Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [195]
Politically, well, this conflict has become a they-said, he-lied, we-should-have exercise in partisan politics. Bottom line, through executive leadership and congressional approval, this nation went to war. We invaded Iraq. That war, which we initiated, has become a nasty, protracted insurgency. Americans tend not to like lengthy military engagements; the insurgents know this, and even count on it. Few of the chosen soldiers I spoke with in Iraq saw this fight in political terms. They were too focused on training Iraqis, and trying to find and target insurgents. They did, however, wonder if their nation had the stomach to see this one through. They get CNN on satellite, even at the remote ODA locations.
“You watch news of the war on TV,” a detachment sergeant told me, “and it’s unlike anything we see here on a day-to-day basis. You also see the approval polls for the war, and it makes you wonder. I don’t care how we got here—we’re here. And we have to stay here and help these people until they can do it on their own. For the nation, it’s pulling out. For us, it’s leaving behind friends you’ve promised to stand alongside until the job’s done.”
So much for the media and the political dimension. What’s really happening over there? Are we winning? Can we win? This war, like all wars, will take time, treasury, lives, and national will. Do we have enough of these elements to see this one through to a successful or an acceptable resolution? I get asked these questions a lot, especially after I returned from Iraq.
Ten days in Iraq is not enough to see it all, but it was enough to dramatically raise my concerns. Quite frankly, I’m worried. We have lives at risk, and that may not change for a while; I flew with two flag-draped coffins on a leg of my trip back home. The casualties are a trickle compared to what they were or could be, but a single death in Afghanistan or Iraq is still an item on the nightly news. And more than a news item if that death is in your community or your family. The fact that this death is matched daily by the more than forty Americans killed on our highways by drunk drivers does not lessen my concern for this single fallen warrior. It does, however, speak to this war in terms of the current media consciousness. This war is costing a lot of money, but as compared to our gross national product and what we spent in the Cold War, including Vietnam, it’s not all that much. Time and national will may well be the deciding factors. We are an impatient culture and an impatient electorate. Dedicated, skillful insurgents think in terms of decades. To use a sports analogy, we think in terms of athletic seasons, and politically, in election cycles. Militarily, we have problems. I recall a comment of Secretary Rumsfeld’s a few years back: “You have to go to war with the Army you have.” He’s right, and we did. That said, the composition of our armed forces is wholly unsuited to fight this war. What’s really sad, for me, is that this is not unlike our experience in the Vietnam War—or the Vietnam Insurgency. To quote that great American, Yogi Berra, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
We have a superb and highly professional military that has no peer when it comes to expeditionary and maneuver warfare. But today’s enemies don’t fight that way. They may posture in a conventional military manner, with parades and smart marching columns—as Saddam’s army did and Kim Jong Il’s army still does—but they cannot match us on the battlefield. In 1968, the North Vietnamese tried to mass their forces against ours during the Tet Offensive and at Khe Sanh. They took a terrible beating. Our media ceded these victories, but the enemy was crushed on the battlefield. So they stepped up their insurgency efforts, and five years later they sent us home. Saddam was a slow learner; it