Thank you

Aboard the "T.R."

The article, 24 Hours on the 'Big Stick',by P.J. O'Rourke, brought back a lot of memories.

Landing on an aircraft carrier is...To begin with, you travel out to the carrier on a powerful, compact, and chunky aircraft--a weight-lifter version of a regional airline turboprop. This is a C-2 Greyhound, named after the wrong dog. C-2 Flying Pit Bull is more like it. In fact what everyone calls the C-2 is the "COD." This is an acronym for "Curling the hair Of Dumb reporters," although they tell you it stands for "Carrier Onboard Delivery."

There is only one window in the freight/passenger compartment, and you're nowhere near it. Your seat faces aft. Cabin lighting and noise insulation are absent. The heater is from the parts bin at the Plymouth factory in 1950. You sit reversed in cold, dark cacophony while the airplane maneuvers for what euphemistically is called a "landing." The nearest land is 150 miles away. And the plane doesn't land; its tailhook snags a cable on the carrier deck. The effect is of being strapped to an armchair and dropped backwards off a balcony onto a patio. There is a fleeting moment of unconsciousness. This is a good thing, as is being far from the window, because what happens next is that the COD reels the hooked cable out the entire length of the carrier deck until a big, fat nothing is between you and a plunge in the ocean, should the hook, cable, or pilot's judgment snap. Then, miraculously, you're still alive.

Landing on an aircraft carrier was the most fun I'd ever had with my trousers on. And the 24 hours that I spent aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt--the "Big Stick"--were an equally unalloyed pleasure. I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn't get any bigger, or more moving, than a U.S.-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that's longer than the Empire State Building is tall and possesses four acres of flight deck. This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth or sixth largest airforce in the world--86 fixed wing aircraft plus helicopters.

I, too, was a rider on the "T.R." (that was what it was referred to by it's crew the two times I sailed with her in the 90's). The COD experience is all that he describes, and more. I personally found the recoveries (landings) on the carrier quite a bit more exciting than the launches. They were more like controlled crashes. The pilots actually go to full throttle prior to "trapping" (catching a cable with the landing hook) in case the aircraft misses all four cables and goes over the side of the ship. At full throttle the plane has a chance to remain airborne and not fall into the sea.

As I remember it, the carrier has seven decks down from the hangar deck (not the flight deck as stated in the article), and 10 levels up from there. The hangar deck was considered the main deck on a carrier.

The article also puts some things into context regarding John McCain, who piloted aircraft during flight operations on board carriers. And he advances some interesting arguments that favor McCain's life experiences -- over those of the two Democrat contenders -- as better preparing him for the White House.

Ignore the partisanship, though, and just enjoy Mr. O'Rourke's vivid descriptions of his day on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

Fallujah, then and now

Michael Totten has an excellent article in City Journal about the tremendous progress, and problems, that mark the meanest city in Iraq.

Fallujah is strange, sullen, wild-eyed, badass, and just plain mean,” writes Bing West in his 2005 war chronicle No True Glory. “Fallujans don’t like strangers, which includes anyone not homebred. Wear lipstick or Western-style long hair, sip a beer or listen to an American CD, and you risk the whip or a beating.” Fallujah has been Iraq’s bad-boy city since at least the time of the British in Mesopotamia; even then, travelers were warned to stay out. More recently, Saddam Hussein recruited some of his regime’s most ruthless officers from Fallujah. Even though it was a quieter city than most in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, with less looting than in Baghdad and a staunchly pro-American mayor, the Americans should have known that Fallujah was trouble.

But they didn’t, and so they were unprepared when a rogues’ gallery of Islamists, Baathists, and garden-variety malcontents made the city the launching pad for an Iraqi insurgency. The Fallujans who embraced the insurgency were foolhardy, too: had they looked at what similarly-minded Islamist totalitarians had done to Afghanistan, they would have known what hell awaited them at the insurgents’ hands. General David Petraeus’s radical transformation of counterinsurgency tactics has come at just the right time: the overwhelming majority of Fallujans, deciding that America is the lesser of evils, have now aligned themselves with the Marines and the American-backed city government.

The insurgency arose in Fallujah before spreading to the rest of the country. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the insurgents—now on the run elsewhere in Iraq—were first beaten here in the City of Mosques.

Mr. Totten provides a balanced picture with both encouraging and discouraging elements, but ends with a realistically positive outlook about the future of this city in Anbar.

Go read the whole thing.

Support our troops

By signing an online thank you card to General Petraeus.

Please.

Bullseye!

A Navy SM-3 missile successfully intercepted the malfunctioning U.S. intel satellite that was in a decaying orbit.

It was an unprecedented mission for the Navy, so extraordinary that the final go-ahead to launch the missile Wednesday was reserved for Defense Secretary Robert Gates rather than a military commander.

Cartwright estimated there was an 80 percent to 90 percent chance that the missile struck the most important target on the satellite - its fuel tank, containing 1,000 pounds of hydrazine, which Pentagon officials say could have posed a health hazard to humans if it had landed in a populated area.

Cartwright showed a brief video of the SM-3 missile launching from the USS Lake Erie at 10:26 p.m. EST, northwest of Hawaii, and of the missile's small "kill vehicle" - a non-explosive device at the tip - maneuvering into the path of the satellite and colliding spectacularly.

He said the satellite and the kill vehicle collided at a combined speed of 22,000 mph about 130 miles above Earth's surface.

Asked about the satisfaction felt among those in the military who had organized the shootdown on short notice by modifying missile software and other components, Cartwright smiled widely.

"Yes, this was uncharted territory. The technical degree of difficulty was significant here," Cartwright said. "You can imagine that at the point of intercept there were a few cheers that went up."

China seemed to be unhappy with our success. . .

The elaborate intercept may trigger worries from some international leaders, who could see it as a thinly disguised attempt to test an anti-satellite weapon - one that could take out other nations' orbiting communications and spy spacecraft.

Within hours of the reported success, China said it was on the alert for possible harmful fallout from the shootdown and urged Washington to promptly release data on the action.

"China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at news conference in Beijing. "China requests the U.S. to fulfill its international obligations in real earnest and provide to the international community necessary information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way so that relevant countries can take precautions."

If China's unhappy, then it must have been an impressive achievement.

Bravo Zulu

Exemplar

The Reaper

The latest in USAF UAV technology.

Highest standards

Ralph Peters weighs in about how our troops are the best-behaved in history.

THE media love to trash our troops. Every crime alleged to have been committed by a soldier or Marine in Iraq is headlined until it seems that those in uniform are so busy with atrocities they haven't got time to fight.

No accusation is too preposterous for "respected" media outlets to feature, and the left-wing press convicts our troops long before they see a courtroom. Our service members are portrayed (by those who never served) as a sadistic rabble.

But when you look at the facts - the hard numbers - a very different picture emerges.

While crimes committed by our troops can't be condoned (and they certainly aren't), official crime statistics make it clear that we have the best-behaved military in history - one that's vastly more law-abiding than our general population.

He then starts comparing military courts-martial numbers to those of American cities like Santa Cruz, CA, and Vicksburg, VA.

I personally have had a lot of experience working with the services (primarily the Air Force and Navy, but also with the Marines and Army), and have found them to be good, decent people overall. I met a few wild cards, but they conformed to military discipline like everyone else. In my experience, the men and women of the U.S. military are more professional, dedicated, and morally well-grounded than the average U.S. civilian. They are held to a higher standard -- and respond accordingly.

Bread for Baqubah

Michael Yon, in the conclusion of his "Bread and Circuses" dispatch, describes the tremendous efforts by our soldiers, the Iraqi Army, and several brave Iraqi civilians to get food shipments to Baqubah.

After fueling the trucks in the convoy, we headed to Baghdad to get the food. The trucks took an exit down a route that we did not follow, because it had not been cleared of bombs. Sometimes bombs are so large they are buried under roads using earthmoving machines and sit for months waiting for someone just like us, taking a shortcut only to get launched to God. The shortcut caused an hour difference in arrival times, and the break in contact led to frustrating hours of additional delay, tooling around Baghdad trying to find the warehouse, and re-establishing contact with all the trucks. But if there were any huge bombs waiting for us, we avoided them, and this dispatch got written.

Mr. Yon does an excellent job telling his story with words, photographs, and video segments.

It's well worth your time.

First-hand experience

I know exactly what J.D. Johannes is talking about in describing the Chinook's hydraulic characteristics.

The Blackhawk helicopter is a smooth, quiet ride but I prefer the CH-46--more leg room and luggage room.

The CH-47, the Army Chinook, is bigger, louder and smells even more like hydralic fluid than the CH-46.

If you ever get on a 46 and 47 and you can't smell the hydraulic fliud--get off that chopper because it is not airworthy.

They leak hydraulic fluid so badly that the only time they don't is when they're low on it . . .

From General Petraeus

Michael Yon reports on the progress in Iraq and provides the text of General Petraeus' message of 10 May 2007.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry. You may also download the PDF file here.

Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen serving in Multi-National Force-Iraq:

Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground. This strategy has shown results in recent months. Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate attacks, for example, have finally started to turn a substantial proportion ofthe Iraqi population against it.

In view of this, I was concerned by the results of a recently released survey conducted last fall in Iraq that revealed an apparent unwillingness on the part of some US personnel to report illegal actions taken by fellow members of their units. The study also indicated that a small percentage of those surveyed may have mistreated noncombatants. This survey should spur reflection on our conduct in combat.

I fully appreciate the emotions that one experiences in Iraq. I also know first hand the bonds between members of the ” brotherhood of the close fight. ” Seeing a fellow trooper killed by a barbaric enemy can spark frustration, anger, and a desire for immediate revenge. As hard as it might be, however, we must not let these emotions lead us—or our comrades in arrns—to commit hasty, illegal actions. In the event that we witness or hear of such actions, we must not let our bonds prevent us from speaking up.

Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone “talk;” however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual (2-22.3) on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.

We are, indeed, warriors. We train to kill our enemies. We are engaged in combat, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly, and we must be violent at times. What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight, however, is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings. Stress caused by lengthy deployments and combat is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign that we are human. If you feel such stress, do not hesitate to talk to your chain of command, your chaplain, or a medical expert.

We should use the survey results to renew our commitment to the values and standards that make us who we are and to spur re-examinat ion of these issues. Leaders, in part icular, need to discuss these issues with their troopers—and, as always, they need to set the right example and strive to ensure proper conduct. We should never underestimate the importance of good leadership and the difference it can make.

Thanks for what you continue to do. It is an honor to serve with each of you.

David H. Petraeus,
General, United States Army
Commanding

Air Force coolness

I thought this was pretty darn cool, so I thought I'd share it with you . . .

{Via Chic[k]pilot.}

New development

In the Haditha case. It seems that an intel officer produced exculpatory evidence that shows the whole incident was manufactured by the terrorists and magnified by our media.

You decide:

In a nutshell, the case exploded when an intelligence officer dropped a bombshell on prosecutors during a pre-hearing interview when he revealed the existence of exculpatory evidence that appears to have been obtained by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and withheld from the prosecutors.

This officer, described by senior Marine Corps superiors as one of the best and most dedicated intelligence officers in the entire Marine Corps, was in possession of evidence which provided a minute-by-minute narrative of the entire day's action — material which he had amassed while monitoring the day's action in his capacity as the battalion's intelligence officer. That material, he says, was also in the hands of the NCIS.

Much of that evidence remains classified, but it includes videos of the entire day's action, including airstrikes against insurgent safe houses. Also included was all of the radio traffic describing the ongoing action between the men on the ground and battalion headquarters, and proof that the Marines were aware that the insurgents conducting the ambush of the Kilo Company troops were videotaping the action — the same video that after editing ended up in the hands of a gullible anti-war correspondent for Time magazine.

When asked by the prosecution team to give his copies of the evidence to the prosecution, he told NewsMax.com that he was reluctant to do so, fearing it would again be suppressed or misused, but later relented when ordered by his commanding general to do so.

Go read the whole thing.

ISR aircraft

An interesting article at the Air Force website about an airborne reconnaissance platform that I have been associated with.

The Rivet Joint mission supports both national and tactical requirements, demonstrating a 21st century asymmetric warfare capability.

"We are also able to provide threat tippers via a classified chat capability, which enables us to cross-cue with other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and combat platforms who might be in the area to see if we can share information and give our warfighters a more complete picture," said Lt. Col. Karen Bridges, the 763rd ERS commander.

Planners are able to build target packages on high value targets, can direct action by ground forces, prepare for operations such as the recent Operation Achilles, coordinate close-air support, direct CSAR operations and provide direct threat warning for coalition personnel or assets.

Interesting stuff . . .

Support our troops

Our troops speak

Bill Ardolino, as an independent journalist, embedded in Iraq recently for a few weeks. He reported his experiences in his blog, INDC Journal, and brought back some video -- including interviews of the troops about their mission in Iraq.

Introduction: A Citizen Journalist in Fallujah

Part I: The Troops in Fallujah Speak

Part II: Letting the Troops Speak for Themselves

I highly recommend you go watch these videos (in spite of the Ann Coulter ads) in order to get a better perspective on what our troops are going through over there.

[Via Hot Air.]

Liberty

Remember me . . .

An Appeal for Courage

If you are an Active Duty, Reserve, or National Guard military member, please go to this site and consider signing the petition there.

This petition is being spearheaded, in a large part, by the efforts of LT Jason Nichols, USN; SGT David Thul, MNARNG; and Larry Vandergriff, USA (Retired).

Appeal for Courage is a non-partisan, grass-roots effort to communicate to Congress the troops' desire to remain in Iraq until our mission is complete. We feel calls to retreat embolden our enemy and hurt our support within the American public and Iraqi people.

The petition itself reads:

As an American currently serving my nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to fully support our mission in Iraq and halt any calls for retreat. I also respectfully urge my political leaders to actively oppose media efforts which embolden my enemy while demoralizing American support at home. The War in Iraq is a necessary and just effort to bring freedom to the Middle East and protect America from further attack.

Military cutbacks

Jenny Hatch, over at Natural Family Blog has an interesting collection of photos that provide a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to talk of military cut backs.

Different

Marine Cpl. Matt Sanchez writes about how our military is different than what is being portrayed in liberal circles.

So why did a bunch of privileged brats calling me cannon fodder for joining the Marine Corps bother me so much? I could speak of racial injustice, breaking group and student conduct rules, or harassment, but that wouldn't be the entire story. When I'm completely honest with myself, I understand the real reason this episode made my blood boil.

Deep down inside, most of the people at sophisticated, exclusive Columbia University felt they were superior to the military, and particularly the Corps. Honor, courage and commitment? Any undergrad and most of the faculty would tell you, in a double-spaced six-page essay, that these things are relative — impossible to define. For the academics, joining the Corps over attending an Ivy League school was an obvious sign of desperation.

Were we desperate? Our platoon "heavy hat," Staff Sgt. Forde, never once mentioned he was named the best tanker in the Corps — two years in a row. But my professors at Columbia always mention the books they and their colleagues have written and often assign those books, as graded papers, so we all have to mention them, too. Who is desperate?

I joined the Corps not because I couldn't make it elsewhere or because I needed money to go to school. No signing bonus was going to turn me into a soldier. I became a Marine because I wanted to be among the best, just as I applied to Columbia because I wanted to be among the brightest. I knew both required a high price.

I thank God every day that there are men and women in this country like Cpl. Sanchez. I am privileged to be able to work with quite a few of them myself. This country needs them -- whether we care to acknowledge it, or not.

Go read the whole post.

[Via Sarah at trying to grok.]

Change of command

Ralph Peters, in the New York Sun comments on the impending new U.S. commander in Iraq: General David Petraeus.

With back-to-back tours of duty in Iraq behind him and the most-positive image among Iraqis of any U.S. leader, military or civilian, Petraeus is a natural choice. His intelligence, drive, devotion to service and negotiating skill make the lean, young-looking general seem perfect.

The question is whether Gen. Petraeus is the right choice - or if he'll merely be the final executor of a failed policy.

Ralph Peters is very blunt, but he makes some good observations. Read the whole thing.

How we will win in Iraq

US CENTCOM has this article posted about Army engineers bringing joy to an Iraqi orphanage.

27 December 2006
By Mohammed Aliwi
Gulf Region South District

AN NASIRIYAH — Orphanages recently received numerous packages of stuffed animals delivered to promote goodwill between Iraqi and U.S. children and help the rebuilding effort in Iraq.

“The children were extremely happy and did not believe that the stuffed animals were given especially for them,” said Edmay Mayers, a program analyst with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

An Iraqi associate told Mayers the headmistress of the orphanage welcomed the team that delivered the toys and appreciated what the Americans were doing for the Iraqis. On her first tour to Iraq, Mayers visited one of the elementary schools and saw a beautiful interaction between the Americans and the children. “The children of Iraq have stolen my heart,” Mayers said. “They are precious, young and innocent, and if only a child remembers that an American, British, South African or Australian person gave them something that made them feel special as a child, then we have done our part to help these little ones.” For her, the children need these toys as much if not more than the school supplies.

They need something to hold close to them and love, and these stuffed animals have a lot of love left in them for these children, she said.

“I wanted to tell all that we are receiving tons and tons of stuffed animals, toys, school supplies, clothes, et cetera,” Mayers said. “All are being given to Iraqi children in schools, orphanages, clinics and now the Basrah Children’s Hospital. I am so thrilled that so many individuals have opened their hearts to the mission in Iraq.”

Robin Parks, a project manager with GRS, said all children love stuffed animals. They are brightly colored, soft and huggable, and can provide cheer and comfort to children. “Everyone involved in this exchange wins, but the person who is happiest is the lucky Soldier or civilian who has the honor of actually giving that toy to a child,” Parks said. “They probably feel like Santa Claus. One day the Iraqi children may remember that a stranger gave them a favorite gift.” Mayers said countless Iraqis are displaced and have been unable to restore their lives, but they still see the children smile in spite of all the bad living conditions that surround them. “We put the toys, animals and candy into plastic baggies to give to the children,” Parks said. “Sending the stuffed animals makes the people at home happy to be a part of this effort; receiving the animals makes the children here happy; and I am happy that I can help in some small way to make this exchange happen. Everyone wins.” Mayers typed into a Web browser the words “free stuffed toys” and came up with an Internet hit saying that someone was looking to give away “gently used” stuffed animals. “I e-mailed the (Web site manager) and she immediately posted it to her Web site and called it ‘Spread the Word,’” Mayers said. “It is now on approximately 50 or so Web sites. It also has been announced on a radio station in North Carolina, and an article in a newspaper in Troy, NY. People have read the Web sites, newspapers, listened to the radio and opened their hearts to these beautiful children. I have also been in touch with a gentleman in (England) who has lots of toys to send us.”

According to the Air Force 1st Lt. Richard L. Hallon, a project engineer with the Thi Qar Residence Office of Gulf Region South, a stuffed animal is like a companion to the children; it helps them when they are scared of the dark and helps them to fall asleep.

“One day, I saw a 4-year-old Iraqi child looking up at a Soldier, smiling with wide eyes, trying to communicate with hand signs and gestures. His little shiny eyes were not directed to me, but stopped me from thinking about war,” Hallon said. “If a smile can do this, imagine what a toy can do. It is in an effort symbolizing the notion of people helping people regardless of beliefs.”

