Definition of Terrorism

"Terrorism is not a group, not an ideology, but a tactic. A war on a tactic, without a defined enemy, signifies no ending, and an endless undefined war is regarded by many as a state of terror."

p. 22

NUPIReport [2008]
The Geopolitics of ‘Hearts and Minds’: American Public Democracy in the War on Terrorism

By Anja Sletteland
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

I don't think I've read anything that so simply and succintly describes what terrorism is, and how by making these words part of our habitual culture do we lose sight of what exactly we are doing, and why.

The Ugly Americans: How Not to Lose the Global Culture War

 Martha Bayles from C-SPAN on FORA.tv
Watch the full lecture here 

The Ugly Americans: How Not to Lose the Global Culture War
By Martha Bayles

On December 4, Martha Bayles. delivered the fourth of the 2006-2007 Bradley Lectures.

At the outset, I should say that my book is very much a work in progress. I'm only midway through the research and cannot pretend to have all the answers. But I'm working hard on collecting most of the questions.

The current debate over America's declining reputation has focused on "public diplomacy," a term coined in the 1960s by Edmund A. Gullion of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and perhaps most fully articulated by the U.S. Information Agency in a statement recently quoted by William P. Kiehl, editor of an excellent new book from the Public Diplomacy Council called America's Dialogue with the World:

Public diplomacy seeks to promote the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad.

Inherent in this definition is a tension between "informing," in the sense of objective reporting, and "influencing," in the sense of shaping a "message" to win foreign support for U.S. policies. The first is modeled on the journalistic ideal of truth-telling, the second on the need for propaganda--or, to use the preferred military term, "strategic communications." Both of these aims are legitimate, but obviously they pull against each other. And the resulting tension is not likely to be resolved any time soon.

But this is not my topic. My topic is the cultural dimension of America's image--or if you prefer, the image of American culture in the world. The USIA definition does not include the word "culture," but during the Cold War, this and other agencies of the U.S. government (including the CIA) practiced a vigorous "cultural diplomacy" in the sense of fostering educational and scholarly exchanges; sponsoring artist and writer tours; and supporting libraries, translations, intellectual publications, and scholarly conferences.

Why, then, does "culture" scarcely appear in the many reports on "public diplomacy" published in Washington since 9/11? The easy answer is that unpopular foreign policies cannot be made popular by a sprinkling of cultural pixie dust. But in the battle for hearts and minds against radical Islamism, not to mention resurgent anti-Americanism elsewhere, cultural diplomacy--and an awareness of how American culture impacts others--is crucial, because in the long run, it is mainly through culture that one group of people judges the humanity of another.

There is growing evidence of a cultural dimension to global anti-Americanism. For example, the political scientist Giocomo Chiozza has revisited the data in the Pew 2002 Global Attitudes Survey and found a surprising trend. As he writes, "movies and television are arguably the two main venues that have defined the United States as a popular icon." Yet the data suggest a "striking" degree of "dislike of American popular culture among those individuals who had a favorable opinion of the United States: about 38.2 percent of the people who were mildly supportive of the United States disliked its music, movies, television, and about 29.5 percent of those with a very high opinion of the United States thought likewise of its popular culture."[1]

Dig, dig, dig...Mind Games

Mind Games ~ By Daniel Schulman

Columbia Journalism Review May/June 2006

Excerpt
...
The weaponization of information is not original to the war in Iraq, nor is it unique to any military engagement during what has come to be known as the information age. Journalists have always encountered wartime spin, they have been the targets of propaganda and selective leaks, and, on occasion, have been used for purposes of deception (which has resulted, in certain cases, in saving the lives of American soldiers). In The Art of War, which remains an influential text among military strategists though it was written during the sixth century B.C., the Chinese general Sun Tzu writes: "All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe that we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near."

In Iraq then, and indeed in the broader war on terror, it is not the use of information as a weapon that is new, but rather the scale of the strategy and the nature of the targets. Increasingly, the information environment has become the battlefield in a war that knows no boundaries, its offensives directed not just at the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, or at regimes that take an adversarial posture to U.S. policy, but at the world at large. Technological advances, meanwhile, have made access to information instantaneous and ubiquitous, erasing longstanding barriers, legal and otherwise, that in the past have protected the American public and press from collateral damage in propaganda campaigns.

