Why We Fight, Why We Don't, And How We Lie To Ourselves

[EYE SPY]

MilitaryReflections

Why We Fight, Why We Don't, And How We Lie To Ourselves


A few thoughts on things military, roused by hype about our recent access of patriotism for the War on Terrorism, and maybe by one too many war documentaries on late-night television.


(1) Men seldom enlist from patriotism. They enlist in time of peace because they are bored, need a job, dream of travel, don't know what else to do with themselves, want to prove their manhood, or have heard lurid tales about the women in Hong Kong. Patriotism is at best an afterthought.

In time of war, reasons again vary. Some enlist to get the service least likely to see combat. During Viet Nam, the National Guard was popular for just this reason. Gutsier men will join because they want to see combat. They simply like the action. Some of these later become correspondents, and go from war to war. A few men, the ones who adhere to the elite commando outfits, carry with them an intense and angry aggressiveness for which they seek a acceptable outlet. They want to kill people.

None of this is patriotism. Nor is it a desire to save the world from communism, national socialism, slavery, or the misbehavior of the Japanese. The truth is that people do not care greatly about unpleasant political systems in places they have never seen. Truth, virtue, and morality are add-ons convenient for explaining things done for less noble reasons.


(2) Most men actively do not want to fight for their country, and will go to great lengths to avoid it. That is why in serious wars we need a draft. After the war, draftees may find it socially useful to discover that they were inspired by patriotism.


(3) Soldiers often have not the slightest idea why they are fighting. Oddly, they don't seem to care.

I doubt that one enlisted man in fifty could have found Viet Nam on a map. Nor could have much of the public on whose behalf they were said to be fighting. Few soldiers knew what communism was, other than a darkly threatening Very Bad Thing. Few could spell it, nor did they care. Books were available. They didn't read them. Nor, usually, did the public. Soldiers didn't care in the least whether the Vietnamese, whom they generally hated, lived under communism.


(4) Draftees go to war not because they are brave, but because they are not brave enough. It takes courage to volunteer for war. It takes courage, or at least decisiveness, to hide in Mexico. It does not take courage to be drafted. This is why it works. The draft relies on the principle that at each step, from reporting for training to getting irrevocably on the troop ship, it is easier to cooperate than to resist. A draftee may fight bravely. Yet he wouldn't have gone unless compelled.


(5) Much of America does not like its soldiers, or its military. The upper classes hold servicemen in contempt. The Ivy Leagues for example provide almost no volunteers. Parents near bases often forbid their daughters to date servicemen. Our grade schools expel boys for drawing soldiers. At the end of a successful war a maimed GI may get a week of drinks bought for him, but after that he just makes people uncomfortable. Veterans of Korea were ignored. Those from Vietnam were often despised.


(6) In democracies, prosecution of war depends on hiding the nature of war. On the History Channel we endlessly see the bombers of WWII flying over Europe, to stirring music, amid clouds pocked with flak, turrets blazing at incoming Messerschmitts. Bombs fall, flash-flash-flash, across the remote city below. It's an adrenal rush, exciting, and calls to something deep in the audience.

You don't see little Hans, far below and four years old, screaming because something wet and messy is oozing from Mommy's head and her eyes are funny and the fire is getting closer and why doesn't someone help him? Nor do you see the turret gunner with his intestines hanging out like greasy rope and blood pooling in low spots.
The anger such observations arouse in many military men is a dead giveaway of their discomfort. Governments know that if people saw much of this, they might not fight.


(7) American wars often begin, through unprepared ness and simple stupidity, with the pointless sacrifice of countless troops, which is usually explained as springing from the perfidy of the enemy. In WWI, WWII, and Korea we were utterly unready. Pearl Harbor occurred because we didn't bother to track the Japanese fleet.
Having bled our soldiers profusely because of inattention, we congratulate ourselves on winning in the long run. Stirring music again accompanies the congratulation.


(8) Officers, characterized by physical rather than moral courage, usually seem more interested in protecting their careers than the lives of their men. They will assault a beach, but won't open their mouths. The higher the rank, the more they behave like cheap politicians. I saw this many times when I covered the military.

For example, a pilot once wrote me saying that certain social policies were gravely damaging the capacity of his service to fight and would lead, in a serious war, to substantial military incapacity and loss of life. He then said for God's sake not to use his name or identify his unit. CYA. The same pilot flew many missions over Baghdad.


(9) After a war, veterans often dislike their own country more intensely than they do the enemy. A soldier goes to war, perhaps encouraged by martial bands and splendid uniforms, to fight someone he is told is the enemy. He returns missing a leg, wearing a colostomy bag, or remembering things that it is better not to remember.

He then finds that people at home have been partying and living the good life while he was bleeding, that they don't really care about him, that some laugh at him for having been stupid enough to go. And he no longer has anything in common with them. An impassable gulf separates him from the country.

Year by year as the war recedes, its apparent importance diminishes. The enemy, like as not, suddenly becomes an ally. Yet the soldier still has the colostomy bag, still sits in the wheelchair. He feels used by the happy people who stayed at home, decides that he was had, that somebody, he's not sure just who, maybe the whole country, played him for a sucker.

And he hates them for it.


www.fredoneverything.net

[zenmaster]

(1) If this true, then those who raise the flag outside their house aren't patriotic. This proves the author never served in the military.

(2) Once again, the author proves he has never been in the military or gone to combat. There are always a few who will not go, but the bad choices of the few should not blemish the heroism of the many.

(3) Once again, the author proves his (or her) lack of military service. Thanks for assuming your protectors are ignorant or uneducated. They are not. Most have more sense of the happenings of the world than college students. Even if they are ignorant, they are the product of the schools, not the military.

(4) This may be true- I wasn't around for a draftee military.

(5) Maybe the author despises the military, but most of America does not. True, there are some who stand against what I do, but most do not. It is too bad most Americans do not know enough about what veteran have given for them.

(6) This is partially true. Not enough of the bad sides of war are shown. In the recent past, an effort to show all sides of the story has appeared, especially in Hollywood.

(7) Yes, many men have died who shouldn't have. This usually results from a feeling of isolation; a feeling of security that results in the downsizing of the military.

(8) This is a reaction to the pressure to be PC and polite put upon officers by politicans and the unwillingness of the American public to accept that freedom isn't free- it requires some to make sacrifices to keep it alive.

(9) I have never seen this. When I returned from war, I appreciated my country and my freedom; having just seen those who do not have freedom or hope. Most bitterness towards one's country is caused by those who take their freedom for granted and casually say things that cause the veteran to feel like he sacrificed himself for naught.

[Herrmannek]

fredoneverything
this explains all, or maybe I should say everything

[spoonman]

This proves the author never served in the military.

check your facts there ace.

[Argyll]

It said he was a war correspondant........doesn't say he served at all Spoonman ;)

[spoonman]

It said he was a war correspondant........doesn't say he served at all Spoonman ;)

alright, i suppose it wasn't as obvious as i wanted it to be.


A Few Good Men

Tales From The Marine Corps Asylum




Today I'm going to tell you about how I used to be an amtrac herdsman. It will give meaning to your life. It's a service of this column.

This was in 1966 in Camp Pendleton, CA. Yours truly was a clueless Pfc. getting ready, like thousands of other kids, to ship out for Vietnam. We didn't know where Vietnam was. We didn't know what the war was about. To a Marine, these were technical questions. If you needed to know, you could ask someone in Admin.

Now, you have to understand that the military is the craziest, most bizarre institution known to man. Sometimes it sounds almost reasonable. It isn't. You find yourself in weird airplanes, and perhaps jumping out of them, or underwater in submarines like aquatic starships or roaring along in strange machines with huge guns, driven by last year's high school seniors. Usually nobody knows what is going on. That's so the enemy can't predict what you will do.

I was in Amtrac School. It means "amphibian tractor." An amtrac looks like a steel load of bread with tracks. They were something like nine feet high, eleven feet wide, and forty feet long, and never worked right because the Marine Corps never had enough parts. The idea was that if you wanted to invade in island with people shooting at you, which I usually didn't, the Navy would drop amtracs in the water, stuffed with 37 combat-equipped infantrymen. The trac would churn madly for the beach like a slow but earnest whale and drop the front ramp. The infantry would charge out and get machine-gunned. The trac would go back to the ship and get more. It made as much sense as anything else.

Trac school, like the Corps itself, was a short course in democracy. We had drawling Mississippians from the Delta, where the air turns smoky blue over the evening fields and stillness seeps from the ground. There were black kids from Chicago, from the deep city where they said the sun didn't shine, and clean-cut suburban Anglos like muscled Boy Scouts, and a Polack kid named something extensive like Wasloski who kept getting lovely Asian women tattooed on his forearms, and then on his upper arms. By the time we graduated he probably had them running down his back.

