Posted on 04/08/2008 4:41:53 AM PDT by moderatewolverine
“This is my hardest deployment,” Marine Sergeant Cooley said as he unfastened his helmet and tossed it onto his bed. “We weren't trained for this kind of thing.” He's been shot at with bullets and mortars, and he's endured IED attacks on his Humvee, but post-war Fallujah is more difficult and more stressful than combat. He isn't unusual for saying so. Many Marines I spoke to in and around the Fallujah area said something similar.
“We're trained as infantrymen,” Captain Stewart Glenn said. “But here we are doing civil administration and trying to get the milk factory up and running.”
“We make up all this stuff as we go,” Lieutenant Mike Barefoot added.
While most Americans go to school, work traditional day jobs, and raise their families, young American men and women like these are deployed to Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan where they work seven days a week rebuilding societies torn to pieces by fascism, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and war. It is not what they signed up to do. Some may have geeked out on nation-building video games like Civilization, but none of the enlisted men picked up any of these skills in boot camp.
(Excerpt) Read more at michaeltotten.com ...
"We make up all this stuff as we go," Lieutenant Mike Barefoot added.
So much for Bush's 2000 campaign promise to avoid using the military for silly nation-building campaigns.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke
If we're going to be doing this kind of stuff with any chance of long-term success, our military needs to be bigger than it presently is. And I mean a lot bigger, not just a few thousand troops.
quote only really applies when there was a plan in the first place.
Totten’s “dispatches” are first hand reports, not the commentary found in editorials, IMHO. Other than that, thanks for posting.
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