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Thu 27 Jan, 2005 12:38 pm
I received this and am passing along this report from Butrflynet:
Thought you would find this stuff interesting. The stuff in italics are my comments to introduce what is being said. The stuff in bold are posted comments by others that the soldier is responding to. He has some interesting insights and the point of view of one who has recently been there.
These are excerpts from the Politics and Religion category of a private message board that I keep tabs on. His responses are in bold.
Butrflynet
A soldier, recently returned from Iraq. He leans to the right politically, which makes what he has to say even more interesting.
Responding to a post referencing photos of dead people in Iraq:
BE AWARE, there are some graphic and gruesome photos here.
I'm glad the photographers didn't leave any contact information. At least one general put out messages to the effect that some photos in the latter half of that list are a good way to lose pay grades.
Not only do pictures of American coffins show disrespect to the troops, but now we've been told that dead enemies demean the Iraqis (and Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians, Iranians and whoever else wants to kill an American today.) Shooting, blowing up and bombing them is just fine though.
Someone asked why he thought pictures of American coffins show disrespect to the troops:
I am very interested to hear why you, a soldier, think this.
I should have been more clear when I posted. My experiences left me with a much greater understanding of the reasons for military ceremony, to include respect for the dead. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to be muttering along with everyone else when the brass spend half an hour congratulating each other while everyone else is standing at attention to provide scenery. But somewhere along the line, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier stopped being a tourist attraction for me.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with a tasteful, well-done photograph of the fallen arriving in their homeland.
Any attempt to hide this fact is shameful and without honor, in my opinion.
You can guess my feelings on the current administration, given their stance on families meeting their loved ones' remains at the airport, and their consistant attempts to keep all media from the flag-draped coffins as they're brought to their final resting place.
Some people run towards the sound of the explosions. Some people run away. It's astonished me to find out which of my friends and peers fit in each category. It's also astonished me how eager one man is to fight, when he decided to start running before even hearing the explosions when it was his time.
In a discussion of religion vs technology, the soldier was asked:
First froma philisophical viewpoint why would anyone "care about the Future"?
As S.M. Stirling said in one of his novels, "Dynastic immortality may not be much, but it's the only thing going." I'm prejudiced by my origins, but I'd rather see the world circa 2100 resemble something along the lines of the United States than say, 1998 Afghanistan.
Were an alien race to find our remnants in 50,000 years and learn they were caused by a Nuclear Exchange brought about by a "Religous War Between Islamic and Christian Extremists", would they conclude technology and all the good it can do for us was at fault or that the message of "Love thy neighbour" as taught by Jesus was its cause?
I don't know about any alien race 50,000 years in the future, but this exact situation was what led me to reject the Christianity that my father's family so loves.
Organized, regimented, "we have all the answers in our book" religion SCARES me. I can find little in this world that has been such an incredible force for evil. Honestly, I don't see much of a difference between religious extremists waving their (insert holy book here) and Maoists justifying their actions with a little red book. It's a question of where their spiritual leader resides, nothing more.
Technology allows us to do a lot of stuff better than we could 10, 20, 50, 100, 1000 years ago. But throughout history, we have excelled at using what is at hand to destroy our enemies. Offhand, we have:
Egyptians vs anyone - "The Pharaoh/god on earth told us to!"
The Old Testament (pick your enemy tribe)
Romans vs Christians
A few hundred years later, Christians vs Romans
Islamic destruction of Persia/Byzantium
Christians vs Moors, Iberian Peninsula (all 900 years of it!)
The Crusades
The Conquistadores
The Spanish Inquisition
North American colonization
Every last one of those had the objective of total destruction of the enemy, in the name of religion. Many had ulterior motives, but the reason given would be "In the name of diety." Whether it be culture, city, nation or civilization, the idea was to wipe it from the planet.
The least successful result was a hundred years of terror, torture and murder. The most successful was genocide.
Ironically, the latest attempt at religious war is the only I can think of that is likely to backfire. The instant the western world stops caring about the Jihadist's own civilians more than they do, is the instant that the Jihad relearns the full horror of modern warfare that the Western world has refined over millenium of practice.
