Category Archives: Military

The Flame of Alaska?

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The things you learn about candidates from reading their books. Despite the length of those columns I wrote after reading Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s chronicles of their early years, obviously there was much I didn’t have room to get into, including a lot of stuff that each candidate’s respective detractors like to point to.

Obama had his dope-smoking years, a period of rebellion in which I think he was self-consciously trying to emulate Malcolm X in his wild, self-destructive period — although being careful not to go too far, of course. (We both read the Autobiography in high school in Hawaii. I found it interesting; Obama saw it briefly as a guide to being a "black man in America," something he had to practice to learn.)

John McCain, having been a Naval Aviator, was less inhibited. He had Marie, the Flame of Florida. And others; that name just stood out. She apparently was an exotic dancer who performed for the fliers at Trader John’s, their favorite Pensacola after-hours locale. Ensign McCain dated her for awhile. She was "a remarkably attractive girl with a great sense of humor." He made the mistake once of taking her on an impulse to a party given by a married officer. (The single junior officers seldom socialized with the married couples. There was a good reason for this.) She was "a good sport" about it, but was clearly out of place among the Eastern Establishment-educated wives:

The young wives she was about to meet would be decorously attired and unfailingly genteel. Marie was dressed somewhat flamboyantly that evening, as was her custom.
… Marie sensed that the young wives, while certainly not rude to her, were less than entirely at ease in her presence. So she sat silent, not wishing to impose on anyone or intrude in the conversations going on around her. After a while, she must have become a little bored. So, quietly, she reached into her purse, withdrew a switchblade, popped open the blade, and, with a look of complete indifference, began to clean her fingernails.
… A short time later, recognizing that our presence had perhaps subdued the party, I thanked our hosts for their hospitality, bid goodbye to the others, and took my worldly, lovely Flame of Florida to dinner.

I like that line, "as was her custom…"

Kathleen Parker believes the crusty old sailor who once romanced the Flame of Florida had a similar motivation for choosing Sarah Palin — another remarkably attractive girl with a great sense of humor — to go with him to the party those Republican stiffs held up in St. Paul. Only this time, the date was the hit of the party. They particularly liked the part where she took out her switchblade and sliced and diced the Community Organizer with it.

But perhaps we’re reading too much into this.

Faith of our Fathers

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H92607

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
One day in late summer 1970, I was playing tennis on the courts next to the Officer’s Club at Pearl Harbor. I was 16. My opponent, a long-haired boy whose name I now forget, was younger. He was a visitor from the mainland, the little brother of the wife of a junior officer on my Dad’s ship.
    Suddenly, a gnarly bantam rooster of a man rushed onto our court through one of the gates, followed by an entourage of followers who could only be senior naval officers, despite the fact that all were in white shorts, conspicuously devoid of insignia.
    Without pausing in his stride, the first man commanded, “You boys get out of here! I’ve got this court.” Taken aback, we nevertheless immediately moved to obey. I knew active-duty officers had precedence over dependents on Navy courts, and although this man looked old for active duty — at 59, he seemed ancient — we could not doubt his authority. As we moved to collect our gear, he noticed my father — at that time the executive officer of the USS Kawishiwi — sitting on the bench where he had been watching us play. The man went immediately to Dad and spoke to him briefly, then came quickly over to us boys. I was unprepared for what came next — an apology.
    Introducing himself, he explained that he was extremely busy, that he reserved the court for this time and that it was the only recreation he had, so he had been in a hurry to get to it, which explained but did not excuse his brusqueness, and he hoped we would understand.
    No problem, admiral, I said. Don’t mind us. We’re moving. Enjoy your game.
    The man was John S. McCain Jr. Had he been in uniform, he would have worn four stars — the same rank his father had attained in World War II. He was CINCPAC — the Commander In Chief Pacific Command — a title that to a Navy brat had the same ring as the words “the king” would have had to someone in Medieval Europe. Except that no king of old ever had authority over as much military power. He commanded all U.S. forces in and around the Pacific and Indian Oceans, from the U.S. west coast to the Persian Gulf. The American forces fighting the war in Vietnam were only a portion of his responsibility.
    Among the hundreds of thousands of men under his command was a lieutenant commander being held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. The naval aviator was nearing his third anniversary in captivity, most of that time in solitary confinement in a tiny, stifling cell, his monotony relieved only by brutal interrogations. His body, and at one point even his spirit, broken, he would be there for another two-and-a-half years.
    I didn’t know any of that at the time. Only years after Sen. John McCain had risen to national prominence did I connect him to the admiral I’d met that day. But even among the many who knew about the connection, few ever heard CINCPAC speak of it. Only those closest to him knew about the ritual with which he would mark each Christmas: Every year, he would go to Vietnam and visit troops stationed closest to the DMZ. At some point he would go off by himself to the edge of the base and stare silently northward, in the direction of his son.
    Last week, you read (I hope) a column headlined “Barack Like Me,” in which I explained my sense of identification with elements of Barack Obama’s personal journey of self-definition. If you missed it, I urge you to go to my blog (the address is at the end of this piece) and read it. This column is a companion to it. I wrote the earlier piece after reading Sen. Obama’s autobiography about his youth.
    This past week, I read Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir, by John McCain and Mark Salter. It’s the very different story of a young man who was far less confused about who he was or where he came from. And as much as I felt I understood “Barry” Obama, my commonality with Navy brat McCain is much more direct, and certainly simpler.
    A few months ago, I wrote another column headlined, “Give me that old-time conservatism,” in which I wrote of the values I had learned growing up in a Navy family, “the old-fashioned ones: Traditional moral values. Respect for others. Good stewardship. Plain speaking. And finally, the concept that no passing fancy, no merely political idea, is worth as much as Duty, Honor and Country.” It was written shortly after Sen. McCain won the S.C. primary, at a time when “conservatives” in his party were doing all they could to stop him.
    His autobiography is a 349-page exploration of those values.
    His grandfather was a hard-driving, smoking, drinking, gambling old salt who cried when he read casualty reports. He had less regard for his own welfare, once telling his wife he would not spend a penny on doctors, preferring to lavish all his money “on riotous living.” He commanded the fast carriers of Task Force 38 through one epic battle after another across the Pacific, stood in the front row at the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, then flew home that day. He dropped dead during the party his wife threw to welcome him home.
    His father was a cigar-chomping submarine commander in the same war, who over the next 25 years worked ceaselessly to live up to his father’s example. As CINCPAC, he unsuccessfully pressed his civilian superiors to let him pursue victory in Vietnam. The B-52 attacks on Hanoi (wildly cheered by his son and fellow prisoners as the bombs fell around them) and mining of Haiphong harbor helped focus the North Vietnamese on an eventual peace agreement in Paris. But Admiral McCain didn’t even get to see the war to that unsatisfactory conclusion before being relieved as CINCPAC. He retired, and lived another nine years, but was never a well man after that. His son believes that he, “like his father before him, sacrificed his life” to the strains of wartime command.
    On the fringes of this presidential campaign, one reads silly e-mails and blogs accusing Barack Obama of being less than American because of the African, Muslim part of his ancestry. Some Democrats weakly respond that John McCain isn’t an American, either, having been born in the Canal Zone in Panama. I have to smile at that, because in my life’s experience, the Zone looms as the very essence of America. During the two-and-a-half years I lived in South America in the 1960s, Panama was the place we occasionally visited to get our booster shot of home, the Land of the Big PX, a place to revel in the miracles of television and drinking water straight from the tap without fear.
    Ironically, Panama means far less to John McCain, since his family left there when he was three months old. It was the start of a routine that I know very well:

