escape.
Back at the staging base, I rounded up the pilots and Electronic Warfare Officers and told them that nuns were in the convoy. To a man they replied, “Really? That’s interesting.” but didn’t really care. When I told the debriefing officer, Lt Weasel, he said, “Who cares? The CIA doesn’t care and neither do we. The nuns have no business sticking their noses in this.” I became enraged and yelled, “You motherfucker! That’s so fucked up!”. The observing sergeant pulled me from the room.
I spent sleepless nights after this trying to understand what I was involved in; why people were so willing to invest their lives in fighting; why we were always supporting right-wing regimes with ties to US business vs supporting human rights and calling out mendacity. Learning more about the conflict, I learned that right-wing Salvadoran military and para-military death squads had targeted nuns for rape, torture, and murder because they opposed the regime and preached liberation theology. I started to feel like a Nazi.
Reflecting on the fact that the CIA always knew how many would be in the convoys – and they knew ~400 would be on this one – it has struck me that they knew nuns were aboard this convoy, but they chose not to make this known or debate the issue. With the intelligence they had gathered, and with what they did share, it’s not possible they didn’t know. Somewhere in Washington or Langley pictures of dead nuns torn to shreds by US fire sit in archives. The CIA, in many respects, is a lot like the SS, with detailed documentation and images of the death and destruction they have orchestrated. The United States Central Intelligence Agency knew those nuns would be killed, and they wanted them killed because they upset the Agenda.
To this day the sadness over having participated in this atrocity pervades my being. It’s one thing to attack and kill those who don soldiering outfit and gear – they know what they’re getting into [or so you tell yourself]; but to slaughter those whose sole purpose is to support, protect, and provide aid to the afflicted and innocent…
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Rubicon spent just under three years as a military Scout. During that time he was awarded the “AF Cross, 2 Silver Stars, 4 Bronze Stars, Defense Superior Service Medal, AF Good Conduct Medal, and the CIA Distinguished Service Medal” (ODNI). When he refused to kill further, he was stripped of these awards and was abandoned with his PTSD by the military and thrown away.
Sean Griobhtha (gree-O-tah) is a combat veteran. His latest book is X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars: An indictment of US Citizens: ignorantia non excusat, which details the life of Rubicon, another combat veteran. You can find him mostly on SubStack. He can be reached at O.Griobhtha+XRubicon@gmail.com. It’s important that you read the Foreward (Vanguard); written by a highly intelligent woman with a heart of empathetic gold; she’ll bring you in gently, which neither Rubicon nor I would ever do.