In addition, the aggressive manner in which this administration has pursued its information campaigns has in some cases blurred the bright line between two distinct military missions - providing truthful information about the war to the press and public, and waging psychological warfare. This blurring raises questions of credibility not only for the military but also for the press, which has been, on occasion, an unwitting conduit for psychological warfare campaigns. No reporter is immune to this. Nor is any reporter's public. In April, The Washington Post reported that Dexter Filkins of The New York Times had been used as part of a psychological operation intended to play up the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda's operations in Iraq, in the insurgency. A story leaked to Filkins in February 2004, according to the Post, was part of a larger effort - aimed mostly at the Iraqi press - to exploit Iraqis' distrust of foreigners by exaggerating the importance of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, and the foreign element he represents. The Post suggests that this effort goes beyond Zarqawi and beyond Filkins, too. Internal military briefings, according to the paper, "indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war."

More than ever, information warfare is a military imperative. The problem is that in the government's haste to sow democratic seeds in the Muslim world, it has at times forsaken the very principles it has sought to proliferate. "They are screwing with democracy," Sam Gardiner told me.

Indeed, after the Lincoln Group's Pentagon-funded propaganda campaign, in which Iraqi media outlets were paid to run stories written by military information operations troops, was uncovered in late November, the Defense Department announced that it would consider whether it must amend its current guidelines on communications and information warfare. In many ways, this could be a turning point.
 ...

Source

Digging a little deeper

“Who and Where Is Major Ben Connable?” is a piece of commentary by Jim Freeman, asking exactly that. Rather amusingly it got a defensive response from one of Connables friends.

I do have to say, the language of both Freeman and ‘defense’, although cooly formal and somewhat overly polite has a real undertone of disdain and suspision. It’s kind of unnerving to hear grown men, men in authority and responsibility, speak quite intolerantly to eachother. I think it says a lot about the divide between the military and the public they are in service to.

Who and Where Is Major Ben Connable? ~ Jim Freeman asks some questions…

He seems to moan about Connable not having a lot of Google hits - into the 100s, whereas his name gets into the 1,100,000s. Which is a bit weak, as Freeman is a more common name than Connable. Duh? What he does find doesn’t satisfy what he’s looking for. Obviously, Connable is a serving marine, any detail further than basic is understandable. But I do share Freemans need for some sort of credibility check, if the guy is going to put himself out there, then he should expect questions, questions and more qs.

I completely agree that Connables articles do have elements that seem quite contrived. But then again, he is a marine major and is probably been fed on language like this for most of his career - also if you’ve heard guys like this talk publicly, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any hint of cynicism or sarcasm, they’re pretty straight talking no bullshitters.

Following Up on the Elusive Ben Connable ~ Connables friend & Freeman tête à tête
Major Ben Connable Checks In ~ Connable responds via his friend

A Marine sees what defeatists don't ~ USATODAY
The Truth On the Ground ~ Washington Post

Perceptions from the ground

It always seems strange that the perceptions of people on the ground differ so much compared to the news reporting. Then you remember that these news stations all have their own political agendas, alliances as well of course satisfying who ever pays their salaries with ratings. But in the end, they are there to give you the news, news meaning the most shocking, horrible, violent, sensational and exciting stuff - skewed, overblown, hysterical or not. The ultimate in reality tv.

But then again, Connable is an officer afterall and that means management - and who trusts management these days? He no doubt has his own reasons - namely keeping his part of the marine corps running as smoothly as pos. Connable had a few articles published at this time in Iraq, all seemed to be efforts to counter the scale of the chaos and violence aired, often in real-time, on our screens.

It's 2012 now, things seem to have quietened down in the media about Iraq...but that's just in the media.

Note: Who is this John B. Dwyer? A google search turns up a few notable military history books, and maybe more importantly a load of articles published on American Thinker - a conservative online magazine. Reading a few of his pieces, there is no doubt on where he stands - well away from me.

Leatherneck.com - posted by thedrifter ~ 27 Feb 2006

Major Ben Connable writes from Iraq, via John B. Dwyer. He debunks many media myths and supplies essential perspective to the news coverage of the Sunni-Shia violence.

I'm still in Iraq, safe and sound at Camp Fallujah. I still feel very far removed from the war even though I am fully immersed in its minutia for about 15 hours every day. At Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi, right on the edge of the river along the northwest of the city, I could smell, taste, and feel Iraq even when I couldn't get outside the gate. The call to prayer echoed across the water and the occasional stray round would hit the camp. For all the downsides, living in Ramadi kept me close to the problem at hand. It's hard to believe that Fallujah of all places is calm, but there it is.