As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings forced to establish myself quickly in another social order.

    If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. It fostered in McCain and me and thousand
s like us an independence that’s hard to explain to those who never experienced it. I suspect it contributed greatly to the characteristics that his campaign inadequately, and monotonously, tries to describe with the word “maverick.”
    But there was a constant in our lives. Growing up, I most often heard the United States Navy referred to as “the Service.” It both described what my father did and why he did it. It was the same for the McCains.
    Barack Obama struggled for identity in his formative years largely because of the absence of his father. John McCain and I both experienced the absence of fathers: “We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war.” But unlike Mr. Obama, we understood exactly who our fathers were and why they were gone:

    You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you… drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance.

    But as much as our childhoods were alike, John McCain the man is very different. It’s one thing to know “the Service” as a dependent. It’s far different to serve. As I type that, it sounds terribly trite. Yes, we all know John McCain is a war hero, yadda-yadda, right? But I don’t care how much of a cliche it’s become, it’s true. And it sets him apart.
    I can’t write a “McCain Like Me” column because from an early age, he was different. He always knew he would follow his father and grandfather to the Naval Academy. I knew nothing of the kind, and not just because my father graduated from Presbyterian College. There was a brief time in my late 20s when I considered giving up journalism for the Navy; I even took a written test for prospective officer candidates, and did well on it. But my father pointed out to me what I had always known: My chronic asthma would keep me out. So I dropped the idea.
    John McCain, by contrast, rebelled against inevitability, raising hell and breaking rules all the way through his four years at Annapolis, repeatedly stepping to the brink of expulsion, and graduating fifth from the bottom of his class. Even reading about the hazing he experienced as a plebe, when upperclassmen did everything they could think of to break him and cause him to “bilge out” — nothing, compared to what he would suffer as a POW — I thought, Did I ever experience such treatment? Was I ever tested to that extent? And the answer was “no.” Nor, despite all his doubts about himself, his own period of rebellion or his sense of alienation, did Barack Obama have such a formative experience. If so, he doesn’t tell about it.
    The gulf between John McCain and me would exist if he had never been captured. His heroism during those five unimaginable years — a time when he finally learned the full importance of being part of something larger than himself — only turns the gulf into an ocean.
    I say that not to criticize Sen. Obama, or myself. But it’s a fact. We never knew anything like it. Men like John McCain and my friend Jack Van Loan — his fellow prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton — will forever be imbued with an aura that not even The One can claim. Some dismiss the McCain slogan “Country First” as worn-out rhetoric. But I know that for him, perhaps more than for any candidate I’ve ever known, it simply describes who he is and how he’s lived his life.
    That almost certainly is not enough to help him win the election. As I watch him on the verge of failure, that saddens me. He’s had three decades to come to terms with the fact that the war in which he gave so much caused so many of his fellow Americans to lose their faith in their country, and he’s dealt with it admirably.
    Now this. As I watch him drift further from his goal, I can say “Barack Like Me,” but McCain — he’s on a different plane, and always has been. And increasingly, he seems to be there alone.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/

Ap610714012

 

9/11 plus seven years

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The way we split up duties on the editorial board, Cindi Scoppe handles scheduling. For instance, she maintains "the budget," which has nothing to do with money — it’s newspaperese for a written summary of what you plan to publish in upcoming editions.

A couple of weeks back, Cindi put a bold notice on the budget to this effect: 9/11 ???? Beyond that, she’s mentioned it a couple of times. Each time I’ve sort of grunted. The most recent time was Monday, and I felt compelled to be somewhat more articulate. I explained that I hate marking anniversaries. Such pieces are so artificial. The points one might make 365 days after an event should not differ from what you would say the day before, or the day after — if you’re saying the right things.