Every morning this cross-section of truck-stop America went down to the beaches, where the Pacific sprawled off toward China and gulls hung motionless on currents of air, and practice with the tracs. Mostly we practiced driving up and down and pulling one trac with another. We must have puzzled the gulls no end. It certainly puzzled me.

Now, an amtrac doesn't have an open top. When you're inside one, the noise is deafening -- roar of huge gasoline engine, grinding and thumping of the tracks, squealing hydraulics, metal rattling against metal, odd whining and warbling at the high end of hearing. An amtrac was like a boat that really wanted to be a railroad car. They smelled of oil and bilges. To talk to the other two crewmen, you had to wear headphones, making you look like demented pilots trying to fly a Dempster Dumpster. A machine gun poked out of a little turret with a periscope -- one of those old Browning .30 cals that reportedly sometimes worked.

You don't fully understand the word "screwy" until you've been in the driver's compartment of one of these ugly suckers, high above the sand, head poking from the steel hatch, wearing the ear phones so you look like Snoopy flying a Conex box. I remember wanting a red scarf. Anyway, one day I was supposed to drive the monster down the beach. Why, I didn't know. Things seemed fine where we were.

So there I was, last year's chemistry major, with a crazy Polack inside covered with Vietnamese women and a radioman named Toro Sanchez who barely spoke English. Having a communications guy who couldn't communicate made perfect sense in the Marine Corps. We were A Few Good Men. Nobody said anything about smart, sane, or, in a few cases, even sentient. (There was a tank at Pendleton with an all-Mexican crew, which I thought of as the Sancho Panzer, that nobody could talk to at all.)

So I stomped the accelerator. Wasloski was at the periscope, hollering over the intercom, "Fire One! Fire Two!" He apparently had decided that we were a torpedo boat. As it happens, "acceleration" is not the right word for the motion of an amtrac. The things are not agile. You give it the gas, and nothing happens. After a modest interval the grinding thump of the engine takes on an agitated sound: The machinery knows it is supposed to do something. The rumble becomes a howl. Black exhaust belches forth. Finally the tracks turn.

Stripling though I was, I knew madness when I lived it: Fred Reed, former student of bonding orbitals, shepherding this thundering box, a wandering scrapyard, with Wasloski firing torpedo spreads at passing tanks and the gulls wondering whether evolution hadn't made some terrible mistake.

Taking the beasts into the ocean was the squirrelly part. They floated only a foot or so above the water. Tracs always leaked. As seawater came in, the bilge pumps took it out. Little glass vision blocks in the sides were actually underwater. Waves broke over the top. It got spooky.

Part of our job was to load up with green troops just out of infantry school, and drive them around the ocean so they could have An Amtrac Experience. We'd drop the ramp on the beach. The grunts would jam in, carrying rifles and packs, till no one could move. They always looked unhappy. Taking this iron box into the water did not strike them as a good idea. Wasloski would stand under the machine-gun periscope. The ramp closed with a hydraulic squall as if it had just eaten something.

The engine howled and the monster crashed through the surf zone and we were . . . afloat. Barely. You could feel the unease of the infantry. Water leaked in, ominously. The grunts didn't know we had bilge pumps. The troop compartment was dim and a green undersea light came through the vision blocks. Waves washed over us. The grunts knew that if we sank, as seemed virtually certain, no one would get out.

Whereupon Wasloski, a certifiable sadist, peered into his periscope and hollered, "It's rough up here! Take her down to fifty feet!"

The grunts turned pea-green. Some of them may have died on the spot. They didn't know any better.


the above is from the self-same site.

[Haiw]

Check his biography; he even fought in Nam with the Marines and got a purple heart.

[EYE SPY]

http://prodtn.cafepress.com/5/9415915_F_tn.jpg



And quoted from his bio



After two years at Hampden-Sydney, where I worked on a split major in chemistry and biology with an eye to oceanography, I decided I was bored. After spending the summer thumbing across the continent and down into Mexico, hopping freight trains up and down the eastern seaboard, and generally confusing myself with Jack Kerouac, I enlisted in the Marines, in the belief that it would be more interesting than stirring unpleasant glops in laboratories and pulling apart innocent frogs. It certainly was. On returning from Vietnam with a lot of stories, as well as a Purple Heart and more shrapnel in my eyes than I really wanted, I graduated from Hampden-Sydney with lousy grades and a bachelor-of-science degree with a major in history and a minor in computers. Really. My GREs were in the 99th percentile.

