From an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes:
Coke bottles are a pretty sturdy sort, and from what I could see, there’s not even a bottling plant in Iraq (that’s not to say that they can’t import, of course).
So is this part of the story BS?
I have no factual anything to add to this. However, in general when you read this, is the first thing that comes to mind, “Well boys will be boys…!” ?
Sounds like hooey to me.
I thought i remembered a story from early in the war saying that Coca-Cola had been provided for the troops, but i can’t find it now. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the soldiers, or at least some of them, were able to get their hands on some Coke.
I managed to find, on Lexis-Nexis (so i can’t provide a link) a story about Coca-Cola in Turkey that says:
I guess it’s well within the realms of possibility that some of this Coke gets to American troops in Iraq.
As for the substance of the claims, i’ll take a “wait and see” attitude on that. Given the confirmed behavior of some US troops in Iraq, it wouldn’t surprise me if incidents like his had occurred. At the same time, though, even if they did occur we have to be careful about extrapolating from a few isolated incidents.
Trademarks aside, the term ‘coke bottle’ is sometimes used to refer to any soft drink bottle. The coke bottles in question may in fact have once held ‘Egged Sam’s Orange Crush’, or similar cocoction
That’s certainly true, Squink. It may not have been Coke at all.
But it would surprise me if it was in glass bottles. Though Coke still produces some glass bottles domestically, if there is not a bottling plant in Iraq, I doubt they would ship glass all the way to Iraq, as it is heavier and more expensive to ship, and breakable.
Just out of curiosity, is it hard to break a glass bottle like a Coke bottle over somebody’s head? If it didn’t break, it seems like you could cause some pretty bad concussive damage. And if it does, how do you know you’re not going to cut open the guy’s head? For something that they do as a “joke,” it seems like there could be some serious ramifications. Or maybe Coke bottles are really flimsy. Or maybe these guys are just a**holes who really don’t care.
I find this comment absurd. Too many stars would have to line up for a bottle to be broken over the head of someone in this manner. Think about it, you have to time the swing just right, right speed, smooth ride, the victim doesn’t see it coming, you have to hit just the right spot on the head and the bottle has to actually break.
What would make more sense is if the author meant that soldiers break bottles over the heads of Iraqi`s by meaning that they smash the bottles against a wall over the head of someone and the glass debris falls on top of them. Or against a tree, over the head of someone. I realise the author could have used the word above but maybe chose not to for the effect this particular wording creates.
Re-read the quote using that imagery and it will make more sense to you.
As someone who worked for an ambulance company for a couple of years, I can definitely state that hitting someone over the head with a beer bottle often leaves the victim with a depressed skull fracture and brain damage. Smashing a bottle on someone’s head is a movie trick with a bottle made from sugar. Doing it in real life with a real bottle is seriously stupid or murderous.
Potentially, but not always. I had an empty Rainier pounder thrown at my head hard enough to smash it. I needed a few stitches, but never lost consciousness or had any other ill effects.
In my wild teenage years, I got involved in a fight with a bunch of cops and one of them broke a full Heinz ketchup bottle over my head. I kept fighting and didn’t receive any damage other than cuts (as far as I know).
According to a serving National Guardsman who was on active duty in Iraq last year and who blogs at CounterColumn , there is much to doubt about this story - scroll down until the entry “The Herbert Column”.
To summarize: he never saw a glass soda bottle in Iraq, not for Coke or any other soda; people wouldn’t stand close enough to the road to make it physically possible; and if Iraqis were that close to a vehicle, the occupants would either be manning their weapons, or would have the windows closed, to avoid anyone lobbing a grenade in.
So it seems likely the soldier is lying or exaggerating widely.
First off, in parts of the U.S., “coke” means any sort of “soda” or “pop.” In any event I have yet to be to any country, particularly one with hundreds of thousands of Americans passing through, that doesn’t have a wide variety of Coca-Cola products at hand.
Soda (what we say in my neck of the woods) is very commonly available in glass bottles in large parts of the world, including the Middle East, as the deposit system is still big.
We have tens of thousands of hyped-up kids who have been trained to kill and frequently lack any knowledge or respect of local culture to Iraq. They hate being there and see everyone as the potential enemy (which they are, especially after this sort of abuse, not to mention the years of war and sanctions). How could abuses not result in this situation?
Some of what Delgado also said for background, from the same piece:
Normally I don’t believe that contradicting eyewitness accounts with speculation and ‘absence of evidence = evidence of absence’ (a former Guardsmen didn’t see Coke bottles; presumably if he didn’t recall seeing leashes then Abu Ghraib was quite impossible as well :rolleyes:) is GQ standard. There seems to be a national cognitive dissonance operating that’s driving people to grasp at any possible method of discrediting Delgado’s stories, and the bloggers especially are zeroing in on the presence of C/coke bottles as a possible weak link.
Could it be that the NYT writer and/or the source were/hand been on the white powder or rock form rather that the liquid? 
That cracked me up spingears!
The Gods must be crazy.
I personally witnessed someone get a beer bottle shattered on the back of their skull and without even getting a cut. One of the freakier things I ever saw.