Nevertheless, I’m kicking around a column idea, one that I’m not sure will work. If I can pull it together between now and Wednesday morning, we can run it Thursday.

Actually, it’s a couple of column ideas. One would simply be a bullet list of things to think about: the movement of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be one bullet, another would be Osama bin Laden, another would be the state of the NATO alliance — or something like that. Something acknowledging that it’s tough to isolate One Thing to say on a topic so complex.

The other would be to hark back to the editorial I wrote for the Sunday after 9/11 — 9/16/01. In it, I set out a vision of how the U.S. needed to engage the world going forward. A key passage:

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

There’s nothing profound about it — it seems as obvious to me as the need to breathe. But America is a long way from embracing the concept holistically. We seem to lack the vocabulary for it, or something.

A couple of months ago, former State staffer Dave Moniz — who is now a civilian employee of the Air Force with the civilian rank of a brigadier general, operating out of Washington — brought a couple of Air Force guys to talk broadly about that service and how it’s doing these days. In passing, one of them mentioned the concept of DIME (which refers to "Diplomatic," "Information," "Military" and "Economic" as the four main elements of national power), which apparently is widely understood among military officers these days, even though it doesn’t enter much into civilian discussions.

We’ve wasted much of the last seven years arguing about the legitimacy of the exercise of military power, to the exclusion of the other parts. It’s sucked up all the oxygen. Occasionally we talk about "soft power," but as some sort of alternative, not as a necessary complement. And as long as our discussions are thus hobbled, it’s tough for us ever to get to the point of accomplishing the overall goals of making the world safer for liberal democracies:

    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

With rescue workers still seeking survivors in the smoking rubble of the twin towers, it didn’t occur to me that the military part would be such a political barrier. I couldn’t see then how quickly political partisanship would reassert itself, or how quickly we would split into a nation of Iraq hawks and the antiwar movement.

I’m encouraged that the surge in Iraq has been successful enough — Gen. Petraeus was thinking in DIME terms as he suppressed the insurgencies — that we are prepared to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (Which reminds me of something I often thought over the last few years when antiwar types would talk about "bringing our troops home." I didn’t see how anyone would think we could do that, with the battles still to be fought against the Taliban. The most compelling argument those opposed to our involvement in Iraq had was that it consumed resources that should be devoted to Afghanistan. Obviously, as we turn from one we turn more to the other — not because we want to exhaust our all-volunteer military with multiple deployments, but because until we have a larger military, we have no choice — no credible person has asserted that Afghanistan is a "war of choice.")

You know what — I’m just going to copy that whole Sept. 16, 2001, editorial here. Maybe it will inspire y’all to say something that will help me write a meaningful column. Maybe not. But I share it anyway… wait, first I’ll make one more point: What the editorial set out was not all that different from the concept of "Forward Engagement" that Al Gore had set out in the 2000 campaign to describe his foreign policy vision — although after he unveiled it, he hardly mentioned it. Too bad that between his own party’s post-Vietnam isolationism and the GOP’s aversion to "nation-building," we’ve had trouble coalescing around anything like this.

Anyway, here’s the editorial:

THE STATE
IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD
Published on: 09/16/2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A8

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words "missile defense shield" to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.
    That’s about the only way it might have helped.
    Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.
    We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.
    Essentially, we have wasted a decade.
    After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.
    We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was "It’s the economy, stupid." Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s "policeman."
    Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.
    Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.
    Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.
    In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, "When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.
    At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.
    Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.
    We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call "humint" – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.
    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.
    This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.
    We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

American Sardaukar? Best combat picture from Iraq, anyway

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Sardaukar
Although Susanna seemed to like it, my analogy back on this post — comparing American troops to the Atreides in Dune — wasn’t quite perfect.

Truth be told, the overwhelmingly superior efficiency, dedication and effectiveness of U.S. troops today is more closely comparable to the Sardaukar. That’s not an analogy I like to make, because the Sardaukar were the bad guys — or at least, allied with the bad guys. They were arrogant, and received their comeuppance from the little-regarded, fanatical desert people they thought they could easily crush. So you can see how I wouldn’t like that analogy at this particular point in history. It doesn’t fit with my worldview at all.

Probably the best way to put it in Dune terms (if one is to be so frivolous as to draw such analogies) is that the U.S. military has the virtue of the Atreides combined with the competence of the Sardaukar. (And now that I think about it, I seem to recall that the reason the emperor sent the Sardaukar after the Atreides was that the Atreides troops under Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck had been trained to the point that they were almost as tough as the Sardaukar, and the emperor saw that as a threat. So maybe our guys are the Atreides after all — or what the Atreides might have been. That makes the sci-fi nerd in me feel so much better.)

This brings me, through a leap that probably makes sense only to me, to a photo I grabbed from AP back during the fighting in Fallujah in 2004, and never used. If I had been blogging then, I would have posted it, but I wasn’t.

It’s the best photo I can remember seeing from the fighting in Iraq. Actually, when you think about it, it was one of the LAST photos of actual fighting I’ve seen. You don’t see pictures of action any more on the wires. You see portraits of soldiers and marines who have died, and pictures of caskets and funerals. You see pictures taken AFTER something happened — say, the aftermath of an IED. Or you see pictures of soldiers on routine patrol, or aiming their weapons from a fixed defensive position, but not firing them.