[2Sheds_Jackson]

That vomitous piece of hand-wringing populist trash has all the insight and depth one can expect from a 6th grader. The author manages to trot out nearly every shopworn left wing talking point & tie it all up in a bow. I want my 2 minutes back.

[spoonman]

The author manages to trot out nearly every shopworn left wing talking point & tie it all up in a bow. I want my 2 minutes back.

rofl

you cannot really categorize his opinions, you should check his other articles. one of them is entitled "are white males gods?" and he does conclude that they may in fact, be gods.

[Argyll]

It said he was a war correspondant........doesn't say he served at all Spoonman ;)


:oops: ...............I nead reading glasses,as there's too much beer in the ones I'm using just now!

[Flagg]

It's an opinion piece....and regardless of how factually incorrect it may be....everyone is entitled to have one.

[Nawlins]

It's an opinion piece....and regardless of how factually incorrect it may be....everyone is entitled to have one.

Opinions are like a**holes...

[Vance]

It's an opinion piece....and regardless of how factually incorrect it may be....everyone is entitled to have one.

Opinions are like a**holes...
But not everyone has an asshole...

[Haiw]

Must be a big turn-off for Midtown teh Buttsexor... ;)

[Flagg]

I just had a brief glimpse of Wrong Said Fred's website......I've never heard of the guy before but to me he looks like he's trying to steal Hunter Thompson's mojo

[EYE SPY]

America's Tub-Thumping Patriots Are
Whooping It Up Most Frightfully Against France


By
Fred Reed




Sometimes a writer craves to bare his soul and lighten his burden of hidden sin — yes, to admit that he hasn't always lived as a Christian, that he has played cards in low dives, and done shameful things with floozies in foreign ports. He wants to make a clean breast of it before the world, to say, "There. You see me in all my sordid sorrow and moral wretchedness. Forgive me if you can." Well, I'm at that pass. I'm going to confess.

I like the French.

All right. I'll leave town. (Actually, come to think of it, I've left town.)

Yes, I've written harsh things about the French. The French like the French awfully well, and I figured that here was a teeter-totter that needed some balance to it. So I laughed at them. There was no malice in it. I was just being professionally disagreeable.

But now our tub-thumping patriots are whooping it up most frightfully against France. The reason? The French saw no reason to blow up Arabs in a contrived war of dissembled purpose. Neither did I. Nor do I remember that the French are corporals in our army. Anyway, if we don't support their opposition to the war, why shouldn't they oppose our support?

The patriots call the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." It's embarrassing-though not because they insult the French. I just wish we had a patriot who sounded more than eleven years old.

I grant you that the French are imperfect. They live on a reputation they do not deserve. I refer to their famous intolerance of visiting Americans, which is a tourist attraction, and listed in travel guides. One expects a Parisian to sight down his nose as if taking a measurement, sniff, and be supercilious.

But no. You cannot trust a Frenchman.

In former years I often went to Paris for the Air Show. Always the French were tiresomely civil. I had expected the heathen rudeness one associates with moral crusaders. I considered bringing a case at law: I had spent all that money in expectation of gorgeous churlishness, and didn't get any.

I waited everywhere for lightning to flash, for some spark to ignite the powder magazines of Gallic abrasiveness. Surely something would provoke them to vile manners. In particular I had been warned that they would not suffer Americans who had not been born with a perfect fluency in French.

The rascals would not perform. My wife of the moment entered a drug store in Paris to buy cough syrup. She thought she was asking for medicine, but was in fact asking for a doctor ("medecin"). The help were astonished as she went about peering at shelves, in the apparent belief that in France doctors were kept in little boxes.

When the mistake was understood, the French…laughed. They were friendly. They were helpful.

It was low treachery.

Patriots make much of the dismal record of the French in matters military. Well, yes. It's hard to argue with failure. I note however that the French have Germany on their borders, a condition associated with military failure for everybody enjoying the same circumstances. Americans cannot always distinguish between military prowess and the Atlantic Ocean. In fact a great many Americans cannot find the Atlantic Ocean.

The Yankee record in festive slaughter may not be quite as good as we puff it up to be. The United States came late to the parade of WWI after everybody else had done the fighting, and declared itself victorious. America won splendidly in WWII, drew in Korea, and lost in Vietnam. The United States has only a fairish record in wars against helpless countries: Lost in Cuba, Somalia, Lebanon, Cambodia, and Laos, but won in Grenada, Panama, Iraq I and, maybe, Iraq II and Afghanistan II.