The best part is, we don't simply destroy you, we destroy you and then remake you into what you most fear; Us.
More of the discussion:
Now we have people trying to suggest that "Inciting Hatred" against other groups is a uniquely religous phenomena and or that it inevitably leads to murders and killings and these people use the same tactics as they claim the Religous Zealots use.
Those that believe in something more are ignorant, superstitous, irrational and akin to savages ready to sacrifice children to some "Volcano God". How is that Extremism any different that that advanced by religous Zealots? It is merely a means of claiming one side right the other wrong, and the side that is wrong is responsible for all of Earths ills.
Oh, there's plenty of people besides religious leaders who manage to incite hatred in the name of... whatever. But the big successes tend to be cloaked in religion. There are notable exceptions, such as the German Civil War, Hundred Year War and WWII. That such tactics inevitably lead to murders and killings is self-explanatory. That's half of the point of such things. (The rest being whatever you can grab along the way)
Not all religion is bad either. I've little fear of the militant wing of the Hare Krishnas taking over an airport, a neo-pagan group firebombing churches, or a splinter Buddhist sect starting a guerilla war.
The way my viewpoint differs from that of a "religious Zealot" (Your term, not mine) is that I have no interest in shooting, hanging, beheading, crucifiying, burning, throwing to wildlife or physically tormenting you should you disagree with my views.
There are religious extremists who believe that their religious laws should govern a secular state, or their code of conduct is the one, true universal standard of right and wrong. A mirror image of THAT I will admit to, quite proudly.
Abraham is a tired old example of the 'Volcano God' thing, so why not a new one? Flip on the tube any Sunday morning, and I'm sure you can find someone willing to help you appease God by offering up some cash. I don't condemn people who fall for it. It's their money, and they can do what they wish with it. I do sometimes wish they'd stop falling for the same old stunt though.
As for whether or not the other side is responsible for all of Earth's ills, names for eras such as the Enlightenment and the Renaissance weren't picked at random. They did, however, coincide with the drop in power of the religious institution.
More discussion of the war.
Saddam and the Taliban had no one resisting them now did they?
More than you might think. Fallujah has indeed been flattened. The towns that actively opposed Saddam can better be described as erased. You don't see people complaining about it because there are no people from that town any more. They're all dead. I lived for a year half a mile from a mass gravesite mounded up over a hundred feet tall.
>The Burka is back and women must stay locked in their homes where they are "free" to be woken from their sleep and searched by American GIS who kick the doors in any time of the night looking for terrorists. They are now prisoners in their own homes.
They've gone from a secular, Baathist culture to an Islamic one. If you're surprised by this, raise your hand. Now look just to the right on a map and notice the large, heavily Islamic country beside them. I doubt you are, so I'll ask you to note how much of the country was actually involved with the ruling party.
I was privileged to see information on dozens, if not hundreds of raids. They're conducted for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's literally to send a message.
When a sheik (who has no equivalent whatsoever in western politics. Think something between Patriarch, mayor and gangster boss) overlooks dozens of armed men setting up an ambush in his neighborhood, he's clearly in favor of what they're doing. The amount of firepower even a minor sheik can muster is better than most police stations in the US. A powerful sheik can probably outgun the NYPD. Raiding his house for information tends to lead to VERY interesting, but inadmissable in any court, documents. Raiding his tribe's houses leads to unhappy people, who get pointed towards the sheik... and usually a few participants from the abovementioned ambush.
Other times, raids are conducted because we saw someone duck into the house after an attack, because a known informant (or quisling, if you favor the insurgents) has told us something's going on, or the place really doesn't look right. Regardless, raids are NEVER conducted just because someone felt like it. Mistakes happen, but the vast majority of such raids are on target and conducted with a minimum of force. I personally know of several instances where soldiers were invited to stay for tea, breakfast or a quick snack, as bizarre as that sounds.
