War from the inside

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, soldiers, war, war stories, memoirs

CJ stands for Crazy Jay, whose civilian name is Dillard Johnson. With the help of James Tarr, he has produced a memoir: Carnivore: A Memoir by One of the Deadliest American Soldiers of All Time. According to an official U.S. Army study titled On Point, his team of about six scored about 3,000 KIA (killed in action) against Iraqi military and paramilitary forces, just in the first weeks of the Iraq war beginning in March, 2003, operation Iraqi Freedom. The facts, corroborated by numerous interviews, emphasize the combination of superior armor and weapons, fighting skill and training, and a lot of great good luck. "Carnivore" is the name Johnson's team gave to their Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a 25-ton mini-tank.

I seldom read war memoirs. Most are simply chest-beating bragging. Somehow, when I saw this book, I couldn't pass it up, and I am glad I read it. War truly is hell, the scenes after battles are truly hellish, and it is amazing that men can enter hell and return with any semblance of sanity. I am not disturbed by reading that about 1/3 of combat veterans have symptoms of PTSD (we used to call it "shell shock"). I am instead astounded that 2/3 of them can return home and get on with their lives, not unscathed, of course, but not disablingly damaged.

Early in the book, Johnson describes getting into Iraq, which was defended by berms along the border with Kuwait. He says you can see them on Google Earth, and indeed you can. The only set of imagery GEarth has is from July 2006, as seen here. This is south of Basrah. For scale, the larger bomb crater is 17.5m across. The yellow line is the border. Note a berm on the Kuwait side also, nearer the road. A third berm, ~350m to the south, is the edge of the UN Peacekeeping Zone prior to 2003. The Iraqi berm has been pierced in many locations, to let through American armor, which at the time consisted primarily of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. The other two berms also had to be pierced, but not in as many places, as they weren't being defended.

I was tickled by a statement about Johnson's sniping activities later in his career (121 kills). He writes, "In war, if you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck." This goes along with my own attitude, that there is no such thing as a fair fight: Don't get into a fight until you can assure you have the advantage. That is just good tactics.

So I'll leave it at that. Read Carnivore for yourself. You'll be glad you did.

Possibly the luckiest man still alive

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, war, journalism

It is amazing that I can read two books, very similar in size, but I finish one in two days and the other takes a week or more. I usually get through fiction faster than nonfiction, but not always. The current two-day marvel is In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars by Kevin Sites. The book comes with a 90-minute DVD that covers about half the wars, and the videography and editing make it even more compelling. I managed to survive watching it while eating lunch; not a practice I recommend...

A summary of the wars, not in the order presented:

• Hot shooting wars ongoing [9]: Afghanistan, Colombia (50+ years, continuing), Iraq (& West), Kashmir, Israel (& Palestinians + allies), Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda
  
• Unstable but not currently active [1]: Haiti
  
• Cease-Fire or under negotiation [5]: Congo, Lebanon (Hezbollah & Israel), Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka
  
• Conflicts of the somewhat recent past [3]: Cambodia, Lebanon (& Syria), Vietnam (& West)
  
• Potential [2]: Iran (& West), Syria (& West)

The author's relentless focus is not on the military operations themselves, but on their effects on the populations. I once invented an epigram for a college paper: "History is made by the rich, suffered by the poor, and forgotten by their grandchildren". As the four current African wars reported here make clear, I was wrong, or at least one-third wrong. Not all history is forgotten when it involves atrocities between ethnic groups. The northern Iraqis, the Kurds, do not forget.

With the exception of a very few of the very rich, war makes all into paupers. It may seem that the fighters, at least on the stronger side, are able to live relatively well, but they suffer a relentlessly growing poverty of spirit. Nobody really wins a war.

The book is full of personal stories. A dying old man in Iraq whom the author could have at least comforted a little, but did not. He accuses himself for that, and is much comforted when he is able to render help to another, though he must break the journalist's code of noninvolvement to do so. As the segment in the DVD makes clear, all the journalists got involved that time, carrying people out of the rubble on doors made into stretchers. A child bride in Afghanistan, who suffered more tortures in six years with her "future father-in-law" than nearly any abused prisoner of war. This woman or that one, a victim of "rape as a weapon of war". Terrorism isn't just bombings.

In fact, since the old rules of gentlemanly engagement (which were honored mostly in the breach anyway) were swept aside in favor of "total war" just over ninety years ago, every war has been carried out primarily by terrorist methods. The "shock and awe" campaign that began the most recent Iraq war was intended to terrorize. I have read that the 21^st Century American "battlespace" is a defined zone in which no opposing force can survive more than a few minutes.

Yes, indeed, we're getting better at war. At least during the two Great Wars of the 20^th Century, slightly more than half the total casualties were military forces, for most countries involved (no, I'm not forgetting the Holocaust, and there were actually three of those). These days, a civilian population needs to count itself lucky to "only" have ten to one hundred civilians killed per military casualty.

Kevin Sites must count himself very fortunate to be among the living. To spend ten to twenty days in each of the war zones mentioned above, and survive, is so stunningly against the odds, I'd have to say God had something to do with it. This book is full of stories that need to be told. I am thankful that the Kevin Sites blog and Hot Zone web site are presenting them to anyone with an internet connection.