What you don’t see is American troops inexorably, irresistibly advancing the way they are in this photo. This photo is classic, and illustrates a standard offensive infantry tactic in the act. Maybe some of you with infantry experience will correct me on this, but what I see is one soldier laying down covering fire down a street with his M-240 Bravo (which, as James reminded us Monday, is likely manufactured right here in Columbia SC, at FN) while the other men in the squad cross the street. Another soldier (actually, I’m guessing these are Marines; someone with sharper eyes than mine can probably tell for sure) backs up the machine-gunner, prepared to shoot with aimed fire at any enemy who stick their heads out, using his standard rifle.

The second man to cross the street is another machine-gunner, who will no doubt establish a base of fire from the opposite side of the street in order to allow the first MG operator and the last of the squad to cross.

The squad seems to be operating with a relentless, almost mechanical efficiency that is terrible to behold — if you are the enemy. In fact, it’s probably the unusual perspective of this photo that created the literary (if you can call sci-fi "literary") allusion in my mind: This is probably what it looks like when you are the enemy, and the U.S. Marines are coming to get you — like the Sardaukar with their "hard faces set in battle frenzy."

As I said, you don’t see many pictures like this one. It’s impressive. It certainly made an impression on me.

We will kill Harkonnens together

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James Smith is a very nice guy, and he’s also a Democrat in the post-Vietnam era. These undeniable facts lead to a sense of dissonance sometimes when he talks like a soldier. I’ve noticed this several times in the couple of years since he joined the infantry.

I noticed it again yesterday during his address to Rotary. Now that I’m writing about it, I forget exactly who said the words that kicked off this train of thought, although I remember the context. Maybe James said it, or maybe it was said by one of his comrades during a video clip he showed us. No matter. It was part of his presentation, and I know I have heard James say the same thing at other times.

Anyway, the context had to do with fighting alongside Afghan allies. These are a people bred to unbelievably (by Western standards) harsh deprivation ever since Alexander the Great was there. The dry, stark landscape is practically lunar, and the person you speak with today could get his head cut off and his body left in the dust of the road (there is only one paved road running through the entire province, and you stay off of it because a beaten path invites IEDs) as a warning, just because he spoke to you.

James speaks warmly of the bonds between his men and the Afghan police they work with. He repeatedly says any one of them would have taken a bullet for him. At one point in the presentation, either James or the guy on video, speaking of those allies, mentioned this thing that binds them: They "kill Taliban" together.

Normally, James speaks of the bond in terms that wouldn’t make delicate civilians — especially peace-minded fellow Democrats — wince, such as mutual self-sacrifice (that willingness to take a bullet) or the way the children of the country inspire him to believe in its future. But one gets the impression that among soldiers (and national police), the "kill Taliban together" thing is either said often, or is so understood that it doesn’t have to be said.

When it came up Monday, I immediately thought of Dune. Similar landscape, and the bond that the Atreides sought with the Fremen (too late to save the Atreides, unfortunately) was so very much like this one. There is the passage in which a small band of surviving Atreides form an ad hoc alliance with some Fremen, and the key affirmation that they are now allies goes like this:

    "We will kill Harkonnens," the Fremen said. He grinned.

A Rotary meeting is about as far as you can get from the surface of Arrakis. But I get the impression that Afghanistan is not.

Capt. Smith speaks to Rotary

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Capt. (Rep.) James Smith spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club about his experiences in Afghanistan. Some highlights:

  • Before the speech, the club recognized my colleague Chuck Crumbo for the job he did reporting, in country, on the exploits of the 218th Brigade. Chuck accepted the well-deserved honor with typical modesty.
  • Capt. Smith told the story again of how he, at age 37, bucked the system by insisting that he be allowed to quit the JAG Corps and join the infantry — after being inspired by a visit to Ground Zero in NYC. The system bucked back, and in fact finally told him that he would have to resign his commission and start over as an enlisted man in basic training, keeping up with the 18-year-olds. Obviously, they expected him to say, "Never Mind." But he accepted the challenge, went through basic, worked his way back up to captain, and ended up leading a team that fought the Taliban alongside Afghan national police forces. (The poor-quality video below, from my phone, is the part when he was telling the story of going to Basic again.)
  • Yes, he did say the phrase, "If I run for governor." Interestingly, the subject was brought up by arch-Republican Rusty DePass. Rusty’s son served with Capt. Smith in Afghanistan, and he has warned his Dad that if the captain runs, he’s going to support him.
  • Also in the audience was Joe Wilson, and this provided another example of how military service bridges partisan gaps. (It’s a pet theory of mine that the partisan bitterness of this generation results from politics now being dominated by the post-draft — and especially post WWII — generation, and they lack that shared experience to teach them that we’re all Americans first, not Democrats or Republicans.) Anyway, Rep. Smith made a point of mentioning that Joe was his C.O. back in his JAG days.
  • As in his e-mailed reports you read on this blog, James exhibited his characteristic optimism about the future of Afghanistan, based on his experience with the children of the country. Whenever they’d roll into a village, he’d send his second-in-command to talk to the village elder, then go question a 10- or 11-year-old himself. The elder, trying to walk a tightrope between the Coalition and the Taliban, would blow smoke, such as "We last saw about a dozen Taliban a couple of weeks ago." The kid would give the straight intel, along the lines of "There were two dozen, and they rolled out of here the moment they saw you coming, just minutes ago."

It was a compelling presentation (particularly the part about how his team tracked down a Taliban leader who had been terrorizing the region), and I wish I’d had the resources at hand to have gotten the whole thing on video — good-quality video. Sorry about the lousy quality of this below…

   

Provocative thoughts about Iraq

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Fallujah

Now that the Surge has been indisputably successful, and the debate is mostly about what one does with that success going forward, it’s possible to have more intelligent and dispassionate discussions of what has happened, is happening and should happen in Iraq.