Forging warriors

Bill Roggio, currently imbedded with the US Marines in Iraq, discusses the details of standing up the Iraqi Army.

The relationship between the Marines and the Iraqi Army has changed over the past year. The 1st Iraqi Army Division is now in the Fallujah region, and the 1st Brigade's sister unit, the 2nd Brigade, is now operating independently, with embedded Marine Military Transition Teams. Major David McCombs, the executive officer of the 3-2-1 MTT, said their mission is to “advise, assist and mentor the Iraqi Army, and what they do with this is up to them.” There is 1 MTT at the brigade level, and 1 MTT for each of the 3 light infantry battalions in the brigade.

The Marines of the 3rd Recon Military Transition Team (or MTT), advises the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade of the 1st Division (3-2-1). The 3-2-1 MTT is made up of 15 personnel (11 trained MTTs with 4 augment Marines), who are embedded withing an Iraqi battalion (about 500 troops).

He provides a balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the MTT as well as the Iraqi units, and then makes some recommendations.

Recommended.

Marines from space

Popular Science has an article outlining a Marine proposal for a Small Unit Space Transport And INsertion (SUSTAIN) capability that would couple the Marine's mission to a suborbital transport in order to deliver US Marines to any location on Earth within two hours.

As any battlefield commander will tell you, getting troops to the fight can be as difficult as winning it. And for modern-day soldiers, the sites of conflict are so far-flung, and the political considerations of even flying over another country so complicated, that rapid entry has become nearly impossible. If a group of Marine Corps visionaries have their way, however, 30 years from now, Marines could touch down anywhere on the globe in less than two hours, without needing to negotiate passage through foreign airspace. The breathtaking efficiency of such a delivery system could change forever the way the U.S. does battle.

Hoooaahhh!

The ROC

Bill Roggio provides a description and analysis of his experiences as an embedded reporter in Fallujah.

The Military Transition Team for 3 Company, as well as the rest of 3rd Battalion, have truly moved into an advisory role. “They advise, assist and mentor the Iraqi Army, and what they do with this is up to them,” said Major David McCombs, the executive officer of MTT for 3rd Battalion. The other two MTTs for 1 and 2 Companies have the same role as 3 Company's MTT.

The Iraqi soldiers, or jundi, in southwestern Fallujah run multiple patrols on their own; the Marines do not accompany the jundi every time they leave the wire. They provide for their own food, ammunition, “3 Company gathers their intelligence, plan and execute their own operations,” said Lt. Cortez, the lead adviser at The ROC.

These soldiers are volunteers, and are highly motivated to kill “Ali Baba” - the name they give the insurgents. There are major shortcomings with the Iraqi Army in Fallujah: logistics, pay and the lack of heavy weapons hold the jundi back from being fully independent (this will be covered in more depth along with the police in future posts on the MTTs/PTTs). But a fighting spirit is not one of these shortcomings.

This is the kind of boots-on-the-ground information that we desperately need in this country to make an informed decision about our current and future involvement in building a democratic Iraq.

Old Ironsides

Supporting the troops

Australian vocalist, Beccy Cole, sings a song of gratitude and pride to the Aussie troops (diggers). This music video has been around for awhile, but I thought I'd go ahead and post it. It's well worth listening to again.

Shop at Sears

My father-in-law forwarded me an email that said some pretty good things about Sears. I found out at Snopes that the email has been floating around cyberspace since 2003, and I also found out that the email is true. Here's an excerpt of that email:

I assume you have all seen the reports about how Sears is treating its reservist employees who are called up? By law, they are required to hold their jobs open and available, but nothing more. Usually, people take a big pay cut and lose benefits as a result of being called up...

Sears is voluntarily paying the difference in salaries and maintaining all benefits, including medical insurance and bonus programs, for all called up reservist employees for up to two years. I submit that Sears is an exemplary corporate citizen and should be recognized for its contribution.

Suggest we all shop at Sears, and be sure to find a manager to tell them why we are there so the company gets the positive reinforcement it well deserves.

Pass it on.

On their website, it is obvious that Sears goes the extra mile in support of our troops. But this is where I discovered one innaccuracy in the email.

Reservist/National Guard employees who are called to active duty and deployed are paid the difference between their military pay and their salary at Sears. Sears Holding Company Life/Medical/Dental insurance continues, as do annual merit increases and incentive pay. And Sears holds their job for them. And all of this for five years!

It turns out that Sears changed their military benefits policy in 2004 -- by extending the benefits from 36 months to 60 months.

Talk about supporting our troops!

I'm going to do more of my shopping at Sears from now on. I urge you to do the same.

The military and the media

Bill Roggio, currently in Iraq, has a post up about the perceived dichotomy between what our media is reporting and what our military is experiencing in Iraq.

In nearly every conversation, the soldiers, Marines and contractors expressed they were upset with the coverage of the war in Iraq in general, and the public perception of the daily situation on the ground. The[y] felt the media was there to sensationalize the news, and several stated some reporters were only interested in “blood and guts.” They freely admitted the obstacles in front of them in Iraq. Most recognized that while we are winning the war on the battlefield, albeit with difficulties in some areas, we are losing the information war. They felt the media had abandoned them.

This is well worth following. Recommended.

Heroine, 17th Cav

Annika highlights CW3 Lori Hill being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Go on over and read about how she earned it.

[Thanks for posting on this, Annika!]

Bravo Zulu

Thank you all for your generous support of the Valour-IT Project.

Donations have not been finalized yet, but it looks like the total is in excess of $200,000 raised for Voice-Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops.

Bravo Zulu ya'll -- for a job well done!

Memorial post

Sarah, over at trying to grok has posted a moving memorial to Cpt. Sean Sims.

May he live forever in the hearts of kids born free in Iraq.

Go read the whole thing.

Valour-IT Update

We did it!

Thank you all for helping the Valour-IT Project to achieve exceed the goal of $180,000 for our wounded Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen!

231

The Marine Corps is celebrating 231 years of noble service to our country today! In honor and celebration of that, I am posting the Valour-IT donation button for the Marines.

Please support the men and women who have gone in harm's way and have suffered grievous injuries as a result.

In gratitude

Please consider donating as little or as much as you can to the Valour-IT initiative. Donations go to buying voice-activated laptops for those wounded heros in our military who cannot use their hands as a result of their injuries.

Note that the money goes to our wounded from every service -- not just the Navy.

This post will be at the top of this blog all day. Scroll down for recent posts.

Honor

College professor and military reservist Austin Bay posts about military service, John Kerry, and honor. Here is a snippet:

Imperious elites like Kerry and newshounds are sceptical of honor as a concept, much less as a real issue for real people who’ve done real things, like fight and suffer through the ordeal of war. Of course appeals to “honor” are abused, but appeals to “passion”, “compassion”, “righteousness”– the entire panoply of emotions are, on an hourly basis, twisted and manipulated. And claims of “honorable service” may be suspect. Faux-vets are exposed with regularity.

This whole post is well worth the read -- especially a personal story he relates from his military service. Highly recommended.

Project Valour IT

Project Valour IT is one of those worthy causes that cannot be oversold. It provides voice-activated laptops to those who have lost the use of their hands while serving our country.

Please pray for this effort to raise money for our wounded warriors. And then give prayerful consideration to making a donation yourself.

Thank you.

Project Valour IT

Soldier's Angels, a very worthy cause that supports the needs of our troops and their families, has a goal of raising $180,000 for Project Valour-IT. Project Valour-IT provides voice-controlled laptops to disabled soldiers recovering from hand and arm injuries or amputations at home or in military hospitals. The laptops allow them to communicate electronically with friends, family, and buddies who are still deployed -- without having to manipulate a mouse or type on a keyboard.

This is an extremely worthy cause, and one I wholeheartedly support. I have elected to support this effort on the Navy team, but all funds go to buying laptops for anyone who needs them -- regardless of their service.

I have added an overall status to the Bulletins section, and a Navy status to the Support section of my left sidebar for those of you who would like to donate.

Please consider supporting this effort with your money and your prayers.

Censorship?

Michael Yon, over at The Weekly Standard, discusses an alarming development in Iraq.

My experiences with the U.S. military as a soldier and then as a writer and photographer covering soldiers have been overwhelmingly positive, and I feel no shame in saying I am biased in favor of our troops. Even worse, I feel no shame in calling a terrorist a terrorist. I've seen their deeds and tasted air filled with burning human flesh from their bombs. I've seen terrorists kill children while our people risk their lives to save civilians again, and again, and again. I feel no shame in saying I hope that Afghanistan and Iraq "succeed," whatever that means. For that very reason, it would be a dereliction to remain silent about our military's ineptitude in handling the press. The subject is worthy of a book, but can't wait that long, lest we grow accustomed to a subtle but all too real censorship of the U.S. war effort.

I hope this is not true, but if it is, we must nip it in the bud. This is NOT why we fight.

Yon goes on to talk about the critical need for our side of the story to be reported. (Emphasis added.)

There's little comfort in the supposition that this mess might be more the result of incompetence than policy. After all, what does it matter whether the helicopter crashed because it ran out of gas or because someone didn't tighten the bolts on a rotor? Our military enjoys supremely onesided air and weapons superiority, but this is practically irrelevant in a counterinsurgency where the centers of gravity for the battle are public opinion in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, and at home. The enemy trumps our jets and satellites with supremely onesided media superiority. The lowest level terror cells have their own film crews. While al Sahab hums along winning battle after propaganda battle, the bungling gatekeepers at the Combined Press Information Center (CPIC) reciprocate with ridiculous and costly obstacles that deter embedded media covering our forces, ultimately causing harm to only one side: ours. And they get away with it because in any conflict that can be portrayed as U.S. military versus media, the public reflexively sides with the military.

Read the whole thing. Yon's is a rare perspective -- one that needs to be shared. Highly recommended.

Why we fight redux

OPFOR has a nice story and picture underlining the humanitarian aspects of our struggle in Iraq.

Got a tough but heartwarming story and a picture of a medical Chief, John Gebhardt in Iraq. This little girl’s entire family was executed…they intended to execute her also and shot her in the head…but they failed to kill her. She was cared for by John’s hospital and healing up, but has been crying and moaning. The nurses said John is the only one she seems to calm down with, so John has spent the last four nights holding her while they both sleep in that chair. The girl is coming along with her healing.

Go check it out.

Standing up the Iraqi Army

David Bellavia, Owen West & Wade Zirkle, infantry veterans of the Iraq war and cofounders of Vets for Freedom, have a good column up about the birth of the Iraqi Army.

Their infantry skills aren't perfect. Iraqis carry their weapons every which way, and they enter buildings like horses out of the gate, often bumping into one another. American units drill urban movement to exhaustion; Iraqi squads may discuss it over sweet chai tea. Yet, when they search a building, they confidently rip detonation cords from under rugs and blasting caps from corners and belt-fed ammunition from hidden cupboards. Iraqis find in minutes all kinds of suspicious or incriminating items that even a polished American unit would have missed.

Highly recommended.

A duty of care

Jonathan Gurwitz has an enlightening article up at OpinionJournal about some great efforts going on to provide help to our wounded warriors and their families. As is said in the article:

"Don't use the word charity with regard to the military," Arnold Fisher declares passionately. "This is duty."

This touched my heart.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Intrepid Fallen Heroes
"This is Americans doing for Americans."

BY JONATHAN GURWITZ
Thursday, July 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

SAN ANTONIO--"I want to get back to active duty," Staff Sgt. Steve Bosson told me in May. "I want to go back to my unit."

Two years earlier, the native of York, S.C. had been on a rocket denial mission west of Baghdad with Delta Troop, 9th Cav, 1st Cavalry Division. After an ambush and a firefight with insurgents, Mr. Bosson went to secure an RPG launcher lying near a wounded fighter. The launcher was booby-trapped. When he picked up the weapon, a grenade exploded, shredding his left leg.

Today, Mr. Bosson is at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. After more than 50 surgeries, he is fitted with a prosthesis and near the end of his rehabilitation process. On Friday, he was scheduled to go in for yet another revision surgery.

Since the fall of 2001, BAMC has treated more than 2,300 casualties from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The trauma center is heartbreakingly filled with the mangled and burned bodies of young Americans. For the wounded, the love and care of family members is indispensable. The painful rehabilitation process is made more bearable by the presence of loved ones. And many times, that would not be possible were it not for Fisher Houses, like the one where I met Steve Bosson.

---

Fisher Houses are homes away from home for the families of wounded service members. They were born from a discussion in 1990 between the late Zachary Fisher, New York developer and philanthropist, and Pauline Trost, wife of Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Carlisle Trost. Mrs. Trost, who was a volunteer at Bethesda Naval Hospital, relayed the story of a sailor sleeping in his car because he couldn't afford a hotel room while his wife was recuperating from surgery. The account inspired Mr. Fisher and Adm. Trost to begin a bureaucratic fight to create an innovative partnership between government and private philanthropy.

Slashing through red tape, the first Fisher House opened in Bethesda eight months later. Today, 35 Fisher Houses are in operation, all but two in the U.S. Three more are under construction: two additional facilities in San Antonio to accommodate a lengthy waiting list of families at BAMC, and another in Tampa.

All this has been accomplished entirely with private funds from the Fisher family and from corporate and individual donations. The Pentagon proffers land to the Fisher House Foundation (fisherhouse.org) for the construction phase. When the houses are complete, the foundation turns them back over to the Department of Defense for operation and maintenance.

"We don't want government money," says Arnold Fisher, Zachary Fisher's nephew and the driving force behind the Fisher family's efforts. "This is Americans doing for Americans."

Bill White, a director of the Fisher House Foundation and president of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, another of the Fisher family's philanthropic endeavors, says the houses have saved military families in excess of $70 million. In addition to offering housing, the foundation has partnered with the Hero Miles program to provide airline tickets for the families of wounded service members. Fisher House Foundation travel agents have booked more than 7,000 flights.

The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund (fallenheroesfund.org) evolved from Zachary Fisher's desire to provide financial assistance to the families of service members killed in the line of duty. Without fanfare, Mr. Fisher and his family directed assistance to dependents of military personnel killed in the USS Iowa explosion, the Gulf War, the bombings of the Khobar Towers and the USS Cole, along with other military operations.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the Fisher family established the fund and opened it to public donations. Grants of $10,000 went out to the widows and widowers of military personnel who lost their lives in Afghanistan, $5,000 to their children. At the time, the U.S. government military combat death benefit was only $6,000.

Congress raised the death benefit to $12,420 in 2003 and $100,000 last year. With the U.S. government finally providing respectable compensation, the board of directors of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund took on an even more ambitious project. The extraordinary number of catastrophic injuries from the war on terror has created a critical need for long-term rehabilitative care.

Progress on a $10 million Military Amputee Training Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center has languished for more than two years. At the suggestion of Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, surgeon general of the Army, the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund committed to build a 60,000-square-foot, state-of-the art rehabilitation center at Fort Sam Houston.

Ground was broken on the $37 million project last October. Under the watchful eye of Arnold Fisher, the Center for the Intrepid is on schedule to open in January. Like the two Fisher Houses already in operation and the two that are currently under construction at Fort Sam Houston, the center is being built entirely with private contributions from over 500,000 donors.

---

Staff Sgt. Bosson's determination to get back to his unit, which will redeploy to Iraq in November, isn't just wishful thinking. Among 447 amputee patients from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom treated in all Army facilities, 10 have returned to active duty. "I'd rate my chances at 90%," he says.

In this nation of 300 million, the burden of the war on terror falls on an exceedingly small community. Beyond the obscured corridors of Walter Reed and Brooke Army Medical Center, normalcy reigns in the homeland. Perhaps more than anything else, the lack of a sense of shared sacrifice has attenuated the brutal reality of this conflict.

And while there are many things that governments can do, there are some things, such as helping the fallen warriors of the voluntary armed forces, that citizens of a free nation should do. "Don't use the word charity with regard to the military," Arnold Fisher declares passionately. "This is duty."

Mr. Gurwitz is a columnist at the San Antonio Express-News. [Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

The Ramadi experiment

Wade Zirkle and David Bellavia, both with multiple deployments to Iraq as part of the military on their resumes, are currently embedded in U.S. units in Iraq and have published an article over at The Philadelphia Inquirer that describes Iraqi and U.S. operations ongoing in Ramadi.

Two weeks after thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces established a series of combat outposts, called "strong points," surrounding Ramadi, residents are returning to the unruly city, hoping to find relative normalcy.

As the strong points were being occupied, residents had fled or braced for a full-scale Fallujah-style assault that never happened. Instead, they are seeing a "soft offensive" that is emblematic of the new face of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency effort.

Despite the similarities between the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah two years ago and Ramadi today, the current offensive will be slow and deliberate, and will focus on rebuilding local infrastructure, not destroying it. One U.S. commander said of the effort, "It is not a push; it is a slow squeeze."

Go read the rest -- especially the last four paragraphs.

Hijacking Haditha

Michael Yon, a veteran who served as an embedded reporter in Iraq, has a thought-provoking essay about what we do and do not know about Haditha. He recounts several experiences he lived through while embedded with the Deuce-Four in Iraq. He also puts things in a context that is much more rational than the hyper-ventilating "reporting" surrounding the Haditha incident right now.

We do not know if our Marines massacred those Iraqis. In war, things like this can and will sometimes happen, which is not to say it is acceptable. After almost four years of conflict, involving more than 100,000 military personnel, this clearly is not the norm or we would have heard about many such cases. But the difficulty of fighting a counterinsurgency mission in a shifting political environment is something about which our military leaders are mindful. . .

Read the whole thing. It will make you weep.

The downward spiral

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor for The Wall Street Journal, has a sobering column up about our country's impending loss of confidence in our military's ability to achieve success in Iraq.

I don't particularly care for what he has to say, but I am afraid he may be right.

It's in the extended entry.

Haditha
The indictment of U.S. troops was inevitable.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Friday, June 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

You knew it had to happen. Haditha, an "incident" involving American troops in Iraq, is now part of the erosion of support for the war in Iraq. The Iraq Syndrome has finally arrived.

---

This past Monday, Memorial Day, a driver down Manhattan's fast West Side Highway would have slowed at 46th Street to allow the crossing of a constant stream of visitors heading to the USS Intrepid, the aircraft-carrier museum on the Hudson River. It was a beautiful day but a hot day to stand on long lines in the open sun. A small squadron of planes flew up the Hudson in the solemn missing-man formation, with one plane trailing. Amid the sunshine, the chairman of the Intrepid museum, Arnold Fisher, said something to the gathered crowd no one could have expected to hear.

Mr. Fisher, whose family runs the Fisher House Foundation for the military, suggested that the men and women at arms were being forgotten. And he apologized to them. "I apologize to you for carrying the burden of this nation's commitment to freedom and liberty alone." Mr. Fisher's bitterness over the troops is a Cassandra cry, a portent. But why now?

Opinion polls put support for the war below 40%. Still, it has become obligatory now as a nod across the political spectrum to the corrosive Vietnam Syndrome, to reassure that one's opposition is only to the war, not to the men fighting it.

Really? How does that work?

Arnold Fisher said the troops were forgotten, but they are very much on the minds of the news cycle just now. This Memorial Day week the news is preoccupied with stories of the Marine squad that allegedly killed civilians at Haditha, a town in Iraq. The narrative of this story has pretty much set in already: It's another My Lai, we all know they did it, the brass covered it up, and prison sentences for homicide are merely a formality.

