Warrior to Warrior

Vietnam veteran and author John Harriman returns to Mudville with the latest installment of his series Warrior to Warrior, letters from a Vietnam veteran to our soldiers in Iraq. See the intro to the series here).

Who's Stupid Now?

Dear Warrior in Iraq . . .

I wanted to write to you this week without sounding like the stupidest Army officer I ever knew.

This was a lieutenant colonel, my brigade executive officer at Ft. Jackson, S.C. I went to him as an Army captain to report that I had inspected a set of abandoned, deteriorating barracks that my company was ordered to move into. I told him that I'd found the barracks unfit for living. I asked him to see for himself and to recommend that the post commander find another, more suitable set of barracks for my troops.

His answer: "Back in the Korean War when I came here for basic training, we had to live in tents out there on the lawn outside this very building. Your troops ought to be glad they have a roof over their heads." That was the end of it for him. He didn't even get his hind pockets out of his chair to go see for himself.

I don't want to be that guy in my letter to you. But...

I recently got a letter myself from a friend. He enclosed a column from the Washington Post by Mark Shields, a piece titled, "Where's the Outrage?" Shields's own outrage--and that of my friend--is aroused first by yet another story of our troops going into battle in unarmored Humvees. And second by reports that a Marine Corps officer is being railroaded out of the service for complaining about the heavy casualties his unit took in fighting from these vehicles in Ramadi, Iraq last year.

Shields goes ballistic in his piece about the "cowardly callousness of this nation's civilian and military leadership," who are guilty of "betrayal." No lack of outrage there.

I don't want to be callous myself, especially where our fighting men become casualties, and their family members suffer for all their lives in the aftermath.

And since I first went to war in Vietnam in M-48 tanks, the heaviest armor available at the time, I didn't have the same problems as those now traveling in and fighting from Humvees. But I can say this with certainty: Even a tank wasn't enough armor for me.

Warfare is a history of evolution of violence. Pre-World War I, troops used to attack across the open in tactics we now call human wave, and overwhelm the rifle firepower of their enemies. The invention of the machinegun put the human wave tactic in the very back of the tactics closet. So troops fought from trenches where direct fire was not as lethal. Until the invention of the tank, which was impervious to the machinegun and could crawl over the trenches.

Which brought about the invention of bazookas and other shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons like the rocket-propelled grenade. The RPG was the tank killer in Vietnam and lives on today in terrorist armies in Iraq because of its lethality and portability. One terrorist can knock out a Humvee--or even a tank--with one well-placed shot, which is a very high payoff in the cost/benefit formula of terrorist warfare where the enemy is even willing to strap explosives to his own body.

In Vietnam against the RPG we evolved, too. We countered our lack of armor by hanging water cans, C-ration boxes, sections of track and clothing containers on the outside of our turrets. The extra few inches of standoff made the explosive much less lethal to tanks. Every armored personnel carrier in our unit used strips of scrap metal runway material or chain link fencing to do the same thing. The troops took to lining the floors of the carriers with layers of sandbags to reduce the effect of landmines. You talk about an excuse for outrage in the press. If it was there, I never heard it.

In any event, when he could, the enemy escalated to arming dud American bombs and using them as landmines, which defeated the sanbags. He also began shooting tanks in the engine compartment, where the fuel tanks were. In the M-48A2C, the fuel was gasoline, not diesel, and if ever there was a reason for outrage that was it. So we got the M-48A3, a diesel tank much less prone to burning.

And so on. And so on. And so on. (And aren't we a deadly and devious species?)

Look I don't want to debate here whether we should be fighting in Iraq at all. And I don't know the details of the cited incident about the Marine officer. But I do know this: If we ever decided in 1941 that we could not commit to a war until we had absolute certainty of victory against every kind of threat, including evolving enemy tactics without suffering casualties--and a five-year plan for postwar reconstruction besides, everybody in North America would be speaking Japanese today. Or German. The men who died in World War II for lack of preparation or equipment would populate several western U.S. states.

I wish that every American vehicle in Iraq was armored to the nines. And at times, I wish that Mark Shields was secretary of Defense. If both those things happened, all our men and women would be safe. Right?

Till next week . . .

God bless you and Godspeed.
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John is a veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam and a member of the American Legion. These columns are excerpts from an upcoming book. His current book, Delta Force #1 : Operation Michael's Sword is a fictional account of the 9/11 attacks and the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom.