Patience...
Today is Monday. It was one week ago tonight that President Bush drew the line in the sand for Saddam..."you have 48 hours to vacate the premises or else". It was another two days before hostilities began with a shot to the Tyrannts embunkered backside. Five days since the war began. And already the plethora of talking heads are asking "what's taking so long?" Sunday was described as a "day of setbacks". The stock market is down 300 points today because "traders are nevrous" that this could be a long struggle....perhaps months.
It would be easy to simply blame naive talking heads or nervous traders....but these mirror, in some sense, the general public. A youngish general public who relate a war with our high tech gear to playing video games resolved in an hour, and whose memory of a "real war" was Gulf War I. Neither of these have any resemblence to the present situation.
Let me shed some perspective from my days when I was in the "young public" category. 1965 was the year of the first real combat for American forces in Vietnam. I was a sophomore in high school. I watched [a misnomer...in those days we read] the events in Vietnam fthrough two more years of high school. I continued to read and watch through four years of college. In 1971 I became a member of the "Green Machine" and the war was still going on. Although the American combat phase was for the most part over and done by 1972, the US was still involved until 1975. That is ten years of war dispatches, news coverage, killed in action reports, demonstrations and heart felt grief.
In Vietnam we lost over 58,000 brave young Americans, the preponderance between the years 1965-1970. In rough averages that is 10,000 young American lives each and every year. Again in rough averages approximately 30 human lives each and every day, with perhaps three times that number wounded, and some percentage captured, tortured and executed by enemy forces. Every day for fiive years.
In those days most of us got the details of the day old news through newspapers and then the dreadful, Evening News, which would cram the days events into 30 minutes of video bites with short commentary in summation. It became a way of life for years. The deaths in ones, two's or three's did not even make the newspapers unless the death had a connection to your hometown. Deaths in large numbers took up a 2 minute segment on the TV news, and then on to other events.
I'll have to be honest and say that as an ex professional soldier, I am as transfixed by the continuous news flow of today as the general "general public". The wild rides through the desert with the good ol' 7th Cav, the images of the attack helo's pummeling the bad guys, the massive precision bomb strikes. It's not all a bad thing for people in our protected society to see the competance of our forces and to face the reality that war does mean death and destruction, both for "us" and "them". Seeing this makes us feel like we are right there. The problem is that 95% of our population is not right there, really. We are sitting comfortably at home just as if we've watching the next Ultimate Reality Game Show. We can turn the action off and go eat a pizza in our cozy beds. Our guys and girls in Iraq can't.
We at home can nitpick ourselves to distraction with the details, while missing the big picture. We are attacking all the way across an enemy country. In five days we have gone hundreds of miles across his own defended home terrain with minimal casualities. We are closing in on his capital and his leader may be dead or injured. I can tell you that from a military standpoint, this is miraculous. But there are rough days ahead, perhaps with more dead and wounded than we have seen since the worst days of Vietnam. We must keep our eyes on the prize, because the outcome will be decided in our favor.
Today is Monday. It was one week ago tonight that President Bush drew the line in the sand for Saddam..."you have 48 hours to vacate the premises or else". It was another two days before hostilities began with a shot to the Tyrannts embunkered backside. Five days since the war began. And already the plethora of talking heads are asking "what's taking so long?" Sunday was described as a "day of setbacks". The stock market is down 300 points today because "traders are nevrous" that this could be a long struggle....perhaps months.
It would be easy to simply blame naive talking heads or nervous traders....but these mirror, in some sense, the general public. A youngish general public who relate a war with our high tech gear to playing video games resolved in an hour, and whose memory of a "real war" was Gulf War I. Neither of these have any resemblence to the present situation.
Let me shed some perspective from my days when I was in the "young public" category. 1965 was the year of the first real combat for American forces in Vietnam. I was a sophomore in high school. I watched [a misnomer...in those days we read] the events in Vietnam fthrough two more years of high school. I continued to read and watch through four years of college. In 1971 I became a member of the "Green Machine" and the war was still going on. Although the American combat phase was for the most part over and done by 1972, the US was still involved until 1975. That is ten years of war dispatches, news coverage, killed in action reports, demonstrations and heart felt grief.
In Vietnam we lost over 58,000 brave young Americans, the preponderance between the years 1965-1970. In rough averages that is 10,000 young American lives each and every year. Again in rough averages approximately 30 human lives each and every day, with perhaps three times that number wounded, and some percentage captured, tortured and executed by enemy forces. Every day for fiive years.
In those days most of us got the details of the day old news through newspapers and then the dreadful, Evening News, which would cram the days events into 30 minutes of video bites with short commentary in summation. It became a way of life for years. The deaths in ones, two's or three's did not even make the newspapers unless the death had a connection to your hometown. Deaths in large numbers took up a 2 minute segment on the TV news, and then on to other events.
I'll have to be honest and say that as an ex professional soldier, I am as transfixed by the continuous news flow of today as the general "general public". The wild rides through the desert with the good ol' 7th Cav, the images of the attack helo's pummeling the bad guys, the massive precision bomb strikes. It's not all a bad thing for people in our protected society to see the competance of our forces and to face the reality that war does mean death and destruction, both for "us" and "them". Seeing this makes us feel like we are right there. The problem is that 95% of our population is not right there, really. We are sitting comfortably at home just as if we've watching the next Ultimate Reality Game Show. We can turn the action off and go eat a pizza in our cozy beds. Our guys and girls in Iraq can't.
We at home can nitpick ourselves to distraction with the details, while missing the big picture. We are attacking all the way across an enemy country. In five days we have gone hundreds of miles across his own defended home terrain with minimal casualities. We are closing in on his capital and his leader may be dead or injured. I can tell you that from a military standpoint, this is miraculous. But there are rough days ahead, perhaps with more dead and wounded than we have seen since the worst days of Vietnam. We must keep our eyes on the prize, because the outcome will be decided in our favor.
