Fight Against Terror : Of Soldiers, Terrorists & Ordinary Folks
(click on photo to enlarge – courtesy The Project Gutenberg EBook)
Like Joe, I am also travelling…but in Western India on a Press Institute of India and World Bank assignment for journalists. However, I have some spare time so could not resist the temptation of responding to Rep. John Murtha’s statement, considered by some as “provocative”.
The Pennsylvania Democrat said of the Haditha incident: “The tremendous pressure and the redeployment (of soldiers/Marines) over and over again is a big part of this…And this strain has caused them to crack in situations like this.”
I know this is not a politically correct statement to make, however it seems to me much closer to truth (in my huge country some parts have been plagued with ethnic and religious insurgency for years).
The terrorist strategy relies on surprise, is secretive, brutal and turns into a long-term engagement with the State forces because it cunningly chooses soft targets.
This strategy helps divide the civil society because in view of brutal violence people start pressurising the State to end terrorism quickly. As there is no quick-fix solution, the onus then falls on the soldiers of the country.
However, the situation becomes more complicated when a State takes the fight to the foreign soil (at times uninvited). The hatred of the populace multiplies when the soldiers from abroad (for whatever genuine reasons) overstay their hospitality.
Now this complicates the situation. On the one hand the local population has to contend with violence because of ethnic and religious divisions…and then comes the might of a strong foreign nation — whose culture, manners and language is totally different…A recipe for disaster.
So the local civil population begins resisting both the terrorists and the foreign soldiers — earning the wrath of both lethally armed professionals. A deadly situation — from the frying pan into the fire.
The foreign soldiers are not seen as liberators–but as another curse. The soldiers are not there of their own free will. For them it is the command structure. And a good soldier is expected to obey the command – right or wrong.
“The issue is a difficult one for soldiers and marines to discuss. To admit that repeated deployments can wear down their judgment or effectiveness is to admit, in effect, that they are not up to the job that has been given them. This runs counter to a bedrock tenet of the armed services, which is to do whatever job the nation gives them with pride and professionalism.
“Moreover, soldiers and marines resent what they see as the self-righteous condemnation of critics who sit thousands of miles from the fight and have little concept of what it means to fight an insurgency.”
I think Rep Murtha’s statement merits serious discussion without the usual hyperbole and hysteria — a COOL HEAD is needed to do this!!! Aye or Nay????
7 Responses to “Fight Against Terror : Of Soldiers, Terrorists & Ordinary Folks”
I think Max Boot covered the argument in The Savage Wars of Peace. And, in a recent Slate article, Fred Kaplan discussed the new Army Manual on counterterrorism. Fighting set-piece battles is different than civil affairs.
Senator Murtha is an old Marine whom HAS fought an insurgency in Vietnam. He is well qualified. However he does not have to be qualified, he is a Congressman representing a constituency and that constituency’s opinion is paramount with qualification being totally irrelevant.
Soldiers and Marines may resent whatever they like but will do as they are told or be removed from the military. As for overstressing the military, their leaders will decide this. Which Congressman John Murtha is constitutionally charged with oversight of on behalf of his constituency. His comments are properly within the purview of his political responsibilities. Lastly, the American people will decide by retaining or removing those leaders via the election process. All this congressional discourse regarding the subject is well under control.
One major error committed by the Bush administration, by invading Iraq, was to overlook cultural/religious rivalries in the region. Notably the nearly one thousand year old violent conflict between the Sunni and the Shia. This and other errors are being re-evaluated by our political leaders.
Max Boot is a chickenhawk young enough to be fighting the GWOT, instead he kills us with his keyboard. His latest gem is titled:Our enemies aren’t drinking lattes.
Among the more surrealistic moments of my travels was pausing at a base near Baqubah — a far-from-pacified Iraqi city that was Abu Musab Zarqawi’s last base of operations — to enjoy a fresh-brewed iced latte at a Green Beans coffee shop. It hit the spot, but when I later told a Marine captain about the experience, he took away some of my enjoyment by asking, “I wonder how many men had to die to get those coffee beans to Baqubah?”
I would if he risked injury to his manicured fingers to bring us such wisdom.
One of his better feats of stupidity was an opinion piece before the war titled:This Victory May Haunt Us – Winning still requires getting bloody. This gem was about how we are not vicious enough to send a message in Afghanistan.
This is not a war being won with American blood and guts. It is being won with the blood and guts of the Northern Alliance, helped by copious quantities of American ordnance and a handful of American advisers.
….
The low-risk manner in which we have conducted the Afghan campaign so far can only add credence to this “bodybag” myth. It is, of course, a rightful cause for celebration that not a single American life has been lost to enemy fire on the road to Kabul, but it can only be a cause of worry that we have not shown a willingness to conduct ground operations in earnest. Our bombing campaign reveals great technical and logistical prowess, but it does not show that we have the determination to stick a bayonet in the guts of our enemy.
