The Betrayal Part
When I was a kid, I wondered if I’d ever go to war. I wondered what that would be like. War was a constant backdrop. My uncle was killed in the war. A lot of kids’ dads had been in World War II, Korea or Vietnam. We all played army, little kids training ourselves for war. In the 1960s, we were still doing duck-and-cover drills at school. Then I was 14 and listening to the radio, as only a few hundred miles away Saigon and Phnom Penh fell. War was what happened.
War was still in the background in the 1980s. When the Iranian crisis was going on, and I was in college and registered for the draft, I didn’t want to go and fight and die in Iran. By then, post-Vietnam anti-war chic, I believed the “no blood for oil” line the protestors were chanting. You know what Churchill is supposed to have said. If you’re not a socialist when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re still one when you’re 40, you have no brain.
Things changed. Ronald Reagan showed that it was possible to face down and even dismantle the utter evil of the Soviet Union without the apocalypse we feared. Saddam showed us another face of unadulterated evil throughout the 1990s. While a lot of Americans may have come to believe bloody war was a thing of the past, it became apparent that war might be an unavoidable and even an effective measure in some circumstances. Then my work took me into war zones. I began to learn other things about war. I started to become familiar with its parts.
In late March, 2003, I was in the desert with a U.S. Army tank company. We were going into action soon, but this was a lull, tanks sitting ready in the desert. An officer and I were talking about what we were doing there.
“In five years,” he said, pointing to the Abrams tanks parked on the sand around us. “The Iraqi Army will driving tanks like these.” He talked about his expectations for a free, democratic Iraq.
I told him I hoped so. I also believed in what we were doing. But I knew that trying to terraform a politically and psychologically traumatized Arab nation was a daunting task, and I wondered whether the United States government, already with a lot of negative baggage in the neighborhood, could do it. I didn’t have any crystal ball, and I never imagined what would in fact happen in Iraq. But I said to the captain, “This is the easy part, what we’re doing right now. The hard part is what comes after.”
Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly writer, who also supported this war, was still alive then. He would be dead in a couple of days. SFC Paul Smith, a 3rd ID platoon sergeant, was still alive. In a few days, heavily outnumbered, he would hold off and destroy an attacking Iraqi force, dying as he held his ground. Navy Lt. Nathan D. White, whose friendly fire death I witnessed as a strange reversing light in the desert’s night sky, was also still alive as the captain and I had our conversation. A lot of Iraqis whose death masks are still with me, they were alive then. Four other newsmen, fated to be killed by Iraqi and American fire, had about a week to live.
I would learn more about the parts of war. About finding out that friends are dead. About going forward into fire in the morning, expecting to be dead by nightfall. I would learn that I could do this, and discover how part of the brain just shuts down and other parts come to life in combat, to carry you through. I discovered that I liked it, and wanted more of it. A great surprise at the age of 42, never having been a particularly brave person, that made me wonder what kind of person I really was. Then, I would learn about the strange feeling of being alive still when it was all over, when others were dead. About coming home to be reviled and accused, and to see the cause friends had died for disparaged.
But the cause still went forward, though it ran into problems and more people died. Nothing is easy in life, this is what we learn, everything’s a fight, and that’s why, by the time we’re in our 40s, most of us stop believing in giveaways and easy outs. We have to have faith, but we have to be smart, and we have to be able to adjust.
Now, in this war of ours in Iraq, the pressure is not for a smart adjustment. Four years into war, people are tired of it. As Americans, with notoriously short attention spans, a lot of them maybe are bored it. The pressure now, no matter how the Iraq Study Group cares to couch it, is for abandonment. To pull out slowly. To ask a lot of American soldiers not to die for a cause, but to die for a mistake. The mistake of giving up. To go hat in hand to enemies who know they only have to wait in order to win.
This is beginning to feel like another part of war I had not experienced, something as terrible as all the other parts, the death and the loss, because of what it means for those things. I know enough about history to know this is what happens, maybe more often than not.
So is this going to be the betrayal part?
There are a lot of things I still don’t know about war. Some of them I dread more than I dreaded the expectation of death in combat. My son, 10 years old, has grown up in a world of war more intense than I grew up in. He was five and watching TV when he saw the Twin Towers on fire. His uncle was a soldier, helping to keep us safe, we told him. Then his dad went away to war. He met people who had been in war, even people who had been horribly wounded in war.
And he has said things to me like, “When I grow up, if I don’t get killed in battle, I want to be a Major League pitcher.”
I’m proud of a boy who talks like that, and heartbroken that he has to. I know the day may come when my boy has to go, and I’ll learn things about war that hundreds of thousands of American parents have learned in the past few years.
Will my son then also have to learn all these gut-wrenching things?
What about the betrayal? Will he have to learn about that as I fear we might be about to?
On the Iraq Study Group:
Hope Muntz from comments;
Well, I don’t pay much attention to politics, but having grown up in a military family, I can tell you this much–the moment your CIC starts treating with the enemy, it’s over. My dad told me once that a little cut-off switch goes off in your head when you know that, and from then on in all you’re thinking about is how not to get killed.
At Captain’s Quarters, Ed asks “These are the Realists?” This morning he weighs in again with the consequences of withdrawal.
Don Surber asks “How dare we abandon our allies?”
T.F. Boggs, deployed in Iraq, is disgusted by the ISG’s performance. Via Powerline.
Spencer Ackerman at the American Prospect finds nothing responsible about the ISG’s “Responsible transition.”
Belmont’s Richard Fernandez on ISG’s soundbite: Speak loudly and carry a small stick.
George Will says the ISG thinks the problem with Iraq is the Iraqis, whom these recommendations will compel to behave otherwise. He doesn’t appear optimistic about that.
Robert Kaplan at the Atlantic sees some strengths and weakenesses.
David Ignatius drinks deep of the ISG’s Koolaid.
Topics: Uncategorized
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:10 pm Comments (7) on Wednesday, December 6, 2006
7 Responses to “The Betrayal Part”
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December 7th, 2006 at 10:59 am
If we give up now, I fear the next war will be even worse, and that it will engulf my grandchildren. And I’ll blame most those people who saw every side of this war as equivalent, and who were not able to stand on any principle.
December 7th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
I stopped reading Clancy years ago, but I do recall that, in the last one I read (”Clear and Present Danger”), whenever I visualized that government official who abandoned the troops in the field to their fate, he always looked just like James Baker.
December 7th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Perhaps as a “grownup” you should demand your president not lie you into a way. Perhaps as a “grownup” you should focus on where the keys actually are, and not just look under the lamp. Perhaps as a “grownup” you should demand accountability.
Perhaps as a “grownup” you should stop smearing people that disagree with you, and stand up to your friends that do smear those people. Perhaps as a “grownup” you should realize that those that dissent may have a point and may in fact be right. As a “grownup” you may wish to consider that you are not always right about everything.
Perhaps as a “grownup” you should consider what the morality is of throwing live bodies after dead bodies in an attempt to salvage your distinctly ungrownup like actions to date have been.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Perhaps as a “realist” you should learn to discern the difference between objective truth and the party line.
Perhaps as a “realist” you should accept the fact that criticising your views is not the same thing as suppressing them.
Perhaps as a “realist” you should learn how to dissent without giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and for that matter, perhaps, as a “realist”, you should learn that it is, at a minimum, fatuous to think that you can change the hearts and minds of your own countrymen by slandering them and attempting to criminalize policy differences.
Finally, perhaps, as a “realist”, you should learn that the best way to oppose a medieval, messianic death cult with pretensions to establishing a global caliphate is not to meekly offer your throat to the assassin. Unless, of course, you’re indifferent to the prospect of becoming a dead realist.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Perhaps as a “grownup” you…
Real grownups face the situation we got, not the one they wish we had.
It ain’t about Bush anymore jackass.
December 7th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
Well, I don’t pay much attention to politics, but having grown up in a military family, I can tell you this much–the moment your CIC starts treating with the enemy, it’s over. My dad told me once that a little cut-off switch goes off in your head when you know that, and from then on in all you’re thinking about is how not to get killed. And that feeling spreads through the ranks like the flu until everybody’s got it and then the game’s over. That’s how he described things in Vietnam.
Well, today I noticed Bush and Blair inviting Iran and Syria to negotiate with them. To all the servicemen and women in Iraq this just means one thing: the game’s over. So is the war. You win some, you lose some. And sometimes you end up losing the ones you’ve already won.
I guess it takes a special kind of fool to do that.
December 7th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
This is from part of an email exchange between Jules and me before I was able to get the comments working. The context was my disagreement with his assessment of Sec. Rumsfeld’s performance as SecDef.
Instead of listening to, let alone implementing anything that the ISG says, this is what GWB should do.
“I think GWB has done a great job all things considered. Except for three things.
1) The Rule of Engagement were and probably still are too limited. If you use a Mosque as an armory, it ceases to be a house of worship and becomes a target. Screw the Arab Street, whatever that is, and the seething mobs. Same for using civilians as shields. Harsh as it may sound, shoot through them a couple of times and they cease being of value.
2) He has done an absolutely dreadful job articulating the reasons for the overall war and mobilizing the American public to support the war. As bad a speaker as he may be in public, he should be on the air at least once a week making a speech.
3) He has to stop this “Religion of Peace” BS and tell us about the realities of the threat. Many of us understand the threat, but the public at large doesn’t.”
Gary