IT'S DAY 1,230 of the WAR IN IRAQ
"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."
--Ben Franklin, statesman, author, inventor, 1706-1790
CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war--now branded as Crises in the Middle East--but you won't catch anyone saying it's Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks' evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud about a "shame on you" e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.
The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn't happenstance. It's a barometer of the scope of the tragedy…The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. "It's depressing to pay attention to this war on terror," said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on July 18. "I mean, it's summertime."
--"The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq," Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
I rode out to my first embed assignment with (Cpl. Jason) Morrow and (Staff Sgt. Raymond) Plouhar. A week later, the two were killed in almost the same spot as Cheeks. (LCpl. Benito Ramirez.) And the next day, the other Marines saddled up and went out to keep the road open--for what?
--"Call Sign: Havoc: For Marines in Fallujah, the Deadly Toll Has No End," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006. Jones was given the assignment by his editor, Gayle Reeves, a Pulitzer-prize winner who thought the former Marine whose son is currently deployed with the Marines to Iraq, would "get it."
"I was wondering…I didn't know…that reporter from the Fort Worth Weekly who rode with our unit…He didn't get blown up, did he?"
--my son, Cpl. Dustin Mills, upon hearing I'd been granted permission to quote from Don Jones's superb Fort Worth Observer article chronicling life--and death--for my son's Marine Corps unit in Iraq.
It's been almost three full weeks since I've posted anything other than memorials to the fine young men who died in my son's unit just weeks before they were scheduled to go home.
Any death of any troop in any warzone hits military families hard, but when the men and women who are "KIA"--military-speak for Killed in Action--are part of the tight-knit family of our children's units, some of whose parents we may know, some of whom we may have met during earlier Homecoming celebrations or come to know through our children's stories…the grief hits us particularly hard. We know that this death could so easily have been our own, and in a way, it is.
The tragedy of more than 2500 deaths and tens of thousands more wounded--some horribly so--is a personal grief this country should feel every time they hear of another. These are our country's brightest and best--you have no idea how brave they are. How painfully young most of them are. How many of them leave behind terribly young, devastated families--widows not yet out of their teens, infants and small children doomed to grow up fatherless. The social repercussions of these losses over the course of time cannot be calculated.
For every dead soldier or Marine, there is a destroyed family left behind. Mothers and fathers who spend the better part of the first year in a state of complete, uncomprehending shock. Extended and step-families left reeling for the rest of their lives. Lost and grieving siblings who can never fill that loss. Friends and lovers who will never go another day in their lives without thinking of that person, without missing them.
These are not STATISTICS. They are PEOPLE. For the most part, so very many of them are still children barely out of high school who have not yet voted in their first elections.
And where is the sacrifice? Where are the American people while these horrific tragedies rip families asunder, leave combat buddies haunted and shaken for the rest of their lives? Where is their attention? Where is their compassion? Why are their hearts not torn from their chests with every newscast, every uptick in casualties?
They are frantically pressing numbers to vote in the next American Idol. They're watching a bunch of arguing backbiting lying whiners "surviving" on a desert isle because it's "reality."
They are changing the channel because it's depressing. It's summertime, after all.
A former Marine and longtime photojournalist, the father of a young Marine newly deployed to Iraq, I intended to stay for three months. But within a month, I had learned the lesson of Iraq. And I came home.
Creeping down the middle of the road at 10 miles an hour is not how most Americans imagine the war in Iraq is being fought. Many people who continue seeing televised images of pitched battles, with bombs and missiles raining down on a hapless and defeated foe, have no idea that those graphic videos, for the most part, are almost two years old. But the daily crawl in heavily armored humvees continues to be one of the most dangerous and vital missions that members of Lima Company of the 3/5 carry out in western Fallujah.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
"Think of what you hate most about your job. Then think of doing what you hate most for five straight hours, every single day, sometimes twice a day, in 120-degree heat, (said Army Staff Sgt. Jose Sixtos), "Then ask how the morale is." Frustrated? "You have no idea."
…"It sucks. Honestly, it just feels like we're driving around waiting to get blown up," said Spec. Tim Ivey…"No one wants to be here, you know, no one is truly enthused about what we do."