These gems are from a imigrant who won’t serve in the military to tell our troops how to use their bayonets. I wonder how the writers Galloway and Col. Hackworth would respond to such BS. I can only include what Galloway wrote nearing an end to a carreer that started in Vietnam before Boot’s fathers sperm was wasted fertilizing the egg in his mother(sorry about the hyperbole).
Galloway writes:
– Galloway concluded: i like to think that is what i am doing also, and it is a struggle that grows out of my obligation to and love for america’s warriors going back 41 years as of last month.
“there are many things we all could wish had happened. i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, ‘You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don’t quit now…’ Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty.
i could wish for so much. i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time. i could wish that Jackson’s widow Betsy had not found, among the possessions of her late husband, a copy of my book, carefully earmarked at a chapter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was reading at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her husband, herself and a 3 year old baby girl.
those things i received in the mail yesterday and they brought back the tears that i wept standing there in that pit, feeling the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen american soldier 41 years ago on a barren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war. someone once asked me if i had learned anything from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry. And Mr Boot tells us to much Lattes and not enough bayonets. I cannot understand how anyone can read these chickenhawk neocon s and not “Cry” to what they have done to our country.
Swaraaj wrote: The Pennsylvania Democrat said of the Haditha incident: “The tremendous pressure and the redeployment (of soldiers/Marines) over and over again is a big part of this…And this strain has caused them to crack in situations like this.”
This paragraph very politely says it all.
Instead of “strain” I would have said “utter frustration” that eventually turns to rage.
I’m not trying to excuse what happened at Haditha, what happened should not have happened.
But neither will I allow those in power to be excused for sending our troops back into a meat grinder over, and over, and over, and over again.
Imagine something as small as cutting your finger, then being forced by a superior authority to obey an order to stick your hand back in the same place knowing that you will be cut again, then have to repeat the process a third, and perhaps a fourth time, each time getting your finger cut.
Eventually everything human about you will rebel.
Its called human “baser instincts” or an unconscious uncontrolled will to survive.
Its the same reason that a child, after it sticks its hand over a flame, and gets burned, never does it again, at least not willingly.
On a higher scale, say being repeatedly ordered and forced to re-enter a life threatening situation, and having no other choice but to obey as soldiers must obey, and when “some” stimulus rares up and one of the many forms in the baser instincts catagory kicks in, and varies from individual to individual and their personal mental stability at the time.
Human baser instincts, the will to survive, in this instance in a war zone, totally depending upon magnitude of negative event, can show up as anger, outright rage (temporary insanity), mental collapse, utter hatred for a thing or a people, spontaneous violence, rebellion, etc. In short something done by a particular individual that he/she would have never consciously thought of much less done in what we call “normal conditions.”
The best way I know of to give depth to this is to read up on the “Tunnel Rats” of the Viet Nam war; ordinarily small men, due to their diminuitive stature, ordered to crawl into the tunnel mazes, day after day, month after month, to find and kill the enemy.
The Tunnel Rats that weren’t killed, were wounded either by enemy combatants, explosive boobie traps, pitfalls into bungie sticks, snakes, even scorpions, etc..
The survivors, all of them I met, including one of my high school chums named Ray Thomas, have been mentally altered permanently in degrees from being institutionalized for life, to simply and suddenly getting that “100 meter stare” like a switch was suddenly flipped and they are lost to this world and back in those terrible holes where death awaited them.
These young men, those that did survive, were all but ignored by the military, the Veterans Administratin, and our government until nearly ten years after the war ended and they began to get psylogical help and medications that at least gives them some sembalance of normality.
The only thing that surprises me about today’s issue in the matter is that rage has not become more prevalent among our troops in Iraq, especially among those ordered back into action the third and fourth time.
If our government leaders persist on keepin our troops in Iraq, they must, one way or another, preferably a draft, send in fresh troops and cease sending the same troops repeatedly back into that physical, psychological hell hole. And “we” out here must insist if not demand they do it NOW!
Salmenio…OUTSTANDING reply.
Lets correct Senator to Congressman. My editing
sucks.
Chippedchips
Thanks. I must say your post is quite excellent also.
I cannot stand fireworks, gunshots, or, sudden loud noises of any kind. Though I don’t leap for cover anymore, on the 4th of July I get a motel room as far away as possible from fireworks.
I saw a man’s head cut off right in front of me with a machete. I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t get a thousand yard stare. I get the shakes.
These troops in Iraq killing civilians, whether legal killing or not, will pay the mental price down the road. I guarantee it.