December 28, 2007
DISORDER IN ONE'S MIND DOESN'T ALTER REALITY:
Home Thoughts From Abroad: Some U.S. soldiers have spent so much time in Iraq, it feels like home. (Lawrence Kaplan, Dec. 26, 2007, Slate)
Whether measured in terms of tactics and techniques improved, operational schemes perfected, or the clan loyalties of every house on every street cataloged and memorized, the accumulation of experience counts for everything in this war. In Iraq, roughly half of all casualties tend to be suffered during the first three months of a unit's 15-month deployment. When I last visited Bravo Company, it was getting hit by IEDs twice a day and mortared routinely. "The whole area was a meat grinder," Sgt. Johnson recalled, pointing to the canals and dikes that order the surrounding "triangle of death" into neat grids. But engagement with local tribes, intelligence tips, and targeted raids had quieted the area to the point where the company hadn't been hit by a single IED strike in four months. Similarly, the brigade as a whole had lost more than 50 soldiers during its first eight months in Iraq, but only one during the last four months.What is true in microcosm is also true writ large. In a war where it's nearly impossible to detect intellectual coherence, the Army's learning curve tells a clear story.
The arc of the war lacks coherence only if you never understood its end and continue not to. Grasp once that the point was to depose a minority tyranny and create an opportunity for majority self-determination and the rest is not only comprehensible but often takes on a certain inevitability. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 28, 2007 4:28 PM
They whine if ya draft 'em and make them serve 9 months in country(Vietnam) and then they whine when volunteers spend years in country(Iraq). Clearly the second strategy is the correct one as shown by the results on the ground, not to mention reenlistments into those ground combat units are strong and have been since the beginning of the war.
It's astounding how little the media have learned in 40 years when compared to the U.S. Army.
Posted by: Pete at December 28, 2007 6:13 PMI just spent Christmas with my nephew who returned from Iraq just a few weeks ago. He said the last 6 months in the Ramadi area were boring, and there's nothing going on. during the last 6 months he only knows of one guy in his unit to get injured in anything other than an accident. He's pretty upset with the American media and it's focus on the negative. He's not very supportive of the Iraqis and doesn't care for them on the whole, but he's not griping about having been there. He'd also reenlist if his wife (also an Iraqi veteran) would let him.
Posted by: Patrick H at December 28, 2007 6:36 PMYour outfit is home.
Posted by: Lou Gots at December 28, 2007 8:21 PM