Tabula Rasa (Michael Yon - warning link has some brutal war pics)

From Baghdad Recent mention of cooperation with Fox News kicked rumor into high gear, leading some long-time readers to lament my “selling-out” to a major outlet. Simultaneously, thousands of new readers via the Fox website have little idea why my work suddenly is featured there. This dispatch will hopefully quell both concerns. My website and Iraq coverage remain independent of all financial support save that of my readers. Here’s a brief on how I became witness to this war:

I grew up Florida. Joined the army for college money, made it into Special Forces and the same week I graduated from Special Forces “selection,” was accused of murder after a fistfight in a Maryland nightclub. Those charges were eventually dropped. Special Forces gave me shelter, taught me to speak German fluently and tried to teach me Polish. Among other topics, we studied insurgeIncy and counterinsurgency. I was on two A-teams. We trained to infiltrate extremely deep behind enemy lines, past the point where helicopters could extract us. The exfiltration plan included, “Hope to see you again, but nobody’s coming to get you.” I learned something about my country. We were not the wimps many people seemed to think; we were deadly serious about going into someone’s backyard when needed.

You had a BGEN as a mortar platoon leader, and he hasn't gotten a promotion since '81? He must have really pissed somebody off.

He was really, pretty good. How many LTs have you had that tried to teach you how to recognize Cassiopeia?

I once had a 2LT tank commander recently out of Hudson High who, looking for the night gunnery *white light* target for the .50 MG in his commander's cupola, managed to find the planet Venus in his NOD and tried to shoot it down, at which he failed.
Does that count?

I can't believe that I'm remembering this stuff. He had just graduated from the USMA at West Point before he was assigned to my platoon, IIRC.

During the 1993 Mississippi River flooding in and around St Louis, I was assigned to work with a USAF engineering Colonel who was a pretty sharp guy but had no knowledge of the Scott AFB area or facilities- between the two of us, we made a pretty decent team. Having been signed for several million dollars worth of radios that an NCO would need several lifetimes to be able to repay a statement of charges on, I had very reluctantly accepted a direct commission as a 2LT. After our initial relief effort of the Dauster Field airport at Creve Cour, MO was concluded, he headed back to Scott and I went to a nearby MO Army National Guard armory in hopes of grabbing a shower and using their phone, and maybe a meal. Since the Army Engineer School was at Ft Leonard Wood, not surprisingly the NG unit was an engineer outfit, quite busy with flood relief operations.

When I entered their 1SGTs office, I was greeted like a long-lost friend, and directed immediately to the COs office. It seems that the rising waters had taken out most of the bridges across the Mississippi resulting in a 150-mile drive to the one remaining usable, and most of the unit's platoon leaders and XO were on the other side. I was really, REALLY needed, this nice captain who was looking at me like a hungry wolf looks at a bunnyrabbit said, to handle commo for one of his platoons, and he and his first shirt would handle the other and command ops. I told him if my USAF bosses would okay it, it was fine by me, and we began burning up the DISN line to Scott, where I got a VOCG order to play castlebuilder until he got someone [anyone!] better qualified. The good news was that I had two dozen PRC-77 radios and a couple of PRC77Bs in my USAF station wagon, and had stocked up on a hundred or so batteries before I'd left. Coms was NOT a problem.

I met a nice little black NCO who'd be running his platoon while I was on the radios, and he introduced me to his crews; who seemed nicely confident and ready to go. I felt better when he told them that I wasn't *just* a USAF commo puke, but was former Army enlisted too; that seemed to end any ideas they might have had about killing and eating me.

But afterwards as we were cleaning out his armory's pop and candy bar machines, he told me I was the oldest second lieutenant he'd ever seen, and he figured I must have really fu#$ed up.

He was absolutely right.

Yon's reporting displays a basic bias that we are not able to win. He judges us doomed in Afghanistan and failed in Iraq.

The way we've squandered our initial successes in both theaters, I'd say he's right. Remember the treatment of a battalion commander, who having successfully performed his assignments during the move on Iraq then, as ordered, transformed his 700-person artillery battalion into infantry/MP footsloggers for patrold and residence searches, and did so without any fatalities among his unit, right up until the time that he was charged with a war crime and relieved of his command.

Both of these judgements are wrong and nothing anyone says by way of empirical evidence changes his judgment.

Could be Yon is noticing parallels with previous militarily successful counterinsurgencies [Algeria, Vietnam, Rhodesia] that became defeats via political sellouts. And he accurately sees another coming.

I think your conclusion is Yon's problem. He sees Vietnam coming.

I translate this as-- he will interpretively help it come along.

I think Afghanistan and Iraq have been catastrophic successes.

The anti war fools that dominate our discourse have suffered and absolutely stunning set of defeats. The easy roll back of the Taliban and the paper tiger army of Saddam has left the anti military culture of our time mad as hell.

Consequently, we are treated to the most absurd exaggerations of failure in these theaters in order to re establish the war is hopeless hell meme.

Carl Levin, the lead Dem in the Senate said a minimum of 10,000 US troops would die in the first six months of taking Bagdad.

That was just a shade wrong.

Al Qaeda promised to establish an Islamic Western office in the nation state of iraq. Now they have a four percent approval rating among the Iraqi public and they are getting whipped by everone from Anbar chieftains to Sunni Baathists of Bagdad.

The fact that mistakes have been made by the US are hardly as interesting as the COMPLETE FAILURE to report the crushing defeats of our enemies in AFghanistan and Iraq and the unsurpassed heroism of our American troops in achieving these victories.

Michael Yon can get a clue and start acknowledging the HEROISM that forms a thread of success. He does not need to supply the desperate subtext of Vietnam. It ain't there-- except for Al Qaeda. Mark my words, Iraq was Al Qaeda's Vietnam. They are done for.

I think your conclusion is Yon's problem. He sees Vietnam coming.

I translate this as-- he will interpretively help it come along.

That's sort of like being surprised when someone fleeing a burning building exits using the only available door. Yon is now in the position of Joe Galloway or Charlie Black after Vietnam; they went on to cover other conflicts admirably; we'll see what happens with Yon.

The Army similarly thought nasty things about Keyes Beech when his Chicago Daily News reportage blew the whistle on high-level misdoings and outright corruption during the Korean War, but it was clear that Beech was driven by a desire to protect the American soldiers who were suffering as a result. That sort of noble motivation is possible with Yon, but is certainly less apparent.

I think there are other interpretively possibilities for the Iraq war besides Vietnam. Indeed. In my Post #23 above, I suggested that the Algerian and Rhodesian counterinsurgencies offer interesting comparisons.

Stunning and amazing success or World War II are two rather substantial possibilities that have eluded Mr. Yon.

I don't think the Pacific campaigns offer a lot of similarities other than some dealing with the mindset needed for defeating an enemy willing to accomplish his mission with suicidal tactics; though the Japanese antiguerilla operations in the occupied Phillipines [particularly Luzon] offer some thought. But though neither Anzio, Metz or the Offensive in the Ardennes could be considered particularly successful, there is at least one possible example from the ETO: the July-August 1943 *Operation Husky* invasion, campaign and occupation of Sicily, by the U.S. Seventh Army and 1st Infantry Division under Patton and Sir Bernard Montgomery's British 8th Army. But that campaign concluded reasopnably successfully in just 37 days, and those who view Iraq as a *quagmire* have a point by comparison with the rapid relative success of Operation Husky.

The cost: the US lost 2,237 killed and 6,544 wounded and captured; the British suffered 2,721 dead, and 10,122 wounded and captured; the Canadians suffered 2,310 Casualties including 562 killed in action. But the fall of Palermo resulted in Mussolini's being deposed from power, bled troops from Hitler's planned his offensive near Kursk, and American troops still nervous from the pounding they'd taken in North Africa during the Kasserine Pass now had a campaignm in which they could take legitimate pride.

Unfortunately American soldiers were later found guilty of murdering seventy-three Italian prisoners of war at Biscari airfield, and 318 Americans were casualties of a single friendly fire incident. And the Three German Corps defending the island retreated in good order across the Strait of Messina to fight on in Italy; it was not an unqualified success. And we can wonder what reaction the American public would exhibit if we suffered 2200 dead in Iraq in a single month.

Let's be crystal clear. If it must be Vietnam then let's acknowledge that the fundamental premise of winning for the North Vietnamese was manipulation of America's discursive space to bring about withdrawal and abandonment.

I think this thought has surely occured to all journalists covering Iraq. Sorry, but that's NOT what they're taught in Journalism school, nor the accompanying liberal arts history courses to which they've been subjected.

In the Vietnam war the US, despite its huge wealth and power, was unable to defeat a colonial people. Ever since then the military tops in the US have been anxious to "remove the legacy" of Vietnam and show that the US cannot again be beaten. Although the intervention in the Gulf is primarily to secure imperialism's control over oil supplies, it is also designed to show the world the power of the US.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.