This is no different than our issues with the JI and other extremist groups that are holed up in nations where $3/day is a great living. Our ultimate problem is we have a pool of millions of impoverished teenage boys with no hope, no future, and no local economy to break the cycle - fertile "insurgent" seeds for the taking, at a price you can't beat.
A VERY large part of the issue is the problem with getting local workers at any price. I don't say contractors for a reason. When really big projects are put up for bid (and I'll grant that they often aren't), it's a multinational corporation that gets the prize. When something like 'build a new school' or 'put in a water pumping station for this village' goes up for bid, most of the time it's an Iraqi contractor who takes it. Concepts like 'we don't take kickbacks to put your bid at the top' and 'I don't give a rat's ass who your sheik is, your bid was ridiculous' are tough to get across, but at least one person in the group picks it up really quickly when money's involved.
Then the tough part comes. The contractor brings in his local work force. Some of them are very good, having participated in Baathist government projects, or have previous experience in other countries. Some of them are literally kids picked up from the neighbors the day prior.
Regardless of skill level, it's very, very hard to find someone who has a solid work ethic in a blue collar position, at any pay rate. If you don't assign an American supervisor, work proceeds at a snail's pace. If the supervisor isn't a subject matter expert, the work that gets done is of extremely poor quality. One Seabee I knew hit on the tactic of firing, on the spot, any welder who knowingly put together a shoddy structure. He'd crawl up to the toughest, hardest to reach spots and check the welds. If they weren't to standard, the guy didn't come back. He was one of few who managed to get good results from the locals.
No hope? No future? No economy? I've seen handouts, I've seen work programs, I've seen contracts supervised by Iraqis. I've yet to see anything that actually works when you're trying to cram money into the area. The one thing that DOES work is putting in American soldiers with a decent paycheck and no place to spend it. A handful of people recognize incredible opportunities for profit and take advantage of it. One canny pre-teen made more in a week than many Iraqis make in a year. Unfortunately, I've heard that insurgent attacks took out the base near him, so his family is yet another without a job.
Discussion in response to the Inauguration speech. One of the right-wingers posted a letter from one of the generals spewing the company line and ranting about the liberal media conspiracy to censor the news. The soldier responded:
Anecdotal information from personnel serving in Iraq can be revealing, but not definitive.
It's interesting to note that this letter certainly shows what the press is doing, not that you believe it I am sure.
I've two bits to add to this discussion. One's anecdotal, one's not so.
By the time my brigade left, our primary maneuver force was stuck guarding the most dangerous stretch of highway in Iraq. The job probably could have been done by whatever odds and ends were scraped up, but nobody really wanted to volunteer THEIR troops for it. These soldiers weren't going out into towns and looking for good works, they weren't monitoring projects or taking scumbags off the streets, they were watching a few miles of road to make sure resupply missions didn't get blown to heck. The euphamism used for that sort of thing is "Force Protection." Expect to see that term often in the upcoming months and years.
As far as public statements by battalion and division commanders, something you may want to keep in mind is the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under this set of regulations, members of the military can legally be punished for criticizing President Bush in their official capacity. If "General Snuffy" makes a negative statement, vs "Bob Snuffy", he can face a multitude of unpleasant consquences. Depending on the political leanings of their superiors, criticizing policies, effects of decisions or publicly pointing out negative consequences can be construed as disrespect too.
On the other hand, positive statements in an official capacity can be career-enhancing for the same officer. Whether they're about his own unit or his support for those above him, making the military look good is always The Right Thing to Do.
The soldier responding to questions about "force protection."
It's funny you should bring that topic up. We actually had some experience with the 'helmets off' route last spring. A Marine MEU commander spouted that 'winning the hearts and minds' slogan in Newsweek during an interview. Army grunts in Iraq read that issue and laughed, scratched their heads or made jarhead jokes.
Then we found out that since he outranked our brigade commander, he was taking over our camp along with his own. Much quiet swearing ensued.
We narrowly missed having our battalion commander assassinated (which, no two ways about it, would have touched off a My Lai-style massacre of every moving thing in that village) during a sheik council meeting.
We suffered vastly increased mortar attacks, because it wasn't nice to respond with artillery into a populated area.
A number of Marines died because of unsafe practices during foot patrols in the nearby city.
A few of you might remember an article in Maxim magazine about Iraq's "Wild West" region. Having spent some time near and talked with soldiers who served in Sadr City, I can say that it's not the most active part of Iraq, but it's not far off. With the 'helmets off' approach, the intensity quickly grew to rival the worst in Iraq, until the city had to be locked down with a Bradley on every street corner.
Ironically, the techniques that are having the most success are derivatives of ones Saddam might have used. Arrests made quickly and with maximum nonlethal force. "Alamo" style holdouts solved not with trained capture teams to drag out those resisting arrest, but with massed fire from tanks. Signs are posted in Arabic that trespassers will be shot- and enforced.
Even with small teams almost entirely isolated from everyone else, in known locations, day after day, (the most tempting target I can think of) as long as the Iraqis 'know' what will happen if they attack US soldiers, they will not do it.
The downside is that these techniques require a powerful force that is going to be around for a long, long time. Unless we're willing to abandon core values of the American people and out-do Saddam for ferocity and terror, I don't know that there is a way to win this one without a near-permanent force in Iraq.
BTW, don't even get me started on the transformation thing. When combined wit the new 'expeditionary Army', it didn't take long for common soldiers to come up with one possibility that quickly became reality - soldiers deploy, the $8/hour paperwork pushers don't. Soldiers see massive pay screwups which take months to fix.
Unfortunately, the people we've put in high office aren't as forward thinking as a ne'er do well high-school graduate.
Pay increases, generous allowances for extended deployments (if you have a pushy and clever Personnel shop to get them for you), a flood of new equipment and expanded promotion opportunities have not made Bush very popular among the military. He's also managed to get us into a war we're frankly not equipped to fight, doctrinally or with the resources onhand.
As Rumsfield told one grunt, shut up and do the best with what you have.
The soldier responding to questions about Iraqi geography and civilians:
I wonder if some time when you have a few moments you might write a short note about the geographical landscape that you saw in Iraq and about the natives, if any, whom you met. -Kardios
Well, I have a 24 hour watch shift tonight, so it's as good a time as any. Besides, if I mumble any more regs to myself right now, I'm going to wake up my coworkers. Study break!
Were there trees? Hills? Grass? Lots of sand?
I was stationed near the Euphrates river most of the time. Within a mile or so of the riverbed, date palms were fairly plentiful. More than that, and you were lucky to see a tumbleweed. Seeing those was a big surprise for us, and made one soldier homesick for Arizona.
Near the shores of the two lakes in the center of Iraq, you actually get a fair amount of vegetation. Trees line the valley sides, long grasses grow and small farms flourish well out into the countryside.
Out in the desert, there was little besides the flat expanse of grit, gravel and dust for much of the year. In the winter months, it drizzled or rained maybe a third of the time, eventually turning the ground into a clay-ey muck. Around the beginning of December,when the rains were starting, I remember coming across a group of people huddled in a circle, staring at the ground. I nosed into the crowd and asked what was going on. One of them pointed. "Look, grass." I stopped and joined the crowd for a few minutes.
In the southeast, closer to Kuwait, you get more of the archetypical 'desert'. In the summer/fall months there are sandstorms that start in mid-morning, get worse in the afternoon and taper off around nightfall. To experience it for yourself, wait until August. Go outside and put up some heat lamps. A few more. Now get a big fan, one of those models they use for warehouses or factories. Turn it on whip-your-hat-off high. Have a friend stand behind it, dumping in beach sand by the handful. Welcome to the sandbox.
Near Baghdad, it rarely gets over 130. 150 in the summer is commonplace in Kuwait. At one point, according to the National Guard guys who'd been there since this kicked off, it was 150, humid and sandstorming. We asked how they coped. "Stay inside."
