If
you want to taste fear, then go to Iraq with the young
soldiers and Marines in house to house combat as
reported by journalists who were there with the troops.
After the fighting is over, you might want to tell
the uniformed heroes of the Iraq war something.
Last year it was Fallujah, brought to life in eight
days of terrifying reporting by Dexter Filkins of The
New York Times. This year’s nasty fight was for Tal
’Afar, reported by Michael Ware of Time magazine.
Beyond admiration for them, I wonder why reporters
and soldiers willingly expose themselves to killers
without faces or countries, who can spring at them from
a rooftop, a doorway, the next alley.
Why do they do it? The simple answer is that both are
professionals. They are doing their jobs. The reporters
are covering the biggest story of the decade, and the
soldiers believe they are fighting terrorists,
protecting America.
Will the soldiers feel the same in 10 years? What do
we tell them now? Do we have the heart to tell these
young heroes the truth? We’ll come to that, but first
let’s go back to November 2004 in Fallujah:
It is Tuesday, Nov. 9, and after 16 hours of fighting
the Marines thought they’d finally won their battle for
the green-domed mosque, the insurgents’ command center.
Reporter Filkins takes up the story:
“Then a car drove up behind a group of the Marines.
Seven men bristling with Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled
grenades and black ammunition belts spilled onto the
street, ready to fight at point-blank range. The Marines
turned and fired, and killed four of them immediately,
blowing one man’s head entirely away before he fell on
his back, arms spread wide.”
Two days later, Nov. 11, The Times’ reporter and a
Marine sergeant are squinting through the sunset haze
trying to make out the enemy when they see “a black flag
pop up all at once above a water tower about 100 yards
away, then a second flag. And the shots began, in a wave
this time, as men bobbed and weaved through alleyways
and sprinted across the street. ‘He’s in the road, he’s
in the road, shoot him!’ the sergeant shouted. ‘Black
Shirt!’ someone else yelled. ‘Due South!’”
After fighting all day, it is 1:30 Friday morning,
“they stopped and entered a house, intending to find a
place to sleep. There was a huge boom inside. ‘Oh no! Oh
no!’ someone shouted. ‘My leg!’ someone else screamed.
‘My leg!’”
Filkins made this dry observation. “The battle for
Falluja does not fall into any neat category, and even
the messy label of urban warfare does not capture the
intensity and unpredictability of this battlefield. In
some places, the insurgents appear to fire and fall
back, perhaps trying to tease the Marines into ambushes
or dissolve into the grimy fabric of the city to fight
another day.”
In late September this year, Time reporter Michael
Ware covered the attempt to purge the al Quaida
stronghold of Tal ’Afar where, he said, “The fighting is
so close, you could throw a rock and hit the man trying
to kill you.”
Two and a half years after the invasion, Ware
observed “the reality of the beleaguered U. S. mission
in Iraq: a never-ending fight against a seemingly
inexhaustible enemy emboldened by the U. S. presence,
the measure of success as elusive as the insurgents
themselves.”
Our courageous, idealistic young soldiers are
battling a foe out of Greek mythology: Heracles versus
the Hydra-headed monster. Every time a head of the
monster was severed by Heracles’ sword, two grew to
replace it
The Greek hero defeated the beast by cauterizing the
severed stumps, thus preventing new heads from growing.
Heracles could summon the powers of the gods, and became
a god himself.
Will an Iraqi constitution heal a ravaged country,
and cauterize the beast of insurgency? Or has this
president assumed that America has godlike powers, and
thus fallen prey to the folly of man?
What will we tell the brave young Marines —
teen-agers, many of them — choking back their fears and
fighting on, endlessly? If we are honest, we will tell
them the war was wrong. There was a better way.