In our percentage of wars won we rank high in the standings, and would make the playoffs, but on the percentages the British would be well ahead.

If the French have declined in war since Napoleon, they still have style. I wish we had some. Our current emperor always gives the impression that he has just finished eating a peanut-butter sandwich. His speeches sound like the winning entry in the seventh-grade elocution contest in Texarkana. By contrast, you can look at almost any French minister without suspecting that he was dressed by his mother, and the merest of them radiates an air of worldly understanding and intelligence that would get him jailed in America. A French cab driver has more class than a Congressman, and probably fewer gravy-stains.

The French respect intelligence, whereas we are deeply suspicious of it. I'm not sure that intelligence has much place in diplomacy, other than to let one make bad choices in better prose. Still, misjudgment engaged in with class at least makes better reading for later students of history. Whatever their failings, the French do not cultivate boorishness as a compulsory credential of democracy, lie systematically to their children, or endeavor to crush intellectual endeavor. We didn't either, once.

America used to have a brash, rough, leather-breeches style with a cornpone but genuine appeal. The genius of America was the pawky outsider laughing at European pretensions, the lethal wit of Twain, Bierce, Mencken, Hunter Thompson. The country wielded canny frontiersman like Davy Crockett, enjoyed the cracker-barrel shrewdness of Andrew Jackson, who figured you put Bourbon in branch water and not on thrones.

Thing is, backwoods virility doesn't well make the transition to suburbia. The American unease with ideas didn't sit badly on Huck Finn, Daniel Boone or, in the Heroic Age of American technology, the buzz-cut engineers working on Apollo. But put Tom Sawyer on Ritalin in deliberately crippled suburban schools to keep him from being a boy; teach him that to be manly is sexist and to be educated, elitist; wean him from independence and self-determination but give him nothing to replace them; rigorously discourage intellectual enterprise — and you get the polar opposite of a Frenchman.

Europeans, and assuredly the French, like to believe that the tremulous age of Europe makes them proof against the jejune lunging of the young United States. I see blessed little evidence of it. But there is something appalling in the ****ish anti-civilization now eagerly embraced by America. Much of our noisy patriotism is not readily distinguished from the bad temper of congenitally hostile louts. We have a president who probably thinks Oat Cuisine is something one feeds to horses. I'm not sure that, before we put our own house in order, we are a position to look down too scornfully on the French.

[WARPIG]

It's an opinion piece....and regardless of how factually incorrect it may be....everyone is entitled to have one.

Opinions are like a**holes...

Opinions are like a55holes.. and this article even smells like it.

[exoninja]

I think there is some truth to this.

And, if you've read the book Black Hawk Down, in it it once asked a soldier why he joined the army, he replied, "I wanna jump out of an airplane and shoot lots of ammo."

[Sir Zach of R.]

So do I but I also want to free the oppressed, protect the inocent, and kick Allah's ass. Oh and blow stuff up, can't forget that.

[angry cow]

"Few soldiers join the military for patriotism"????? WTF? The vast majority of people cite ideology as their number one choice for joining the military. Now I know this doesn't mean that people are necessarily telling the truth, but I could go to medical school if I wanted when instead I'm working on developing early arthiritis (You guys gotta see this article on the Army trying to lighten ruck loads, its 100% comedy) because of my personal beliefs.

To continue my rant, this guy may have served and seen combat, but he is also one of a loud minority that come out of the military whining. He joined lacking any purpose and direction in his life, some people find what their purpose is through military experience, but those who don't generally end up more lost than they were before. He also can only think in the most general of terms because hes talking about a war than ended 30 years ago. Hence, the 3 types of people, argument.

Special Forces-Commandos wanting to kill people? What a joke. Anyone who ever met a real BTDT knows that they care very much about the value of human life. More so than most people. I personally know a guy who wakes up with nightmares almost every night because of a horrifc night in Afghanistan. He jumps when a car backfires. But he would go back in a sec if they asked him too because he believes in the cause and he cares about his fellow soldiers.

Ugh, I can't take this anymore, maybe I should go kill some babies to vent my frustration, since that's apparently what I like to do. Bah wheres the smilie for "F Off"?

[Ichhabe]

So do I but I also want to free the oppressed, protect the inocent, and kick Allah's ass. Oh and blow stuff up, can't forget that.

Well, if you at one point in life get the oportunity to kick Allah's behind: then I'm sure he's going to turn you in to a virgin that have to do som Special sevices in his garden. ;)