Does The Next Generation Value The Sacrifice Of War?

USA TodayDecember 21, 2006 Pg. 13

Does The Next Generation Value The Sacrifice Of War?
By Jack Valenti

There is a piece of sadness that the election failed to debate. It is the lamentable detachment by the young among us to freedom's history.
The press has reported that Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, his masterly recreation of courage and fidelity to duty and country exhibited by young Marines in the bloodiest battle of World War II, has gone largely unattended by the youngsters of this day.
Watching this movie, watching ordinary young men performing extraordinary feats of heroism, broke my heart. They put to hazard their own lives not to win medals, but because their country was in danger. Why, then, a casual indifference to this story by so many young people? Maybe it's because we have been so benumbed by war, particularly this Iraq war, and because so few youngsters have worn a uniform. A movie about a battle a half a century ago carries no umbilical connection to them. That's understandable. But it ought not to be.
Perhaps some parents might want to do what I did years ago. When my son was about 14, I took him to Omaha Beach and the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France. We stood on the bluff above the beach in the same spot where Nazi troops had dug in. They had poured rifle, mortar and machine gunfire onto the U.S. troops clambering out of their landing crafts. They cut them down on the sand and in the water that seemed to still run red with the blood flowing so wantonly on that invasion day, June 6, 1944.
My son was struck with how close it was from the bluff to the beach. I said, "John it was very close, but remember those young boys never turned back, not one of them. They never turned back. They kept coming."
Then we walked a short distance to the American Cemetery. It is on land a grateful France granted to the United States for use in perpetuity. The Stars and Stripes flies over this cathedral of the dead. We turned our gaze to the grave markers, row upon row upon row, as far as the eye could see. There, I told my son, were buried 9,387 young men, many of whom were in between the ages of 18 and their early 20s, "just a few years older than you are right now," I said.
We walked among the markers laid out in serried ranks. I asked my son to read the inscriptions on those grave markers, the bland finalities of a young warrior's life — name, rank, outfit and the day he died — lives ended before they could be lived.
Finally, I stopped and looked full face at my son. "John, I want you to know why I brought you here." He looked puzzled. I said, "I wanted you to understand that these boys, who never knew you, nonetheless gave you the greatest gift one human can give another. They gave you the gift of freedom. They bought and paid for that gift in blood and bravery. They made it possible for you and millions like you to never have to test your own courage to see how you would react when the dagger is at the nation's belly and death stares you right in the face. You owe them a debt you will never be able to repay."
My son seemed genuinely moved. We never spoke about this again until one day years later, he phoned me. "Dad, last night I saw Saving Private Ryan. You were right. They never turned back, not a one. They kept coming." His voice trembled as he spoke.
Somehow, my own voice cracked a bit with gratitude. My son remembered. May God grant that every boy and girl in this free and loving land never forget the gift of young boys so long ago, a gift given to generations of Americans who were yet to be born.

Jack Valenti flew 51 combat missions in World War II as a pilot commander of a B-25 twin-engine attack bomber with the 12th Air Force in Europe. He also is former chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Rest In Peace Maj. McClung