Echoes of the greatest generation

kw: musings, war, letters, poetry

I've been going through old family letters, putting them in protective sheets and binders. I hope some family historian will have the energy to transcribe them. It is a fascinating exercise. I've come to the wartime letters between my parents. The image just below is a V-MAIL letter my father wrote (I've obscured all but their first names; my mother's address no longer exists).


V-MAIL was a way of saving weight and space in the 1940s, when we didn't have that many airplanes yet; these standardized sheets were photographed onto microfilm and the undeveloped rolls were flown to the U.S. from overseas. One mail bag full of film could carry as much as 35-40 bags of "unshrunk" mail.

The film was developed and printed onto 3"x4" sheets—still readable if the soldier followed instructions and didn't write too small. The image above is probably that size on your monitor. These sheets were mailed to the recipient, who typically got a week's letters all at once. My father's letters indicate he would get 1-2 weeks' worth from his fiancée at once...but her letters were originals, not filmed.


This particular piece of V-MAIL had gotten wet, so it couldn't be filmed, as it wasn't clear enough. It was sent entire. The microfilmer's note is shown along with the standard instructions to the writer in this image. This image and the one above can be seen in a larger version by clicking on them.

A few weeks after this letter was sent, Dad(-to-be) realized he could not get home for Christmas. He was in the South Pacific, where he remained until early 1946. So he sent the following poem on Nov 18, 1943:

I'm many miles from Department Stores
There's nothing here to buy.
It makes be blue as I can be
But darling I'll not lie,
I must be frank and let you know
I'll not be sly or foxy.
I can't do my Christmas shopping
So - your gift I'll buy by proxy.

(He had asked his mother to buy a gift for her.) My son and I write occasional poetry. I guess it is one more thing we "come by naturally"...that is a family proverb. When one of my brothers, or I, would do something my Mom knew she or Dad once did, particularly the mischief, she'd say, "Well, you came by that naturally."

I wonder if any Americans today would tolerate the wartime restrictions that my parents learned to consider as routine. Some of the V-MAIL letters have a word or two blacked out by the censor (whose stamp appears upper-left in the first image above). Other mail was sometimes clipped—the offending word(s) cut out with a blade. One of the censor's clips looks like it started with a pinking wheel, then the slits were connected by razor cuts.

My dad's first half year of letters are written on one side of heavy foolscap. Whenever my Mom or his mother would send him onion skin, he could get more pages into a 6 cent Air Mail envelope...but many of the envelopes have postage due stamps on them. Later, all the foolscap letters are written on both sides, but the onion skin ones are still one-sided; the paper is so thin the ink shows through and writing on two sides is impractical. However, onion skin weighed 1/3 as much, so it was worth it.

The letters mention gas stamps and food rationing back home. There is a lot that they didn't talk about much. My parents weren't the type to berate us with how hard they'd had it. Their reason for urging restraint would not be "I had to wait THIS long for food coupons", but "It isn't right to be wasteful." They trained our consciences, for which I am thankful.

A lonely G.I. can write a lot. I am not yet through the first year, and I have four fat binders full of Dad's letters...and two-plus years to go! I get about two months per binder. Amazing.

The ultimate war classic

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, war, diplomacy, duplicity, translations, classics, chinese literature

I once spoke with a retired U.S. Army Colonel. He'd just given a speech about the need for strength, at a time (late Vietnam war era) the military was much hated. He said, "Peace means you have no living enemies." That sounds pretty strong, but he went on to say the first resort is to win over someone, to make an opponent an ally; war is the last.

Having just read The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu, I see where he was coming from. A quick look for references indicates that this must be the second-most studied book in history, after only the Bible.

The edition currently in print in paperback, translated by the late General Samuel B. Griffith, is being touted as a guide to managers, not just for military readers. While I like the emphasis on gaining allies, the classic Thirteen Chapters is much more about deceit and duplicity. When war is necessary, deception is necessary, but to consider commerce and business to be "war on another field" as some have termed it, makes this a very risky proposition. Just consider Enron...

More than half the volume is apparatus. The translation is but 68 pages, and a third of that is translated commentary, a tiny fragment of the 23 centuries of Chinese scholarship of Sun Tzu. The first, 18-page, appendix is mostly composed of a translation of a similar treatise by Wu Ch'i. In another appendix we find this volume is the seventh English translation.

My own favorite quote is from the chapter "Offensive Strategy": "...those skilled in war subdue the enemy's army without battle. They capture his cities without assaulting them and overthrow his state without protracted operations."

This brings to mind the conclusion of the Cold War. President Reagan set the stage with his "Evil Empire" speech, showed his willingness to go to war with a couple small operations such as Grenada, then stood at the Berlin Wall and said, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The Soviet Premier could do little but watch as the German people and many of their Russian guards did just that. I remember it was my birthday, November 9, 1989, and I was driving to work when the news bulletin came on the radio. I pulled over to weep, and was half an hour late to work. Such is the benefit of appropriate strategy.