Archive for the 'Military Blogging' Category

So this is how it all ends?  Boot Camp at Parris Island, leading to School of Infantry, leading to the fleet and all of the ranges and training, leading to … Iraq.

It is hard even to know how to begin to express my feelings.  My usually quick hand taps the keyboard in boredom and listlessness as I try to write this post.  My mind, usually capable of handling Alvin Plantinga and Paul Helm, darts from one disconnected thought to another, and my prayers have become literally childlike-simple, even utterances and mumblings and repitition.  Sleep comes very hard these days.  When trying to figure out how we felt, the only thing to which my wife and I could make a comparison with the deployment of our son was a recent death in the family.  The fatigue, the sickness on the stomach, the sadness; deploying him has been like enduring a death in the family.

The mere thought of silly and trite television viewing makes be sick, and I want more than anything else information about the war.  Not the biased and leftist information from the main stream media, nor the cheerleading sis-boom-bah reporting from the conservative web sites.  No, I want the truth … and frankly, I think I am entitled to it.

I have followed Operation Iraqi Freedom for a while, writing as often as I could to express both agreements and disagreements, make observations, and give my readers an alternative view of the things that are transpiring in Iraq.  In the time I have been writing I have had to learn about counterinsurgency, MOUT, snipers, EFPs, body armor, rules of engagement, nonkinetic operations, squad rushes and room clearing tactics, Iraqi geography and the differences between Sunni and Shi’a.  I have jettisoned my reading list and picked up the Small Wars Manual and the recently published Counterinsurgency Manual.  My favorite e-mails are from people discussing military matters – because nothing else much matters at the moment.

It is hard to know where to go from here.  I spend much time in prayer and some time in fasting.  But writing?  It has been too difficult, and I have not posted in some time.  I recall the counsel that Donald Sensing gives concerning writing on a web log: do it mainly for yourself.  If others benefit from your journal, then so much the better.  I suppose I will keep doing this, albeit at a slower pace.  My wife and daughter think I am driving myself crazy with my study of the war.  My other son Joshua thinks that if I don’t study and write I will drive myself crazy.  Perhaps they are all wrong and I am already crazy.  In the end, my son deserves to be mentioned in my journal, so as hard as it was to send him off, here it goes.

We showed up in Jacksonville, N.C., on Saturday morning to begin our last visit with Daniel before he deployed.  It was good to be with him.  Not good in the usual sense of the word.  Our words flow too quickly and without serious thought when we aren’t under duress.  No, it was really good to be with him.  The visiting actually started the weekend before when we met him at the beach, family and friends, to spend quality time together.

This time it was different than previous visits.  The stress was gone, and the preparations for what was going to happen were completed.  There was only the here and now, the time to sit at the beach and talk and play football, the opportunity to grill steaks and enjoy meals together.

But the weekend we saw him off things moved apace.  Backpacks and sea bags were packed, geared was stowed away, and weapons were checked out of the armory.  He and I did manage to slip in a movie, and along with a Corporal in his unit who stayed with his family, Daniel stayed with us in the hotel the night before he deployed.  Again, it was good to be with him.  We kept his truck, and getting up at 0430 hours to get him back to Camp Lejeune wasn’t exactly in the plan, but I adapted with the help of some caffeine.

When my wife and I went back later in the morning to the parking lot between the barracks and the New River, we arrived to a mountain of backpacks and sea bags, M16s, SAWs, cars and families seeing their sons or husbands off.  Daniel tailgated with us for a while, and we got in another meal with him at our car.  Pictures were taken, families huddled up, and hugs were frequent in the parking lot that day.  A truck showed up, and backpacks and sea bags quickly made their way via a chain of Marines to be loaded up.  Contrary to the predictions, the busses arrived as scheduled.

Seeing them get on the bus was the hardest part.  My wife cried, and as I turned to look at the mother of the Corporal who stayed in the hotel with us the previous night, she was crying as well.  [This was the Corporal’s third combat tour.  Note to self concerning subsequent deployments: this doesn’t get any easier.]  Wives were distraught, but the men were jacked up and ready to go.  The busses rolled out soon after arrival, and then it was over.

The long drive home was lonely.  The exhaustion and preoccupation the remainder of the week was debilitating, and remains so to some degree.  I guess I expected much of this.  What I really didn’t expect was the reaction of some people to my son’s deployment.  Perhaps I should have known.  I recall a fellow marine parent from Connecticut wrote me once and expressed surprise at the reaction of his ‘friends’ to his son’s deployment.  In Connecticut, he said, many people saw the war as criminal adventurism, and he and his wife literally lost friends due to his son’s involvement in the war.  My son Josh made an insightful observation about this, responding to me that this father didn’t really lose friends; he weeded out the worthless.

With us it hasn’t taken on quite as draconian a form as that.  It is more subtle.  At first my wife wondered why those strange people were giving her those strange looks and gestures, until she saw what they were looking at when they did those things: her USMC car tags and stickers – things that Daniel calls moto-gear (motivational stuff that he wouldn’t be caught dead sporting … his only moto-gear is a USMC tattoo in Old English down the back of his left arm).

But there is an even more subtle form of disrespect that has become apparent to us.  Ignoring us, our son’s service, and the cost to our family.  To be sure, some people at work mention it and tell me they’re praying for his safety.  Some people at church do as well.  Were it not for our small group fellowship at church, we probably couldn’t make it.  But for those long time ‘friends’ at work and (yes, even at) church who, after hearing us mention our son, fail even to say a word, much less say they will pray for us, it causes me to wonder how I could have ever considered those people friends.  How odd this seems to me.  How could my discernment have been so poor?

Now there is only the waiting, and hoping that a fateful phone call or visit doesn’t happen.  It is the not knowing and not hearing that makes this so hard.  All we can do is pray, write to him and pray some more. And lean on our true friends.  I would go to Iraq in a heartbeat to write and report, but don’t even know how to make such a thing happen.  For the time being, my body is at work every day, but my heart is in a place I’ve never been.  Iraq.

Just before the busses arrived, a pile of sea bags in the background, SAW in hand.

[Note: Nothing related to operational security has ever been or will ever be divulged on this web site.]

In what we feel will prove to be an absolutely magnificent idea, the Multi-National Force now has a You Tube channel where you can witness video of combat operations, among other interesting things.  Here is their description of what they intend to do with this channel:

What you will see on this channel in the coming months:
– Combat action
– Interesting, eye-catching footage
– Interaction between Coalition troops and the Iraqi populace.
– Teamwork between Coalition and Iraqi troops in the fight against terror.

What we will NOT post on this channel:
– Profanity
– Sexual content
– Overly graphic, disturbing or offensive material
– Footage that mocks Coalition Forces, Iraqi Security Forces or the citizens of Iraq.

Bravo to what they DO and DON’T intend to include.  Here is the link, but a link will also be permanently included on this site.

Multi-National Force You Tube Channel

In Michael Fumento’s latest post he takes on boosterism.

A lot of people like AEI Scholar Robert Kagan’s reports on Iraq because he says what they want to hear. He’s a booster. Thus, for example, he writes in his latest column in the Sunday Washington Post that “NBC’s Brian Williams recently reported a dramatic change in Ramadi since his previous visit. The city was safer; the airport more secure.” Actually, I’ve seen that Ramadi is safer than it had been. Alas, it has no airport. It hasn’t since the war began. It has landing zones for helicopters but not even a strip of runway on which C-130s can land. Brian Williams, having been to Ramadi would know that and indeed a search of his writings turn up no mention of any Ramadi airport.

Okay, so Kagan committed a faux pas. But it doesn’t enhance one’s credibility to say a place that doesn’t exist is “more secure.” Nor does it help his overall theme as expressed in the title of his column “The ‘Surge’ Is Succeeding.” It’s way to early to make any such pronouncements. What we’ve seen so far is that as American forces increased, Sadr apparently just slipped across the border to a safe haven in Iran and has clearly told his men to lay low for the duration of the “surge.” When the tide ebbs, he plans to reclaim the beach. It is a good plan, which isn’t to say it will work. Our best hope is that his men can’t take it anymore and defy Sadr, giving us the chance to kill and capture them. But that clearly hasn’t happened yet and it may never.