And calm it remains. I catch the TV news for a few minutes each day at the chow hall, and we have an open source cell here that pushes all the major articles over from CNN, FOX, Reuters, etc. I couldn't help but have a strong sense of deja vu as I watched the stern faced premonitions of doom and read the dramatized, overwrought literary panic attacks over the past few days. April 2004 feels like yesterday — the Shia' were revolting, the country was collapsing into civil war, the government was going to collapse, our experiment in Iraq was drawing to a close... sound familiar? I wrote the following article during the worst of those days:

Things are never, ever as bad here as they appear on television. It would be very hard to characterize the events of the last week as "good."

Conversely, it is far too easy to paint them as an utter disaster drawing us inexorably towards certain doom. here's a middle ground that remains uncharted. Some thoughts on the current situation in Iraq.— The mosque was blown up, the Jaysh al—Mahdi in the greater Baghdad and southern areas of Iraq have killed some people, and there have been demonstrations. All this is true. The fear amongst both Sunni and Shia' is real. The potential for civil war exists, just as it always has, and just as it does in many countries around the world. With that in mind...

— Nearly every recent Iraq story on T.V. or the newspapers is inaccurate in some way large... and large. The numbers are inflated, the damage exaggerated, the estimates are misleading, and the predictions are based on pure conjecture, often by people far removed from the problem. One demonstration that was listed as 10,000 people was actually 2,000. One demonstration listed as violent was actually peaceful (in Iraqi terms — nobody hurt). Far fewer mosques were damaged than first reported.

— The photos and images are the worst of the worst. Nearly every news channel and website has lead the Iraq story for the past few days with either a shot of an angry, emotional demonstration or armed men prowling the streets. One is left with the impression that this is happening on a massive scale — the images reflect the situation in the entire country. In reality, only a few neighborhoods in Baghdad and the southern cities have seen the worst of this activity. The vast majority of protests were peaceful, dispersed peacefully, and often reflected anger at the attack and not at members of the opposite sect.

— There was a combined Sunni—Shia' demonstration against the attack and the retaliatory violence, and a joint prayer session with Sunni and Shia' in the same mosque making a similar statement. Minor blurbs at the bottom of stories on the third page...

— The Iraqi military and police forces have held together and in a great many cases (with exception) they are doing their jobs. This should be one of the feature stories on the nightly news, but it barely received mention. In 2004, the Iraqi military and police all but collapsed. The fact that Shia' soldiers who make up a vast majority of the troops have (in the vast majority of cases) stayed at their posts, held back Shia' militiamen, and prevented an increase in the violence is remarkable. When our Marines ask the Shia' troops who they live and work with out here in al—Anbar what they think about this whole thing, they typically express concern but have no desire to leave their posts or join the fight. There are exceptions to every rule, but that's the majority opinion.

— How about in al—Anbar, the most violent province? What kind of internecine violence are we seeing here? The answer might surprise you: five peaceful protests of about 150 people each. Things have been remarkably calm in our neck of the woods aside from the normal attack patterns. We don't make the news this week because the reporters are in Baghdad mesmerized by the sight of damaged mosques, militiamen, and demonstrators. Everyone is seeing the country through their eyes.

— What about the talking heads? I saw two great examples yesterday. A "former CIA operative" replete with white turtleneck sweater and tweed jacket said that we were heading for civil war. A professor of Middle East studies from the University of Michigan said, "I lived in Beirut back in the 1970's, and this is far worse than anything I ever saw." Neither of these guys is in Iraq right now — they're getting their news from the NYT and CNN. And they are drawing the same conclusion I probably would be drawing if all I saw was the US press. In effect, they're getting paid to reinforce the hysteria and they're playing along.

I urge everyone to let things settle out a little bit — they always do. This is the way Iraqis express themselves. As horrible as that sounds, it's true. Everyone here is calmly watching how the security forces perform, and I haven't heard one Marine veteran express concern over civil war. The Marines watching the news at the chow hall are often shaking their heads in disbelief. My friends in Baghdad are concerned, but mostly about how this is going to effect their operations and troops. These are immediate operational concerns, not the reflections of strategic panic.

The politicians and religious leaders are talking to each other and calling for calm. Even Sadr is trying to keep things reined in. We see report after report indicating that Iraqis on both sides understand that the attack on the mosque in Samarra was an attempt by Zarqawi to divide the Iraqi people. There is danger here, but also opportunity. This is a chance for the Iraqi troops to prove their professionalism, a chance for the politicians to prove their strength, and a chance for everyone to take a step back and see what can happen if they're not willing to negotiate and work together.

This event also offers a unique glimpse into what Iraq could become if we withdraw and leave the Iraqis to fend for themselves. The Iraqi troops are performing well now because they know that we'll back them up if things get out of hand. I think that they realize this is a test for them and for their commanders, and they're getting an opportunity to handle a difficult situation with a safety net. I also think they don't want to see their country sink into civil war.

The potential is always there. This could certainly get worse. We may find ourselves in the middle of a disaster. It is also possible that this event could help settle issues and bring the Iraqi people closer together in some ways. Anything is possible. Just remember that the predictions of probable civil war are coming from the same folks who predicted civil war in 2003...and 2004...and 2005. I believe that's called "crying wolf."

Blitzer?

Source 1
Source 2

Culture Warriors

An interesting article by marine (of course) Major Ben Connable. Not having any idea of how the military worked, this was a bit of an education in the some of the differences between the marine corps and the army, as well as background history of COIN (counter-insurgency) within the USMC. Connable does sound like he's blowing his own trumpet, but heyho he is a marine afterall. Military people seem to be good at that.

Culture Warriors:

Feb 7, 2008

Marine Corps Organizational Culture and Adaptation to Cultural Terrain
by Maj Ben Connable

As Soldiers and Marines began returning from Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003, a grass roots debate erupted over the ability of our military to operate amongst indigenous cultures. Lessons learned in irregular warfare campaigns dating back to the early 20th Century had not been sufficiently institutionalized to prevent our troops from making thousands of grievous cultural errors in the Global War on Terror, or the "Long War." The services responded to this critical failure with a deluge of cultural and language programs. The Marine Corps, with a rich tradition of cultural study and decades of experience fighting at the outreaches of the American empire, is well suited to take the lead in developing and institutionalizing the kinds of military cultural competencies required to achieve victory in the Long War...

Read / download the rest from Small Wars Journal: Culture Warriors

There Are Realistic Alternatives ~ Gene Sharp

Oh no, not another anti-war pacifist intellectual!? Well that's what I thought when I first heard about this guy. Then I came across Ruarrdh Arrow's film on Current TV and was surprised to find that Gene Sharp's most avid proponent is a US Army infantry colonel of 30 years service, a decorated Vietnam veteran and most definitely not a pacificist. What better credibility could you get?

Gene Sharp's books are available for order or FREE download from The Albert Einstein Institution - http://www.aeinstein.org/

How To Start A Revolution : A Film By Ruarrdh Arrow

The End of 'War'

What is it good for?

General Sir Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force and Martin Shaw's The New Western Way of War show how western leaders fail to grasp the nature of modern warfare, says Martin Woollacott

Martin Woolacott

The Guardian, Saturday 12 November 2005

It seems tautologous to say that there is something wrong with war. Morally wrong, of course, but also wrong in the sense that the function of this dangerous, expensive and ethically dubious institution has become increasingly unclear in the past half century. Wars have, on the whole, ceased to deliver the clear resolutions of human conflicts which, for all their costs, they once did. Now we still have the costs, but not so often the resolutions. This is true of all societies, but western countries have a particularly tortuous recent record of largely unsuccessful warfare.

When western armies lose, doesn't that mean that others win, and therefore that war is still useful to them? Not necessarily, because a frequent outcome is that the conflict continues, even though the war ends. About the only thing that is clear in the muddled landscape of historical relics, irrelevantly advanced technology, nuclear pretence, old symbols and new threats is that war still kills people. That is why it is so important to try to understand what is going on.

These books - one by a soldier trying to wrest some continuing purpose for his profession and one by an academic who believes that the west's attempts to reshape the military instrument have failed - are both very worthwhile efforts to map difficult ground. Though they come to somewhat different conclusions, some arguments and categorisations are strikingly similar. Soldier and sociologist are looking at the same scene, as indeed many others have done, most notably the Israeli military thinker Martin van Creveld, whose On Future War opened up many of these themes more than a decade ago.

"War no longer exists," Rupert Smith proclaims in his very first sentence, by which he means that the industrialised clash of mass armies inaugurated by Napoleon, which culminated in the two world wars, will never happen again. What will also not happen, obviously, is the city-smashing fight we supposedly prepared for during the nuclear confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union, although "lesser" nuclear exchanges between new nuclear powers are unfortunately still a possibility. Smith makes these points so strongly because he believes that political and military leaders and their publics, in the west, are still wedded to the structures and expectations of industrialised war. They are wedded to the assumptions - but also increasingly unable to provide the men, the motivation and the industrial muscle that once went with them. In the range of conflicts the world has actually experienced over the past half century, and particularly since the end of the cold war, armies of this kind have often not done well and governments with these expectations have usually been disappointed.

In the confusion of both purposes and means, it is not surprising that soldiers have found it hard to land a telling military blow. Smith, for instance, was the only UN commander in Bosnia ever able to do so. He did so by quietly building up his forces, by discreetly circumventing the intentions of most of the governments whose troops and guns he commanded, by analysing the capacities and character of his opponent, the Serb general Ratko Mladic, and by successfully deceiving him. The artillery and air strikes he organised in 1995 on Serb forces around Sarajevo, followed up by ground forces, broke the siege of the Bosnian capital. They helped to push the Bosnian Serbs on to the defensive and led on to the Dayton settlement, although Smith is honest enough to say that concurrent Croatian and Bosnian advances were the primary cause of the shift.

Bosnia was a case where the intervening powers literally had no strategy, and in this limbo Smith had to craft the framework for action that his political masters so signally failed to provide. In other circumstances the political will is there and it is all too easy to land the telling military blow, as in Iraq in 2003, but the resulting military victory does not bring a political resolution. As Smith says, an inadequate overall strategy is as bad as or worse than no strategy at all and is most likely to produce the paradoxical combination of military success and political failure, as shown, at least so far, in places like Iraq and Chechnya.

Smith calls the new kind of conflicts "war among the people". They are fights, he says, which, even if successful from the western point of view, usually provide only a step towards the desired end, rather than delivering it at once by military means. They are fights taking place among the people, both in the combat arena and in the world at large. (This is one reason why the media are even more important than in previous conflicts.) They are fights that are often episodes of violence in a long process of confrontation rather than definitive struggles. They are fights where the conventional side, especially if it is western rather than, say, Russian, Indian or Chinese, tries hard to keep both its own casualties and its equipment losses to an absolute minimum. They are fights involving the constant adaptation and reshuffling of weapons and tactics designed for other purposes. And they are fights in which the sides are rarely single states, but rather multinational coalitions and sub-state parties and movements.

There are striking similarities between some of Smith's and Shaw's principles. Smith's "among the people" is close to Shaw's idea of "global surveillance war", in which a conflict is fought under the critical gaze not only of the people among whom it is being waged and the people in intervening nations but of the world as a whole. Above all, Smith's emphasis on force protection chimes with Shaw's central concept of "risk-transfer war". But where Smith sees this as simply a logical consequence of the value and scarcity of military assets in western societies, Shaw goes beyond that to identify what he regards as the key problem at the heart of the way recent conflicts have been conducted by western countries.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, Shaw believes, the west came up with a formula for making war that was felt to be both sustainable at home and likely to be effective. It used technical superiority and, in particular, air power, to destroy enemy combatants without incurring serious casualties. Indeed, it privileged its own military personnel to the point of a readiness to inflict "collateral" damage on civilians that could otherwise have been avoided. It used new ways of controlling the media, including embedding reporters, to dominate the "narrative" of wars, so as to build support at home and suppress the views of opponents. In this way, risks have been transferred from politicians to their soldiers, then on to enemy soldiers and finally to non-combatants. These were wars with varied purposes, but many liberals were attracted to the idea that the military could be used to stop conflicts and to discipline or even unseat oppressive regimes.

Kosovo was the acme of such wars, with not a single allied soldier lost. The Falklands, much earlier, was close. The two Gulf wars seemed to fit the template - but not if you saw them as one conflict and counted the civilian losses not only of the two periods of combat but of the sanction years and of the occupation, a still mounting total. Shaw's conclusion is that even when such wars "work", they are still degenerate. When they do not, the degeneracy is compounded, and when terrorists strike in western capitals it is clear they have understood the vulnerabilities the new way of war was intended to protect as well as their opponents have. Shaw concludes by calling for the strenuous avoidance of war, even if the use of force is sometimes unavoidable. Smith concludes by calling for force to be used only when it is fitted into more realistic and more responsible political strategies. In the end, there is not much in it. There are no magic, painless wars, and we are at a point, both agree, for reassessment and reflection.

Like Father Not Quite Like Son

Texas Monthly March 2006

Sam Mendes' film Jarhead, on the DVD was a great commentary extra of William Broyles Jr. and Anthony Swofford (the writer of the original book). He mentioned his son being out there in Iraq...

No Direction Home
by David Broyles

WHEN I WAS IN IRAQ, I couldn't wait to leave. Now, driving home to Texas, I wish I'd never left. Earlier today, I stuffed my car full of green military-issue duffel bags; the past four years of my life fit inside six of them. Then I changed out of my uniform and passed through the gates of Moody Air Force Base, in Georgia, for the last time.

The boots I threw in my trunk have desert and dirt stuck in the treads, pieces of Afghanistan and Iraq mixed with Georgia swamp. My favorite pair is stained with helicopter hydraulic fluid from flying over Baghdad with my feet hanging out the door, and next to those are my wet-suit booties, which still have mud from a canal near Fallujah, where we dived for bodies. I kept some others too. I did a lot of things wearing all those boots; I did a lot of things I never would have done before.

On September 10, 2001, a few months after graduating from college, I went to sleep not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. The next morning, I woke up and I did. I signed up for the hardest job in the military I could find: Air Force pararescue. Navy Seals with stethoscopes, as they've been called, their job is to save lives, not take them. Their motto is as apolitical and unambiguous as their mission: "That Others May Live." Pararescuemen, or PJs, live and sometimes die by those words.

The two-year PJ qualification program is famously difficult: Nine out of ten don't make it through. After basic training, I was there, and I was in over my head. During a tough pool session a few weeks in, the guy in front of me nearly drowned. Already hypoxic, he had had to swim fifty meters underwater, recite the pararescue mission between gasps, and then try to swim fifty more. Halfway, he'd spasmed and sunk. As they pulled his limp body from the water and worked to revive him, I relaxed. No way we'd keep going.

"Broyles!" the instructor yelled. "You're up! Go!" It was the first time I pushed the bubbling fear down, swallowed my own vomit, and did the thing that needed doing.

After the instructors put the trainee on oxygen, he came back to life, and before he'd stopped coughing up water, he'd quit. In two hours, six more were gone. One of them, a star athlete, lost it and started whimpering like an animal, and they carried him away. We never saw him again.

"Look at that sun, men!" barked our instructor at the end of the day.

"While you were crying about how hard training was, two of your PJ brothers died today doing the real thing."

He shifted and the sun blinded me.

"Enjoy this sunset," he said, "because they can't. Now, drop!"

We fell into the push-up position and knocked out the usual fifty, plus two more in honor of Ridout and McDaniel, the PJs who'd been killed. In a few weeks, we added another for Cunningham; he was shot through the abdomen during a rescue but saved ten lives before bleeding to death. Then there were two for Maltz and Plite; they died on a mission to save two Afghan children. I wondered if I'd be able to make the same sacrifice. I wondered if anyone would do push-ups for me.

Back on Interstate 10, I pull over on the shoulder somewhere between Alabama and Louisiana. Suddenly I don't feel like driving. I study the backs of my hands on the wheel and listen to the rush of passing traffic. Maybe if I never get where I'm going, I can still go back to where I've been.

On my first mission in Iraq, a soldier was trapped underneath an overturned Humvee near Kirkuk. And my main concern, beyond his survival, didn't have anything to do with insurgents: Jesus, I thought, please don't let my boots come off in this mud, not in front of this guy we're supposed to rescue, not in front of his buddies waiting for us to savehim.

Slipping and struggling to move, with their eyes on me, I felt like an impostor. My biggest contribution was grabbing a backboard and throwing it down in front of us. When we stood on it, our boots didn't sink into the mud anymore.I was disappointed in myself, but it didn't last. In Iraq the desert sand scoured away all the bullshit, and what was left was what mattered. The heat melted the big ideas and the bluster of the talking heads back home but not the guy next to me; he just kept sweating. The bullets and mortars uncluttered the view, and I saw the world in sharp relief. I saw it as it truly was. Sometimes, in those rare moments, I saw myself too.

In a war now so lacking in clarity, clarity is what I found.

On the highway, that bright awareness fades. The politicians and pundits and proud citizens are chattering on the car radio; they're on the bumpers of Buicks and the truck-stop televisions. The closer I get to home, the louder their voices become and the farther away I feel.

In high school and college I had friends. In the military I had brothers. I didn't always know their hometowns or what their parents did for a living, but I knew that Tommy wished he were taller and that he would break his back for you if you asked. I knew that when Wes was pissed, he smiled only halfway and talked with an even slower surfer'sdrawl. I knew that Zach got moody away from his wife but that Copenhagen and shooting helped.We had to know each other. On a moonless night over the Atlantic, with parachutes on our backs and fins on our feet, there couldn't be any questions between us.

The first man out of the plane had to pull his rip cord after five seconds, the second man after three, and the rest immediately. If someone didn't, there'd be a collision, and we'd burn into the water. Under canopy, it was all black and the sea flowed into the sky and you couldn't see the guy flying in front of you. You had to listen for the flapping of his chute and trust he wouldn't slam into you and drop you both like rocks. After we'd splash down and swim free of our lines, we knew who'd chase down the rescue package, who'd inflate the boat, and who'd prep the engine. We knew none of us would panic and sink under the swells or choke on the rotor wash of the helicopter when it came. And after it was all over, we knew which guys liked Heineken and which liked Shiner.

As I pass through Beaumont, I glance at the empty seat by my side. For the first time in four years, I'm on my own. The smell of oil blows through the vents, and I wonder if I'm driving away from those guys for good.

I tell myself that this is what I wanted. All those times I was tired, cold, and afraid, I wanted to go home. But at three in the morning, when I pull into my driveway in Austin, the garden seems strange. The door looks different. Was the mailbox always that color? I don't know this place.

A few days before I'd left Iraq, after my third and final deployment, we had one last mission: A Marine patrol had been hit by an IED. This time, I was team leader, and this time, I did my job and did it well. I finally felt like a PJ. Now I'm growing my hair out. I haven't shaved. I'm lounging on the sofa in pajama pants and flipping through seven hundred channels of cable television. There's nowhere to go, no one to impress, and nothing to do. I feel comfortable, I feel safe, and I feel like the bones have been ripped from my body.

In four years of service, I learned more than I ever did in college. When it was over, I didn't get a diploma, and there was no commencement speech. I packed up and drove away. I put my boots in storage.

They don't fit anymore.

Why Men Love War

I've finally found this article that I've heard referred to more than a few times...William Broyles is a well known screenwriter, rather surprisingly wrote The Polar Express (saw last x'mas) and not so surprisingly wrote the screenplay for Jarhead, Apollo 13, Flags of Our Fathers and the series China Beach (which I have never heard of until now).

I've posted about William previously here: The Road to Hill 10

Esquire, November 1984

Why Men Love War

By William Broyles Jr.

I last saw Hiers in a rice paddy in Vietnam. He was nineteen then--my wonderfully skilled and maddeningly insubordinate radio operator. For months we were seldom more than three feet apart. Then one day he went home, and fifteen years passed before we met by accident last winter at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. A few months later I visited Hiers and his wife, Susan, in Vermont, where they run a bed-and -breakfast place. The first morning we were up at dawn trying to save five newborn rabbits. Hiers built a nest of rabbit fur and straw in his barn and positioned a lamp to provide warmth against the bitter cold.

"What people can't understand," Hiers said, gently picking up each tiny rabbit and placing it in the nest, "is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I can't tell anybody."

Hiers loved war. And as I drove back from Vermont in a blizzard, my children asleep in the back of the car, I had to admit that for all these years I also had loved it, and more than I knew. I hated war, too. Ask me, ask any man who has been to war about his experience, and chances are we'll say we don't want to talk about it--implying that we hated it so much, it was so terrible, that we would rather leave it buried. And it is no mystery why men hate war. War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that. But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since. And how do you explain that to your wife, your children, your parents, or your friends?

That's why men in their sixties and seventies sit in their dens and recreation rooms around America and know that nothing in their life will equal the day they parachuted into St. Lo or charged the bunker on Okinawa. That's why veterans' reunions are invariably filled with boozy awkwardness, forced camaraderie ending in sadness and tears: you are together again, these are the men who were your brothers, but it's not the same, can never be the same. That's why when we returned from Vietnam we moped around, listless, not interested in anything or anyone. Something had gone out of our lives forever, and our behaviour on returning was inexplicable except as the behaviour of men who had lost a great love, perhaps the great-love of their lives, and had no way to tell anyone about it.