--"Waiting to Get Blown Up: Some Troops in Baghdad Express Frustration With the War and Their Mission," Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, July 27, 2006.
"There is no glory in what we do."
--Cpl. Dustin Mills, in a phone call home.
I've been watching evening newscasts my whole life, but since my son joined the Marines, I sit and switch equally between the Big Three networks--(live in the boonies, don't have access to CNN but expect it's much the same)--searching for stories about the war in Iraq.
In recent months, even before the Israel-Hezbollah war, I have become increasingly alarmed with the fact that the war coverage has been dramatically dropping. Many nights, unless there's some kind of spectacular event like a ranking television journalist getting "blown up," as the troops call it, there is nothing on at all about Iraq.
And now, of course, half of each evening broadcast is devoted to "Day Whatever" of the Mideast war. Many, many stories about children who have been victims of Israeli bombs or Hezbollah rockets. I don't recall very many stories--AT ALL--about the children who were victims of American bombs in Iraq.
Sometimes, using stock footage because it has become too deadly for most journalists to travel more than a mile from their hotel--which didn't save ranking ABC and CBS reporters--sometimes they mention something like "four Marines died in the al Anbar province of Iraq today." And then they move on to something lighter, something less depressing. Or maybe, a good, juicy serial-killer story.
Of course, back when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, he forbade the depiction of flag-draped coffins coming in on flights home, and the policy is still in place. The American people can be hypnotized and mesmerized by all the patriotic songs and billowing flags and hometown hero-stories on the local news, and rest easy at night that somebody else's children are fighting the so-called "war on terror" thousands of miles away…out of sight and out of mind.
And when the summertime news gets too depressing, they can just switch over to cable and become immersed in the scintillating troubles of a bigamist, the easy killing of a mafia boss, or the latest find-a-husband reality program.
Keeping the routes open means keeping them clear of IEDs (improvised explosive devices)--either they find and disable the IEDs, or the IEDs find them. These roadside bombs, built of everything from small homemade explosives to massive 122mm artillery shells, can produce small irritating explosions that flatten a tire or puncture a radiator--but the powerful ones can obliterate a vehicle, no matter how well armored, along with those inside.
It’s a job that has to be done over and over: Drive down a road, and the locals in the shops, sitting over smokes and tea, wave at the Marines. Drive back 20 minutes later, and an IED takes out a humvee, and the old men and the boys who’ve been sitting there have seen nothing. In the months since Lima has been in Fallujah (at the time, five) there have been over 100 IED “incidents.”
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when” his young Marines are going to get hit by an IED, says Gunnery Sgt. Brett Turek, at 38 the “old man” of the company.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
This history can't be undone; there's neither the American money nor the manpower to fulfill the mission left unaccomplished…We feel badly…and change the channel."
--The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq, Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
I find it very interesting that the determined talking-head pundits and op-ed writers who insist the most that, if the Americans pull out of Iraq, "chaos" will ensue...I find it very interesting because NONE of them have ever actually BEEN to Iraq.
If they had--that is, if they had been to the kinds of areas in Iraq where my son has spent the better part of the past two years of his life--they would see that IRAQ ALREADY IS CHAOS.
The more Karl Rove pouts from his air-conditioned office that the evil "media" has infected Americans with only negative news about Iraq, the more the disconnect between the way the civilian leadership who has planned and executed this fiasco is dramatically demonstrated. Bush does a five-hour flyby to Baghdad and comes home jubilant about how much better things are going in Iraq than is made to seem in the media.
Couple of weeks later, the Iraqi prime minister visits Bush, sits down where there ARE NO TELEVISION CAMERAS, and basically tells our commander in chief that Baghdad is in meltdown and that if something is not done soon, the whole country will be lost.
Hence the somber follow-up news conference where Bush actually admitted that things were, indeed, "terrible" in Iraq.
Then, brave army soldiers who've spent a year in hell and are gearing up and packing up to go home to their relieved families are suddenly told that, no, they have to stay FOUR MORE MONTHS, and spend that time in Baghdad.
This is because the much-vaunted Iraqi army are a bunch of dumbasses, most more loyal to their militias and tribes than to their country, and they have been unable--or unwilling--to prevent this burning of Baghdad.