Here are two examples that were side-by-side on the WSJ‘s opinion pages this morning:

  • Francis Fukuyama’s "Iraq May Be Stable, But the War Was a Mistake," in which he tells of a $100 bet he lost. He had predicted in 2003 that at the end of five years, Iraq would be a mess of the sort that "you’ll know it when you see it." Of course he lost, and paid up. But he is not giving ground on whether we should have gone into Iraq to start with. He still says that much-larger-than-$100 gamble wasn’t worth it.
  • Jonathan Kay, in a book review of The Strongest Tribe by Bing West, describes how local U.S. commanders in Iraq understood from the start what it would take to succeed as we now have. But they were hampered by a SecDef who ironically had a little too much in common with the antiwar folks:

    Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary until November 2006, was focused from the get-go on bringing the troops home and insisted that "the U.S. military doesn’t do nation- building."

    It was only after Bush got rid of Rumsfeld and then decided to do what the likes of Petraeus and McCain advised did our success begin.

    Probably the most compelling part of the review is at the beginning, where a passage describing what it was like to be a gyrene in Fallujah in 2004 was quoted at length:

    "Imagine the scene. You are tired, sweaty, filthy. You’ve been at it day after day, with four hours’ sleep, running down hallways, kicking in doors, rushing in, sweeping the beam of the flashlight on your rifle into the far corners. . . . there’s a flash and the firing hammers your ears. You can’t hear a thing and it’s way too late to think. The jihadist rounds go high — the death blossom — and your M4 is suddenly steady. It has been bucking slightly as you jerked and squeezed through your 30 rounds, not even knowing you were shooting. Trained instinct. . . . ‘Out! Out!’ Your fire team leader is screaming in your face. . . . [He] already has a grenade in his hand, shaking it violently to get your attention. . . . He pulls the pin, plucks off the safety cap, and chucks it underhand into the smoky room."

60 years of an integrated military

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Today is the 60th anniversary of the integration of the U.S. Armed Forces, a commemoration I would have missed without this release from the Pentagon:

    Secretary of Defense Robert Gates today celebrated the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of the armed forces and the federal civil service in a ceremony at the Pentagon.
    Executive Order 9980, which President Truman signed on July 26, 1948, created a Fair Employment Board to eliminate racial discrimination in federal employment. Executive Order 9981, signed the same day, began the process of eliminating segregated units and occupational specialties from the post-World War II military.   

Having grown up in the military (making it sort of like my real hometown), I’ve always taken pride in the fact that it was the first major institution in our country to integrate, far ahead of the schools and the rest of our society.

Perhaps that experience of being surrounded by a meritocracy that made a point of erasing unimportant divisions — everyone was alike, once they put on the uniform — had a lot to do with my having the attitude as an adult that the differences civilians still make so much of really don’t matter. Consequently, the way Democrats and Republicans — and all too many black people and white people — look at each other as alien seems unAmerican to me.

Civilian golf

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Shield1

When I was very young, I spent large chunks of my summer days playing golf at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. That’s one of the nice things about being a military brat during the Cold War, back when this country went to any and all lengths to provide for servicemen and their families — you could play a LOT of golf for practically no money at all. As I recall, at some base courses all I had to do was sign my name, provided my Dad had paid a nominal monthly fee, which he always did. Some people grew up on farms, or in suburbs. I grew up playing golf on military courses from Florida to Hawaii, or playing basketball with sailors at the base gym, or bowling in a high school league at the base lanes, etc.

Now, with bases closing, and bases that aren’t closing cutting back on amenities or opening them to the public to help pay for them, things are different.

In some ways, this is good, from my perspective. I figured out several years back that I can play at the course at the former Naval Air Station in Millington, Tenn. — where I spent even more hours back when I was still a dependent — even though I no longer have a military ID. That course is almost exactly as it was in the early 70s. It’s still run by the Navy, but it now bears the civvy sobriquet "Glen Eagle."

But last week, I had occasion to play the MB course (civilian name: "Whispering Pines") for the first timeCup since the base closed, and the experience was for me sadly different. Part of that was that I played it back in the days when there were only nine holes — the "back 9" consisted of playing the same holes from different tee boxes. There were days in my youth when I played — walking, and carrying my clubs on my back — 27 or 36 holes, and was none the worse for wear. Can’t do that any more.

There are 18 holes now (and I think there were before the base closed). So this time, I went to play the front nine and found only two holes to be as I remembered. I still had a nice time, but … I hate to see anything that was once military turn civilian (correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think this course is now run by local government). You may think that’s weird, but it’s what I grew up with. ForPad
instance, there were the concrete pads in little hidden cul de sacs in the woods on the drive into the course, which were once there to hide warplanes from the Russkies in case we ever went toe-to-toe with them in nuclear combat. Those are now overgrown (right). To folks who grew up in the civilian world, particularly those of a pacifist stripe, this change might be seen as a positive development. To me, it’s a piece of ground that is somehow less purposeful, even less noble, than it was.

I did find the old Tactical Air Command shield etched into the glass of the door to the pro shop. But it’s companion shield, emblazoned with "Valor in Combat" had a paper sign taped over it urging visitors to "ASK US ABOUT 10% OFF MDSE…" This seemed just a bit tawdry to me.

But that’s just me.
Shield2

The Iraq paradox

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Obama_2008_iraq_wart

We’ve arrived at a very weird place in terms of our presidential candidates’ positions with regard to Iraq. Thanks to the amazing success of the surge — the policy that Bush at long last initiated after four years of John McCain saying that’s what we should do — both McCain and Obama find themselves in an awkward situation.