Haditha is indeed the new Abu Ghraib. What this most importantly means is that any U.S. military action overseas now, no matter its level of justification, can be taken down by the significance assigned to events by the modern machinery of publicity. This explains why the U.S. commanders in Iraq announced yesterday that all soldiers in the next 30 days would take what the headlines are calling "ethics training." Of the some 150,000 U.S.-led troops there, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the U.S. combat commander in Iraq, said "99.9% of them perform their jobs magnificently." Yes, and 99.9% of them, after all they've been through, will deeply resent the clear inference they lack "core values." Is that different than standard "Corps values"?

Stories of apparently malfeasant U.S. troop behavior are arriving daily now. A military truck whose brakes failed from overheating crashed and killed Afghan civilians. Press reports are now fly-specking whether the troops shot over or at the rock-throwing mob of more than 300 that surrounded them. Every one of these troops surely knows the story of Mogadishu. Been there, never again. But there will be investigations of their behavior.

Finally came the even more lurid pregnant-woman shooting. As transmitted around the world by the BBC: "A pregnant Iraqi woman in labor and her cousin were shot dead by U.S. forces as they rushed to a hospital along a closed road, police and relatives say." The BBC's next four sentences neatly sum up the common story line now in play around U.S. troops: The soldiers said the car failed to heed a stop warning in a prohibited area; the driver said he heard no warning; U.S. troops will be "trained in moral and ethical conduct" and this "comes in the wake" of the Haditha allegations.

---

In El Paso, Texas, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, whose death from a roadside bomb is the event said to have precipitated the Marine shootings at Haditha, said simply: "I don't even listen to the news." This may be the widespread reaction as the Haditha story overwhelms all else--enough, I don't want to hear about it.

And there begins the Iraq Syndrome.

Some elements of the newly ascendant Democratic left may welcome it, but no serious person in American politics should.

The Vietnam Syndrome, a loss of confidence in the efficacy of American military engagement, was mainly a failure of U.S. elites. But it's different this time. This presidency has been steadfast in war. No matter. In a piece this week on the White House's efforts to rally the nation to the idea of defeating terrorism abroad to thwart another attack on the U.S., the AP's Nedra Pickler wrote: "But that hasn't kept the violence and unrest out of the headlines every day." This time the despondency looks to be penetrating the general population. And the issue isn't just body counts; it's more than that.

The missions in Iraq and Afghanistan grew from the moral outrage of September 11. U.S. troops, the best this country has yet produced, went overseas to defend us against repeating that day. Now it isn't just that the war on terror has proven hard; the men and women fighting for us, the magnificent 99%, are being soiled in a repetitive, public way that is unbearable.

The greatest danger at this moment is that the American public will decide it wants to pull back because it has concluded that when the U.S. goes in, it always gets hung out to dry.

Two major military reports will come out soon on the Haditha incident, and no one will gainsay justice if that is required. But the atmosphere around this event is going to get uncontrollably manic, and that will feed the dark, inward-turning sentiments already poisoning the country's mood over issues like the immigration debate.

Good for Democrats? Don't count on it. After this, the public appetite for a Democratic president's "humanitarian" military intervention in a Darfur or East Timor will be close to zero.

One suspects that U.S. troops were party to some awful events in the Pacific and European theaters of World War II, all gone in the mists of history and the enemy's defeat. Not now. Gen. Chiarelli's magnificent "99.9%" notwithstanding, it's the phenomenon of the so-very-public 0.01%--at Abu Ghraib, on an Afghan street, at Haditha--that is breaking America's will this time.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

On Iraq reporting

Command Sargeant Major Jeffrey Mellinger, senior enlisted soldier in Iraq, has a post over at Michael Yon's Frontline Forum wherein he comments on the virtually non-existent reporting about Iraq by the mainstream media.

There is still an insurgency being fought as we build a government and work to provide unity, safety, security and jobs. Haven’t read a story yet on us spraying the date palms. Iraq was once the number one producer of dates. We are working aerial spraying to rebuild the crops. Where’s the story? Oh, sorry. It’s not got any sex or blood in it. Let’s see. How about the huge civil affairs festival in Irbil last week? Hmmm. No story in hundreds of kids singing and dancing, adults laughing and competing in sports. And surely no story in learning how to operate and program computers, operate tractors, dump trucks, or repair generators and motors. What was I thinking?

I can certainly understand his sarcasm. I recommend you read his entire post. In fact, you should spend some time reading the othere posts in Michael Yon's Frontline Forum. They show you a glimpse of the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq that you rarely get to see.

Stranger in a strange land

Marine 1LT Jeffrey Barnett, currently deployed in Iraq, provides context to the Haditha incident. He is not seeking to justify any criminal actions by our Marines, but to show how this highly unusual behavior might actually occur.

Examine the following hypothetical example: During a vehicular patrol, you drive though a small neighborhood of four houses around 0800. Everything is kosher. Women are making breakfast, children are playing, and men are talking to each other near the road. You drive through the same area two hours later at 1000 and things are vastly different. Nobody is outside. As the second vehicle in the patrol rounds a corner just past the four houses it is hit by an IED. The magnitude of the casualties can be left to the individual imagination. Whether it killed everyone inside the vehicle or just peppered the doors with dirt, the intent was the same. Someone wanted to kill you. Someone looked at your truck and said to themselves “Those men should die, and I’m going to make it happen,� It—pisses—you—off.

Go read the whole thing.

The military has been on top of Haditha

And, in fact, was in the midst of conducting an investigation into the incident weeks before Time broke the story:

The Haditha investigation started earlier than previously thought after a Marine Corps investigator noticed key discrepancies between the physical evidence and the reports from the Marines involved. The New York Times reveals that the Pentagon had already referred the matter to criminal investigators weeks before Time Magazine reported the alleged atrocities at the end of March . . .

Go read what Captain Ed is reporting . . .

Never forget

Gerard Van der Leun has a moving essay posted about his family's sacrifice to freedom during WWII. An uncle he never knew -- who's name he carries proudly.

Remembering these long ago moments now as we linger on the cusp of the Long War, I still cannot claim to understand the deep sense of duty and the strong feeling of honor that drove men like the uncle I've never known to sacrifice themselves. Lately though, as we move deeper into the Fourth World War, I think that, at last, I can somehow dimly see the outlines of what it was. And that, for now, will have to do.

Highly recommended.

Haditha context

Dan Riehl has posted a history of U.S. forces in Haditha in an attempt to show that our history their has not all been butchering civilians, as recent allegations are claiming.

Below the fold are dozens of links to stories and images involving operations of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines in and around Haditha both before and after the incident. None of them are meant to explain away any wrong doing. But there is a Marine history and a legacy in Haditha that's far from negative when viewed in its totality.

I hope and pray that our Marines did not intentionally murder civilians there. But if they did, we need to punish them publicly and with extreme prejudice. Because that is not how America's military does things.

Recommended reading.

Why they fight

Bob McManus has a good article at the New York Post about the Sailors and Marines aboard the U.S.S. Kearsarge and their take on defending America.

"I am part of something larger than myself. I am part of an organization that stands for something."

Indeed it does, and thank God for that.

Thank God for men like Maj. Curtin and the thousands upon thousands of young Americans now under arms - men and women equally dedicated to faithful service to America, never mind the challenge and never mind the danger.

And, of course, for all those who have fallen - and who will fall - to maintain America as an exemplar of peace and freedom in a too-often brutal, benighted world.

The sailors and Marines of Kearsarge get it.

I highly recommend it.

Remember

Jack Dunphy has a good opinion piece up at NRO that talks about a cure for America's attention deficit disorder.

Mrs. Dunphy and I were among the 2,000 or so people who visited the [Los Angeles National] cemetery on Monday to observe Memorial Day, and if I’m any judge of social status I’d guess that only a few of them hailed from any of those elite nearby zip codes. What a shame it is that the people who most enjoy the blessings of American liberty seem to be the least grateful to those who through our history have fought to secure those very blessings.

Go read the whole thing. And think about it. Please.

In Memoriam

Honor our noble dead

At 3 PM, your local time, please take one minute to honor the fallen during America's National Moment of Remembrance today.

Because they fell on our behalf.

Honor, not pity

OpinionJournal has some interesting information on the media's predilection for victimizing our troops -- rather than honoring them.

It's true for many of us, though. A good read with some tips on how to honor those among us who are fighting for our freedom.

It's in the extended entry . . .

Victors, Not Victims
Honor soldiers. Don't pity them.

Friday, May 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Here's a Memorial Day quiz:

1. Who is Jessica Lynch?

Correct. She's the Army private captured, and later rescued, in the early days of the war.

2. Who is Leigh Ann Hester?

Come on. The Kentucky National Guard vehicle commander was awarded a Silver Star last year for fighting off an insurgent attack on a convoy in Iraq. The first woman to receive a Silver Star since World War II, and the first woman ever to receive one for close combat.

If you don't recognize Sergeant Hester's name, that's not surprising. While Private Lynch's ordeal appears in some 12,992 newspaper and broadcast reports on the Factiva news service, Sergeant Hester and her decoration for extraordinary valor show up in only 162.

One difference: Sergeant Hester is a victor, while Private Lynch can be seen as a victim. And when it comes to media reports about the military these days, victimology is all the rage. For every story about someone who served out of conviction and resolutely went on with his civilian life, there are many more articles about a soldier's failure or a veteran's floundering.

It's a sign of some progress that the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are not spit upon and shunned as Vietnam vets were. Yet there may be something more pernicious about mouthing "Support Our Troops" while also asserting that many of them are poor, uneducated dupes who were cannon fodder overseas and have come home as basket cases, plagued by a range of mental, emotional and financial problems.

The vast majority of vets don't fit that description. Many, like one returned Army guardsman we talked to, chalk up this portrayal to the media's fascination with bad news in general. As for his combat in Iraq, both "going to war and coming home is very overwhelming," he says. "But you make choices in life . . . and through inner strength and support, I am making a choice that I want to be healthy."

In some cases, the depiction of military personnel as damaged goods serves the antiwar agenda. Yet retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Tom Linn sees more basic impulses at work. "I honestly believe it is guilt" and even resentment, he says. The military type as misfit "is a stereotype that a lot of people from the Vietnam era have held on to." Then, as now, "they saw men and women who did more than they did . . . and they'd compensate by casting those folks in an inferior status."

---

This Memorial Day, most of us will remember the Americans who have served their country since the Revolutionary War not with pity but with admiration. For those who want to show their gratitude, Major John Morris has some recommendations. He's deputy chaplain for Minnesota's Army National Guard and a founder of a state program called Reintegration: Beyond Reunion. Its broad goal, he explains, is to help returning guardsmen and reservists frame their "experience, to draw from it everything that they can to grow into productive citizens."

How can we help? For one thing, he says, don't assume that all struggling vets are sick, since what looks like abnormal behavior may be culture shock. But do give vets and their families the tools to adjust. Major Morris explains: "Schools, look out for these military kids. Neighbors, cut their grass and shovel their snow, baby-sit and do chores around the house. Employers, make sure those jobs are still there." It's the least we can do, he says: "Since there are so few of us fighting the war, it's easy for the rest of us to try."

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

CIA, DoD split sheets

Strategypage has an interesting article up about how the Department of Defense is no longer dependent upon the CIA for intel.

Without much publicity, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have gotten a divorce. For over half a century, the Department of Defense depended on the CIA for a lot of the intelligence it needed. No more, or at least less-and-less. DoD recently created the post of undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and made it one of the top four positions in the department. DoD is being coy about exactly what the new arrangements are, given the new Director of National Intelligence and plans for "making intelligence more efficient." For DoD, plans aren't enough, as the major issue is that the troops are out there fighting the war on terror, and they need good intel now. So DoD is grabbing as much raw intel (from NRO satellites) as they can, and whatever else the CIA will give up. In the meantime, DoD has its own growing force of agents on the ground, many of them from the Special Forces. This sort of thing isn't new for the Special Forces, they have been going in to foreign regions, dressed as civilians, for decades. Some of this was in cooperation with the CIA, which still hires lots of retired Special Forces troopers, for another career as CIA operatives.

It seems that the CIA lost track of their DoD customer's needs . . . and now they've lost a customer.

Our troops

Peggy Noonan, over at OpinionJournal has a good essay about how American soldiers were regarded by the American populace in times past. She also pays homage to our Soldiers' sacrifices through the years:

The starkest description of the meaning of what the members of the armed services do, and have done, is the simple observation that freedom of speech was not secured for us by editors, readers and writers, but by soldiers who gave their lives to win it and would give their lives to defend it.

I've reprinted it below "the fold" . . .

From 'Eternity' to Here
Americans didn't always appreciate our soldiers the way we do today.

Thursday, May 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

"The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held a fraction of a second longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. . . . This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember?"

For novel readers who care about war and warriors who cared about novels, a great memory is the picture, seen in tens of millions of imaginations, and finally in a film, of Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt playing taps at Schofield Barracks, 25 miles from Honolulu, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, in James Jones's great novel, "From Here to Eternity." It was published 55 years ago and sold three million copies, and it is on my mind today because I'm thinking about the taps we will all hear this Monday, Memorial Day, at ceremonies and in cemeteries throughout the country. When I hear it I'm going to think of what my father always said when he heard taps. "Play it, Prewitt," he'd say. Because that character was like men he'd known in the American army of World War II.

---

It is good that we have this day to remember heroes, to think again of those who over the centuries put themselves in harm's way for our country, for us. It is good that we remember, and take inspiration from, tales of valor, of flags carried uphill, like the one carried by the intrepid young First Lt. Arthur MacArthur, during a Union charge in the Civil War (he would go on to become a lieutenant general and the father of a son named Douglas), and heavily defended positions taken by a lone soldier, like Sgt. Alvin York in World War I. It's good to remember the simple human potential for bravery that lives within all of us, and that in some is fully tapped and met with brilliant, unforgettable actions.

The starkest description of the meaning of what the members of the armed services do, and have done, is the simple observation that freedom of speech was not secured for us by editors, readers and writers, but by soldiers who gave their lives to win it and would give their lives to defend it.

But thinking of "From Here to Eternity" has me thinking of the old American Army of the 20th century, the Depression era, peacetime army that Jones captured as no one else ever had. It was an unspectacular thing, that Army, or seemed so until December 1941. Jones's Pvt. Prewitt was a lost Southern boy who found a home in that Army. He and his friend Angelo Maggio of New York "could live better Inside."

They came from little, had no money, had received indifferent public educations, and the 1930s Army they joined was neither racially integrated, gender-neutral nor adequately funded. The great divide, the caste system, was between officers and enlisted men. The latter were given training and discipline and were left with a passionate and passionately mixed attitude toward the institution that made them part of something as it chipped away at their individuality, that employed them and enslaved them, that made them men and often treated them like children.

When James Jones himself joined the Army, in 1937, a young man whose options seemed limited, he wrote back home, "This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and they feed you like hogs." In the 1953 film of the novel, directed by Fred Zinnemann, the first shot after the credits is of men marching in brisk formation. But all you can see are their boots on a dusty field, perfect but anonymous.

They were not, the men of the peacetime, Depression-era Army, especially respected by the public they served.

---

Our current Army is very different. Our people respect it, and its members are comparatively well-educated, largely middle-class, highly professional, and integrated in race and sex. Chances are good its members will be thanked when they return home from wherever they are--Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, elsewhere. It is a good thing we finally appreciate them, a good thing we, as a society, give them the honor they deserve. There are heroes among them, and their exploits too will be spoken of this Monday, and in Memorial Days of the future.

So here's to them. May they flourish and be safe. Here's to the heroes down the ages who did valorous, death-defying, death-ignoring things. And, this Monday, here's to someone else. Here's to the uncelebrated of the armies of the past, to all the men who went unlauded, who wanted to serve brilliantly, who didn't always quite make it or didn't quite get the call, who were replacement troops never sent to the front, whose service was comparatively undistinguished or unrecognized, but who were there, and did their job, and for us. And that's enough. Here's to them, and to their fictional counterparts Prewitt and Maggio, and all those who once found a home in the army.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

A special thanks to the 3rd ACR

The major of Tal Afar travelled to Fort Carson, Colorado to thank the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment for bringing stability back to his city. A job well done.

Go read the rest, and watch the video, too.

U.S. Army recruitment

In the last seven months, the U.S. Army has met or exceeded all of its recruiting goals.

Go read the rest. You'll find items of interest.

An American hero

As part of the OpinionJournal Federation, Ralph Kinney Bennett writes about a naturalized American who earned the Silver Star in Afghanistan.

It's a good story.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

OPINIONJOURNAL FEDERATION

Sgt. Sar's Silver Star
One man's journey from Cambodia to America to Afghanistan--where he became a hero.

BY RALPH KINNEY BENNETT
Wednesday, May 10, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

The sound of the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters echoed off the rugged, snowy ridges, almost 9,000 feet up in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. In the dim first light of dawn, the men of U.S. Army Special Forces detachment Alpha 732 were scanning the fog-bound boulders and trees, searching for Taliban fighters.

They spotted a tiny village of earth and stone huts strung out along the top of a ridge. Something didn't look right about the peaceful scene that early morning, March 2, 2005. The Blackhawks touched down, one on either side of the ridge, less than 100 yards below the huts. Six men jumped out of the chopper on the north side of the ridge, and as it flew away they came under intense automatic weapons fire from the village. Returning fire, they sought cover amid rocks and trees in the knee-deep snow.

As the other copter had touched down on the south side of the ridge, Master Sgt. Sarun Sar heard the heavy fire and spotted Taliban fighters around the huts above him. The sudden arrival of the 12-man Alpha 732 team by air had surprised the enemy. But the advantage of surprise was evaporating fast in a hail of fire.

In seconds, Sgt. Sar, a veteran of many combat operations over the past 15 years, grasped that if that fire from the high ground was not quickly suppressed, the Blackhawks could be damaged or destroyed if they tried to land again and his small detachment could be pinned down in this remote area.

---

Sgt. Sar, Cambodian-born, with a ready smile and a gentle demeanor that belies his toughness, reacted immediately. He charged toward the huts and the scattered muzzle flashes of the Taliban weapons, lifting his knees high to negotiate the deep snow as he ran uphill. He could hear bullets whizzing past him.

Sgt. Sar had his M-4 carbine set on semiautomatic, choosing his single shots carefully. He knew the area from many patrols. He didn't want to hit any of the civilians whose confidence he and his men had worked so long and so hard to win.

The 15 to 20 Taliban fighters, who had pinned down the Americans on the north side of the ridge, seemed stunned by the swift, furious charge of the short, wiry, helmeted figure rushing up the ridge from the south. Taliban began to fall, hit by Sgt. Sar's well-aimed shots.

Now he was almost to the huts. Those Taliban who had not been killed broke and ran for the nearby woods. One turned to fire at the onrushing sergeant but was killed. Another, carrying an AK-47 assault rifle, disappeared into one of the huts.

Only then did Sgt. Sar realize that he was alone. His men, who had exited the Blackhawk after him, had been temporarily pinned down. They were far behind him, still working their way up the snowy hill. Keeping his eye on the doorway of the occupied hut, he called on his radio for help. Within minutes the team's medic was beside him.

The door to the windowless hut was partly open. Sgt. Sar could see only darkness inside. He had a flashlight mounted on the barrel of his M-4. Deciding to "keep the momentum," he barreled through the small, low opening, gun to the front. But the heavy load of patrol gear he was carrying caught on the sides of the small doorway.