Sandstorms in the west are more of a fine dust that actually turns the air orange. One of my friends took a beautiful picture of a strangely-colored raid that I'll try and post to the Under Mars website Bradach mentioned here. During August-October, when the ground is absolutely parched, you get this weird moonscape-like scenery from the finely powdered clay that mounds up everywhere.
I didn't get the opportunity to see what it's like up north, in the Kurdish area and highlands. From what I'm told, it's actually much like Europe or America.
Did you meet any Iraqis? Get to be friends with them? Sample their food?
A number of them, mostly casually. There were kids who could scrounge whatever you wanted. There were policemen, town council members, sheiks, Iraqi soldiers and local contract labor that we dealt with daily. There were Iraqis who'd been vetted and ran internet cafes, souvenir shops, mini-marts, pizza and hamburger stands of dubious veracity, even barbershops for soldiers who got tired of barracks haircuts, all on various camps.
One of the soldiers in my unit 'adopted' a kid from a nearby village, who'd always recognize him as we got out of our humvees and run up to happily attach himself to the heavily armed and armored foreigner. Others, no doubt burgeoning scrounging experts, got whacked off the humvees with hands and blunt objects as they tried to steal whatever wasn't secured. (Remember, if you can pry it up, it's not fastened down!) "Gimme!" was a refrain echoed by children, oftentimes while their elders said the same thing in more flowery language during a meeting.
Baghdad itself has a strip that's sprung up in the Green Zone where you can get damn near anything, especially if you ask one of those kids. It reminded me vaguely of Seoul's cheaper shopping districts, but with a different flavor. Knives, tactical gear, cheap DVDs and expensive whiskey were common. Inside the camp there's a more regulated version of the same with more of a 'tourist trap' feel, though goldwork is a bargain and there are some incredible finds if you get lucky. If I'd had the cash on me, I'd have snatched up an 1800's officer's cavalry sword with scabbard for barely more than a hundred bucks.
We had several dozen locals who worked 'inside the wire' in the areas Bradach pointed out. We also had locally hired interpreters who could speak up to half a dozen languages.
As for becoming friends, I guess it would depend on how you'd define the term. Joke around with, exchange favors, sit down and eat a meal together, talk about what we're going to do the next time we get home, yeah, we did all that with the interpreters we worked with. If someone had a Maxim or Stuff magazine laying around, they'd borrow it- to practice their English of course. Some used their real names, some insisted we call them by a favorate nickname such as "Snake" or "Ace". Everyone else had a callsign so they wanted one too, and a cool one while they were at it! A few even carried weapons for personal protection, and loved being part of the unit.
But you never, ever, ever trusted them. When push came to shove, our loyalties were with each other and our country. Theirs were ultimately unknown, regardless of what they appeared to be.
Iraqi food can be very different from what we'd eat, and very similar. There are only so many ways to cook a chicken, though I've never had a rotissarie-style bird served whole on pita bread before.
Grains are popular, along with vegetables. Chicken was the most common meat I saw, though several giant western-style chicken farms nearby might have had something to do with it. The red meat I had tasted like teriyakee beef, which it may well have been. Coffee is very, very strong, almost like espresso.
Most of what I had was feast food, served at a banquet for at least semi-important guests. Even the kids table eats well on those days. I didn't get a chance to try much of the average Iraqi's diet, and I certainly wasn't going to get it from a place next to a camp. Anyone who's willing to take the risk and put up a restaurant there is going to max out his profits and stock foods the Americans will buy hand over fist.
Am I naive to ask such questions?
Naw, just human. I had several Iraqis ask me to describe what America looks like to them. I tried telling a Jordanian what I recalled of the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon, but I'm not sure he believed me. Imagine trying to describe to someone who has never seen anything but a few tens of miles of dusty clay desert what a snow-covered Rocky Mountain range looks like in winter as the first clear rays of the sun shine over it, a New Hampshire forest at the peak of the autumn foliage, the humanity-packed urban canyons of Manhattan, the vast farms of the Plains at harvest and a typical suburban neighborhood at Christmas.
The first time I tried, I realized how fortunate I was. Not for what I had, but for what I had seen and what I could imagine.
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