  • The Surge has succeeded so well that Maliki is emboldened to say that we can start talking about the Americans leaving, since the Iraqi government sources have gotten so much better at kicking the Sadrists around and other such demonstrations of prowess.
  • Obama is so wedded to the mythology of MoveOn.org et al, for whom it is a religious precept that every soldier or Marine ever sent into Iraq was the worst, most horrible mistake in the history of the universe (actually, I’m probably understating their position just a little here).These are the bruised innocents who reaction to the surge was, "What? We’re going to send MORE soldiers in to be maimed and killed; have we lost our freaking minds?"
  • McCain feels like, "Finally, everybody (except the MoveOn types) recognizes that MY idea of boosting our force levels has worked beyond our wildest dreams, bringing us closer and closer to being able to declare victory." Of course, with things going so well he’s not about to say that the success of the surge we can, irony of ironies, speak about Americans drawing down forces — just what Obama’s always wanted to do, regardless of realities on the ground. That would look like Obama was getting his way, and among the simple-minded it would look like "Hey, Obama was right all along" — even though he was the exact opposite of right, even though we only got to this good spot by doing what Obama adamantly opposed.
  • And Obama certainly can’t recognize currently reality and say "Oh, well, the surge worked. Wow, great jobs guys; you proved me wrong. But now can we leave?" If he ever uttered the phrase, "the surge works," his most intense and devoted supporters’ heads would explode spectacularly.

So here we are:  Things are going well in Iraq, and neither campaign can use that fact advantageously.
How weirdly ironic is that?

Mccain_2008_wart

‘Member’-ship

1 Reply

My Sunday column was originally about 11 inches longer than the published form. One of the first things that went in editing it down was my parenthetical digressions, which are sometimes my favorite parts — even though they frequently have NOTHING to do with my point.

An example would be the one in the original second paragraph of the column, to wit:

    You did? Are you sure? I just ask because, as a member of the U.S.
economy (Can you be a “member of the economy?” I don’t see why not,
since everybody these days refers to uniformed military personnel as
“members of the military,” as though the Army were the Kiwanis Club or
something), I’ve got to tell you that I’m feeling a little
understimulated.

It’s a little difficult for me to explain why, but this is a pet peeve of mine. I hate hearing of military personnel referred to as "members of the military." It’s like calling soldier, sailors or marines fingers or toes (or some even less noble appendage), or comparing them to participants in some private club, which to me seems to denigrate their service in some undefinable way.

Those of you old enough to have a sense of perspective will realize that this is a fairly recent construction. I first started hearing it regularly in the 90s, maybe just after the Gulf War. It’s basically yet another awkward attempt to be "gender-inclusive." You tend to hear it as a replacement for the traditional "servicemen." Why we can’t say "servicemen and -women" when we mean to include both, I don’t know.

Colombians now have their own Entebbe

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Betancourt

    "We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

            — Ingrid Betancourt

Just a week or two back, I read a front-page story in the WSJ about Ingrid Betancourt. The thrust of the story ("A Hostage to Fame") was that she was such a cause celebre around the world that she had too much value to the FARC, and therefore would probably never be traded. This caused me to think, "And this story isn’t helping with that, is it?"

But what wonderful news yesterday! Just goes to show good things can happen, even when they seem impossible.

And good for the Colombian military — they now have their own Entebbe, and that’s saying something. Nobody but the Israelis can say that, and the Israelis have gone through a good, long dry spell without one. Sure, there was the Syrian/North Korean nuke plant, but that’s nothing like putting boots on the ground way into the interior of Africa, complete with major-league deception and an impossible rescue.

One of my colleagues said this was better than Entebbe — it was, after all, cleaner. No hostages or rescuers killed, the deception complete from start to finish. Absolutely. Of course, the rescuers in this case had a lot more time to plan, months in which to infiltrate and gain the guerrillas’ trust. In the end, different kinds of operations. Entebbe was a brilliantly executed military coup de main. This latest caper was more of a perfect intelligence operation, involving no actual combat between armed antagonists. No, that’s not a perfect distinction — the military operation involved great intel, and the intelligence operation required military skills and discipline — but it serves.

Anyway, it was a great job, and the Colombians deserve a big Way to Go! from civilized folk everywhere.

France_betancourt_wart

‘Now away the walking blood bank!’

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Ap510126016

Back on this post, David shared this blood-donation experience:

Props to you for donating blood Brad! When I was abord Navy ships
and we would do battle training, one of the things that would be called
away during battle exercises would be:

"Now away the walking blood bank!"

This meant that all able-bodiedAp070525015049
seamen not otherwise directly
engaged in combat operations were to muster at sickbay to donate blood
so that it was on hand and ready for use as casualties were taken. I
always thought this was a pretty cool thing.

Blood is a life-saver, combat or not.

David

And so it was that when I was searching for something in the AP archives and ran across the above photo, I had to share it. Here’s the caption:

Some of the 750 crewmen of the aircraft carrier Boxer fill beds and line up in the wardroom of the ship to give blood for the wounded in Korea in San Francisco on Jan. 26, 1951. The 27,000-ton Essex class carrier has seen considerable action in the Korean War and is presently being overhauled in the navy yard in San Francisco. (AP Photo/FX)

We should all take a moment and write a note to thank Al Gore for inventing the Internet. It’s way cool. You can find almost anything on it.

