For everyone he was "Snuffy", the long-nosed admiral. Leighton Warren Smith, son of a pig farmer from Alabama, Southern United States, has bombed the deepest Vietnam 280 times as an attack fighter pilot in his life. The annals of that lethal war credit him for having destroyed even the Thanh Hoa Bridge, the most resistant in all of North Vietnam. In 1994 he became Commander in Chief of the United States Navy Forces in Europe and of the NATO Allied Forces in Southern Europe. These are the nefarious years of NATO operations in Bosnia. Few know what is really happening in that land of crows and the dead. Smith is in charge of those war operations.
Snuffy knows everything
He, on the other hand, knows everything. He knows, like few others, the impact of those bombs that planes drop like torrential rain on civilian and military targets. He repeats it to the highest in rank and clashes without half measures with the proponents of the insane theory that it is necessary to "bomb for peace". On July 31, 1996, with a twist, in the middle of the war, he renounced the leadership of the United States Navy and NATO forces in Europe. The abandonment is premature, unexpected, in many ways without an explanation. He, however, knew everything, including the kind of bullets that were plentifully hurling themselves, without a tomorrow, in that land of blood and fratricidal war. Before leaving his post, however, it is August 31, 1995, in the NATO headquarters of southern Europe, in Naples, he gathers all the Italian military leaders and beyond.
Italy, always deny
There are the Chiefs of Staff of the three Weapons and of Defense. Desert shirt, short sleeves, graduated with the highest honors, a microphone in his hand and a painter's easel on his right. The sign illustrating his counterparts from the Bel Paese is not encrypted. Far from it. The representation is geographical and numerical: "We bombed in 359 areas, with 3,500 shots". It is much more than a confession. Along with the number of "targets" hit, there is also the cruelest admission: "we used depleted uranium weapons". The message is all too clear: the presence of soldiers, even in a "peacekeeping" position, to keep the peace, can be lethal. The information is reserved for military leaders who, however, forget about it after a few years. The "forgetful" of the Italian Defense are so "distracted" that they end up sending the Italian soldiers, most of them will be Sardinians, with the Sassari Brigade, directly in those areas hit by lethal depleted uranium bullets. They deny everything, though. And the first to deny those facts is the Minister of Defense of the time, Sergio Mattarella, the current Head of State, who, on 27 September 2000, affirmed in Montecitorio: "First of all, I would like to reaffirm that to date no military of our contingent in Kosovo was repatriated because he was suffering from leukemia and that no suspected cases of this disease have ever emerged. It should also be excluded that the two fatal cases of acute leukemia that occurred in the armed forces, the first six years ago, the second last year, are linked to depleted uranium. In the second case, the young soldier had been employed in Bosnia, precisely in Sarajevo, where there has never been any use of depleted uranium ».