I wonder how many of those troops who were basically yanked out of line to get out of what my son calls "this cesspool of a country" will be killed during those four months in Baghdad?
That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad's civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what Americans would have the stomach to watch?
--"The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq," Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
They say that Iraq is the same size, roughly, as California. How do you think most Americans would react if, in California, 100 people a day, or 2,000 in the past two months, were killed in fighting between each other?
What if the families of the victims could not pick up their bodies from the morgue for burial because, if they did, they would be killed by rival tribes, sects, or militias, so their loved ones were buried in anonymous graves?
This is going on every day in Iraq. But to watch the White House, or the evening news, is to not know.
Or care.
The thing is, every time I tune in to yet another debate over whether or not Iraq will degenerate into civil war--which means our troops will no longer be fighting, only babysitting, that civil war, driving 10 mph down the road waiting to get blown up--every time, I have to laugh.
It's a cynical laugh.
If you honestly think Iraq is not ALREADY torn apart by a civil war then you really HAVE been watching too much "reality TV." Either that, or FOX news.
As I write, 10 Marines, most from the 3/5, guys whom I met and hung out with, are dead, all but one from IEDs…
…For five nights with Bravo, I slept in the cot next to the company gunnery sergeant’s turret gunner, Cpl. Ryan Cummings of Streamwood, Ill. We bullshitted, told lies, talked about women, drinking, and raising hell when we got home. On patrol, he was careful — always sat way down in the sling seat, wore all the protective gear he could find, always stayed alert to his surroundings. But when an IED flipped over his humvee, he was partially ejected and crushed to death.
And for what?
For the American troops, places like Fallujah must seem more and more each day like some deadly Middle Eastern version of the Hatfields and McCoys, with explosive charges taking the place of squirrel guns and the American military caught in the middle.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
That tribal/clan mentality complicates the situation for the Marines. A personal slight or just bad blood can have deadly consequences. If Marine intelligence or Iraqi Army units receive information about a weapons cache or explosives hidden at a house or in a field, they will move into the area to question and possibly arrest suspects. If contraband is found, the most relevant question becomes whether the tip-off was a good deed or a lie to cause a neighbor grief. Many Iraqis have found that they can use the Americans to settle old scores. Iraqis know what clan and tribe their neighbors are from and what they do for a living and often have very strong feelings about those clans and businesses. In the end there are no simple answers, no simple solutions — not for the Iraqis who are living in fear and getting killed and not for the Marines in the field fighting and dying.
--ibid
Not only do the troops on the ground know this is a civil war, but so do their commanders. And they are speaking out about it.
You have to understand that for soldiers and Marines to go on the record with their intense frustration and despair at serving in this war, so that they are quoted by name and rank, as in the pieces, "Waiting to Get Blown Up," and "Call Sign: Havoc,"--is significant. It reflects a top-down dissatisfaction with the way the U.S. military has been forced to fight this war by an inept and politically-driven civilian leadership.
Keep in mind that, at the beginning of this war, when it was all gung-ho wave the flag and kick Iraqi ass, for any soldier or Marine to have honestly stated such misgivings about his or her mission resulted in swift and often severe punishment. Sometimes they lost rank. At the very least, the incident was recorded in their fitness reports and kept on file for the rest of their time in the military, which could have prevented promotion.
And by the time a soldier or Marine reaches the highest ranks of the military, he or she is as much a politician as the civilian leadership, and they know better than to say anything that could jeopardize their careers or their advancement or retirement with the highest rank and most money they can get.
This is why I was so surprised at the remarks of Army Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli:
"What we have here is a level of sectarian violence," he said. "And the way you have to fight this is that you have to have presence on the streets. I don't know any other way to fight it…What didn't we figure? We didn't figure this sectarian killing," Chiarelli said…"For the military, the plan is uncharted ground.
"Quite frankly, in 33 years in the United States Army, I never trained to stop a sectarian fight," he said. "This is something new."
--"Coincidence or Consequence?", Dan Froomkin, Washington Post, July 27, 2006, quoting an article by Julian Barnes in the Los Angeles Times from Baghdad.
In other words, not only are we now all tangled up in a sectarian civil war, but we don't know what the hell we're doing there or even why we're doing it any more.