For instance, below we have Elvis signing up to donate in Germany in 1959…

Ap590116010

Bloody well right — just ask Her Majesty

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Busy as we are on Friday (I’ll probably be here past 10 p.m. again), Mike just gave me a heads-up on this, and being a lover of tradition, I had to pass it on:

    An RAF pilot has been ordered to trim his handlebar
moustache by an American General who took offence at its length, but
the British serviceman was not prepared to lose his whiskers without a
fight.

    The British airman, who sports a
handlebar moustache in the proud tradition of the RAF, refused to
comply when his superior officer in Afghanistan took offence at his
facial hair.

    Showing a bravado akin to that of
Biggles, he fought back, eventually convincing the general that his
generous whiskers were in line with regulations laid down by the Queen
herself…

I guess he told that cheeky Yank, all right… Let’s here it for Flight Leftenant Ball — hip-hip… Huzzah! Hip-hip…

Through a Marine’s eyes

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This was forwarded to me today, and I pass it on as I received it:

I was part of the Dateline NBC special program titled “Coming Home” that aired Sunday, May 25th. It is about the “cost of killing.” I live in South Carolina. My name is Jesse Odom and I am 25 years old. I served in the Marine Corps and fought in Iraq. Here is my story.  Thank you.

    People on both sides of the spectrum, those for the war in Iraq and those against the war in Iraq, for the most part, say that they support the troops.  That support is typically limited to putting yellow ribbons around trees or by placing some type of sticker on their cars, and of course, by verbally saying that they support our troops. People automatically assume that our troops will get the armor they need to protect themselves in combat, they will assume that they have decent living conditions here in the States and in our warzones, they assume that our men and women are getting all of the health benefits they need, they will assume that our men and women who have been in combat will get the proper mental health care they need in order to get back on a stable mental track. The list goes on. I am tired of our naïve approach to supporting our troops and I pledge to change that. 
    On March 20th, 2003, my unit (Alpha Company 1st Bn 5th Marines) was the very first group to cross the Kuwait-Iraq border. Shortly after, we were engaged in combat and I found myself holding a fatally wounded Marine in my arms, my friend and leader, Shane Childers. I watched him die and he spoke his last words to me. He was the very first American killed in the war. We fought our way to Baghdad, accidentally and unfortunately killing the innocent, constantly living in fear, and trying to stay alive. Once we made it to Baghdad we found ourselves in what many have said was the most violent and fierce firefight during Operation Iraqi Freedom. We fought for nine hours. Nearly a hundred men were wounded and I witnessed the death of another Marine that I looked up to. We raided Saddam’s palace and the Abu Hanifah mosque where Saddam had been sighted. We killed many men and captured others. We lived at the palace for a while and then moved back to southern Iraq and eventually back to the United States.
    Shortly after getting back to the United States I finished my enlistment while my friends in my unit went back to Iraq. I started to write a book when I got out of the Marine Corps. I didn’t plan to publish the book but I used it as a coping mechanism. I camped out at my computer night after night, putting my unit’s story into words. Throughout this process, I kept up with some of my other friends that also got out of the military. Many of them struggled, and some still do. My friend, Chip Wicks, could not handle his problems and hung himself in February of 2004. This put me on a path to try to change some things. I started talking to my other friends and many of these men also had, and still have, a difficult time coping with the fact that they had witnessed and did things that many in our country could never imagine. They have a hard time coping because they are good men with Christian beliefs and a moral conscious; even though many do not regret fighting in Iraq. Many of these men will not get help, but even those that do, have to fight tooth and nail to get the help they need.
     Some of our men are being asked to use their own money to get counseling for their PTSD. The list of faults is too long to list in this email.  The faults are not limited to mental health care. However, I have decided to focus my efforts on PTSD and the suicide epidemic among our combat veterans.  People read my manuscript and loved it. I was told I should get it published and eventually I took the steps to do this. In the book, I tell my unit’s unbelievable story. But, the story does not stop on the battlefield. The battlefield has followed us home. Also, I tell of the haunting aftermath of war. I describe some of the issues that our troops and veterans face today.  I use real examples.
    In this book, I follow my unit as we prepared for war, when we went to war, and now home, where we have been put on the back burner. I am devoted to support our troops and I am going to do what I can to make a difference.
    I set up a fund titled the Chip Wicks Fund in honor of my friend that took his own life.  I am donating 10 percent of my royalties from the book sales to this fund, and the publisher has agreed to contribute 10 percent of their net proceeds from this book to the fund.  I am also accepting donations on my website.  The fund will be used to seek out and help those that have problems adjusting back into the civilian world.  Those that have or may have PTSD.  I don’t want any more of my brothers and sisters to die due to depression (suicide) when they can be helped.  I want you to help me support the troops. Not by simply waiving a flag or putting a ribbon around a tree. I want you to put this story on the front page of your paper and help me change some things.  I am trying to get more support from our government, but that will take some public pressure. 
    My book is eye opening.  It is not written by a seasoned author, a ghost writer, a politician or journalist who went on a fact-finding tour in well protected areas in Iraq. This book was written by a Marine infantryman who went and served his country and is now asking our country to truly support our troops and our combat veterans. You can help me and our men and women in uniform (and veterans). I want people to read my book and see what is going on behind the scenes of our media. I want to sell books and raise money for an unresolved problem in our country. I want people to read the book so they can see the world through an enlisted man’s eyes. My efforts are not limited to the book and the fund, I am going to go to our politicians and demand change.
    My book is titled “Through Our Eyes” (Bella Rosa Books, June 2008, ISBN 978-1-933523-14-9).
    You can go to my website and copy anything on it you want to put in your newspaper article (excerpt, pictures, bio, etc). My website is www.iraqthroughoureyes.com — I want to open the public’s eye and this book will help do that.

