Iraq and Vietnam: A Vietnam vet remembers

Welcome to Iraq… but call it Vietnam.

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Think “light at the end of the tunnel.” Think the era of Lyndon Johnson. Think of that flood of positive numbers – the “metrics” of victory – that came pouring out of Vietnam and now, in the form of numbers of troops armed and trained for the new Iraqi army, police, and security forces, is flooding out of Iraq. Top generals back in Washington all lend a helpful hand. (Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers: “Well, first of all, the number of incidents is actually down 25 percent since the highs of last November, during the election period. So, overall, numbers of incidents are down. Lethality, as you mentioned, is up. … I think what’s causing it is a realization that Iraq is marching inevitably toward democracy.”)

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Meanwhile, in Iraq, the American officers fighting the war and their troops tell another story to reporters. Senior officials now claim not-so-privately “that there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops during the past two years.” Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, commented to reporter Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, “I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that … this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations.” Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, told Lasseter (a fine reporter, by the way) that “the insurgency doesn’t seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting. ‘We can’t kill them all,’ Wellman said. ‘When I kill one I create three.'” Gen. George W. Casey, top U.S. commander in Iraq, “called the military’s efforts ‘the Pillsbury Doughboy idea’ – pressing the insurgency in one area only causes it to rise elsewhere.”

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And in the meantime, in the opinion polls, slowly but inexorably, public support for the war continues to erode. As Susan Page of USA Today reports in a piece ominously headlined, “Poll: USA Is Losing Patience on Iraq,” “Nearly six in 10 Americans say the United States should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq, a new Gallup Poll finds, the most downbeat view of the war since it began in 2003.”

Does no one remember when this was the story of Vietnam? The desperately rosy statements from top officials, military and civilian, in Washington; the grim, earthy statements from U.S. officers and troops in the field in Vietnam; the eroding public support at home; the growth of the famed “credibility gap” between what the government claimed and what was increasingly obvious to all; the first hints of changing minds and mounting opposition to the war in Congress and the first calls for timetables for withdrawal?

Excuse me if I’m confused, but didn’t the men (and one key woman) of the Bush administration pride themselves in having learned “the lessons of Vietnam” (which, as it happens, they played like an opposites game until the pressure began to build when they suddenly began acting and sounding just like Vietnam clones)? Isn’t our President the very son of the man who, when himself president and involved in another war in the Gulf, claimed exuberantly, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all”? Well, here’s a news flash then. In Washington today, they’re mainlining Vietnam.

Oh, and speaking about Vietnam-era parallels, how about this one: It turns out there are two different races of Iraqis. There are their Iraqis – jihadis, Ba’athist bitter-enders, terrorists, Sunni fanatics, and even, as Major General Joseph Taluto, head of the US 42nd Infantry Division, admitted the other day, “good, honest” Iraqis, “offended by our presence.” The thing about all of them is, without thousands of foreign military advisors, or a $5.7 billion American-financed program to train and equip their forces, or endless time to get up to speed, they take their rocket-propelled grenades, their IEDs, their mortars, their bomb-laden cars, and they fight. Regularly, fiercely, often well, and no less often to the death. They aren’t known for running away, except in the way that guerrillas, faced with overwhelming force, disband and slip off to fight another day.

American military men, whatever they call these insurgents, have a sneaking respect for them. You can hear it in many of the reports from Iraq. They are – a typical word used by military officers there – “resilient.” No matter what we throw at them, they come back again. All on their own they develop sophisticated new tactics. Facing terrible odds, when it comes to firepower, they are clever, dangerous, resourceful opponents. The adjectives, even when they go with labels like “terrorists,” are strangely respectful.

Then there’s this other race of Iraqis, as if from another planet – our Iraqis, the ones who scatter “like cockroaches.” They are, as several recent articles on the desperately disappointing experience of training an Iraqi army reveal, not resilient, not resourceful, not up to snuff, not willing to fight, all too ready to flee, and, in the eyes of American military men on the scene, frustrating, cowardly, child-like, and contemptible.

Compare that, for instance, to the following comment on the enemy: “The ability of the [insurgents] to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. … Not only do [their] units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale.” Oh sorry, that wasn’t Iraq at all. That was actually Gen. Maxwell Taylor, American ambassador to South Vietnam, in November 1964.

After a typical episode in which the unit was attacked and ran away (four hailed taxis to make their escape), Sgt. Rick McGovern, who leads the unit, dressed them down. “You are all cowards,” he informed them. He went on, “My soldiers are over here, away from our families for a year. We are willing to die for you to have freedom. You should be willing to die for your own freedom.”

The Wisdom of the Afflicted

How do I not be a veteran?
My identity defined by my life’s shame?
Unremittingly blamed
By my self
For being the sum of my experience
Ignorant of events
Until survival made knowledge

Irrelevant

I feel like a brittle leaf
Pinned on a twig by the wind
Rustling helplessly to be freed
Before I crumble in the breeze

It is a tender spot
Healed and cushioned by time
‘Til it becomes a mere plot
In some dope-induced war story
But it smarts at the touch

Of rough-skinned rhetoric
And it aches a warning
Of impending storms
I am a prophet by pain
I have the wisdom of the afflicted