Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Dec 30, 1999 | Every day this week, perfectly nice latte-drinking, movie-going, please-and-thank-you Americans are trying to blow the heads off a bunch of Iraqis whose faces they'll never see. They'll try really hard to count their pulverized corpses (you get points for them, you know), but to visualize their faces? Not really. It's not that our G.I.s are evil, mind you, it's just that killing as many Iraqis as efficiently as possible is their job, and they take pride in doing it. I know, because it used to be my job and I took pride in it, too. Still do.
From 1980 to 1992, I was on active duty in the United States Air Force. My last overseas assignment was as chief of intelligence for Ankara Air Station, Turkey, a NATO-affiliated base. I got there in June 1989. When I left in late 1990, we were at war with our wacky neighbor to the south, Iraq. I rotated back to the world, and the Pentagon, and remained involved in the war effort till its conclusion. The war affected me in ways that I would never have predicted and have yet to effectively communicate to civilians and the unreconstructed liberals who expect me to be conflicted over my involvement.
I'm not. In fact, I tried hard to be even more directly involved. I volunteered to go to Saudi Arabia (in unsentimental G.I.-speak, "the Sandbox"), from which our troops were staging. I saluted smartly when I was deemed crucial and had to remain on active duty an extra year through the war's aftermath. Indeed, I sought out every opportunity to be heard on operational matters (read: I put my two cents in every chance I got on exactly how I thought the destruction of the enemy should proceed). My only regret is that I wasn't allowed hands-on participation or a more direct role in the decision-making that put "bombs on target."
I'm not bloodthirsty. I can't watch horror movies, people yelling at each other or a hypodermic needle piercing flesh. You cry, I cry. You puke, I puke. I'll walk away from a fight so fast you'd get dizzy. I only enlisted in the first place to get out of my neighborhood. No one was more shocked than I when I turned into Xena: Warrior Princess at the Gulf War's commencement. But I think I've figured out why I responded the way I did and why I wanted to get to the war zone.
Here's the reason that will disgust you: I was professionally curious to see if all the things we'd been simulating for so long would actually work. It's not as if, for instance, we could nonchalantly jam, say, Ecuador's communications one morning just to see if we were doing it right. Now, here was our chance. How much could we destroy with how little? You never know when you might run low on weapons, and a good officer plans ahead. How many could we really kill if we dropped this kind of bomb as opposed to that kind? Oh wait -- a few are getting away. Let's chase them down with something low and slow and see if we can't pick them off. Got em! Good job. Let's see what kinda damage those F-16s can really do when our pilots aren't just "shooting" gun cameras, photo op'ing what they would have destroyed had they not been shooting wussy blanks. Now we could blow those suckers up and see how good we'd gotten at body counting since 'Nam.
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