It was a moment that will ever be frozen in his memory. Sgt. Sar was halfway into the darkened hut, the flashlight on his M-4 illuminating the face of a Taliban fighter, and the muzzle of his AK-47 pointed directly at Sgt. Sar's head. The Taliban fired a short burst, three shots. Sgt. Sar felt the muzzle blast as it lit up the darkness.

Miraculously, two of the bullets missed him. But one struck the lower edge of his Kevlar helmet right at his forehead. It felt like a hammer blow on his skull. "I'm hit, I'm hit," he screamed, falling back out of the doorway. He quickly recovered, realizing the bullet had only grazed him. Sgt. Sar and the medic pressed the attack, tossing a grenade into the hut before he re-entered it and killed the man who had almost killed him.

Within minutes, thanks to Sgt. Sar's fearless initiative, the Taliban ambush that placed the men of Alpha 732 in mortal danger had been smashed. The Americans cleared all the huts in the village, treated two civilians who had been slightly wounded, and rounded up a huge cache of enemy weaponry--rocket-propelled grenades and grenade launchers, a radio, a mortar and shells, bomb-making materials and explosives, and a slew of AK-47 assault rifles. The wounded villagers were flown to a military hospital.

Ten months later, home from Afghanistan at Hawaii's Camp H.M. Smith, Sgt. Sar stood at attention as he received the Silver Star, the nation's fourth-highest award for valor in combat. He was a reluctant recipient. He felt that what he had done that day in Afghanistan was "just my duty as a soldier, protecting my guys like they protect me."

As to his many missions in harm's way--in the Gulf War, in Bosnia and Kosovo, and through two combat tours in Afghanistan--he says quietly that "it's a small price to pay for this country that I love more than my birthplace, this country that has given me so much."

---

Indeed, few at the awards ceremony could have known what a journey Sarun Sar had made to pay that "small price." Born in Cambodia in 1966, he had led an idyllic boyhood even as the clouds of war gathered over Southeast Asia. His father was a schoolteacher, and his mother looked after their home on a large rice farm with his brothers and sisters.

Then war blew his boyhood apart. The communist Khmer Rouge insurgency of the ruthless Pol Pot overthrew the Cambodian government and began the period of the "killing fields," an orgy of executions and enforced starvation that took the lives of more than a million Cambodians who refused to be "re-educated."

Sarun Sar's father was arrested and sent to a prison camp. He eventually died of ailments resulting from his imprisonment. One of Sarun's brothers was executed. His mother and two younger brothers, dispossessed of their farm and hiding in fear of the communists, eventually died a cruel death by starvation.

Sarun and his older sister ended up in a refugee camp along the Thailand-Cambodia border. Under the sponsorship of a church in Montgomery County, Md., Sarun and his sister received visas and came to the U.S. in 1981. His older sister eventually moved to California. Sarun lived with an American family in Maryland until he could finish high school (where he joined the wrestling and track teams).

He felt strongly that he should serve his adopted country. He joined the Army in 1985, one year after graduating from high school. The next year he proudly became an American citizen. While stationed as an infantryman at Fort Benning, Ga., he says, "I was mentored by a sergeant who urged me to consider joining Special Forces."

He did. He also qualified as an Army Ranger, winning honors in his class. Then, between deployments all over the world, he earned a bachelor's degree in American history at Campbell University, in North Carolina. While stationed in Germany, he met and eventually married a Polish girl, Dobromila. Now living in Hawaii, they are currently enjoying the fact that he is "home" from the latest of his many foreign assignments.

---

With his boyish face and quiet voice, Sgt. Sar hardly seems the combat veteran who has earned the respect of the "toughest of the tough," his Special Forces peers. He prefers not to dwell on the many days and nights of patrols and firefights in Afghanistan. He tries to steer "war stories" toward the countless acts of humanitarian work he and his team did in Afghanistan to gain the trust of the people in the countryside. "When I went there, we were engaged in as many as six or seven attacks each day. By the time we left, they were about one a month."

Sgt. Sar feels the American public has heard only about the fighting in the war against terrorism and not enough about the work to achieve peace. "They should be proud of what their soldiers have done to overcome fear and win the hearts of these people." He chuckles when he recalls that when he first arrived in Afghanistan "the people didn't talk to me. Towards the end they wanted me to marry one of their daughters so I could stay a little longer."

Mr. Bennett writes the "American Heroes" series for the American Security Council Foundation.

Remember, we are liberators

Larry Elder reports on how we were greeted when we toppled Saddam in 2003.

It's worth reading.

Remember, we are liberators

Larry Elder reports on how we were greeted when we toppled Saddam in 2003.

It's worth reading.

Remember, we are liberators

Larry Elder reports on how we were greeted when we toppled Saddam in 2003.

It's worth reading.

Aero-mechanized maneuver

Major General Robert H. Scales (ret), a former commander of the Army War College, has a column up in the Washington Times about a military strategy called aero-mechanized maneuver. Here's how he begins:

The soldier I most admire is Huba Wass de Czega, who was born in Hungary, graduated from West Point and retired as a brigadier general. In the early 1990s, he postulated a revolutionary new method for fighting post-Cold War battles. He realized then that soldiers who fought on foot stood a 10 times greater probability of dying than those who fought from inside vehicles.

He also knew that Cold War armored vehicles were so large and ungainly that they could only drive, not fly, to the battlefield. The general's theory, aero-mechanized maneuver, sought to solve this age-old problem by combining the protection afforded by armored vehicles with the speed of air transport.

I recommend it.

Army re-enlistment is up (again)

Unfortunately, this news does not square with the mainstream viewpoint, therefore it is under-reported.

It's in the extended entry.

April 14, 2006: In the last six months, the U.S. Army is seeing 15 percent more soldiers re-enlist than expected. This continues a trend that began in 2001. Every year since then, the rate at which existing soldiers have re-enlisted has increased. This despite the fact that 69 percent of the troops killed in Iraq have been from the army. New recruits continue to exceed join up at higher rates as well.

All this is extremely important, especially when there is a war going on. Experience saves lives in combat, and more of the most experienced troops are staying in. This means that, a decade from now, the army will have a large and experienced corps of senior NCOs. That, in turn, means the younger troops are likely to well trained and led.

The army makes a big thing, internally, about the number of troops re-enlisting, especially within combat units that are in Iraq or Afghanistan. Pictures of mass re-enlistments are published in military media, but the civilian media has generally ignored this phenomena. Also ignored, except by some local media interviewing locals who are in the army, is the positive attitude of the troops, especially those in combat units. The large number of re-enlistments occur because the troops believe they are making a difference, and winning. This is especially true for soldiers who have come back to Iraq on a second tour, and noted the improvements since the first tour.

The large re-enlistment bonuses, paid to some specialists, does get some media attention, as do those who did not re-enlist, as do the wounded and the families of the dead. But the attitudes of the troops themselves, the people closest to the war, are generally ignored by the mass media. If these attitudes are noted at all, they are dismissed as misguided, because the troops are too close to what is going on.

Tribute to a hero

Mark Alexander writes a fond farewell to one of our WW2 heros who has recently passed on. The tribute starts with:

Last week marked the passing of yet another friend, neighbor and Patriot from the Greatest Generation.

Desmond T. Doss was reared in a religious tradition that forbade him from taking up arms. When WWII began, he declined a religious exemption that would have allowed him to continue working in a Virginia shipyard and became an Army medic. He was classified as a "conscientious objector," though he preferred the term "conscientious cooperator" because he never refused to serve his country.

"I felt like it was an honor to serve God and country," said Desmond. "I didn't want to be known as a draft dodger, but I sure didn't know what I was getting into." He never picked up a rifle, though he found himself in the heat of combat in places like Leyte and Guam after being sent to the Pacific. But it was his actions in May of 1945, near Urasoe on Okinawa, that really distinguish this small, lean and singular man.

Bravo Zulu, Mr. Doss. And thank you.

SFC Paul Ray Smith

He received the first (and only, so far) Medal of Honor awarded in the Iraq War. Here is his story. It is the story of a hero.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Common Name, Uncommon Valor
The story of Paul Smith, the Iraq War's only Medal of Honor recipient so far.

BY RALPH KINNEY BENNETT
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Since his days growing up in Tampa, Fla., the lanky kid with the slightly mischievous smile had wanted to be a soldier. By this bright morning, April 4, 2003, Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith had more than fulfilled his dream. He had served 15 of his 33 years in the U.S. Army, including three tours of duty in harm's way--in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Now all his training, all his experience, all the instincts that had made him a model soldier, were about to be put to the test. With 16 men from his First Platoon, B Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, Sgt. Smith was under attack by about 100 troops of the Iraqi Republican Guard.

"We're in a world of hurt," he muttered.

That "world" was a dusty, triangular walled compound about half the size of a football field, near the Saddam Hussein International Airport, 11 miles from Baghdad. Sgt. Smith's engineers, or "sappers," had broken through the 10-foot-high concrete-block southern wall with a military bulldozer and begun turning the compound into a temporary "pen" for Iraqi prisoners as U.S. forces pressed their attack on the airport.

While they were working, guards posted at a small aluminum gate in the north corner of the triangle had spotted the large Iraqi force approaching the compound from the north and west. Sgt. Smith had just run up to join the guards when all hell broke loose. They came under furious fire from machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.

---

The lightly armed work detail needed fire support. Sgt. Smith called for a Bradley fighting vehicle. Within minutes the tank-like Bradley roared through the breached wall and broke through the aluminum gate, taking a position just beyond it and opening up on the attackers with its rapid-fire 25mm Bushmaster cannon.

Sgt. Smith's men took positions around the Bradley. He could see Iraqi soldiers north, east and west of him, streaming out along his flanks. He called for a nearby M-133 armored personnel carrier, to give additional fire support with its M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun.

As the APC passed through the breached wall, its commander, Sgt. Louis Berwald, realized that flanking Iraqi troops had occupied a roofed guard tower to his left, just outside the southwest corner of the compound, and were firing from it. He raked the tower with his M2, then moved on through the compound to a point just outside the north gate behind the Bradley.

By now the Iraqis were concentrating their fire against Sgt. Smith's small force by the gate. An RPG round hit the Bradley, and at almost the same moment a mortar round hit the APC, wounding its three occupants.

Several additional RPG rounds hit the Bradley, which by now had run low on ammunition. The Bradley retreated through the compound, exiting south through the breached wall. With one armored vehicle gone and the other out of action, Sgt. Smith's men had lost any firepower advantage they might have had.

---

Sgt. Smith could have withdrawn as well, back south through the compound. But beyond it was a lightly defended aid station crowded with 100 combat casualties and medical personnel. To protect it from being overrun, Sgt. Smith chose to fight no matter what the odds.

Under intense fire, Sgt. Smith's men heroically extracted all three wounded crewmen from the APC. Sgt. Smith then entered the vehicle, ordering Spc. Michael Seaman to join him as driver and "keep me loaded" with ammo belts. Sgt. Smith popped up out of the turret hatch and grabbed the grips of the .50-caliber machine gun mounted on top.

The Iraqis were practically on top of him. Coolly grasping the situation, Sgt. Smith ordered Spc. Seaman to back the APC south into the compound to a position half way down the eastern wall. There he could arc the big machine gun back and forth, from the gate entrance to the north, all along the western wall of the triangle, to the Iraqi occupied tower in the southwest corner to his left.

To fire the machine gun, Sgt. Smith had to stand in the APC's main hatch, his body exposed from the waist up to a withering fire coming at him from three directions. On the ground through the blur of combat, Sgt. Matthew Keller saw Sgt. Smith grimly firing measured bursts from atop the APC even as a hail of bullets hit around him.

Sgt. Keller yelled at him to get out. Sgt. Smith looked back at him and with a slight shake of his head, made a cutting motion across his throat with his right hand. Sgt. Keller would always remember the look in his eyes. "There was no fear in him whatsoever."

As Spc. Seaman, crouching in the adjoining hatch, fed him ammunition belts, Sgt. Smith directed an expert and murderous fire with the long-barreled M2, hitting Iraqis who tried to enter the compound through the gate or over the wall. He tried also to suppress renewed fire coming from the Iraqis in the guard tower to his left.

Finally, one of his fellow sappers, First Sgt. Timothy Campbell, led a small fire team which stole up to the tower and killed all Iraqis inside. But by this time, Sgt. Smith's machine gun had fallen silent. The attack had been broken. Nearly 50 Iraqi dead lay all over the area. Others were in retreat. But Sgt. Smith was now slumped in the turret hatch, blood soaking the front of his uniform.

Spc. Seaman jumped out of the vehicle in tears. "I told him we should just leave," he said. Pvt. Gary Evans drove the APC out of the compound at high speed to the nearby aid station.

---

But it was too late. When Medic Michelle Chavez tried to remove Sgt. Smith's helmet, she realized that it was holding his head together. A bullet--one of the last fired from the tower--had entered through Sgt. Smith's neck and traveled up into his brain, shattering his skull from the inside. There were 13 bullet holes peppered over his armored vest--the impact from any one of them enough to knock a man down. The vest's ceramic armor inserts, back and front, had been cracked in numerous places.

"Sapper Seven," the wiry, hollow-cheeked guy who had been so hard on his men in training, so exacting, so insistent on "doing it right"; the guy who had led them into battle on the first day of the war with a rock-'n'-roll tape blaring from his Humvee; the guy who had personally got down on his knees in front of their convoy to patiently, carefully extract the deadly mines when they ran into a minefield near the Karbala Gap, was dead.

A chaplain and a sergeant in dress uniforms came to Birgit Smith's home near Fort Stewart, Ga., late on the night of April 4 to break the terrible news. Mrs. Smith, the German girl Paul had met and married during his tour of duty in Western Europe in 1992, listened numbly to her visitors. She fought the growing dread and pain by grasping at a desperate hope:

"Our name is so common," she said, tears welling up in her eyes. "Maybe it's a mistake."

There was no mistake. Paul Ray Smith had given his life protecting his men and his position. He had almost single-handedly blunted an overwhelming attack which might well have overrun the nearby aid station.

"There are two ways to come home, stepping off the plane and being carried off the plane," Sgt. Smith had written in an unsent email to his parents. "It doesn't matter how I come home, because I am prepared to give all that I am to insure that all my boys make it home." He had been the only American killed in the courtyard fight.

---

On April 4, 2005, exactly two years after his selfless action, his wife and their children David and Jessica stood in the White House as President Bush presented them the nation's highest decoration for bravery, the Medal of Honor.

It was the first awarded in the Iraq War. Paul Ray Smith had indelibly marked his "common name" on history's small bright roll of those forever remembered for their uncommon valor.

Mr. Bennett writes the "American Heroes" series for the American Security Council.

Intel in Iraq

Robert Malley and Peter Harling have published an opinion piece at the International Herald Tribune website that discusses the importance of listening to the insurgents in Iraq.

Figuring out who the insurgents are, what they are trying to achieve, how they have evolved and what their vulnerabilities are is not a guessing game. They haven't concealed it. They've broadcast it on Web sites, Internet chat rooms, magazines, leaflets, videos and audiotapes. Given conditions under which insurgents must operate, it's safe to assume that these represent a significant part, maybe even the bulk, of their communications, whether directed at one another or at Iraqi and Muslim populations. To pore over them is to be offered a real-life glimpse into the themes insurgents consider most apt to mobilize activists and legitimize their actions, to witness their internal debates and level of coordination, and to assess their tactical or strategic shifts.

The article is fairly well-developed when discussing the necessity of developing good intelligence on the insurgents whereabouts, tactics, and plans.

What it doesn't do is give credit to the coalition forces for doing just that. Because our forces have been doing just that for quite a while now, and they get better at it every day as more and better Iraqi security forces become engaged.

And then the article discusses the authors' strategy for defeating the insurgency in Iraq:

An effective counterinsurgency campaign will require grasping the insurgents' political dimension, taking their discourse seriously and directing efforts at the sources of their popular support. That means controlling Iraqi security forces, curbing torture, halting collective punishment and other methods that inflict widespread civilian harm, and ending reliance on sectarian militias.

It means, too, making clear that America will withdraw as soon as the newly elected government requests, and agreeing in the interim to negotiate, openly, the terms of its presence and its rules of engagement. The U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, has recently struck a candid and useful tone, but more proactive measures are needed.

America and its allies cannot be expected to establish a monopoly over the use of force. But they can and should be expected to establish a monopoly over the legitimate use of force - which means establishing beyond doubt the legitimacy both of the means being deployed and of the state on whose behalf force is being exercised.

So why was it that these guys wrote this article again? It almost sounds as if they are trying to convince themselves that things are being handled pretty well now in Iraq . . .

Thank you

President Remarks on Third Anniversary of Beginning of Iraq Liberation.

"So, on this third anniversary, the beginning of the liberation of Iraq, I think all Americans should offer thanks to the men and women who wear the uniform, and their families who support them. "

President George W. Bush, 19 March 2006

Thank you all for your service. There are many, many of us here in America and around the world who truly appreciate the sacrifices that our U.S. troops, and their families, are making on our behalf.

God bless you and keep you.

New hardware

You gotta admire this new multiple grenade launcher that has recently come out for our troops.

The M-32 MGL looks like something straight out of an action movie or a weapon ginned up by designers of futuristic video combat games. It’s a bare-bones, shoulder-fired weapon with a bulging six-barreled cylinder. There’s no bones about it. This thing’s all business when the trade is knocking out bad-guys at a distance.

“You can put six rounds on target in under three seconds."

[Hat tip to Annika.]

Stay focused

Clifford D. May, over at Townhall does a good job of putting America's foreign policy priorities in perspective. Here's his conclusion:

For a moment, focus on the future: America cannot afford to again embolden its enemies as it did in Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993 and in other places at other times. American cannot afford to leave Iraq with Zarqawi in any condition to claim credit for the departure. The reality and the perception must be that American military and intelligence forces have mastered the skills necessary to defeat their 21st century enemies.

And while no one can guarantee that freedom and human rights will prevail in a united Iraq, history should record that Americans did everything in their power to achieve that outcome.

Now go read how he arrived at that conclusion. Recommended.

Operation Swarmer

Bill Roggio, over at The Fourth Rail, has an informative summary of Operation Swarmer taking place near Samarra.

Blackhawks from the 101st Airborne Division's aviation brigade departing a military base to begin Operation Swarmer near the city of Samarra. Image courtesy of Sgt. First Class Antony Joseph, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade.

Success in Tal Afar

I've seen many news accounts that imply, or even state explicitly, that our military -- from Rumsfeld to Private Smith -- is unable to adapt to the unique situation in Iraq. An article in the Washington Post last week illustrates that our military (and, by impolication, its civilian leadership) is very much able to adapt. In fact, adaptability has been one of the strongest characteristics of the U.S. military -- from its inception in the 1700s to the present . . .

The article starts with:

The last time the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment served in Iraq, in 2003-04, its performance was judged mediocre, with a series of abuse cases growing out of its tour of duty in Anbar province.

But its second tour in Iraq has been very different, according to specialists in the difficult art of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign -- fighting a guerrilla war but also trying to win over the population and elements of the enemy. Such campaigns are distinct from the kind of war most U.S. commanders have spent decades preparing to fight.

This makes for some good reading. It is also nice to see this being reported by a mainstream newspaper. . .

A letter in praise of our troops

From the mayor of Tall Afar, Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

I have met many soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment; they are not only courageous men and women, but avenging angels sent by The God Himself to fight the evil of terrorism.

Go read the rest . . .

Media war

Reuters has an interesting piece about our military's media struggle against terrorism.

It boils down to the fact that terrorists have "media committees" devoted to using the media as a tool to further their ends. But the U.S. military is constrained by laws preventing the use of propaganda that affects the American citizenry.

I'm not advocating allowing our military to propagandize us, but it seems that terrorists have a lot going for them in terms of free publicity provided by our very own news organizations, doesn't it?

And that is a powerful weapon . . .

Back in the USA

Major K is back home, God bless him! Thank you, soldier. You have my heartfelt gratitude!

Embed Margaret Friedenauer

Margaret Friedenauer is a reporter for the Daily News-Miner out of Fairbanks, Alaska. She is currently embedded with the 172nd Stryker Brigade in Iraq. Her blog is Reporting from Iraq, and has some interesting entries.

We were just sitting there, waiting for the explosive guys to come check out and dispose of what the soldiers figured was an IED when the darn thing just blew up.

It's one of my daily reads. I recommend you make it one of yours, as well.

Fire and Ice

The first-rate blog of an official Marine Corps artist: Fire and Ice

Humor on uniform

This is really quite humorous -- in a dark sort of way. Check out the black patch under the US flag . . .

The flags below the black patch are (top to bottom): Russia, Germany, France.

[Hat tip to my father-in-law and his email buddy.]

Baby Noor update

Here is an update to the Baby Noor story. And here is my initial blog entry about Baby Noor.

The Liberty Limited

My father-in-law forwarded an email to me with this article on it about a Philadelphia couple who put together a train to transport wounded GIs to the Army-Navy game last fall. There was very little publicity -- just this article from the Philadelphia Daily News. Here's how it starts:

AND NOW, in time for the holidays, I bring you the best Christmas story you never heard.

It started last Christmas, when Bennett and Vivian Levin were overwhelmed by sadness while listening to radio reports of injured American troops.

"We have to let them know we care," Vivian told Bennett.

So they organized a trip to bring soldiers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital to the annual Army-Navy football game in Philly, on Dec. 3.

The cool part is, they created their own train line to do it.

Go read the rest . . . it's a good 'un.

A difference of perception

Sarah, over at trying to grok, has posted about an episode of the TV show Over There wherein she was presented with an extremely negative view of our troops in Iraq:

The other night my husband and I caught an episode of that show Over There. The plot in a nutshell was that the Americans had captured an insurgent who knew information about where stolen missles were. At the end of the episode, the insurgent agrees to tell the Special Forces officer where the missles are (on a farm) as long as the Americans promise not to kill the farmer and his family. Long dramatic pause as the officer promises...cut to the next scene of the farmer feeding his goats and his farm getting blown to bits from an air strike.

Naturally, I got wrapped up in the moral dilemma of the issue. Why would the director of this show have the officer promise and then just blow up the farm? What was the underlying agenda behind this move? I turned to my husband and asked him, "Would that really happen?", meaning would someone be able to so easily renege on a promise like that and just blow up a family of civilians. The answer I got was not what I expected...

Go read the rest for an inside look at reality from an Army officer who has actually served in Iraq.

Bravo Zulu Georgia Nat'l Guard

The Georgia National Guard is well-represented in Iraq by soldiers who prefer saving lives to taking them.

Thank a Soldier Week

It is Thank A Soldier Week (19-23 December)!

Townhall.com is sponsoring an effort to get our words of gratitude to our troops. Click on the link to go watch a video taken at the Country Music Awards. While you're there, take the time to send an email of thanks. And there are also links to various organizations that support our troops and their families where you can donate money, knitting, and other things.

This post will remain at the top of my posts for the whole week. Scroll down to see other new posts.

An American soldier

Katherine Kersten, with the Star Tribune, has an article about SSG Joe Buhain and some of his experiences in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

What do you do if you are an Army medic and you are asked to provide medical care to an Iraqi terrorist who has just killed or maimed some of your buddies? Staff Sgt. Joe Buhain of Rochester knows the answer.

This is in contrast to the endlessly repetitive (and mostly false) reports about our troops being abusive while in-theater.

I recommend it.

Staying the course

Marine Major Ben Connable has a good article in the about the truth on the ground in Iraq, and the importance of staying the course. He is looking forward to returning to Iraq for another tour of duty there. Why? Because he believes that it is important for us to successfully complete the job of building a new democracy in Iraq.

He is realistic about his assessment of the chances, but he is worried about the western media's dangerously false portrayal of Iraq as a quagmire:

For every vividly portrayed suicide bombing, there are hundreds of thousands of people living quiet, if often uncertain, lives. For every depressing story of unrest and instability there is an untold story of potential and hope. The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.

It is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth.

It is a good article, and well worth reading.

Letter to an American Soldier

Vasko Kohlmayer, over at the American Thinker, has posted an open letter to our noble warfighters. Here's an excerpt:

When I kiss my little girl good night, I do so knowing that many have paid -- and many are paying still -- a heavy price so that I can partake in this wondrous moment in freedom and peace. The thought that so many laid their lives while making it possible is almost too painful to bear. Tied to you with a bond forged by your sacrifice, I acknowledge its lopsided nature -- I get the benefits while you bear the cost.

It's very much worth reading.

Defeat from the jaws of victory

Norman Podhoretz has an interesting op-ed up at OpinionJournal about the American panic over Iraq. He compares the panic here in 1776-77, during the Revolutionary War, to our present one:

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-77 and the American panic of 2005-06. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: In that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq--which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces--cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Though long, this one is well worth reading. I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry.

AT WAR

The Panic Over Iraq
What they're really afraid of is American success.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Monday, December 12, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, "the times that try men's souls," the times in which "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" become so disheartened that they "shrink from the service of [their] country."

But Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . Their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.

Thus, he explained, "Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head," emboldened by the circumstances of the moment to reveal an opposition to the break with Britain that it had previously seemed prudent to conceal.

The similarities to our situation today are uncanny. We, too, are in the midst of a rapidly spreading panic. We, too, have our sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, in the form of people who initially supported the invasion of Iraq--and the Bush Doctrine from which it followed--but who are now abandoning what they have decided is a sinking ship. And we, too, are seeing formerly disguised opponents of the war coming more and more out into the open, and in ever greater numbers.

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-77 and the American panic of 2005-06. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: In that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq--which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces--cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

---

Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the "insurgents" from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with "fierce resistance"? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?

Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between Arabs and Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?

There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news. It occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than eight million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these eight million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi man-in-the-street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.

But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79% of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper's front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it

was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths." A nearby graphic--"The Toll"--divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service.

In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:

Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.

About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his "gut feeling," Mr. Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did "a little tally" of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be Jan. 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:

• 2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration's Iraq policy.



• 1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.



• 887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.



• 216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.



• 761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.



• 357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.



• 182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.



• 217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).



• 107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.



• 123 stories noting Vice President Cheney's admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.



• 118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.



• 121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.



• 27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure.

As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:

• 16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.



• 7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.



• 73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities.

Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the president and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion.

But the charge of incompetence has also been hurled by strong supporters of the Bush Doctrine in general and of the invasion of Iraq in particular, whose purpose is to prod the people running the operation into doing a better job. The most authoritative such supporter, Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins, has expressed a

desire--barely controlled--to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high, and that I really shouldn't get exercised about them.

Now, this person may well have deserved a slap for being presumptuous toward a distinguished military historian, or for insensitivity in downplaying casualties when speaking to the father of an infantry officer on his way to Iraq. But at the risk of exposing myself as another highly educated fool, I must confess that I too think we need to be reminded that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties in this one are very low by any historical standard.

---

Before measuring Iraq in these two respects, I want to look more closely at some of the actions taken by the Bush administration that are universally accepted as mistakes, and to begin by pointing out that the main one is based on an outright falsification of the facts. This is the accusation that no thought was given to what would happen once we got to Baghdad and no plans were therefore made for dealing with the aftermath of the combat phase. Yet the plain truth is that much thought was given to, and many plans were made for dealing with, horrors that everyone expected to happen and then, mercifully, did not. Among these: house-to-house fighting to take Baghdad, the flight of a million or more refugees, the setting of the oil fields afire, and the outbreak of a major civil war.

As for the insurgency, even if its dimensions had accurately been foreseen, it would still have been impossible to eliminate it in short order. To cite Mr. Cohen himself:

If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon?

A related group of alleged "mistakes" turn out on closer inspection to be judgment calls, concerning which it is possible for reasonable men to differ. The most widely circulated of these--especially among supporters of the war on the right--is that there were too few American "boots on the ground" to mount an effective campaign against the insurgency. Perhaps. And yet the key factor in fighting a terrorist insurgency is not the number of troops deployed against it but rather the amount and quality of the intelligence that can be obtained from infiltrating its ranks and from questioning prisoners (a task made all the more difficult for us by the campaign here at home to define torture down to the point where it would become illegal to subject even a captured terrorist to generally accepted methods of interrogation).

Finally, there are "mistakes" that were actually choices between two evils--choices that had to be made when it was by no means obvious which was the lesser of the two. The best example here is the policy of "de-Baathification." This led to a disbanding of the Iraqi army, whose embittered Sunni members were then putatively left with nothing to do but volunteer their services to the insurgency. Yet allowing Saddam Hussein's thugs to continue controlling the army would have embittered the Shiites and the Kurds instead, both of whom had suffered greatly at the hands of the Sunni minority. Is it self-evident that this would have been better for us or for Iraq?

However, even if I were to concede for the sake of argument that every one of these accusations was justified, I would still contend that they amounted to chump change when stacked up against the mistakes that were made in World War II--a war conducted by acknowledged giants like Roosevelt and Churchill. Tim Cavanaugh, in a posting on the website of Reason magazine, has offered a partial list of such blunders and the lives that were lost because of them: "American Marines were slaughtered at Tarawa because the pre-invasion bombardment of the island was woefully deficient. Hundreds of American paratroopers were killed by American anti-aircraft fire during landings in Italy--for that matter the entire campaign up the Italian boot was an obvious waste of time, resources, and lives that prevented the western Allies from getting seriously into the war until the middle of 1944. . . . In late 1944, Allied commanders failed to anticipate that the Germans would attack through Belgium despite their having done so in 1914 and 1940." In brief, Cavanaugh concludes, "On any given week, World War II offered more [foul-ups] and catastrophes than anything that has been seen in postwar Iraq."

And I would also still say, as I have said before, that the number of American casualties in Iraq is minimal as compared with the losses suffered in past wars: in World War II, 405,399; in Korea, 36,574; in Vietnam, 58,209. Similarly, the mistakes--again assuming they were mistakes rather than debatable judgment calls--committed in the first year after the fall of Saddam were relatively inconsequential when measured against those made in the aftermath of the Allied victories over Germany and Japan.

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Several Iraqi bloggers, and many letters written by American soldiers in the field that have found their way onto the Internet, paint a very different picture. Like Arthur Chrenkoff, these close-range observers do not overlook the persistence of major problems, and they do not deny that we still have a long way to go before Iraq becomes secure, stable and democratic. But they document with great detail the amazing progress that has been made, even under the gun of Islamofascist terrorism, in building--from scratch--the political morale of a country ravaged by "posttotalitarian stress disorder," in setting up the institutional foundations of a federal republic, in getting the economy moving, and in reconstructing the physical infrastructure.

The columnist Max Boot, who has himself been free with charges of incompetence, and who takes the position that we should have put more troops into Iraq, can (like Eliot Cohen) see clearly through his own reservations to provide a good summary of the situation as it now stands:

For starters, one can point to two successful elections . . ., on Jan. 30 and Oct. 15, in which the majority of Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote. The constitutional referendum in October was particularly significant because it marked the first wholesale engagement of Sunnis in the political process. . . . This is big news. The most disaffected group in Iraq is starting to realize that it must achieve its objectives through ballots, not bullets.

Moving on to the economy, Mr. Boot (relying on a Brookings Institution report) tells us that "for all the insurgents' attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy," per capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30% higher than it was before the war; that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% in 2006; and that there are five times as many cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein's day, five as many more telephone subscribers, and 32 times as many Internet users.

Finally, Mr. Boot points out that whereas not a single independent media outlet existed in Iraq before 2003, there are now 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations, and more than 100 newspapers.

To all of this we can add the 3,404 public schools, 304 water and sewage projects, 257 fire and police stations, and 149 public-health facilities that had been built as of September 2005, with another 921 such projects currently under construction.

As for the military front, a November 2005 report by the Committee on the Present Danger cites an example of what is being accomplished by American troops:

In the recent Operation Steel Curtain on the Syrian border, our troops detained more than 1,000 suspected insurgents. One hundred weapons caches were found and cleared. Since January, 116 of Zarqawi's lieutenants have been killed or captured.

The CPD report also notes the steady strengthening of the Iraqi armed forces, and the increasing degree of responsibility they are assuming in the fight against the insurgency:

[Since July] Iraq's armed forces . . . have added 22 new battalions, and 5,500 police-service personnel have been trained and equipped (as have some 2,000 special-police commanders). Coalition senior officers report that 80 Iraqi battalions now are able to fight alongside our troops and 36 are "generally able to conduct independent operations." More than 20 of the coalition's forward-operating bases have been turned over to the Iraqi army.

The CPD supports the campaign in Iraq. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is (to put it mildly) unfriendly to the Bush Doctrine and all its works. But Mr. Cordesman concurs with the CPD assessment. Citing slightly different statistics, he notes

continued increase in the number of Iraqi units able to take the lead in combat operations against the insurgency . . . progress of Iraqi units in assuming responsibility for the battle space . . . [and] continued increase in the number of units and individuals trained, equipped, and formed into operational status.

What this means in concrete terms is laid out by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, also no great admirer of how the Bush administration has conducted the Iraq campaign:

For two years, when reporters would ask how it was possible that the mightiest military in history could not secure a five-kilometer stretch of road, the military responded with long, jargon-filled lectures. . . . Then one day this summer the military was ordered to secure the road. . . . Presto. Using Iraqi forces, the road was secured. Similar strategies have made cities like Najaf, Mosul, Tal Afar and even Falluja much safer today than they were a year ago.

---

Why is there so little public awareness of these things? One young reporter, who proudly proclaims his membership in the mainstream media, has been only too happy to provide an explanation:

As long as American soldiers are getting killed nearly every day, we're not going to be giving much coverage to the opening of multimillion dollar sewage projects. American lives are worth more than Iraqi shit.

Observe, in this clever and brutal formulation, the professed concern with American casualties. From it, one might imagine that the statement is worlds away from the hostility to American military power--and to America in general--that pervaded the radical left in the 1960s and that in a milder liberal mutation came to be known as the "post-Vietnam syndrome." And it is certainly true that the antiwar movement spawned by Vietnam rarely had a tear to shed for the American lives that were being lost there. But the newfound tenderness toward our troops in Iraq does not in the least reflect a change in attitude toward the use of force by the United States. To the contrary, the relentless harping on American casualties by the mainstream media is part of an increasingly desperate effort to portray Iraq as another Vietnam: a foolish and futile (if not immoral and illegal) resort to military power in pursuit of a worthless (if not unworthy) goal.

Mark Twain once famously said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. So it was, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the post-Vietnam syndrome. During those early weeks, a number of commentators were quick to proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941 had done to the isolationism of old, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001 had done to the Vietnam syndrome. Politically speaking, it was dead, and the fallout from the Vietnam War--namely, the hostility to America and especially to American military power--would follow it into the grave.

As is evident from the coverage of Iraq in the mainstream media, such pronouncements were more than a little premature: the Vietnam syndrome is still alive and well. But equally apparent is that the reporters and editors to whom it is a veritable religion understand very clearly that success in Iraq could deal the Vietnam syndrome a mortal blow. Little wonder, then, that they have so resolutely tried to ignore any and all signs of progress--or, when that becomes impossible, to dismiss them as so much "shit."

This, however, is at least a kind of tribute to our progress, if a perverse one. The same cannot be said of the opponents of the Bush Doctrine in the universities and think tanks, who are unwilling even to acknowledge that more and better things are happening in Iraq and the broader Middle East than are dreamed of in their philosophy.

Take Zbigniew Brzezinski, who left the academy to serve as Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and is now a professor again. In a recently published piece entitled "American Debacle," Mr. Brzezinski began by accusing George W. Bush of "suicidal statecraft," went on to pronounce the intervention in Iraq (along with everything else this president has done) a total disaster, and ended by urging that we withdraw from that country "perhaps even as early as next year." Unlike the late Sen. George Aiken of Vermont, who once proposed that we declare victory in Vietnam and then get out, Mr. Brzezinski wants to declare defeat in Iraq and then get out. This, he mysteriously assures us, will help restore "the legitimacy of America's global role."

Now I have to admit that I find it a little rich that George W. Bush should be accused of "suicidal statecraft" by, of all people, the man who in the late 1970s helped shape a foreign policy that emboldened the Iranians to seize and hold American hostages while his boss in the Oval Office stood impotently by for almost six months before finally authorizing a rescue operation so inept that it only compounded our national humiliation.

And where was Mr. Brzezinski--famed at the time for his anticommunism--when the President he served congratulated us on having overcome our "inordinate fear of communism"? Where was Mr. Brzezinski--known far and wide for his hard-line determination to resist Soviet expansionism--when Cyrus Vance, the then secretary of state, declared that the Soviet Union and the United States had "similar dreams and aspirations," and when Mr. Carter himself complacently informed us that containment was no longer necessary? And how was it that, despite daily meetings with Mr. Brzezinski, Mr. Carter remained so blind to the nature of the Soviet regime that the invasion of Afghanistan, as he himself would admit, taught him more in a week about the nature of that regime than he had managed to learn in an entire lifetime? Had the cat gotten Mr. Brzezinski's tongue in the three years leading up to that invasion--the same tongue he now wags with such confidence at George W. Bush?

---

But even if Mr. Brzezinski's record over the past 30 years did not disqualify him from dispensing advice on how to conduct American foreign policy, this diatribe against Mr. Bush would by itself be enough. For here he looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the United States being "stamped as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs." This may not be fair, he covers himself by adding; but not a single word does he say to indicate that the British created the very despotisms the United States is now trying to replace with democratic regimes, or that George W. Bush is the first American president to have come out openly for a Palestinian state.

Again Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and by extension Guantanamo, causing the loss of America's "moral standing" as a "country that has stood tall" against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights." And that is all he sees--quite as though we never liberated Afghanistan from the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban, or Iraq from the fascist despotism of Saddam Hussein. But how, after all, when it comes to standing tall against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights," can such achievements compare with a sanctimonious lecture by Jimmy Carter followed by the embrace of one Third World dictator after another?

Then for a third time Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees more and more sympathy for terrorism, and more and more hatred of America, being generated throughout the region by our actions in Iraq; and in this context, too, that is all he sees. About the momentous encouragement that our actions have given to the forces of reform that never dared act or even speak up before, he is completely silent--though it is a phenomenon that even so inveterate a hater of America as the Lebanese dissident Walid Jumblatt has found himself compelled to recognize. Thus, only a few months after declaring that "the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory," Mr. Jumblatt suddenly woke up to what those U.S. soldiers had actually been doing for the world in which he lived:

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting [in January 2005], eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.

The columnist Michael Barone has listed some of the developments that bear out Jumblatt's judgment:

[The] progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results--the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya's giving up WMD's, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi's recent suicide attacks, and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia.

Even in Syria, reports the Washington Post's David Ignatius:

People talk politics . . . with a passion I haven't heard since the 1980s in Eastern Europe. They're writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950s.

And not only in Syria. As the democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who, like Mr. Jumblatt, originally opposed the invasion of Iraq, told Mr. Ignatius's colleague Jim Hoagland:

Those [in the Middle East] who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors . . . [because the invasion of Iraq] has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be midwives.

Nor are such changes confined to the political sphere alone. According to a report in The Economist, a revulsion against terrorism has begun to spread among Muslim clerics, including some who, like the secular Mr. Jumblatt, were only recently applauding its use against Americans:

Moderate Muslim clerics have grown increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel . . . as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.

Zbigniew Brzezinski may be wrongheaded, but he is neither blind nor stupid. Why, then, his willful silence in the face of all these signs of progress? I can only interpret it as the product of a rising panic. No less than the denizens of the mainstream media, he is desperately struggling to salvage a worldview that, like theirs, should have been but was not killed off by 9/11 and that, like theirs, may well suffer a truly mortal blow if the Bush Doctrine passes through the great test of fire it is undergoing in Iraq.

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Mr. Brzezinski's worldview is a syncretistic mix of foreign-policy realism (with its emphasis on stability and the sanctity of national borders) and liberal internationalism (with its unshakable faith in compromise, consensus and international institutions). In this he differs somewhat from another former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, a Republican who occupied the office under George W. Bush's father and whose own commitment to the realist perspective is pure and unadulterated.

In spite of this difference, the two men are at one in regarding the war in Iraq as a disastrous distraction from the really important business to which we should be attending in the Middle East--namely, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an article published some months before the invasion and entitled "Don't Attack Saddam," Mr. Scowcroft wrote:

Possibly the most dire consequence [of attacking Saddam] would be the effect in the region. The shared view in the region is that Iraq is principally an obsession of the U.S. The obsession of the region, however, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we were seen to be turning our backs on that bitter conflict, there would be an explosion of outrage against us.

Evidently he still holds to this view. So does Mr. Brzezinski, who attacks "the Bush team" for having transformed "a manageable, though serious, challenge of largely regional origin into an international debacle," and who urges us to get out of Iraq, the sooner the better, so that we can shift our focus back to where it really belongs--"the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."

Well, whether the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is truly "the obsession of the region" or, rather, a screen for other things, it certainly is the obsession of Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft, as it is of almost everyone else who looks at the Middle East from the so-called realist perspective and to whom stability is the great desideratum. Even from that perspective, however, the nonstop preoccupation with Israel would seem to be warranted only if the conflict with the Palestinians were the main cause of instability throughout the region.

This is indeed what Messrs. Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and most other members of the realist school believe. (But not Henry Kissinger, the leading realist of them all. Even though he is skeptical about the possibility of democratizing the Middle East, Mr. Kissinger favored the invasion of Iraq and thinks that victory there is essential. Nor does he believe that the war between the Palestinians and Israel is the most important problem in the world, or even in the Middle East.)

Yet the realities to which the realists are so deferential in the abstract make utter nonsense of this idea. Since the birth of Israel in 1948, there have been something like two dozen wars in the Middle East (variously involving Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Iraq) that have had nothing whatever to do with the Jewish state, or with the Palestinians. In one of these alone--the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88--more lives were lost than in all the wars involving Israel put together.

The obsessive animus against Israel goes hand in hand with the overall strategy for dealing with the Middle East that prevailed before 9/11, and to which Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft are still married, heart and soul and mind. The best and most succinct description of that strategy was given by President Bush himself in explaining why 9/11 had driven him to reject it in favor of a radically different approach:

For decades free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.

And again:

In the past, . . . longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

We learn from Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker that, when Condoleezza Rice quoted these words to Scowcroft (her former mentor), he responded that the policy Bush was rejecting had actually brought us "50 years of peace." (What, asked James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, "do you call someone" who can describe the many wars that have been fought in the Middle East in the past five decades as "50 years of peace"? Mr. Taranto's sardonic answer: "A 'realist.' ")

In addition to remaining convinced that the old way of doing things was right, Mr. Scowcroft is utterly disdainful of the new approach being followed by George W. Bush, which (as I like to describe it) is to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy. "I believe," he told Jeffrey Goldberg, "that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history." But the despotisms in the Middle East are not thousands of years old, and they were not created by Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. All of them were established after World War I--that is, less than a century ago--by the British and the French.

This being the case, there is nothing "utopian" about the idea that such regimes--planted with shallow roots by two Western powers--could be uprooted with the help of a third Western power, and that a better political system could be put in their place. And, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening before our very eyes in Iraq. In the span of three short years, Iraq, liberated by the United States from the totalitarian tyranny of Saddam Hussein, has taken one giant step after another toward democratization. Yet Mr. Scowcroft can still assure us that "you're not going to democratize Iraq," and certainly not "in any reasonable time frame."

As with Mr. Brzezinski, so again it seems that nothing else but panic can explain so astonishing a degree of denial.

---

Like the mainstream media and the theorists in the academy and the think tanks, the Democratic Party--fearing that it might be frozen out of power for a very long time to come--is also in a panic over the signs that George W. Bush's new approach to the greater Middle East is on the verge of passing the test of Iraq. Hence the veritable hysteria with which the Democrats have recently tried to delegitimize the war: first by claiming (three years after the fact!) that it had begun with a lie, and then by declaring that it was ending in a defeat. Leaning heavily on the turn in public opinion largely brought about by reports in the mainstream media and the lucubrations of the theorists, the Democrats--with the notably honorable exception of Sen. Joseph Lieberman--now joined in by clamoring openly for a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

A goodly number of these Democrats (party chairman Howard Dean and Rep. Cynthia McKinney, to name only two) are the "Tories" of today, in the sense of having from the very beginning stood openly and unambiguously against the revolution in foreign policy represented by the Bush Doctrine and now being put to the test in Iraq. But a much larger number of Democrats fit more smoothly into Tom Paine's category of "disguised" Tories. These are the congressmen and senators who in their heart of hearts were against the resolution authorizing the president to use force against Saddam Hussein, but who--given the state of public opinion at the time--feared being punished at the polls unless they voted for it. Now, however, with public opinion moving in the other direction, they have been emboldened to "show their heads."

Finally, we have a certain number of Democrats who correspond to "the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots" of the American Revolution. One of them is Rep. John Murtha, who backed the invasion of Iraq because (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he really thought it was the right thing to do, but who has now bought entirely into the view that all is lost and that the only sensible course is to turn tail:

The war in Iraq is . . . a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. . . . Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people, or the Persian Gulf region. . . . Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists, and foreign jihadists. . . . Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Murtha that talk of this kind could only confuse and demoralize the troops for whose welfare, and for whose sufferings, he expresses such concern. By all accounts, those troops are very proud of what they are accomplishing in Iraq. How then could they not be confounded when a respected congressman--a former Marine, no less--declares that they have been fighting for nothing, nothing whatsoever, and when for saying so he gets a standing ovation from his fellow Democrats? How could they not be demoralized to be told that there is no point in going on because their very presence in Iraq is making things worse for everyone concerned?

And how, by the same token, could talk of this kind fail to give new heart to the Islamofascist terrorists--just when they are on the run? How could they not be delighted to see the elected representatives of the American people carrying on a heated debate in which the only questions at issue are how quickly to bug out of Iraq, and whether to fix a timetable and a deadline? How could they not feel vindicated when, after being surprised by the fierce reaction of the Americans to 9/11, they now behold fresh evidence for believing that Osama bin Laden was right after all when he called us a paper tiger?

On the other hand, if (as the president intended all along, as he reiterated in his great speech of Nov. 30 at Annapolis, and as is prescribed in the recently declassified "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq") American forces are drawn down only at the rate and to the extent that they can be replaced with similar numbers of Iraqi soldiers and policemen fully capable of taking over, the joy now being felt by the Islamofascists will commensurately be replaced by dread. For no one knows better than they that, once up to snuff and on their own, the new Iraqi forces will be less inhibited than the Americans by moral considerations and accordingly much more ruthless in the way they fight.

---

Tom Paine grew so disgusted with "the mean principles that are held by the Tories," with the hypocrisy of the disguised Tories, and with the shrinking from hardship of the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots of 1776-77 that he finally gave up trying to persuade them:

I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world to either their folly or their baseness.

And so, "quitting this class of men . . . who see not the full extent of the evil that threatens them," Paine turned "to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out," and rested his hopes on them.

These hopes, we know and thank God for it, were not disappointed. And neither will be the hopes of those today who likewise see "the full extent of the evil that threatens" us; who understand the necessity of the war that our country has been waging against it; who recognize the moral, political, and intellectual boldness of how George W. Bush has chosen to fight this war; and who take pride in the nobility of what the United States, at whose birth Tom Paine assisted, is now, more than 200 years later, battling to achieve in Iraq and, in the fullness of time, in the entire region of which Iraq is so crucial a part.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's January issue.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

An open letter of gratitude

Congressman Tom Price has written a letter of thanks to the troops in Iraq in support of the Thank a Soldier Week (19-23 December). Here's an excerpt:

Iraq’s economy is growing and is expected to continue to grow. New businesses are forming and the GDP continues to rise. In addition, this year, the number of intelligence tips from Iraqi citizens has gone from 483 in March to more than 4,700 in September. You have clearly had a profound impact on the growth and security of Iraq.

As you lay the foundation for a prosperous and democratic Iraq, you are building more than just buildings and roads. You are rebuilding lives. In the future, Iraqi children will be able to grow up safely. They will no longer live in fear. Families will be able to live together in harmony. Children will have access to a quality education and healthcare. Most importantly, the people of Iraq will experience one of the most joyous rights that you and I experience everyday – freedom.

Thank you, Congressman Price.

A different Christmas Poem

Blackfive has posted A Different Christmas Poem. It's a moving tribute to the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who serve to guard us from our enemies.

I've reprinted it into the extended entry, but click on the link above to read Blackfive's comments.

A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS POEM

The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,

I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.

My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,

My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.

Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,

transforming the yard to a winter delight.

The sparkling lights in the tree I believe,

completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.

My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,

Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.

In perfect contentment, or so it would seem,

So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.

The sound wasn't loud, and it wasn't too near,

But I opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.

Perhaps just a cough, I didn't quite know,

Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.

My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,

And I crept to the door just to see who was near.

Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,

a lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.

A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,

Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.

Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,

standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.

"What are you doing?" I asked without fear,

"Come in this moment, it's freezing out here!

Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,

You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!"

For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,

Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts..

To the window that danced with a warm fire's light.

Then he sighed and he said "Its really all right,

I'm out here by choice. I'm here every night."

"It's my duty to stand at the front of the line,

That separates you from the darkest of times.

No one had to ask or beg or implore me,

I'm proud to stand here like my fathers before me.

My Gramps died at 'Pearl on a day in December,"

Then he sighed, "That's a Christmas 'Gram always remembers."

My dad stood his watch in the jungles of 'Nam,'

And now it is my turn and so, here I am.

I've not seen my own son in more than a while,

But my wife sends me pictures, he's sure got her smile.

Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,

The red, white, and blue... an American flag.

"I can live through the cold and the being alone,

Away from my family, my house and my home.

I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,

I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.

I can carry the weight of killing another,

Or lay down my life with my sister and brother..

Who stand at the front against any and all,

To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall."

"So go back inside," he said, "harbor no fright,

Your family is waiting and I'll be all right."

"But isn't there something I can do, at the least,

"Give you money," I asked, "or prepare you a feast?"

It seems all too little for all that you've done,

For being away from your wife and your son."

Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,

"Just tell us you love us, and never forget.

To fight for our rights back at home while we're gone,

To stand your own watch, no matter how long.

For when we come home, either standing or dead,

To know you remember we fought and we bled.

Is payment enough, and with that we will trust,

That we mattered to you as you mattered to us.

Not a 'failed war'

FR8, over at There and Back Again, has a post up with his thoughts on US troops in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

This is not, in my limited knowledge of this war, a failed war by any means. These media moguls, government “officials� and other experts have no clue about this war and what it is like on the ground. Until these people have actually looked into the face of an Iraqi when you stop thugs from robbing his home and see the gratitude, then they will understand that this is not a failed war. Also, where are the reports about all of the schools that have been opened since the fall of Saddam? Since his fall, there have been numerous schools for girls opened to provide an opportunity that was never there before. You never here about the good news stories. Maybe if a few more of these stories were being reported then maybe the American people could understand why we are here.

Oh, and by the way, FR8 is an officer in the Army and is currently deployed in Iraq (for his second time). He's also a fellow Aggie. To be honest, I find his assessment to be much more credible than Representative Murtha's on this matter.

Helping Iraqis

Thunder Six posted about a patrol last month that resulted in two injured boys being treated by US Army medics.

And it looks like limbs, if not lives, were saved in the process.

This is in direct contrast to John Kerry's characterization of our troops "terrorizing" Iraqi citizens.

Trusted agent

Major K has a post up about how many Iraqis trust U.S. forces to act as mediators in disputes between Iraqis.

For a balanced view, you should go read the whole thing, but here is his conclusion:

This brings two things to mind. Firstly, the average Iraqi will often (not always) trust us more than other Iraqis outside of their family when it comes to fair and humane treatment. Secondly, for all of the people at home and in the media that think we are such a widely hated and mistrusted "occupying force," I would like to know why they think the Iraqis hate their honest broker. I have found that only the arhabi do.

The "arhabi" he refers to are the terrorists, both foreign and domestic, in Iraq.

Suicide bomber problem?

Here is one solution.

Deuce Four Homecoming

Michael Yon describes the Deuce Four's Homecoming Ball.

Run away! Run away!

I refer you to this link where the Anchoress details compelling reasons for us NOT to pull out of Iraq.

WMDetails

Former military intel officer Bill Tierney talks about his experiences as an UNSCOM inspector and counter-infiltration officer in Iraq.

What he has to say is pretty scary. Where did the WMDs go, anyway?

Relief efforts in Pakistan

Firepower Forward has been very busy with relief efforts in Pakistan.

Go read the post, and then check out the rest of his blog, too. It is very educational to those of us who have not been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.

Veteran's Day

"Let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain."

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Honor to the soldier, and Sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country's cause. Honor also to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as he best can, the same cause."

-- President Abraham Lincoln

Many of our veterans paid for our freedom and safety with their lives. Many more of them bear the scars of their service -- physically and emotionally.

Please honor our veterans today (especially), but also honor and thank them every single day you enjoy the liberty and freedom that we have so abundantly here in America. Because without our veterans, those individuals who fought and died for us, we would not be a free people.

To every man and woman who wore our country's uniform, who trained and prepared for battle, who stood guard in our defense, who put his or her life in harm's way: Thank you for your service, and for your suffering. You have my respect, my honor, my prayers, and my gratitude. God bless you and keep you.

Marine Corp's 230th Birthday

Today marks the 230th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps. Col. Jeff Bearor (USMC) talks about the Corps and the Marines, past and present, that make up that fine Service.

There really is a tie between Marines, our history and our Corps that is, in some sense, mystical. It starts in boot camp and Officer Candidates School with Drill Instructors regaling recruits and officer candidates with the stories that make up our history and with a few chosen stories of their own detailing their small part of the whole. They talk about the first "Continental Marines," the Barbary pirates, Archibald Henderson (who was Commandant for 30-plus years), landings across the globe, the Boxer Rebellion, Dan Daley, the Philippine Insurrection, Smedley Butler, Belleau Wood, "Chesty" Puller, Nicaragua, "Manila" John Basilone, Wake Island, the Montford Point Marines, Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir, Lebanon, Viet Nam and -- from their own experience -- Kuwait, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Semper Fidelis, Marines. Thank you for your service to our country. And happy 230th birthday!

Strategy for success

Military historian and author, Frederick W. Kagan, has a well-thought out blueprint for victory in Iraq.

I have excerpts in the extended entry.

Mr. Kagan begins with abrief summary of some expectations and realities in the war in Iraq from it's onset up to the present.

THE NATURE OF THE CONFLICT in Iraq has shifted over the past 30 months. A basic assumption of the war plan executed in March and April 2003, and of the counterinsurgency campaign waged since then, was that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis would welcome the establishment of democracy in their country. And although a majority of Iraqis clearly do welcome democracy, there is an important complication. The most significant challenge the coalition faces in Iraq today is the fact that the Sunni-Arab community is in large part unwilling to accept the consequences of democracy, and has not yet reconciled itself to the loss of its dominant position in the country. U.S. military strategy has largely ignored this problem so far. Victory in Iraq thus requires a refocusing of coalition military efforts against this central challenge.

He then spends a good deal of time walking through the evolution of the three major military objectives of the coalition counterinsurgency effort: Killing or capturing Saddam Hussein and his two sons, neutralizing the jihadists and foreign fighters, and transfer of the responsibility for security in Iraq to the Iraqis themselves.

As he discusses the efficacy of the American efforts in Iraq, Mr. Kagan points out some tactics being used by Americans that serve the terrorists well.

It is also essential for the U.S. political elite to abandon the current fad of discussing "exit strategies" and withdrawal timetables. There are few, if any, examples in history of a regime as young and fragile as the current Iraqi state inheriting an insurgency and defeating it. To imagine that the coalition can withdraw, turn an insurgency over to the inexperienced Iraqi army, and expect that army to defeat the insurgency is folly.

And he outlines an essential strategy for victory in, and for, Iraq.

The measure of success is not the number of "trained" Iraqi battalions available, but the defeat of the insurgency. Both the strategy and the message must be: America will not leave Iraq until the Sunni Arabs, and all other groups and ethnicities, have abandoned the hope that violence will lead to political advantage. This condition is the definitional requirement for any peaceful state, and the job Bush started will not be completed until this condition is met, no matter how many Iraqi soldiers or police are on the job.

During the course of his balanced analysis of the U.S./coalition military efforts in Iraq, he briefly discusses what our forces, under President Bush's leadership, have done right.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION and the U.S. military deserve much praise for what has occurred in Iraq these past 30 months. The establishment of a new state, the formation of a new army, the rebuilding of a shattered economy, the foundation of a new democracy--all these are remarkable achievements in a short period of time. They will come to nothing, however, if they do not end in success.

And then he concludes with a warning about the necessity of fully engaging the Sunnis in the democratic process . . . as well as the promise of what that will mean if we succeed in that endeavor.

The problem is within Iraq and specifically within the Sunni community. The coalition and the Iraqis are creating the political preconditions for success and have largely confined the military problems to the Zarqawi network and the Sunni Triangle (where that network is, for the most part, based). But until we, working with our Iraqi partners, have persuaded the Sunni community that violence is counterproductive and cannot improve its political position, the insurgency will continue. That persuasion will require political incentives and military pressure. If we and the Iraqi government apply both in judicious measure over the course of the next few years, there is no reason we cannot win.

Though the article is lengthy, it is well written and very well reasoned. I recommend it.

Nobel prize winner . . .

. . . and East Timor's Foreign Minister, Jose Ramos-Horta, defends the US troops in Iraq.

TIME and again as I watch the barbarity inflicted on innocent Iraqi civilians, often women and children, pass with seeming silence and indifference from the rest of the world, I ask where are those who are so quick to take to the streets to protest every alleged US sin, be it real or imaginary?

If they are so appalled at the graphic photos showing the depraved acts committed by a small number of American servicemen – photos that, never let it be forgotten, were unearthed as a result of the US Army's own investigation – surely they should be even more appalled by the daily carnage inflicted on the Shiah majority in Iraq.

Instead, those who hate the US seem to believe that every wrong committed by an American serviceman must not only be loudly condemned but portrayed as a deliberate act by the US Government, while the systematic and daily barbarities perpetrated predominantly by Sunni Muslims upon their fellow Muslims pass without comment. Such hypocrisy and unwarranted attacks increase the pressure on the US to cut and run from Iraq...

For all the present violence, in a few years Iraq could easily evolve into a peaceful and democratic country. Whether that transpires ultimately rests in the hands of the millions of Iraqis. But they cannot succeed if they are abandoned. And the brave, young American soldiers whom we today see cruising the treacherous streets of Iraq, sometimes battling the terrorists, sometimes conversing with ordinary Iraqis, will be remembered as the heroes who made this possible.

This was originally published in the Asian Wall Street Journal.

Somebody is finally speaking out truthfully about this . . .

Dr. Demarche, who tipped me off to this article, has much more.

Soldier's Angels needs YOU

Please support this wonderful organization that is working hard to supply our soldiers deployed overseas with many different things to brighten their days and make their lives easier -- from moral support to body armor, and a host of things in between.

Holly Aho shares an email requesting help from the founder of Soldier's Angels.

22 October 1983

Blackfive reminds us of the first terrorist attack on U.S. forces 22 years ago in Beirut.

Mala's fate

Thunder6 has a post up at 365 and a Wakeup about a stray bullet that plunged into a little Iraqi girl's head -- and how our soldiers responded in a frantic attempt to save her life.

You have got to go read this post!

Bombing Iraqi civilians?

Jason, over at , who is currently deployed in Iraq, disagrees with the media accounts. And then he tells us the real story -- because he was there.

Of course the MSM is reporting that "civilians" died in the attack. They are not reporting that the cowards who place IEDs on the sides of roads died. They are not reporting that the aircraft saw weapons and they hardly mention that the Cobras where shot at.

Go read it for yourself.

Task Force Quake

Firepower Forward has a post up about how our soldiers in Afganistan and elsewhere moved into Pakistan to assist with disaster relief efforts following the tragic earthquake there.

It is a tribute to our men and women in uniform. And they truly deserve it.

SGT Hook

SGT Hook is back in the blogosphere.

As a soldier in today's army, I'm damned proud of the successes in Iraq and Afghanistan on the political side. It means that our sacrifices are not for naught. As a soldier in today's army, I can't begin to describe how good it felt to have breakfast with my son this morning.

Go check out his site . . .

Camp Katrina

Go check out the new blog Camp Katrina. It was recently started by Specialist Van T. who has just returned from deployment to New Orleans in support of Operation Vigilant Relief. The blog consists of posts and pictures about the disaster relief efforts throughout the region.

It is well worth checking out now and watching in the future . . .

Iraqi Army

Gen. Robert H. Scales (Ret.) wrote an op-ed in the Washington Times about the Iraqi army's progress. Here's an excerpt:

I traveled to Iraq this week with a group of military analysts. From my visit I concluded that the greatest change in the military balance over since last summer has been achieved by the Iraqis Security forces. Their story is only partially told by the recent spike in numbers of Iraqi army battalions from only a few a year ago to 117 today. But soldiers know that the effectiveness of a fighting force is better measured by intangibles such as courage, will to win, skill at arms, leadership, cohesion and allegiance to a higher cause. These are factors that media amateurs and Washington insiders have difficulty comprehending.

Embedded reporter

Michael Yon is back in Iraq and describes the process of becoming an embed. Here's an excerpt:

For most journalists considering Iraq, where the frustrations and dangers are high, where there is little glory and less money, and where the expenses vomit—I've now got probably $35,000 worth of gear that might burn up in the next IED explosion—nobody needs a calculator to figure out this one. Food and lodging are free after the embed process—which greatly helps—but that does not settle the account.

There is much more. It is very illuminating reading . . .

Battle for Mosul, Part IV

Michael Yon's fourth installment on the battle for Mosul.

Support Operation Purple

Operation Purple is a National Military Family Association program to provide free summer camps for children of deployed service members and it has proven invaluable in helping children deal with the stresses as well as the pain of parental separation.

NMFA developed Operation Purple camps in 2004 in response to the need for increased support services benefiting children of men and women serving in the Armed Forces, especially those whose parents are or will be deployed. With funding from Sears, Roebuck in 2004, NMFA conducted 12 camps reaching nearly 1,000 young people. This year, the program has expanded to host more than 2,000 kids. NMFA estimates that more than 135,000 children are experiencing the absence of a parent due to a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. This statistic does not include children who have parents deployed elsewhere around the world.

One way to show our support for our troops is to help their kids. A worthy cause.

Aiding and abetting redux

LTC Tim Ryan, in this World Tribune article describes how the media's coverage has distorted the world's view of Iraqi reality. And how that equates to aiding and abetting the enemy.

This war is not without its tragedies; none ever are. The key to the enemy's success is use of his limited assets to gain the greatest influence over the masses. The media serves as the glass through which a relatively small event can be magnified to international proportions, and the enemy is exploiting this with incredible ease. There is no good news to counteract the bad, so the enemy scores a victory almost every day. In its zeal to get to the hot spots and report the latest bombing, the media is missing the reality of a greater good going on in Iraq. We seldom are seen doing anything right or positive in the news. People believe what they see, and what people of the world see almost on a daily basis is negative. How could they see it any other way? These images and stories, out of scale and context to the greater good going on over here, are just the sort of thing the terrorists are looking for. This focus on the enemy's successes strengthens his resolve and aids and abets his cause. It's the American image abroad that suffers in the end.

It's a good article from a man who has been there and done that. Recommended.

Inroads in Iraq

Bill Roggio, over at The Fourth Rail, provides an optimistic assessment of the progress being made against terrorists in Iraq. Here's how he begins:

The past month has been exceptionally hard on the upper management of al Qaeda in Iraq. The death of al Qaeda's number two in command, Abdullah Abu Azzam, highlights this fact. Security Watchtower documents the heavy losses. In the Anbar and Diwana provinces, sixteen leaders, including six "emirs", five senior facilitators and 5 brigade or cell leaders have been killed or captured. This list excludes the Coaliton's success in dismantling the al-Ahwal brigade in the city of Hit. The Lincoln Tribune provides the details, summarized below. Note the cascading effect of capturing a senior leader of the al-Ahwal brigade. Within two weeks the leadership is rounded up.

This is encouraging news. I hope he is spot-on about this. Recommended.

Rhma's story proceeds

Michael Yon is finally able to report a resolution to the Deuce-Four's struggle to get Rhma back to the USA for desperately needed medical treatment.

I wrote about it, knowing that if Americans knew that Rhma was stuck in Jordan, our good people would not let that stand. Once again, the good and generous nature of average Americans glimmered the moment they found the problem. People all over the United States took it upon themselves to call their congressmen and senators, many of whom interceded on behalf of a sick little girl who had faith that Americans would take care of her.

Go read the rest.

Semper fi

For two ex-Marines -- my father-in-law and my 'Uncle' Earl: Captain Jimmy Bones And His Devil-Dog Marines

Return to Afghanistan

Firepower Forward describes his return, from mid-deployment leave, to Afghanistan. One of the stops is Ireland:

After a 3 hour layover in Shannon Ireland, we are called to board. 200 soldiers begin making their way out of the small terminal towards the gate. Several of the American tourists in the terminal position themselves near the door and shake hands with soldiers or clap them on the back wishing them good luck as the(y) exit. I remember visiting Dublin last year and having our host go out of her way to show me some anti-Bush posters on lamp posts and billing them as a general indictment by Ireland against the war. Today though, as I near the terminal exit, I hear the clapping start sporadically then rapidly spread throughout the terminal. Looking over my shoulder I saw every person in the terminal on their feet applauding. My eyes misted over as our contingent made our way out of the terminal and back towards harms way, thankful for the hospitality of the Emerald Isle.

Go read the whole thing.

[Hat tip to CaliValleyGirl.]

Michael Yon redux

The Deuce Four, Michael Yon's host unit in Iraq, is coming home. Michael himself is out of Iraq making preparations for his return. He will be much better equipped this next time.

During this temporary re-quipping and organizing phase, I will also post a few more dispatches about Iraq. One of these, Battle for Mosul IV, I tried to post many times from Mosul, only to have the fighting interrupt the writing.

And he promises to post more dispatches. I hope he also does some serious R&R before he returns to Iraq. He certainly deserves it!

Progress happens

This UPI article discusses the lessons learned in Fallujah. It starts with:

Fallujah may end up being a lesson in both how not to conduct a counter-insurgency campaign, and conversely, how to do it successfully.

And paradoxically, the real success will be when terrorists can be treated like criminals and dealt with through the judicial system, according to Col. Dave Berger, commander of Regimental Combat Team 8, responsible for Fallujah and its immediate environs.

Recommended reading.

Spread the word

Army Col. H. R. McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, presented an overview briefing last week about Operation Restoring Rights in Tall Afar, Iraq. He discusses the units involved and what was discovered after the operation was underway -- and it underlines a key reason that we are there:

We have been joined by a very effective organization, the 3rd -- the 2nd of the 325, the White Falcons from the 82nd Airborne Division. They've gotten into this fight and have done a tremendous job. We're coordinating our efforts with the 1st of the 72nd Infantry in Mosul, who is pursuing the enemy relentlessly in their area as the enemy attempts to flee. They are hunting them down in that area. But the American soldier is pursuing the enemies of Iraq, they're pursuing the enemies of our nation. We are committed to this mission to bring freedom and security to 26 million people here. And it is very clear to our soldiers as we go into these areas, as we see these caches, as we see the horrible acts that these people have committed, as we see the extremist literature and the intolerance and the hatred that this enemy possesses, it is very clear to us that these are enemies of our nation, and we are proud to be here to pursue them and defeat them in Tall Afar and broadly throughout this region.

And he closes with a plea to accurately report the progress being made in Iraq, and the dedication of our troops in the region.

COL. MCMASTER: Hey, thanks. And please, everybody, just please tell the American people how great their soldiers are. You've got to tell them. I mean, it is unbelievable what they're doing. I mean -- and I know I can't keep you any longer, but I just want to tell you, they're fighting. They're defeating the enemy. They are partnered with Iraqi security forces. They're building Iraqi security force capability. They're providing humanitarian assistance. They're organizing reconstruction right now. They are taking care of the people of the city as they're pursuing the enemy. I mean, it is extraordinary the quality of the young men and women who we have here pursuing the enemies of our nation and helping to secure the people of Tall Afar and western Ninevah. So you got to tell them.

Read the whole thing for a well-balanced view of what is going on in the Tall Afar area.

Voices from the front

The Tampa Tribune is going against the grain (at least for the mainstream media) and publishing interviews of soldiers deployed overseas. Here is what they have so far:

6 Sep 2005

14 Sep 2005

They're worth reading.

Never Forget

Major K, a US Army officer deployed in Iraq, posted a nice summation of the fight we find ourselves in.

Four years ago today, we suffered the worst terrorist attack in modern history in New York City. It was the culmination of over 20 years of islamo-fascist terrorism directed against western nations by numerous organizations and their allied nation-states. Four years ago today, we decided that we had had enough and were not going to take it anymore. This war has been raging for over twenty years. Four years ago, we started fighting back. This is bigger than Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Iraq, Zarqawi and the Ba'athists. Everyone of them, however, is an indispensible part of this war. Today, I am glad to be here more than any other day. This is going to be a long war, and it will not end here nor will it end with me. I am just thankful to have a tiny piece of this, and honored to be among the Soldiers that I work with every day. This war will not be won by our Generals. This war will be won by our Sergeants. Light a candle. Never Forget...

Michael Yon's report

Michael Yon provides us a progress report on LTC Kurilla and the Deuce-Four . He has also spruced up his website a good bit. Though the Deuce-Four is coming home this month, Michael Yon plans to remain and report on the Iraqi elections coming up next month.

US Army recruitment -- the real story

Check out this Stars & Stripes story. It's about recruitment.

LTC Kurilla down -- but not out!

Michael Yon has a gripping post about the mission that LTC Kurilla was wounded in.

This is real stuff, folks. Written from the heart. Here's a snippet:

There were shops, alleys, doorways, windows . . .

The soldiers with LTC Kurilla were searching fast, weapons at the ready, and they quickly flex-cuffed two men. But these were not the right guys. Meanwhile, SSG Konkol's men were clearing towards us, leaving the three bad-guys boxed, but free.

Shots were fired behind us but around a corner to the left.

Both the young 2nd lieutenant and the young specialist were inside a shop when a close-quarters firefight broke out, and they ran outside. Not knowing how many men they were fighting, they wanted backup. LTC Kurilla began running in the direction of the shooting. He passed by me and I chased, Kurilla leading the way.

There was a quick and heavy volume of fire. And then LTC Kurilla was shot.

(There are some pictures with the post, so it may load a little slow, but it's worth the wait!)

Michael Yon tells it like it is. You have got to read it.

Army recruitment is up (but not reported)

Betsy Newmark is guest blogging at Michelle Malkin's site and has this interesting post about Army recruitment.

Proximity delays

Michael Yon writes about proximity delays.

Then comes the question: "Why didn't you write about that?"

The answer is simple. Often I am asked to withhold information due to the immediate sensitivty. And so, I never release the slightest hint. But then somebody in Baghdad--three steps removed from the action here in Mosul-- releases it to CNN and the rest of the world. What is seen on television and in the papers is practically always inaccurate, or is at least poorly framed. But I rarely waste a breath trying to correct the information. It's too late. Life is busy here.

The greatest paradox I have seen in this war results from "proximity delay." The proximity delay for me is caused by being embedded so closely with Duece Four soldiers that I often see things unfolding before they happen, and then I am in the thick of events as they occur. But then I am asked not to write about events.

Much of the censorship is self-imposed because I will not write anything that jeopardizes US, Iraqi or Coalition forces or civilians. This is not a game of who gets the scoop; I am not per se a journalist. On some missions I've been the first to spot the enemy. On others, I've been so close to the action, my face gets smacked by flying shell casings. I come away with information and details no other writer could possibly have.

There's more . . .

Why we fight

Firepower 5, a soldier deployed in Afghanistan, has a post up about why he is over there.

I usually have a fairly decent ability to put my feelings into words yet somehow I struggled with how to portray my feelings about this, about the compelling reason I feel to be here and be a contributor to this campaign. Some may perceive this to be a lack of substance or conviction, that isn't the case. It's more that the issue is so vast that it can't be capsulated into a few quick epithets or euphemisms. In my mind, to say simply that this is a "Religious War" or "Blood for Oil" is a not only hubris, it is condescending, arrogant, and indicative of overt laziness. Even a precursory overview of the history and issues surrounding this region will make it very evident that you could no more encapsulate this conflict in a single sentence than replicate the Mona Lisa with a single brushstroke.

You should read the rest.

'Over There' is not

Michael Fumento was imbedded with our troops in Iraq. He has posted his review of Bochco's television series "Over There".

CPL James Wright

.This is a story about a young Marine who lost both of his hands in combat, and yet he wants to make a career out of service in the Marines.

It’s been two months since Wright’s hands were blown off in a fierce firefight in Iraq, and depending on others for help with tasks as basic as brushing his teeth or getting a drink of water has become routine for this elite reconnaissance Marine.

Wright’s arms are still in bandages and he awaits prosthetic replacements. But despite his wounds, Wright sees a bright future ahead.

Thank you, Corporal Wright, for your tremendous sacrifice on my behalf. Godspeed in your recovery and rehabilitation. My thoughts and prayers are with you.

Worthy Cause

Please click the link and check out Project Valour IT. It is a new program being organized by Soldier's Angels that will be providing laptops and voice-activated software for wounded soldiers who cannot use their hands/fingers due to their injuries. Go check it out!

Michael Yon in Mosul

Another informative (and heartstopping) post by Michael Yon. Here's an excerpt:

I walked back through the dark and did the radio interview by cell phone. During such interviews, I get the impression that people at home are losing faith in the effort, though we are winning. But at home they cannot see it, and when I said goodbye that time, I sat in the dark.

Highly recommended.

Hiroshima revisited

Thomas Sowell points out that using nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not the ultimate evil (as some revisionists would have us believe). Here's an excerpt:

What was new about these bombs was the technology, not the morality. More people were killed with ordinary bombs in German cities or in Tokyo. Vastly more people were killed with ordinary bullets and cannon on the Russian front. Morality is about what you do to people, not the technology you use.

I did a lot of research in college about the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. It boiled down to the unshakeable belief by our military and political leaders that the Japanese would fight to the last man, woman, and child. And, after three years of war with the seemingly fanatic Japanese military, our leaders had every reason to believe that. Those two nukes, though horrifyingly destructive, saved hundreds of thousands of lives -- if not millions. And most of those saved lives were Japanese.

I recommend you read the rest.

We ARE winning in Iraq

Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants has a good post up that brings some perspective to the debate over Iraq. We really are winning (emphasis added):

Since Wednesday, we've had extensive and lugubrious coverage of the destruction of a single amtrac by a roadside bomb. The death of the 14 Marine reservists from Ohio is indeed a tragedy, but the loss of a single vehicle to mine is no indice, one way or the other, of how the campaign is going. The fact that so much attention is being devoted to the loss of a single vehicle should remind us that overall casualties are low.

He makes several good points. I recommend you read the rest.

We ARE winning in Iraq

Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants has a good post up that brings some perspective to the debate over Iraq. We really are winning (emphasis added):

Since Wednesday, we've had extensive and lugubrious coverage of the destruction of a single amtrac by a roadside bomb. The death of the 14 Marine reservists from Ohio is indeed a tragedy, but the loss of a single vehicle to mine is no indice, one way or the other, of how the campaign is going. The fact that so much attention is being devoted to the loss of a single vehicle should remind us that overall casualties are low.

He makes several good points. I recommend you read the rest.

Monday in Mosul

Michael Yon has another post about operations in Mosul:

Near the edge of the base, a mushroom cloud was drifting away, and more black smoke began rising; a fire was born. The explosion had not been a nearby rocket, but a car bomb. The blast killed at least four Iraqi Policemen, and at least five civilians, including a 12 year-old kid, practically on our doorstep. The terrorists had attacked an Iraqi humanitarian convoy hauling assistance from Baghdad to Tal Afar, near the Syrian border. Such is daily life here, where progress is measured while the flesh and blood of the newly dead dries on the pavement.

It's well-worth reading. Yon gives well-balanced reports about what is going on over there.

Bad apples

Not-so-good news from Iraq. It seems that there are some lowlife persons in a California National Guard unit deployed to Iraq.

A company of the California Army National Guard has been put on restricted duty and its battalion plunged into disarray amid allegations that battalion members mistreated detainees in Iraq and extorted money from shopkeepers, according to military officials and members of the unit.

You need to register with the LA Times to read the rest. If these allegations are true, these guys need to be punished. Big time.

A day at a time

Another glimpse of what's going on in Iraq, through the blog of Smith, an American at Heart.

[Hat tip to Callimachus.]

Veteran soldiers - new citizens

Michael Yon has a nice post about 12 soldiers from the Deuce-Four who were just made U.S. citizens.

Talk about earning the right of citizenship! I recommend you go read it.

Another dispatch from Mosul

Michael Yon has a new post up about the Iraqi police and their growing effectiveness. He also discusses the terrorists' adaptation and deadly resolve:

The enemy in Iraq does not appear to be weakening; if anything, they are becoming smarter, more complicated and deadlier. But this does not mean they are winning; to imply that getting smarter and deadlier equates to winning, is fallacious. Most accounts of the situation in Iraq focus on enemy "successes" (if success is re-defined as annihiliation of civility), while redacting the increasing viability and strength of the Iraqi government, which clearly is outpacing the insurgency.

Go read the rest. Yon doesn't pull any punches.

We must continue to run the course

Austin Bay has an op-ed up on the Weekly Standard entitled Nervous in Baghdad. Here's a taste:

My bet is that the Iraqis will pull it off. By the end of 2006 the Iraqis plan to have 250,000 troops and policemen in uniform.

But they won't if America wilts, and our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial pages, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C. There, it seems America just wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The U.S. military is fighting, the nascent Iraqi military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the American political class?

Bullets go bang, and so do ballots in their own way. In terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks--the building of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought--that's a delicate and decades-long challenge.

It is well worth reading (it is a two-page article).

The long ride home

Firepower 5, the executive officer of the 191st Ordnance Battalion in Afghanistan, has a post up about the loss of the helo that had 11 SEALs on board -- and its aftermath.

The Long Ride Home

Sacrifice

Syndicated columnist Jack Kelly has a blog named Irish Pennants wherein he posts some of his thoughts.

His post for July 19 brought me up short. It made me again appreciate how much we owe the men and women who have fought and died in this country's service.

Here's the post:

Light posting today. I had to attend the funeral of Staff Sergeant Joseph Goodrich, 32, a Marine Reservist who was killed in Iraq a week ago Sunday.

Goodrich had been a cop, and the St. John Lutheran Church in Carnegie was filled to overflowing with cops and Marines who had known Joe, who apparently was a truly wonderful man.

I've been to too many of these things. At each of them I wonder at the cosmic justice that has me stumbling around alive while such remarkable young men as Joe Goodrich are taken from us. If I could have traded my life for his, I would have. But he was too busy giving his life to protect all of us here. Too bad the MoveOn crowd will never appreciate it.

Go read the comments, too.

A Soldier's Blog

Shawn Richardson, an officer in the Tennessee Army Reserve currently deployed to Iraq, and a Christian, has a weblog where he records some of his thoughts and experiences.

In this post, he celebrates his birthday half a world away from his loved ones -- at least his mortal loved ones.

It's a good read.

Michael Yon's latest

Michael Yon has a very interesting post about a terrorist weapons cache. He provides a lot more than just a narrative of finding, cataloguing, and disposing of the weapons found:

Part of the persistence of the insurgency results from a staggering availability of fighting materials. There are tons of explosives and munitions here in Mosul, with more streaming in every day, though mounting evidence strongly suggests this flow is abating. For example, the street price of 60mm "mortar bombs" was about $3/shot 9 months ago. Now it’s up nearly seven-fold to over $20. Car bomb incidents in Mosul, while still causing major damage to both military and civilians, have been declining. Whether this is a temporary dip or steady trend remains to be seen. Even if the ongoing flow were completely cut off, there is still a deep well of material on hand.

There are several pictures, as well. Recommended.

Michael Yon's latest

Michael Yon has a very interesting post about a terrorist weapons cache. He provides a lot more than just a narrative of finding, cataloguing, and disposing of the weapons found:

Part of the persistence of the insurgency results from a staggering availability of fighting materials. There are tons of explosives and munitions here in Mosul, with more streaming in every day, though mounting evidence strongly suggests this flow is abating. For example, the street price of 60mm "mortar bombs" was about $3/shot 9 months ago. Now it’s up nearly seven-fold to over $20. Car bomb incidents in Mosul, while still causing major damage to both military and civilians, have been declining. Whether this is a temporary dip or steady trend remains to be seen. Even if the ongoing flow were completely cut off, there is still a deep well of material on hand.

There are several pictures, as well. Recommended.

Operation 'Teddy Drop'

Here's a very real indication of some of the good stuff going on in Iraq.

Stay tuned, because more and more good stuff really is happening over there -- despite the predominantly negative reporting that we get here in the States.

Mojo Medic

Here is a press release from the 256th Brigade Combat Team currently deployed in Baghdad.

It describes, in a pragmatic low-key way, the heroics of a U.S. Army medic.

It's in the extended entry.

256th Brigade Combat Team
Camp Tigerland
Baghdad, Iraq
APO, AE 09326

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 5, 2005
RELEASE 20050705-01

256th BCT Soldier survives sniper attack
Spc. Chris Foster
256th Brigade Combat Team PAO

BAGHDAD -- Being able to react to and maintain control of a situation in a combat environment can be a difficult task for Soldiers. They must be able to quickly react and assess a situation, in order to ensure their survival and the safety of those around them.

“Stay alert, stay alive� is the reminder that is driven into the minds of Soldiers since the first day of basic training and echoes throughout their military careers.

This axiom was driven home for at least one Soldier on June 2.

Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a native of Mendon, N.Y., and a medic with E Troop, 101st “Saber� Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, during a routine patrol in west Baghdad.

While Tschiderer was relaying information to the truck commander of his M114 Humvee, an enemy sniper team prepared to engage him from inside of a cushioned silver van being used as a mobile sniper’s nest. This nest was lined with numerous bed mattresses to muffle the sound of a Dragonoff sniper rifle fired through a hole just big enough for the shooter to engage his target of choice.

Tschiderer was knocked to the ground from the sudden impact of the sniper’s bullet. The bullet only seemed to have fazed this Soldier as, adrenaline pumping, he sprang right back up in order to take cover and locate the enemy’s position.

The sniper was unsuccessful in his mission, due to the stopping force of Tschiderer’s daily wardrobe, his protective body armor, which saved his life.
“I knew I was hit, but was uncertain of the damage or location from the hit,� Tschiderer said. “The only thing that was going through my mind was to take cover and locate the sniper’s position.�

“The shot came from my 12 o’clock position from a silver van parked across an intersection about 75 meters from my location.� said Tschiderer.

After Tschiderer alerted his fellow Soldiers of the enemy location, they immediately began to pursue the terrorists.

Due to his heroic actions and quick decisions, Tschiderer located the enemy while he took cover and alerted the rest of his team on patrol. As the Saber team engaged and disabled the sniper’s position, two terrorists fled on foot, leaving a blood trail that came from the wounds of the enemy sniper.

A cordon and search was immediately set up and Tschiderer assisted his team in the search [for] the two terrorists. The driver of the silver vehicle was detained by a team from B Co. 3-156th Inf. Bn. while Tschiderer and a team from B Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Iraqi Army Brigade, continued to follow the blood trail which led them to the yard where the wounded sniper lay in pain.

As Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs, he gave medical aid to the wounded terrorist—the same one who’d tried to take his life.

Talk about a class act - I'd have wanted to kill him!

Oh, and here's a video that the terrorists were shooting of the incident.

Recruitment down some, but retention is up

Here is the rest of the "recruitment is down" story that the news media was exercising about so greatly.

It turns out that things are definitely looking up!

Angels with with the Deuce-Four

Michael Yon has a new post. About angels.

After seeing the damaged Stryker, and being unable to visualize how human bodies would have to be arrayed in order to fit in what was left of it, I had to ask. I found Mark Bush and asked him how they all escaped being killed.

Without hesitation, Mark looked straight at me and said: "We had angels watching us."

It's a good read . . .

8 Myths about the Iraqi conflict

John Hawkins at Right Wing News posted this article refuting 8 arguments used by people who are against the conflict in Iraq.

He doesn't cover all of the bases, but he does clear up some misinformation that is still being touted as fact.

8 Myths about the Iraqi conflict

John Hawkins at Right Wing News posted this article refuting 8 arguments used by people who are against the conflict in Iraq.

He doesn't cover all of the bases, but he does clear up some misinformation that is still being touted as fact.

Something about service

New York Governor George Pataki's son, Teddy, went into the Marine Corps. He's taking advantage of Marine Corps incentives and getting his law degree before he begins his active duty.

But before you start thinking he's avoiding combat, you have to understand that, in the Marines, he is just as likely to end up as a platoon leader in combat as he is a lawyer in JAG.

Grace under fire

This link is to an article about nurses. Specifically, about a group of military nurses who are stationed in Baghdad. It gives some insight into an aspect of the conflict in Iraq that isn't obvious, but is very much there -- people caring about people.

Gitmo, firsthand.

This is supposed to be a firsthand account of what goes on in the terrorist detention center at Guatanamo Bay. It's worth a look.

Michael Yon and the Deuce-Four

Michael Yon is not a journalist as I had identified him in a previous post. He is an author embedded with the 1-24 Infantry and, as such, he is a war correspondent. He uses a weblog to relate stories, and post pictures, about his experiences in Iraq with the soldiers of the “Deuce-Four.�

In the extended entry, I have compiled excerpts from his most recent posts to give you an idea of his writing style, his motivation, and his experiences. Most importantly, though, they tell a true story about Iraq. These post were made in June, but describe the month of May in Mosul, Iraq with the Deuce-Four.

. . . In all ways, Sam Walton was the corporate equivalent of a muddy-boots General, like George S. Patton.

Colonel David Hackworth, one of the most decorated—and controversial—military leaders in US history, offered nearly identical advice to military leaders. Hackworth said that to really know what's going on, you have to talk to the grunts. You have to walk the line.

I came to Iraq to walk the line. Modesty demands that I qualify this by saying I am not placing myself on a level of greatness of any of these men. I just happen to follow that same principle. Here in Iraq, where so many things are so very different from the way they are reported in the mainstream media, I am actively guided by the advice of these men every step of the way.

I did not come to Iraq with the intention of having someone tell me what the people on the "front lines" were thinking and feeling. I came to see with my own eyes.

And he doesn’t just see it for himself, he shares it with us . . .

Occasionally a journalist passes through for a short embed, but they don't really see much by "drive-by reporting" as this kind of ride-along is called. Since I am not a journalist, and prefer to spend long periods with units, I see things others miss, and sometimes it's impressive stuff. Some of the technology and various forms of intelligence that Deuce-Four uses defies the imagination. I hope that someday the Army clears me to tell the whole story.

Despite the high-tech flourish, most of the genuine intelligence actually comes from detainees who cough up their cellmates like cats choking on hairballs. Another source of reliable intelligence is the local population, who are ever more confident in the effectiveness and staying power of the new government, and increasingly angry with the depravity of the terrorists.

Today, some locals found a very large and well-made shaped-charge (a special type of bomb) buried in a road that could have caused significant damage. The locals didn't just report it; they actually dug it up and removed it from the road! When our guys came by, a kid waved and pointed to the bomb. They may have saved American lives. They definitely sent a powerful message to insurgents who have infested their community.

How’s that for a good example of the Iraqi people teaming with the Coalition troops to defeat the murderous jihadists that have infested their country?

Woven into a series of posts about operations in Mosul, Mr. Yon relates the as-yet-unfinished story of a young Iraqi child named Rhma. I’ve put them together, as follows:

During one late-night sweep in Isla Zeral, Lt. Dan Kearney entered a house where a man asked for help with his five-year-old daughter. She is five years old and her name is Rhma Taha Ahmed and she is afraid of the soldiers, but the father asks the Americans to slow down and look at his daughter. Rhma hid her face while her dad showed her fingers and toes to Lt. Kearney. Her nails were receded and there was blood-blistering, her fingers and toes were tones of red and purple. SFC Joel Lundak called a medic who checked Rhma's vital signs and said she seemed to have a heart condition.

Her father produced papers from a doctor, medical records of a sort, and the interpreter said the documents reported that Rhma has an inoperable congenital heart defect. She will die slowly and painfully. Lt. Kearney calls for Captain Paul Carron, the B company commander, who looks at Rhma and decides to do something. As it happens, a journalist named Sandra Jontz was riding along with Deuce-Four on this mission, and Sandra decides to do something, too. She snaps pictures and takes notes.

[...]

A few hours later the sun rises, and I watch as the doves and sparrows and Black Hawks move across the morning sky. Today is the day Sandra Jontz's story about little Rhma and her heart condition will hit the streets. While a scandal-starved media is about to feast on the 7-course "desecration of the Quran" meal, Sandra Jontz's story is quietly tucked inside the latest edition of the Stars & Stripes. Despite her story being nearly hidden from view, it gets enough spotlight to generate offers of real support. When the story and photos run, medical professionals from coast to coast in America jump on it, offering to fund or provide free treatment.

The good news prompts a return visit to Rhma's house from CPT Paul Carron and his Bravo Company men; only now, instead of being afraid of the soldiers, she is merely shy, and her mother says that when the soldiers are away, Rhma says, "The Americans are going to take care of me."

[...]

Major David Brown, an Army doctor for Deuce-Four, told me that if Rhma still has time, it's running out. Sooner or later, she'll reach a point, beyond which it will be too late to operate. While the clock ticks mercilessly driving her diseased heart muscle closer to failure, her visa paperwork is clogged in the system.

Little Rhma has no idea how many doctors and soldiers are working to help her. At different times, I observe teams of soldiers trying to figure out how to smooth over the bureaucratic snags that keep catching Rhma, preventing her from boarding an airplane to America. Captain Paul Carron writes a plea to Senator Elizabeth Dole. Everybody knows that the obstacles can be cleared if the plea lands in the right hands.

[...]

Yon also relates how our troops value human life. Given their job requires them to be targets for every homicidal terrorist in Iraq; and given that those fanatics have absolutely no regard for the lives of innocents and will shoot, bombard, and explode bombs among them indiscriminately; it is heartwarming (and sobering) to read that our soldiers and marines put themselves at much greater risk because they do not want to hurt innocent men, women, and children. . .

The danger American soldiers face on these raids is exacerbated by their great reluctance to use force when there are civilians around, compounded by the fact that there are children in nearly every home, including the homes of the insurgents. The average American soldier will do just about anything to avoid knowingly hurting a child, and will seldom even use flash-bangs (stun grenades) because of possible effects on children in the closed rooms.

[...]

Benjamin Morton is part of Recon's raiding patrol. He lives directly across from me on base. Everyone calls him "Rat" because he saves everything. Rat moves upstairs, training his rifle above him. Rat's the #1 man, in the most dangerous position. Two enemy men are hiding on the balcony, and one has an automatic weapon with a large drum of ammunition. As Rat comes round the corner, the insurgent sticks the weapon around the balcony corner and fires a long burst of about twenty rounds. Four bullets strike Ben Morton. His buddies come behind him and throw a flash-bang into the room, and return fire, catching a bed ablaze with tracers. They pull Rat out and call for medics. Despite everyone's valiant efforts, Benjamin Morton does not survive his wounds. Had they thrown grenades first, three women and four children would have died alongside the four men who were captured or killed that night. The men were elements of a car bomb cell.

And, finally, the month of May is ended. . .

On the last day of May, Deuce-Four had rounded up 149 suspects, released 16 and kept 133, including the three Algerians who followed the path through Syria. We lost four soldiers; more than a dozen were wounded this month, and now some of us are wondering if the path is cleared for little Rhma. The paperwork has still not cleared. The soldiers continue to do their best to get her to New York. I spoke with Dr. Brown today and asked if there is another country closer where doctors can perform the procedure; he said that doctors in Germany, France and Italy can do it.

Perhaps someone in Rome or Berlin or Paris is listening...

I highly recommend that you go read Michael Yon’s weblog. There is a lot of meat there, he is objective in his observations, and his words ring true . . .

D-Day, 6 June 1944

Sixty-one years ago today, some 154,000 Allied soldiers invaded German-occupied France at Normandy in the largest amphibious operation in history. Many died, many more were wounded. All were fighting to liberate Europe from the oppresive rule of the Third Reich.

73,000 of those soldiers were Americans. They were fighting for the freedom of the peoples of other nations.

D-Day Normandy to Americans is a legacy of our nation fighting for the freedom of other nations. We did it previously in World War I, and have done it since then in places like Korea and Vietnam. Now we are fighting for the freedom of the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our current conflict is no different from those in the past. We are doing what Americans do -- what our heritage has always demanded. We are fighting for what we believe is the God-given right of all people.

The right to freedom.

Fallujah reborn

Critics of the attack on Fallujah last November often invoked the damning (and mythical) utterance from Vietnam: “We had to destroy the village to save it.� Never mind that the alternative to the massive assault on the city backed by artillery, tanks, and aircraft would either be a huge loss of American lives or simply allowing the al Qaeda cut-throat Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to keep it as the terrorist headquarters. Forget that the city was already crumbling from the neglect of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Today Fallujah is on the mend and then some, a symbol of renewal and American-Iraqi cooperation.

Honor Their Memory

Were it not for them, we would not be speaking
Were it not for them, we would not be leading
Were it not for them, we would not be free
Were it not for them, we would not be
Were it not for them

This weekend it is important for all of us to dwell upon the men and women who have died defending our country. These soldiers have died so that we can say what we please. They have died so that our nation can be the world leader it is today. They died so that we have liberty. They died for this nation and its people. They died for you and me.

We owe a debt of honor and gratitude to these who have fallen, and to their loved ones. And we should demonstrate our gratitude -- we should honor their sacrifice -- by leading good and productive lives. By loving and helping one another. By supporting and praying for our troops.

And by never forgetting that freedom is never free.

Michael Yon

Another update on Michael Yon's blog. He does a good job of contrasting what news we mostly get back here in the U.S. with what his unit is experiencing:

The news back home is showing large increases in violence in certain parts of Iraq. But the soldiers here continue to comment that Mosul, at least, seems to come under better control with every passing month.

Major K in Baghdad

Major K has a very interesting blog that details (as much as operational security [opsec] allows) his experiences there in Iraq. He has a post dated 3 May 2005 that talks about the "Sunni Triangle", the insurgency, and IEDs. He sums the post up with this:

The most important thing is the will of the Iraqi people. The overwhelming majority here hate the terrorists, and their hatred grows with every IED.

Michael Yon in Iraq

Michael Yon is an author who is embedded with the 1-24 ("Deuce Four") Infantry Battalion which is currently deployed in and around Mosul, Iraq. He has a blog that is very interesting reading. And sobering. And maddening.

An excerpt from his 1 May post:

There are seventeen provinces in Iraq, and more than ten are quiet. They are busy rebuilding the infrastructure; building a new democracy, but mostly just getting on with life.

Unfortunately, the "Sunni triangle" is a region churning with an insurgency that shows no sign of letup. But by focusing on the flames, the media does not give the world a fair or accurate representation of what's happening for most Iraqi people, or for most of the Coalition forces. I, too, have spent most of my time in Iraq in these dangerous provinces, so even these dispatches might indicate that Iraq has more problems than is actually the case.

Yet even here in the warring provinces, progress is clear. I have endured many tedious meetings with agendas focused on roadside trash, local business development, or Iraqi police training. These normalities do not make good news.

His blog includes pictures, and gives you a good insider's view of what is going on.

His 4 May post is one that will break your heart.