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).

We have this parade waiting

Dear Warrior in Iraq . . .

I hope you don't mind that I've nothing but a couple of random ideas rattling around in my head for this week's letter. And that I'm just going to spill them in no particular order.

Item 1. We hear talk about some units coming home soon. That'd be a great thing. But we who have been to faraway places before advise a little skepticism, no matter what the source of the reports about homecomings. Because if the reports are true, they tend to make you lose focus on the dangerous nature of your day-to-day mission. You need to keep your eye on the ball.

If the reports are untrue, you'll be discouraged besides, which can be an even more dangerous situation. In the military, rumors seem to carry a lot of weight, far more than they deserve. Listen. Smile. Hope. Pray. Get back to work, grinding out the mission and the days with both eyes wide open.

If the reports are true, and you do come home, we'll take care of the welcomings. There'll be parades, of course. Ever since Vietnam, America has been obsessed about parades for returning warriors. I don't know why. When I was in uniform, parades were a pain in the neck. Practice, practice, practice. Stand in the hot sun. Hope like heck you weren't the guy who'd conk out and wake up with blades of grass stuck in your teeth. Marching with somebody yelling at you to "Dress it down." And "Get in step."

All in all, three days of work for 10 minutes of parade.

Oh, I admit it, the 10 minutes were pretty cool. The martial music, the applause, the pride in doing it right. Even so. If you'd have taken a vote of returning soldiers from Vietnam, not three in 300 would have volunteered to march in a homecoming parade.

Sorry, but you won't have a choice. It's now a national point of honor to hold a parade after a war. I'm all for it, by the way. Watching a parade with you in it. Applauding you and your service. Celebrating a homecoming like that. I wouldn't miss these things for the world. You're just going to have to bear with us in our joy.

Item 2. It seems Americans and Iraqis have found a major underground bunker complex not far from one of our military bases in country. Well, 16 miles away. You hear some dismay that such a large site, seemingly under the noses of Americans, wasn't found earlier.

I'm not quite as dismayed. I remember an operation in Vietnam where our unit swept through a patch of trees smaller than average town park. The site was with sight of a fortified Vietnamese army compound just a pistol shot away.

We drove completely through it, shooting as we went and received no fire in return. I saw nothing in the way of enemy activity. Nada. Zip.

On the other side of the trees our unit stopped to report and to plan a route away from the area. If the enemy had sat tight, we'd have been gone in half an hour. But they opened fire, and unleased the wrath of tanks, artillery and air power. The battle lasted all day and resulted in more than 300 enemy dead as well as a few of our own.

The bad guys had holed up, literally holed up, in an infamous tunnel complex of an infamous area known as Cu Chi. Some of these areas were capable of housing an entire regiment of North Vietnamese troops, which I'm guessing is the size of the force we engaged.

So when people complain that WMDs can't be found in a country the size of Iraq, I'm not quite as astonished as they are. Because when I put my calculator to a circle with a radius of 16 miles, I see that the terrorist bunker complex in Iraq was uncovered in an area of more than 750 square miles.

Actually that's good work. As I say, I drove right over--not past but over the top of--just such a complex and didn't see it. It's amazing that anybody, including the terrorists who wanted to spend a night there, could find the thing in an area that large.

Find some more bunker complexes. Put those guys out of business. Come home. We're waiting with that parade.

Till next week . . .

God bless you and Godspeed.

____________

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.