So This Is War [Mar 19, 2003]

I was going to use this space tonight to craft a searing parody of Andrew Sullivan, who, as you all may have guessed by now, is a major satiric target of my little website. The idea was to have my "character" begin in his study giving a narrative about the duty of great nations throughout history in times of war, throwing in some fake quotes from Gladstone and Orwell along the way. Gradually, I intended the monologue to deteriorate into Bush-speak about how we will not use"half-measures" in war, and then deploy some rote Bush-style fearmongering about how if we don't depose Saddam now, there will be another 9-11, only this one will be worse. Then, gradually, I would start raving madly, until nothing was left but war-like monkey cries.

It would have been funny, maybe. But I can't do that tonight. I can't waste my time right now on preening idiots like Andrew Sullivan, who had the gall to say to the L.A. Times that he would be "blogging around the clock during the war." Well, whoop-de-fucking-doo, asshole. Thank god for you. But I, for one, will not wait until your round-the-clock blogging begins just so I can shoot you, the world's biggest fish in the world's biggest barrel. This war, writ large, will never end. And I have other days to waste on making fun of you.

Instead I'm going to publish something by a soldier friend of mine who's currently serving in the U.S. Army but isn't in the Middle East right now. The testimony must go unbylined to protect his anonymity. But, as our noble Commander in Chief would say, make no mistake. He's a real person.

His unembedded voice, like those of other soldiers either free of the propaganda machine or brave enough to dance around it, needs to be heard now. If there are other soldiers out there, either former or current, who want to add something to this real discussion of war, as opposed to the hyper-intellectualized version of the war shat out daily by our pundit class, then please send me letters or testimony. And now, some writing by a man who actually have something to say. One word by him is worth a year of Andrew Sullivan and his goddamn 24-hour blog cycle:

I don’t think anyone, with the exception of some hapless Iraqis in Baghdad after tonight, really understands what it means when the United States Air Force decides to visit your neighborhood.

Sure, our soldiers on the ground are great and loyal and well-trained and tough as all hell just like we would expect red-blooded American boys (no girls in the infantry) to be. But having seen what kind of destruction the Air Force can bring to bear upon an enemy of the United States firsthand, I'm left with no question as to how we won the war in Kosovo before a single troop hit the ground.

A year ago this month, I was sitting on a ridge in Afghanistan hunting down Al-Qaeda stragglers in a valley near the Pakistani boarder. As I sat watching the sun set over the mountains to my east, I couldn’t help but admire the sheer size and majesty of one particular snow-capped mountain. It was certainly bigger than any “mountain” I had seen back home in East Tennessee and it stood out from the rest of the mountains.

And then I watched the mountain disappear.

A huge red fireball of flames and sparks and smoke shot up thousands of feet into the air where a B-52 had just dropped a giant “Daisy Cutter.” The twilight darkness covering the valley highlighted the incredible size of the explosion.

My best friend, one of my squad leaders, was sitting by my side while we shared an MRE. We watched the explosion, sat transfixed for a few moments, and then stared at each other in disbelief.

“Holy fuck,” I remember one of us stuttering.

And then we started to laugh. We laughed because we had seen what neither of us would have ever thought possible, a bomb devouring an entire mountain. We laughed because we had just seen an ass-whipping of epic proportions and hadn't been on the receiving end. We were alive, but whoever the fuck was over on the other side of the valley sure wasn’t. We laughed because there was no way a band of ragtag terrorists could possibly defeat any nation that could make a mountain disappear. Who ever heard of such a thing?

As it turned out, there wasn’t any band of terrorists who could match the USAF.

As we walked that valley in the days that followed, we saw the carnage wrought. In places, not a single tree stood. Cave systems, which had been built to withstand the Soviets twenty years earlier, were completely collapsed. We found a body part here. Another there. And here was a dead Chechnyan, without his head.

We saw Al-Qaeda who had survived the bombing too. One of my friends captured a soldier, disoriented, his brain matter oozing out his earlobes.

For all the criticism, “Shock and Awe” is actually a good way to describe it. Violence--violence on a scale most will never comprehend--is another.