The larger issue is that we don't know what we--or more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops--are fighting for...The war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It's a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot…
The sad truth is that the war's architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they cared about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.
--"The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq," Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
I'll tell you what the sad truth REALLY is, and that is this:
The war's architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they cared about THE AMERICAN TROOPS.
From the beginning of this war, when they trumped up bogus reasons for entering it, lied about those reasons, and sent splendid young men and women into combat to die for those lies…when they refused to listen to their commanders on the ground who begged for more troops and warned that the insurgency was a much bigger problem than the Republican Guard (as early as one week into the invasion)--they not only refused to listen, but they punished any and all who dared speak out, even within the military command--when they shrugged and said such things as "stuff happens" when chaos ensued, when they attacked any political candidate, statesman, CIA analyst, military officer, politician, or journalist who dared disagree with their plan, when they sent troops over and over and over again and again and again to the same war--only it wasn't the same war, it was worse every time--and when they continue to force troops not only to stay past their deployments for months more of grim duty, but also find nasty little ways to force them to stay in the military and even redeploy to Iraq or Afghanistan when their contract of service has ended in what is clearly a backdoor draft…
They have communicated, loud and clear, that they don't really care about the American soldiers and Marines who are fighting and dying every day for Bush's folly.
And don't think the troops don't know it.
The Marines know it, too — no matter their bravery, no matter how much they believe in their country, the mission, their commanders, and the Marine Corps, no matter how much they try to ignore the politics of this war. Nearly every one of the young Marines of Lima are finished with Iraq and the Marine Corps at the end of this enlistment. They’re done, worn out from the constant separation from friends and families. The running joke is that Marines get “care packages” from Iraq, because they’ve been there more in the last four years than they’ve been in the U.S.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
The only time the American people seem to be paying attention any more is when a tiny handful--of the hundreds of thousands of combat rotations that have taken place in Iraq --a tiny handful goes haywire and is accused of committing a murder or an atrocity, why they're just all SHOCKED AND AWED.
Nobody pays any attention to the fact that most of the accused are on their THIRD or FOURTH combat tours in hell when these alleged incidents took place.
Our combat troops, and to a lesser degree if they're not in combat zones, support personnel, are worn out, stressed out, burned out on this war. Most of them who have been more than once to Iraq or Afghanistan can't get out of the armed forces fast enough. And the military can't make their recruitment quotas because of something a Marine dad told me.
This father of a combat Marine who is also in my son's unit, said he met these two gung-ho politically conservative fresh-scrubbed young men who could not wave the flag furiously enough and fully, completely supported their beloved president and his war. So this Marine dad asked them, being the fine strapping healthy young men that they were, why they didn't just enlist and go fight this war themselves?
They laughed.
They laughed, and they said, "Hey, we're patriotic, but we're not STUPID."
I'm sure the families of Benito Ramirez and Jason Morrow and Rex Page and Ray Plouhar and all the others who have been lost and maimed in this war would like to hear that their brave young sons and daughters died and came home mutilated because they were stupid.
In the end, that's the dirty little secret. You see, most of the civilian leadership who started this war and waved the flag while sending my son and other sons and daughters off to fight and possibly die--well, they didn't fight when they had a war of their own, back when they were young and strapping and healthy and fresh-scrubbed.
After all, they were, PATRIOTIC. They weren't STUPID, right? If you'd asked them at the time, before they were involved in politics, that's probably what they would have said, too. Before they grew up to start wars of their own for somebody else to fight.
Maybe that's why this war isn't on the news any more. Maybe, secretly, the American people think the whole thing is stupid, only, they don't know how to fix it. Maybe if they'd program solutions into those realistic video games they play--the ones that make you feel like you're RIGHT THERE in places like Fallujah...maybe that would help.
Anyway, it's too depressing to think about. After all, it's summertime.
--Ben Franklin, statesman, author, inventor, 1706-1790
CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war--now branded as Crises in the Middle East--but you won't catch anyone saying it's Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks' evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud about a "shame on you" e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.
The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn't happenstance. It's a barometer of the scope of the tragedy…The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. "It's depressing to pay attention to this war on terror," said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on July 18. "I mean, it's summertime."
