Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Arm Chair Debrief III

The Insurgency Rant (pt. 1)

The second a military loses the concept of mission, is too long, a minute means an hour, and if the conventional military goes a day without a mission, you might as well make it a year. When the mission deviates from A to B to C and evolves into the never clear quest for freedom, anything but freedom will be served, this is the time when the lies begin, and is how to know if the pot has overflowed boiling water onto an already agitated cat. At the close of 2003, after a March invasion and conventional success of coalition military forces, the troops were still in Iraq. It was eerie and confusing, and at this time that I believe the American people lost interest in the war, and when six months of lawless disorder was going to catch up to a complacent force. No signs of weapons of mass destruction. The sand was blowing through a large question mark, and soon there would be foreign fighters, and with them would come the roadside bombs, the snipers, the battles and the blood.
I have an offensive theory about the matter, and it is only that, an opinion. I think that the mission for the war in Iraq was destabilization. I think an unstable Iraq was believed to be useful in the larger destabilization of the Middle East. The more extreme spectrum of this view has to do with sending people back in time. Shut down their water, electricity, television, institute curfews, and let them kill each other. At the end of 2003 the books from the invasion began turning out, those warm and fuzzy photo collections of teary eyed journalists walking down the alleys of Iraq surrounded by children chanting “U.S.A.!”
Boot Camp was about what I expected it to be. My platoon of recruits was screamed at, could pump out a million pushups, fire an M-16 and if you weren’t me, you could even march in rank and file. Most of it was very intense, the larger lesson that was to be taken from, was that the body and mind can endure much more than a comfortable person could imagine. I continued to follow the war, on Sundays we were allowed to read the newspapers. I graduated Boot in November of 2003, returned home for a short leave and left for my next post at The Marine Corps School of Infantry outside of San Diego. Soon I would be an 18 year old professional infantryman, hypothetically trained to kill anything in my way. My super senses went off when we had a new group of Infantry Instructors fresh back from Iraq, my training platoon would be the first generation of Infantry Marines trained by OIF vets. These combat vets were different from the non combat instructors we had had before. They were very serious about everything, and I started to get a tugging at the pit of my stomach. I had been in the chow hall eating breakfast when I first heard the news of Saddam’s capture on Dec 17, 2003. I was still in training in January 2004 when I heard two of the combat vet instructors arguing over how the capture of Saddam Hussein would affect the overall mission. The instructor that I felt had the most grounded view of the situation lowly bellowed, “Doesn’t mean shit man. Something’s happening out there and Saddam don’t mean shit.” ...

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