Defeatism certainly doesn’t help anything, but boosterism is just a temporary feel-good shot in the arm. It did not help that in May of 2005 Vice-President Cheney claimed the insurgency is “in it’s last throes.” It did not help that Karl Zinsmeister, than also with AEI (and somebody who actually has been to Iraq), published an article in his own magazine a month later declaring “The War is Over, and We Won.” Only realistic assessments of the war will lead to realistic actions, and only realistic actions can lead to salvaging something resembling victory out of this war.

At the AEI I closely follow only Michael Ledeen (and to some  lesser extent Michael Rubin), so I cannot claim to know anything about Robert Kagan.  But I would still like to offer up a few comments on Michael’s main thesis.  Michael Fumento is always clear-headed and sensible, and I admire not only his prose, but his powers of analysis.  I do not consider myself to be a ‘rah rah’ blogger.  There are enough of those, and in my opinion they hurt the war effort almost as much as the biased and highly negative reports from the MSM.

From the very beginning of my short career in blogging, I have called out what I believe to be the more manifest errors of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including inadequate force size, overly-restrictive rules of engagement, open borders with Jordan, Syria and Iran, failing to see the larger implications of the regional war that is occurring, failure of the State Department and the entire administration to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for funding some of the terrorist activities inside Iraq, and imposition of a foreign political system into the Iraqi way of life, the very system itself (parliamentary) creating the inability to hold its largest voting bloc accountable.

There is incredible bravery in Iraq, and just as incredible cowardice at home.  There are victories on the battlefield and terrible losses in hospitals in Iraq and back in the states, with awful costs to our young men such as traumatic brain injury.  There have been huge successes in OIF, with counterinsurgency failures that have been just as stunning in OIF2 and OIF3 as the victories were in OIF1.  I operate under the philosophy that the truth is always the best thing to purvey to the readers.  So does Michael Fumento, who writes on a grander scale than I.

At Blogs of War, John Little gives a link to a new military bloggers contest being run by the VA mortgage center.  In order to keep veterans and active duty personnel better informed about updates to their benefits, they are starting a blog.  They are kicking it off with this contest.  The top Milblog is awarded $3000, with the balance of the top ten being awarded $250.

There certainly are some big players and important folks, and my web site doesn’t deserve to be mentioned with the rest of the list.  Our friend John Little at Blogs of War has been at this since … well … basically since the creation of mankind, or maybe just the computer (the one built by John Von Neumann).  Blackfive has linked me before and is a heavily trafficked website by some ex-military heavy-hitters, and I have a buddy from OPFOR that visits here often.

After you vote for Blogs of War and OPFOR, go to a different computer and vote for me so that my [doubtless] low vote count is not too embarrassing.

Here is the link: VA Mortgage Center Blog Vote Page

If I can make it into the top ten blogs, I’ll use the $250 for ministry.

Over at Blogs of War, John Little has discussed the new Department of Defense blog called “For the Record.”  John cites the assessment of “For the Record” by D-Ring:

For the Record has been criticized as a shoddy attempt to rebut negative conversation about the war in Iraq and the Department of Defense. All this Web site does is link to a given article from the mainstream media and blast it. And it comes across as quite petty.

On top of that, For the Record misses the whole point of a blog — community. There is no blogroll, no ability to comment, no conversation. It follows the traditional DoD model of communication that says “we will send our messages to the people from up on high.

Friend John Little at Chronicles of War has named The Captain’s Journal “Blogger of the Week.”  I appreciate John’s kind words and vote of confidence.  Go check out John’s redesigned Chronicles of War and companion site, Blogs of War.  John has been busy with work and posting was less frequent, but he is back at it again, and for one, I am glad.  I always check out what John has to say.  John always manages to find things that I can’t, and his analysis is clear and level-headed.  I wish a hearty welcome to Chronicles of War and Blogs of War readers.