--"The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq," Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
I rode out to my first embed assignment with (Cpl. Jason) Morrow and (Staff Sgt. Raymond) Plouhar. A week later, the two were killed in almost the same spot as Cheeks. (LCpl. Benito Ramirez.) And the next day, the other Marines saddled up and went out to keep the road open--for what?
--"Call Sign: Havoc: For Marines in Fallujah, the Deadly Toll Has No End," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006. Jones was given the assignment by his editor, Gayle Reeves, a Pulitzer-prize winner who thought the former Marine whose son is currently deployed with the Marines to Iraq, would "get it."
"I was wondering…I didn't know…that reporter from the Fort Worth Weekly who rode with our unit…He didn't get blown up, did he?"
--my son, Cpl. Dustin Mills, upon hearing I'd been granted permission to quote from Don Jones's superb Fort Worth Observer article chronicling life--and death--for my son's Marine Corps unit in Iraq.
It's been almost three full weeks since I've posted anything other than memorials to the fine young men who died in my son's unit just weeks before they were scheduled to go home.
Any death of any troop in any warzone hits military families hard, but when the men and women who are "KIA"--military-speak for Killed in Action--are part of the tight-knit family of our children's units, some of whose parents we may know, some of whom we may have met during earlier Homecoming celebrations or come to know through our children's stories…the grief hits us particularly hard. We know that this death could so easily have been our own, and in a way, it is.
The tragedy of more than 2500 deaths and tens of thousands more wounded--some horribly so--is a personal grief this country should feel every time they hear of another. These are our country's brightest and best--you have no idea how brave they are. How painfully young most of them are. How many of them leave behind terribly young, devastated families--widows not yet out of their teens, infants and small children doomed to grow up fatherless. The social repercussions of these losses over the course of time cannot be calculated.
For every dead soldier or Marine, there is a destroyed family left behind. Mothers and fathers who spend the better part of the first year in a state of complete, uncomprehending shock. Extended and step-families left reeling for the rest of their lives. Lost and grieving siblings who can never fill that loss. Friends and lovers who will never go another day in their lives without thinking of that person, without missing them.
These are not STATISTICS. They are PEOPLE. For the most part, so very many of them are still children barely out of high school who have not yet voted in their first elections.
And where is the sacrifice? Where are the American people while these horrific tragedies rip families asunder, leave combat buddies haunted and shaken for the rest of their lives? Where is their attention? Where is their compassion? Why are their hearts not torn from their chests with every newscast, every uptick in casualties?
They are frantically pressing numbers to vote in the next American Idol. They're watching a bunch of arguing backbiting lying whiners "surviving" on a desert isle because it's "reality."
They are changing the channel because it's depressing. It's summertime, after all.
A former Marine and longtime photojournalist, the father of a young Marine newly deployed to Iraq, I intended to stay for three months. But within a month, I had learned the lesson of Iraq. And I came home.
Creeping down the middle of the road at 10 miles an hour is not how most Americans imagine the war in Iraq is being fought. Many people who continue seeing televised images of pitched battles, with bombs and missiles raining down on a hapless and defeated foe, have no idea that those graphic videos, for the most part, are almost two years old. But the daily crawl in heavily armored humvees continues to be one of the most dangerous and vital missions that members of Lima Company of the 3/5 carry out in western Fallujah.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
"Think of what you hate most about your job. Then think of doing what you hate most for five straight hours, every single day, sometimes twice a day, in 120-degree heat, (said Army Staff Sgt. Jose Sixtos), "Then ask how the morale is." Frustrated? "You have no idea."
…"It sucks. Honestly, it just feels like we're driving around waiting to get blown up," said Spec. Tim Ivey…"No one wants to be here, you know, no one is truly enthused about what we do."
--"Waiting to Get Blown Up: Some Troops in Baghdad Express Frustration With the War and Their Mission," Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, July 27, 2006.
"There is no glory in what we do."
--Cpl. Dustin Mills, in a phone call home.
I've been watching evening newscasts my whole life, but since my son joined the Marines, I sit and switch equally between the Big Three networks--(live in the boonies, don't have access to CNN but expect it's much the same)--searching for stories about the war in Iraq.