Los Angeles TimesDecember 14, 2006
Orange County Marine's Death Transcends Tragedy
The parents of Maj. Megan McClung, who died in Iraq, take comfort in their daughter's commitment.
By Dana Parsons
I was saying to a friend recently that any soldier's death in Iraq from this point on would be a particular tragedy. I also surmised that the commanding officers might well be extra cautious in assigning troops to dangerous missions.
It wasn't dressed up as insight. Just a layman's opinion that, with approval of the war turning so markedly downward, even those on the ground in Iraq might consciously pull up on the reins.
Today, even this far down the pike in Iraq and with the chorus of dissent louder each week, we don't need to debate the merits of the war or how it was conceived or how it's been waged to arrive at a conclusion about Marine Maj. Megan McClung.
I've just finished talking to her parents.
On Dec. 6, McClung died when the Humvee she was riding in hit a roadside bomb. She was 34 and a 1990 graduate of Mission Viejo High School. Two other Marines died with her.
By my thesis, theirs would be tragic deaths.
But I am in serious reassessment mode after reading comments in The Times from her parents, who live on Whidbey Island in Washington. "Please don't portray this as a tragedy," her mother, Re McClung, said. "It is for us, but Megan died doing what she believed in, and that's a great gift…. She believed in the mission there — that the Iraqi people should have freedom."
For someone being called on the phone at a time of sorrow, there's an incredible eloquence and depth to those words.
Here's what I take from them: There are certain irreducible elements of a person's essence that can't be separated out and conveniently lent to arguments over politics and war.
One of the irreducible elements in McClung's life was her belief in the cause, her dedication to the mission. That's military talk that a lot of people don't understand, but it's a point of view that should be draped in honor. I'm not talking about medals or other trappings, but in the honor of being true to one's self.
In that sense, McClung's death can't possibly be seen as tragic. War room decisions made by people who don't do the fighting can have elements of tragic miscalculation and warrant recriminations, but at the level of the individual soldier, how dare we minimize his or her belief in risking their lives to help others?
I won't do it. I might wonder how the government could miscalculate virtually every aspect of the Iraq war, but I won't condemn a Marine who believed at her core that hers was a beneficent mission.
I phoned Mike and Re McClung late Wednesday to ask if they wanted to add anything. "I'm glad that made you rethink things," Re McClung says, referring to her earlier comments in the paper. "It makes me feel very good."
The McClungs, who moved from Mission Viejo last year, understand full well that the country is divided over the war. But they are reflecting these days on the larger issue of people committed to a cause and backing it up with deeds. "A lot of people go through life and they've got all kinds of regrets at the end," Re McClung says. "Things they wish they'd said, wish they'd been, wish they'd done. Megan lived life every day setting priorities and doing what she knew was right."
The McClungs believe their immediate sorrow will in time be eased by recalling their daughter's selfless desire to help the Iraqi people. "How much more nobly could she die?" Re McClung says. "If you have to lose a child or brother or sister or mother or father to death, how could you wish it to be any other way than doing what they believed in and loved the most when they died?"
In another context years ago, I wrote about a young Newport Beach woman's death at the hands of an angry mob in South Africa where, ironically, she'd worked to end apartheid. Some considered it a senseless death that someone so young and committed had been killed at the side of a road. I argued that it was more of a glorious death — that she died for a cause she believed would make the world better.
Just as it was with Amy Biehl, so it is with Megan McClung.
A deep-seated belief that she was helping strangers. A willingness to put herself on the line, so that her actions would reflect those beliefs.
That's not my definition of tragedy.
Orange County columnist Dana Parsons appears occasionally in the Inland Empire edition.

The Green Zone

Still catching up from my time in Iraq - this is a picture of the pool at the Embassy in the Green Zone. I was there with Pauline this past April and we had such a wonderful time. It was such an oasis for us from the drabness of Camp Victory. It was such a joy for me to see groups of Soldiers and Marines with a few precious moments of R&R hanging out at the pool. Such a beautiful country and I just don't get why they can't figure out (don't want to) how to get along. Very sad and discouraging.

Ok - I'm Catching Up

Here is a picture from Christmas 2006 - These signs just appeared at the DFAC. Why the Iraqis used a bright pink sheet for their kind Christmas message, I suppose we'll never know. I am glad that I will be home this Christmas, but I have to admit that even in Iraq, we managed to have a pretty great holiday.

Wise Iraq Counsel

This is an article which ran in the Congress Daily - It was on the Early Bird so I can't link it, but it is one of the best ideas for securing Iraq that I have read.

National Journal's CongressDailyAM
December 4, 2006

Forward Observer

General Garner's Lament


When it comes to Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner has been there, done that for 15 years, so his new plan for getting out of the mess there might be worth listening to.

"You couldn't have gotten the 10 most brilliant men and women in America to design a way for us to fail in Iraq that would have been any better than what we have done on our own," lamented Garner, whom President Bush dispatched to Iraq to heal the country only to stand aside as Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III gutted the very post-combat pacification program that Garner had gotten the president to approve.

"I was never able to find out," Garner answered when I asked him where Bremer got the authority to reverse the presidentially approved plan shortly after taking over from the retired three-star general in Baghdad in May 2003. Garner's plan called for keeping most of the Iraqi army intact rather than send thousands of troopers home with rifles but no jobs and to allow Iraqi school teachers and other vital professionals to keep working even if they had been forced to join Saddam Hussein's Baathist party.

"He just did it," Garner said of Bremer's scrapping of those two major parts of the general's master plan for putting Iraq back together again after Saddam fell. "Maybe Bush didn't know he was doing it."

But Garner, in an interview with CongressDaily, said he still thinks Iraq could be pulled back from the edge of the cliff if the United States launches a crash effort. The new Garner plan, one that strikes me as a lot more down and dirty and less lofty and vague than what we have learned so far about the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report going to Bush Wednesday, calls for taking these emergency steps right now:

*"Robustly" train, re-equip with American modern arms rather than Warsaw Pact junk and advise all 120 Iraqi army battalions with American combat veterans rather than neophytes.

*Assign to each Iraqi battalion 20 to 25 American advisers, all combat tested, from the Army or the Marine Corps. The American advisory team would consist of a lieutenant colonel as its commander; a captain or major experienced in supplying beans and bullets, called a logistician; an artillery forward observer to call in artillery or air support; a radio operator; a medic; a captain and five sergeants with each of the three Iraqi companies in the battalion.

*Structure the career paths of American advisers so they are rewarded if they make the Iraqi battalion battle ready and penalized if they do not.

*Once the American advisory team certified the Iraqi battalion was combat ready, it would be inserted with that same battalion in a contested area now occupied by an American battalion. The advisory team would stick with the Iraqi battalion. It would have a quick channel for calling in helicopter gunships, fighter bombers, artillery fire and medical evacuation choppers with minimal delay. Pickup points for the medevacs would be established.

*The relieved American battalion would stay intact but be redeployed in some nearby peaceful area. The Americans would stay there for several months as a 911 rescue force. If the Iraqi battalion demonstrated it could do the job on its own, the Americans would leave Iraq. "So you have a two-phased redeployment," Garner said. "In the first phase you get the U. S. faces off the street, but they stay in Iraq. In the second phase, they leave Iraq."

*Gerrymander the parts of the country outside of Baghdad into three regions, drawn up in accordance with referenda asking the citizens the kind of regional government they preferred to live under: Shia, Sunni or Kurd. Each region would have its own governor and para-military force to protect its facilities and citizens. The federal constitution would remain in force but be strengthened to make sure Iraq's oil revenues were apportioned to every area of the country on the basis of population.

"You're never going to find a leader for Iraq whom everybody is happy with," Garner contended, on the basis of dealing with the Iraqis since 1991 when he was an Army officer protecting the Kurds in Iraq's mountains. "But if you split Iraq into regions whose governments are elected, you'll find leaders everybody coalesces around, like Massoud Barzani up north in Kurdistan."

Garner, who served two tours as a U.S. Army adviser to the South Vietnamese army, thinks the shoddy way the Iraqi army is being equipped is nothing less than a national disgrace. He said Pentagon friends still on active duty say it is common for an American adviser who has never been in combat to leave an Iraqi compound in a heavily armored and heavily armed Humvee, only to be followed by the Iraqi commander, a veteran of several wars, seated in a beat-up Toyota pickup truck.

"I would re-equip the entire Iraqi army," Garner said, first by having departing American units leave their weapons with the Iraqis and later by turning out military hardware in both Iraq and the United States.

Garner has a lot more ideas for saving Iraq, and his credentials are damn good. Congressional committees desperately searching for a way out of the Iraq quagmire should give a listen to this general who has been there and done that.

By George C. Wilson

Contractors in Iraq

Anyone who has been in Iraq knows how many contractors are there and how impossible it would be for the war effort to continue with Soldiers performing all of the duties. There are not enough Soldiers to do all the jobs. This Washington Post article about the number of contractors is one of the first times I've seen any type of accounting of the numbers. If we are going to continue to fight wars with contractors (keeping us away from a draft, by the way) then our Nation should start doing a better job of recognizing contractors' efforts.