E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
Speakup and View Comments
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Seeking Answers in the Fog of War
By Charles D. Brunt
Of the Journal
Perhaps it's because I start and end each weekday by checking the Department of Defense website to see whether any New Mexico soldiers, Marines, airmen or sailors died in Iraq or Afghanistan over the past day or so, that it's hard to be enthusiastic when the Pentagon re-brands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn.
After all, many of the combat troops who have left Iraq will soon be in Afghanistan, and my tally sheet of casualties will simply have more deaths in the "A" column than in the "I" column.
And switching the U.S. military's mission in Iraq from active combat to "advise and assist" doesn't mean the 49,000 plus servicemen and -women still there — not to mention more than 90,000 "contractors" — will no longer be shot at or targeted by the insidious signature weapon of the "insurgency," the increasingly sophisticated IED.
While we noncombatant Americans placate ourselves with the knowledge that we are finally getting out of a war that we probably never should have gotten into, those who fought there can't shake it off that easily.
Last week, I had the honor — and there's really no better word to say it — of talking to four New Mexicans who fought in combat in Iraq. Slices of their stories, squeezed into available newsprint, were published in the Sunday Journal to mark what we hope is a closing chapter in that war.
Two of those men, former Army specialists Lawrence Guerro and Ben Rosecrans, bear the physical scars of those battles.
Guerro, who lost most of his right leg when and IED demolished his Humvee in Baghdad, still has problems with bone growth that makes it painful to wear his prosthetic leg.
Rosecrans survived a suicide bomber's attempt to destroy his Stryker with an estimated 500 pounds of explosives packed into a Ford Explorer, but contracted a virus in Iraq that is destroying his kidneys.
Neither has seen his 29th birthday.
While Guerro thinks the costs of this war were too high, Rosecrans says we accomplished much by ousting a tyrant and steering the Iraqis toward a constitutional government.
Two former Marines, Adam Kokesh and Joe Callan, found it impossible to reconcile their participation in the war with the policies of the government that put them there, and have since turned their efforts toward anti-war activities.
Agree with them or not, I found it impossible to discount their viewpoints.
On the same pages with these former warriors were three current New Mexico National Guard soldiers who also served in Iraq.
Handpicked by the Guard's public affairs office and interviewed by my colleague Olivier Uyttebrouck, the Guardsmen — speaking within the confines of military service — see the war in strikingly uniform and markedly different ways than three of the four former servicemen.
Each Guardsman — Lt. Col. Ken Nava, Master Sgt. Eric Giles and 1st Sgt. George Jojola — expressed confidence that they were successful in their roles of training Iraqi security forces to take over the formidable task of returning their country to law and order.
Two of the Guardsmen noted that the Iraqi people took great pride in participating in elections, despite the insurgency's best efforts to discourage it.
Taken as a whole, the seven warriors' divergent views of the war reflect the same opposing viewpoints I hear in casual conversations about, not only the war in Iraq, but the one in Afghanistan, now experiencing its own "surge" in U.S. involvement.
To a man, the servicemen interviewed intimated that they have grown tired of Iraq and are ready to move on. So have the American people, most of whom no longer have a clear idea of what "winning" a war means, or whether it's even possible anymore.
The template that evolved over the seven years and five months we actively fought in Iraq could well become the pattern for the nearly nine-year war we're fighting in Afghanistan.
And success, we're learning, depends not just on U.S. military might, but on the character of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of the many telling comments made by the Iraq war veterans we interviewed, I found one that reverberates each time I write down the name of the latest American killed in Iraq or Afghanistan:
"I don't have any problem with going to war," Joe Callan, who served three combat tours in Iraq, told me. "But it had really better mean something."
Maybe by the time our last combat troops leave Afghanistan, we'll be closer to knowing whether either war did.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Charles Brunt can be reached at 823-3882 or at cbrunt@abqjournal.com.
| We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. |
|
|