In recent months, even before the Israel-Hezbollah war, I have become increasingly alarmed with the fact that the war coverage has been dramatically dropping. Many nights, unless there's some kind of spectacular event like a ranking television journalist getting "blown up," as the troops call it, there is nothing on at all about Iraq.
And now, of course, half of each evening broadcast is devoted to "Day Whatever" of the Mideast war. Many, many stories about children who have been victims of Israeli bombs or Hezbollah rockets. I don't recall very many stories--AT ALL--about the children who were victims of American bombs in Iraq.
Sometimes, using stock footage because it has become too deadly for most journalists to travel more than a mile from their hotel--which didn't save ranking ABC and CBS reporters--sometimes they mention something like "four Marines died in the al Anbar province of Iraq today." And then they move on to something lighter, something less depressing. Or maybe, a good, juicy serial-killer story.
Of course, back when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, he forbade the depiction of flag-draped coffins coming in on flights home, and the policy is still in place. The American people can be hypnotized and mesmerized by all the patriotic songs and billowing flags and hometown hero-stories on the local news, and rest easy at night that somebody else's children are fighting the so-called "war on terror" thousands of miles away…out of sight and out of mind.
And when the summertime news gets too depressing, they can just switch over to cable and become immersed in the scintillating troubles of a bigamist, the easy killing of a mafia boss, or the latest find-a-husband reality program.
Keeping the routes open means keeping them clear of IEDs (improvised explosive devices)--either they find and disable the IEDs, or the IEDs find them. These roadside bombs, built of everything from small homemade explosives to massive 122mm artillery shells, can produce small irritating explosions that flatten a tire or puncture a radiator--but the powerful ones can obliterate a vehicle, no matter how well armored, along with those inside.
It’s a job that has to be done over and over: Drive down a road, and the locals in the shops, sitting over smokes and tea, wave at the Marines. Drive back 20 minutes later, and an IED takes out a humvee, and the old men and the boys who’ve been sitting there have seen nothing. In the months since Lima has been in Fallujah (at the time, five) there have been over 100 IED “incidents.”
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when” his young Marines are going to get hit by an IED, says Gunnery Sgt. Brett Turek, at 38 the “old man” of the company.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
This history can't be undone; there's neither the American money nor the manpower to fulfill the mission left unaccomplished…We feel badly…and change the channel."
--The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq, Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
I find it very interesting that the determined talking-head pundits and op-ed writers who insist the most that, if the Americans pull out of Iraq, "chaos" will ensue...I find it very interesting because NONE of them have ever actually BEEN to Iraq.
If they had--that is, if they had been to the kinds of areas in Iraq where my son has spent the better part of the past two years of his life--they would see that IRAQ ALREADY IS CHAOS.
The more Karl Rove pouts from his air-conditioned office that the evil "media" has infected Americans with only negative news about Iraq, the more the disconnect between the way the civilian leadership who has planned and executed this fiasco is dramatically demonstrated. Bush does a five-hour flyby to Baghdad and comes home jubilant about how much better things are going in Iraq than is made to seem in the media.
Couple of weeks later, the Iraqi prime minister visits Bush, sits down where there ARE NO TELEVISION CAMERAS, and basically tells our commander in chief that Baghdad is in meltdown and that if something is not done soon, the whole country will be lost.
Hence the somber follow-up news conference where Bush actually admitted that things were, indeed, "terrible" in Iraq.
Then, brave army soldiers who've spent a year in hell and are gearing up and packing up to go home to their relieved families are suddenly told that, no, they have to stay FOUR MORE MONTHS, and spend that time in Baghdad.
This is because the much-vaunted Iraqi army are a bunch of dumbasses, most more loyal to their militias and tribes than to their country, and they have been unable--or unwilling--to prevent this burning of Baghdad.
I wonder how many of those troops who were basically yanked out of line to get out of what my son calls "this cesspool of a country" will be killed during those four months in Baghdad?
That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad's civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what Americans would have the stomach to watch?
--"The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq," Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
They say that Iraq is the same size, roughly, as California. How do you think most Americans would react if, in California, 100 people a day, or 2,000 in the past two months, were killed in fighting between each other?
