Good article from the NY Times

[Warthog]

Found on www.paratrooper.net :

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Soldiers in all wars are called upon to be heroes, but our men and
women in Iraq are called upon to define a new sort of heroism. First,
they must endure the insanity of war, fighting off fedayeen ambushes,
withstanding the suicide bombings and mortars, kicking down doors and
searching homes.

But a day or an hour or a few minutes later, they are called upon to
enter an opposite moral universe. They are asked to pass out
textbooks, improvise sewer systems and help with budgets. Some sit in
on town council meetings to help keep the discussions on track. Some
act like foundation program officers, giving seed money to promising
local initiatives.

Trained as trigger-pullers, many are also asked in theater to be
consultants and aldermen. They are John Wayne, but also Jane Addams.

Can anybody think of another time in history when a comparable group
of young people was asked to be at once so brave, fierce and
relentless, while also being so sympathetic, creative and forbearing?

When you read the dispatches from Iraq, or the online diaries many
soldiers keep, or the e-mail they send home, you quickly sense how
hard it is to commute between these two universes. Yet the most
important achievements seem to occur on the border between chaos and
normalcy.

At spontaneous moments, when order threatens to break down, the
soldiers, aviators and marines jump in and coach the Iraqis on the
customs and habits of democracy. They try to weave that fabric of
civic trust that can't be written into law, but without which freedom
becomes anarchy.

For example, in a New Yorker article, George Packer describes an
incident in the life of Capt. John Prior. He was inside a gas station
when a commotion erupted outside. A mob of people was furiously
accusing a man of butting in line and stealing gasoline. Prior
established that the man was merely a government inspector checking
the quality of the fuel. Frazzled and exhausted, Prior took the
chance to teach the mob a broader lesson: "The problem is that you
people accuse each other without proof! That's the problem!"

Another soldier, who keeps a Weblog, collects toys and passes them
out to Iraqi children. He brought a pile of toys to an orphanage, but
the paid staff at the place rushed the pile to grab the toys for
themselves — "like sharks in a feeding frenzy," he writes. He has
learned that if he stations himself with an M-16 over the toys,
things go smoothly.

Another soldier writes of his dismay at seeing Iraqi parents give
their kids toy guns as presents after Ramadan. He wonders, Haven't
they had enough death? Don't they realize how dangerous it is for a
kid to wander the street with a piece of plastic that looks like an
AK-47?

When you read the diaries and the postings of the soldiers in Iraq,
you see how exhausted they are. You see that their feelings about the
Iraqis are as contradictory as the Iraqis' feelings about them. You
see their frustration and yearning to go home.

But despite all this, their epic bouts of complaining are interrupted
by bursts of idealism. Most of them seem to feel, deep down, some
elemental respect for the Iraqis and sympathy for what they have
endured. Far more than the population at home, the soldiers in the
middle of the conflict believe in their mission and are confident
they will succeed.

When you read their writings you see what thorough democrats they
are. They are appalled at the thought of dominating Iraq. They want
to see the Iraqis independent and governing themselves. If some
president did want to create an empire, he couldn't do it with these
people. Their faith in freedom governs their actions.

Most of all, you see what a challenging set of tasks they have been
given, and how short-staffed they are. And yet you sense that in this
war, as in so many others, the improvising skill of the soldiers on
the ground will make up for the cosmic screw-ups of the people up the
chain of command.

If anybody is wondering: Where are the young idealists? Where are the
people willing to devote themselves to causes larger than themselves?
They are in uniform in Iraq, straddling the divide between insanity
and order.

[Pexster]

Great article. Thank you, Warthog!

[shahani]

Good article, well written. I don't agree with some parts but I think most soldiers are good decent men/women doing their duty.

The parts I disagree are about how brave they actually are given the enormous firepower available to them against one of the worst fighting forces in the world. No doubt they are brave but in this war very few have actually had to show bravery given this had been a war fought with precision guided weapons and fired remotely from high flying planes.

