Sunday, July 03, 2005
Military & Politics & Stuff
Saw some former relatives today from my first marriage. One had been a Green Beret, had left the army after around 12 years of service, enlisted in the Reserves, and was living a jolly civilian life. After 9/11, he decided that his skills (try getting a Green Beret to fill you in on his skills...easier pulling teeth from an unanesthetized crocodile) might be of use to the Army again.
At first they didn't want him. Too old. But as enlistments get stretched beyond reason, and they HAVE to send some troops home, this age policy is being reviewed and eased. They decided they WERE interested after all. I know he'd been a crew chief on a Huey, and had knowledge of Blackhawks. I know he spent some time in South America. Where he spent that time, and what they did, I don't know. I'll never know. But on visits to him when he was active duty (our wives were sisters...his died in a car wreck, mine divorced me), I got to spend some time with his "boys", and those boys taught me some fascinating things. I'd already learned a few fascinating things from a Green Beret 'Nam vet, but they taught me some other fascinating things. And I don't want to talk about those, ok?
Onward...the ex-brother-in-law, we'll call him Pete, says he thinks the biggest mistake we made in Iraq was to neglect the Norman Schwarzkopf method of war preparation. Norman brings in his logistics and supply people. He gets his infrastructure set up, brings in his combat people, coordinates with all the other services, then unleashes the most awesome military machine in history, and crushes his enemy with a minimum of loss of his own personnel, and the most careful strategic attacks on the enemy.
He thinks we went in without enough troops, without a coherent, decisive disengagement plan, and now we're stuck playing catch-up.
He's not anti-Bush, not in the sense some screaming wimp commie liberal is, but his take on both this George Bush and President Clinton before him is that, because they have no combat time, they don't have the working knowledge that they need to act correctly as Commander-In-Chief.
Pete feels that having hostiles shoot at you, and you shooting back while in the service of your country causes a change in you that nothing else can; gives you a perspective you can't get being a pilot or grunt behind the lines and immune from combat, as Bush and Clinton were.
Pres. Clinton, of course, worked around this by making verbal threats and taking very little action, especially after that mess in Mogadishu. President Bush, we agreed, should have listened to Colin Powell's opinions on how to do it. The first president Bush should have been less sensitive to the other middle eastern countries and allowed the military to crush Iraq once and for all. He should have got a clue when he ordered the American troops to pull off their uniform flags, and the Saudis stepped in and said, "That's not necessary."
Pete's son is going, as soon as he finishes his training, and Pete is deeply disappointed. He was in an industrial accident and received an injury that's going to disqualify him from going active duty, and most especially going to fight.
I've always liked Pete; he's half-madman, half U.S. soldier. In other words, a perfect Green Beret. He's neither hawk nor dove politically; he was always as happy not to be deployed somewhere because a political solution had been reached as he was to deploy when he got the word.
Maybe I'm a little jealous, too; I spent a lot of nights in a warm bed with my wife while he was out in the middle of nowhere doing God knows what, and his wife was sleeping alone. He's never lost sight of why he was doing it. When he says he did it for his country, he doesn't mean for the President and Congress; he means for his family, his friends, for all of us going about our normal lives.
On the other hand, maybe it's a relief, having a friend who isn't hung up on stupid ivory-tower discussions of what's good and bad, how much gray there really is between black and white.
Maybe it's just nice having a good man for a friend.
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