What if the families of the victims could not pick up their bodies from the morgue for burial because, if they did, they would be killed by rival tribes, sects, or militias, so their loved ones were buried in anonymous graves?
This is going on every day in Iraq. But to watch the White House, or the evening news, is to not know.
Or care.
The thing is, every time I tune in to yet another debate over whether or not Iraq will degenerate into civil war--which means our troops will no longer be fighting, only babysitting, that civil war, driving 10 mph down the road waiting to get blown up--every time, I have to laugh.
It's a cynical laugh.
If you honestly think Iraq is not ALREADY torn apart by a civil war then you really HAVE been watching too much "reality TV." Either that, or FOX news.
As I write, 10 Marines, most from the 3/5, guys whom I met and hung out with, are dead, all but one from IEDs…
…For five nights with Bravo, I slept in the cot next to the company gunnery sergeant’s turret gunner, Cpl. Ryan Cummings of Streamwood, Ill. We bullshitted, told lies, talked about women, drinking, and raising hell when we got home. On patrol, he was careful — always sat way down in the sling seat, wore all the protective gear he could find, always stayed alert to his surroundings. But when an IED flipped over his humvee, he was partially ejected and crushed to death.
And for what?
For the American troops, places like Fallujah must seem more and more each day like some deadly Middle Eastern version of the Hatfields and McCoys, with explosive charges taking the place of squirrel guns and the American military caught in the middle.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
That tribal/clan mentality complicates the situation for the Marines. A personal slight or just bad blood can have deadly consequences. If Marine intelligence or Iraqi Army units receive information about a weapons cache or explosives hidden at a house or in a field, they will move into the area to question and possibly arrest suspects. If contraband is found, the most relevant question becomes whether the tip-off was a good deed or a lie to cause a neighbor grief. Many Iraqis have found that they can use the Americans to settle old scores. Iraqis know what clan and tribe their neighbors are from and what they do for a living and often have very strong feelings about those clans and businesses. In the end there are no simple answers, no simple solutions — not for the Iraqis who are living in fear and getting killed and not for the Marines in the field fighting and dying.
--ibid
Not only do the troops on the ground know this is a civil war, but so do their commanders. And they are speaking out about it.
You have to understand that for soldiers and Marines to go on the record with their intense frustration and despair at serving in this war, so that they are quoted by name and rank, as in the pieces, "Waiting to Get Blown Up," and "Call Sign: Havoc,"--is significant. It reflects a top-down dissatisfaction with the way the U.S. military has been forced to fight this war by an inept and politically-driven civilian leadership.
Keep in mind that, at the beginning of this war, when it was all gung-ho wave the flag and kick Iraqi ass, for any soldier or Marine to have honestly stated such misgivings about his or her mission resulted in swift and often severe punishment. Sometimes they lost rank. At the very least, the incident was recorded in their fitness reports and kept on file for the rest of their time in the military, which could have prevented promotion.
And by the time a soldier or Marine reaches the highest ranks of the military, he or she is as much a politician as the civilian leadership, and they know better than to say anything that could jeopardize their careers or their advancement or retirement with the highest rank and most money they can get.
This is why I was so surprised at the remarks of Army Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli:
"What we have here is a level of sectarian violence," he said. "And the way you have to fight this is that you have to have presence on the streets. I don't know any other way to fight it…What didn't we figure? We didn't figure this sectarian killing," Chiarelli said…"For the military, the plan is uncharted ground.
"Quite frankly, in 33 years in the United States Army, I never trained to stop a sectarian fight," he said. "This is something new."
--"Coincidence or Consequence?", Dan Froomkin, Washington Post, July 27, 2006, quoting an article by Julian Barnes in the Los Angeles Times from Baghdad.
In other words, not only are we now all tangled up in a sectarian civil war, but we don't know what the hell we're doing there or even why we're doing it any more.
The larger issue is that we don't know what we--or more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops--are fighting for...The war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It's a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot…
The sad truth is that the war's architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they cared about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.
--"The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq," Frank Rich, New York Times, July 30, 2006.
I'll tell you what the sad truth REALLY is, and that is this:
The war's architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they cared about THE AMERICAN TROOPS.
From the beginning of this war, when they trumped up bogus reasons for entering it, lied about those reasons, and sent splendid young men and women into combat to die for those lies…when they refused to listen to their commanders on the ground who begged for more troops and warned that the insurgency was a much bigger problem than the Republican Guard (as early as one week into the invasion)--they not only refused to listen, but they punished any and all who dared speak out, even within the military command--when they shrugged and said such things as "stuff happens" when chaos ensued, when they attacked any political candidate, statesman, CIA analyst, military officer, politician, or journalist who dared disagree with their plan, when they sent troops over and over and over again and again and again to the same war--only it wasn't the same war, it was worse every time--and when they continue to force troops not only to stay past their deployments for months more of grim duty, but also find nasty little ways to force them to stay in the military and even redeploy to Iraq or Afghanistan when their contract of service has ended in what is clearly a backdoor draft…
They have communicated, loud and clear, that they don't really care about the American soldiers and Marines who are fighting and dying every day for Bush's folly.
And don't think the troops don't know it.
The Marines know it, too — no matter their bravery, no matter how much they believe in their country, the mission, their commanders, and the Marine Corps, no matter how much they try to ignore the politics of this war. Nearly every one of the young Marines of Lima are finished with Iraq and the Marine Corps at the end of this enlistment. They’re done, worn out from the constant separation from friends and families. The running joke is that Marines get “care packages” from Iraq, because they’ve been there more in the last four years than they’ve been in the U.S.
--"Call Sign: Havoc," Don Jones, Fort Worth Weekly, July 19, 2006.
The only time the American people seem to be paying attention any more is when a tiny handful--of the hundreds of thousands of combat rotations that have taken place in Iraq --a tiny handful goes haywire and is accused of committing a murder or an atrocity, why they're just all SHOCKED AND AWED.
Nobody pays any attention to the fact that most of the accused are on their THIRD or FOURTH combat tours in hell when these alleged incidents took place.
Our combat troops, and to a lesser degree if they're not in combat zones, support personnel, are worn out, stressed out, burned out on this war. Most of them who have been more than once to Iraq or Afghanistan can't get out of the armed forces fast enough. And the military can't make their recruitment quotas because of something a Marine dad told me.
This father of a combat Marine who is also in my son's unit, said he met these two gung-ho politically conservative fresh-scrubbed young men who could not wave the flag furiously enough and fully, completely supported their beloved president and his war. So this Marine dad asked them, being the fine strapping healthy young men that they were, why they didn't just enlist and go fight this war themselves?
They laughed.
They laughed, and they said, "Hey, we're patriotic, but we're not STUPID."
I'm sure the families of Benito Ramirez and Jason Morrow and Rex Page and Ray Plouhar and all the others who have been lost and maimed in this war would like to hear that their brave young sons and daughters died and came home mutilated because they were stupid.
In the end, that's the dirty little secret. You see, most of the civilian leadership who started this war and waved the flag while sending my son and other sons and daughters off to fight and possibly die--well, they didn't fight when they had a war of their own, back when they were young and strapping and healthy and fresh-scrubbed.
After all, they were, PATRIOTIC. They weren't STUPID, right? If you'd asked them at the time, before they were involved in politics, that's probably what they would have said, too. Before they grew up to start wars of their own for somebody else to fight.
Maybe that's why this war isn't on the news any more. Maybe, secretly, the American people think the whole thing is stupid, only, they don't know how to fix it. Maybe if they'd program solutions into those realistic video games they play--the ones that make you feel like you're RIGHT THERE in places like Fallujah...maybe that would help.
Or maybe, if they're like one sweet elderly lady said to me...Is Fallujah in Iraq?
People don't know.
Anyway, it's not their problem. They're not going to die; their children and friends and lovers aren't going to die 6,000 miles away from home in a manner so horrible that there won't even be a body to ship home--only parts. After all, those people VOLUNTEERED, didn't they? (I've been reminded of that very thing, right here on this blog.)
I always explain that, yes, they did volunteer, but nobody volunteers to paint a bull's-eye on their backs and go off looking to get blown up while, at the same time, they also try to keep people in that same godforsaken place from mauling and killing EACH OTHER.
Anyway, it's too depressing to think about. After all, it's summertime.
posted by Deanie Mills at 1:44 PM
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