Please support the troops.
Thank you,
Jesse Odom

Speaking of books. On a blog related to the Dateline NBC segment referenced above, a producer mentions one called "On Killing: The Psychological Cost Of Killing In War And Society" by Lt. Col. David Grossman. I’ve read much of it while drinking coffee on a couple of separate visits to Barnes & Noble. It is truly fascinating, and contains a lot of data I had not encountered before. For instance, I had known that a lot of soldiers never fire their weapons when in contact with the enemy, but an analysis of widely scattered battles through history demonstrated that a startling number of those who DO fire more or less intentionally MISS.

Let’s talk military buildup

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There are certain things that worry me, and nobody seems to be talking about them. In fact, our public conversations tend to go off in directions entirely opposed to where the discussion should be going. For instance:

  • Children’s brains are essentially formed, in terms of their ability to learn for the rest of their lives, by age 3. What do we do about that? I don’t know, but it’s weird that we can’t even make up our minds to fund 4K for all the kids who could benefit from it.
  • Also on education — we need to bring about serious reforms in public education, from consolidating districts to merit pay to empowering principals. But thanks to our governor and his ilk, we talk about whether we want to support public schools at all.
  • China is growing and modernizing its military at a pace that matches its economic growth. It won’t be all that long before it achieves parity with our own. But instead of talking about matching that R&D, we can’t make up our minds to commit the resources necessary to fight a low-intensity conflict against relatively weak enemies with low-tech weapons.

Anyway, there was an op-ed piece in the WSJ today about the latter worry:

China has a vast internal market newly unified by modern transport and communications; a rapidly flowering technology; an irritable but highly capable workforce that as long as its standard of living improves is unlikely to push the country into paralyzing unrest; and a wider world, now freely accessible, that will buy anything it can make. China is threatened neither by Japan, Russia, India, nor the Western powers, as it was not that long ago. It has an immense talent for the utilization of capital, and in the free market is as agile as a cat.

Unlike the U.S., which governs itself almost unconsciously, reactively and primarily for the short term, China has plotted a long course, in which with great deliberation it joins economic growth to military power. Thirty years ago, in what may be called the "gift of the Meiji," Deng Xiaoping transformed the Japanese slogan fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong arms) into China’s 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military."

Anyway, discuss amongst yourselves. And if you can, try to get the people running for president to talk about it. We need them to…

Canadian snipers in Afghanistan?

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Don’t know whether this is legit or not, but it is interesting. A friend sent me (without comment) the above video, along with the forwarded text below:

Before you click on the attachment, scroll down on this series of e-mails to read the narrative about what is going on in he attachment.  It is incredible.                                    

Scroll down and read the narrative before you watch the video…

Canadian Snipers in Afghanistan

This footage is pretty graphic and is the antithesis of the "Global
Hawk"; one on one, enemy in sight, one at a time, etc. I guess the
"technology" is in the weapon and the ammo and the "wonder" is in the
personnel who use it.

They never saw, or heard it coming.

Canadian Sniper wiping out Taliban Snipers. In Afghanistan . These
video shots are not made through the shooter’s telescopic sight… they
are made looking through the spotter’s scope. The spotter lies right
next to the sniper and helps the sniper to find and home in on thetarget.

The sniper is using a 50 caliber rifle. A 50 cal. round is about 7-8
inches long and the casing is about an inch in diameter. The bullet
itself is one-half inch in diameter and roughly one and one-half inches long..

Pay close attention to the beginning of the video. A Taliban is laying
on top of the peak in front of you… when you hear the shot fired….
watch what happens. The sniper is also about a half mile away… or
more. A Canadian sniper in Afghanistan has been confirmed as hitting an
enemy soldier at a range of 2,310 meters, the longest recorded and
confirmed sniper shot in history. The previous record of 2,250 meters
was set by US Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam in 1967. The
Canadian sniper was at an altitude of 8,500 feet and the target, across
a valley, was at 9,000 feet. Canadian sniper units often operated in
support of US infantry units, which were grateful for their help.

The record lasted only one day, until a second Canadian sniper hit an
enemy soldier at 2,400 meters (8000 feet).

The Canadian snipers fire special.50-calibre McMillan tactical rifles,
which are bolt-action weapons with five-round magazines. The Canadian
snipers were the only Canadian troops operating without helmets or flak
jackets as they had too much other equipment to carry. Each three-man
team has one sniper rifle, three standard rifles (Canadian C7s), one of
them with a 203mm grenade launcher.

When you watch what appears to be debris see if it isn’t a body flying after being hit.

There’s no original source cited, so I don’t know that clip’s provenance. Nor do I know whether my friend who sent it thought it was horrible, or cool, or what.

But I did have some questions watching it, such as:

  • I knew that a .50-cal. sniper round packed a lot of energy, but can it really throw a human body that far?
  • If this is really through a spotter’s scope, why are the bodies or debris or whatever being thrown sharply to the left? Wouldn’t the spotter be close to the shooter? The sound of the shot (assuming that’s not dubbed) occurs far before the impact is seen, which suggests the shooter is right next to the camera. The movement of the target after impact makes it look like the shooter is far off to the right, maybe at the third angle of an equilateral triangle, which would mean we’d hear the sound AFTER seeing the impact.

And now you might have a question for ME, which is, if I have so many questions, why pass it on? Why, because it’s interesting, and intriguing. Also, who knows — y’all might have some answers to my questions.

FYI, here’s another clip that purports to be about Canadian snipers:

Capt. