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Here Is Your War

Title borrowed from the collected columns of another great dead war correspondent. As long as we’re on war correspondent tributes. Kelly was a literary big-picture guy. Bloom was a gritty this-is-what-it’s-like TV guy. But nowadays GIs can tell their own stories in real time every bit as well as Ernie Pyle, as the great Gordon Alanko demonstrated.  But nowadays, you don’t even need mastery of language for a quick grab on the intensity, terror, banality of war. We have LiveLeak. h/t Theo, who notes that you can hear the  “Allahu Akhbar” that kicks off the ambush. The two words most frequently heard in combat were what caught my attention: an “OH SHIT” as evocative as anything Ernie Pyle ever wrote,* no offense Ernie, even though this is a relatively low-intensity incident despite the obvious urgency of the matter for those involved. You can also hear the screams of a Marine, reportedly hit in the leg. There’s reportedly a happy ending, not on tape. The attackers, who weren’t very effective, were held in place long enough to zero a 500-lb bomb on them.  

Malkin with vid and some questions about recent, higher intensity operations in Sadr City.

* OK, this one’s hard to top.

Topics: Iraq, media, military

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:04 pm on Friday, April 4, 2008

2 Responses to “Here Is Your War”

1. PoliGazette » Here’s Your War Says:
   April 4th, 2008 at 4:00 pm

   […] on over to Jules Crittenden’s place to watch a video of American soldiers in action. First you see the soldiers walking, followed by an […]

2. Fatty Bolger Says:
   April 4th, 2008 at 5:32 pm

   A little background on the man featured in the Ernie Pile article, Captain Henry T. Waskow:

   http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=125432

   Be sure to read his last letter home. If you do, you’ll understand why his men loved him.

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