Twenty Years Later: A Memory of the Gulf War

The United States officially ended its mission in Iraq on Thursday, nearly nine years after it led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Baghdad for the ceremony to personally thank the U.S. troops who have served there, as well as Iraqi security forces. ~ CNN Breaking News, 15 December 2011, 0528 EST

It was Spring, 1991.  I stood upon a knoll overlooking the grave site in Cannelton, Indiana, as the squad of U.S. Army soldiers prepared to fire the salute. A few yard in front of me, also overlooking the burial, stood my son, Rob, and his friend, Ray.  Mark has been about the age of Rob and Ray when I first met him.

The last time I talked to Mark had been near Christmas the previous year. He was home on leave after completing a course at the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, that qualified him as a tank mechanic. Mark was proud to be certified to work on tanks: he told me he loved those huge steel monsters of war. He asked me about my experiences as an armor officer with a tank battalion stationed in (then) West Germany. I remember telling him that much of my time had been spent attempting to keep my tanks operational. Mark smiled and said, "If I had been there, I would have done a good job for you, sir."

Now, just a few months later, I was attending Mark's funeral. He had been killed by "friendly fire" in Iraq as he and his fellow mechanic were clearing a road of disabled Iraqi tanks. An allied fighter pilot mistook them for Iraqi solders and fired a missile into their midst. The lyrics of a song by Eric Bogle came to my mind:

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride, Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside? And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun, I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done. And I see by your gravestone you were only 19 When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916, Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene? 

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly? Did the rifles fir o'er you as they lowered you down? Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus? Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest? ~ The Green Fields of France (No man's Land)

Like Willie McBride, Mark was only 19. At the internment below me there had been no bagpipes; there was a solitary bugle that played Taps and the 21-gun salute of a squad of U.S. soldiers.  Tears ran from my eyes as I stood there.

Mark's was the first death of a person I knew personally. It would not be the last.

Now that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is officially over, I find myself unable to celebrate. Too many civilians, solders, insurgents have died,,, and Iraq is still not at peace. I am again reminded of Eric Bogle's song:

And I can't help but wonder, now Willie McBride, Do all those who lie here know why they died? Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?" Did you really believe that this war would end wars? Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain, For Willie McBride, it all happened again, And again, and again, and again, and again.

And so I pray as I remember and hope.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God. ~ Matthew 5:8-10 

Tomorrow: A Million Doors for Peace

In listing the negatives, the above video doesn't mention although I believe that it should, the dead, wounded, and maimed.

I just learned about this last night. I considered signing on as a volunteer; however, my limited mobility and my need for oxygen might get in the way and I would not want agree to knock on doors and then not be able to do so.

However, volunteers are still needed and you can still be one! Go HERE to read more about what it means to be a volunteer and/or to sign up.

Don’t Have Enough Troops to Do the Job? Hire Mercenaries

The purpose of the Praetorian Guard was to protect the Emperor and, at times, lead palace revolts. ~ William Gilkerson in Gilkerson on War

(Note: This is a very compressed and somewhat skewed presentation of Roman history).

Does history repeat itself? We’d better hope not. There seem to be a lot of parallels between the history of ancient Rome and the present United States. I’ll not go into my perspective on that here, only to say one of the misjudgments of the Romans that led to the fall of the Republic was when Roman citizens became so well off that they no longer served in their armies.

The first response was that the Roman armies were no longer made up of citizen solders, but of professionals drawn initially from the lower classes of Rome and the surrounding cities. Then, because there grew a need for more and more troops as Rome conquered more and more of the known world, the armies were augmented by mercenaries. With the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Caesars, these mercenaries began to play a greater and greater role in Roman politics, until it was provincial mercenaries who sat on the throne of Caesar.

Sound familiar?

Sunday Morning Thoughts

Killed & Maimed

Coming Home

Phil Sheridan & Tosawi

On occasion, our troops killed unarmed enemy prisoners in the Second World War, and LT William Calley oversaw the slaughter of women and children at My Lai. Now we have prison interrogators who held themselves above international and moral law, some of whom are still being trained right here at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where the terms "Raghead" and "Sand Nigger" are used by instructors in referring to citizens of Middle East. (Does that mean that our friends in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc. are "Sand Niggers" too?). To paraphrase General Phillip Sheridan, is the only "good 'Sand Nigger' a dead 'Sand Nigger'?" ~ Wade Sanders, The Greatest Country In The World

Comanche Leader Tosawi (Toshaway, Toshua, Silver Brooch)

General Philip Henry Sheridan (1831-1888)

During the so-called "Indian Wars" of the second half of the 19th Century in the U.S. West, a Comanche leader, Tosawi of the Ponetaka band, led numerous raids on settlers in the American Southwest. In 1867-’68, the U.S. Cavalry made a concentrated effort to end these raids. Tosawi was the first Comanche leader to surrender to the military at Fort Cobb in the Indian Territory.

As the story goes, shortly after surrendering, Tosawi met with General Philip H. Sheridan:

Tosawi: Tosawi, good Indian.

Sheridan: The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.

Sheridan’s notorious response was later misquoted as: The only good Indian is a dead Indian.

There is some doubt as to whether Phil Sheridan actually made either statement. Wolfgang Mieder states in The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian: History and Meaning of a Proverbial Stereotype that it is highly unlikely that Sheridan actually spoke those words. However, Tosawi recounted the story numerous times, always attributing the statement to Sheridan.

I first encountered the statement The only good… when I was an R.O.T.C. cadet in the 1960s. The phrase then was The only good Gook is a dead Gook. “Gook” in this context referred to a Vietnamese.

I was reminded of that horrible phrase recently when I heard the statement: The only good sand nigger is a dead sand nigger. That pejorative term evidently is used by U.S. solders to refer to Muslims. The phrase shocked and appalled me, as did the reference to Vietnamese in the 1960s and, when I read of it, the original phrase attributed to General Sheridan.

How can there be justice, much less peace, when we use such terminology to degrade and dehumanize other people?

As I did research for this post, I found a bit of light in the midst of the darkness where I least expected it: Military.com. I urge you to read the article by Wade Sanders, The Greatest Country In The World, at Military.com from which I quoted at the beginning of this post. Further in the article, Sanders writes:

It is our hubris, a "holier than thou" attitude that permeates our national psyche, and infuriates the rest of the world. It isn't that we are worse than everyone else; it is that we continually crow that we are better than everyone else and this hypocrisy grates on the international community. ~ Wade Sanders, The Greatest Country In The World

But that’s just part of his article. Please read all of it.