Post war, yes, they have been exposed to conventional warfare, hand-to-hand, and where they are better equipped and trained, the enemy makes up with cunning.

In a war, you gotta do what you gotta do to "make the other guy die for his country" to paraphrase General Patton. Applies to both sides.

[Warthog]

Soooooo we still aren't at war?

Guys I know going on patrol every night, every day in their humvees, surrounded by tons of people walking the streets, seem to go to war everyday.

[Aaron_J]

This is an excellent article Warthog, thanks for posting it.

[shahani]

Soooooo we still aren't at war?

Not according to the President. He says there are a few unorganized skirmishes and resistance by rag-a-tag left overs of the Regime and these were expected. War ended more than six months ago.

Remember?

[Theophylact]

from Bad Attitudes:

Cleaning Up Your Own Mess

The reliably fatuous David Brooks poses a tough question for us:

Well, yes, David, actually I can…

How about ancient Rome, and the Ottoman Empire, and the Spanish in South America and the French and the Germans and the British and the Dutch and the Belgians in Africa?

What do you think Kipling and Conrad were writing about, and George Orwell, and a hundred other chroniclers of empire? What were those military governors doing down south after Lee surrendered? What did you think the U.S. Cavalry was doing out west?

Nonetheless David Brooks and his media colleagues are lapping up with their accustomed docility the administration’s odd argument that soldiers can hardly be expected to take on "nation building" duties.

But why in the world not? The very definition of an army’s mission is to take and hold territory. Typically that territory is inhabited. And victorious armies, our own included, have always undertaken exactly the job Rumsfeld and Bush failed to prepare for in Iraq.

Holding the territory has always been, at bottom, a military function. In those fading photographs of Indian rajahs and nabobs, the men with the red uniforms and the white faces weren’t Peace Corps volunteers.

But of course that’s different. Those British officers were imperialists and we are not imperialists. With no empire to practice on, American soldiers have had no chance to learn the dark arts of colonial governance.

Moreover it is right and proper that this should be so. Colonies are for evil people like Stalin and Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung and Ho Chi Minh. Whatever Afghanistan and Iraq may be, they are not colonies.

If they were, we would be evil. Since we are not evil, they are not colonies. Q.E.D.

[shahani]

But Mr Bush seems to think otherwise. He wants to install a suitable (to the US) government which will allow him both access to cheap oil and military bases to attac....errrr....bring freedom to other middle east countries.

This is nothing short of glorifying the military who are not involved in this mess except for following orders from their political bosses who have nothing but power and money on their little minds.

Not the welfare of soldiers.

[MTAtech]

Here are some letters printed in reply to Mr. Brooks' Op-Ed:

To the Editor:

Re "Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves" (column, Dec. 2):

David Brooks talks about "the insanity of war." He then quotes a United States Army captain as admonishing a crowd of Iraqis who were falsely accusing a man of stealing gasoline, "The problem is that you people accuse each other without proof!"

President Bush has done the same thing, accusing Iraq of many things but without proof. And that's what got us into this "insanity of war."

YALE RICHMOND
Washington, Dec. 2, 2003

The writer is a retired Foreign Service officer.

•

To the Editor:

David Brooks describes our soldiers' difficult and dangerous mission in Iraq and asks if anybody can think of another time in history comparable to this one (column, Dec. 2).

Of course we can. In Vietnam, our soldiers faced a nearly invisible enemy on the one hand and a terrorized, impoverished population on the other, and ended up not knowing whom to feed and whom to shoot.

Their heroism was undermined and ultimately defeated by a foreign policy based on bad intelligence and justified by deception, that sought to impose our ways on a culture we did not begin to understand, and by a military strategy that rendered our vast superiority impotent. Sound familiar?

DAVID BERMAN
New York, Dec. 2, 2003

[ClubMed]

Bravery and heroism have nothing to do with justice. They are independent concepts.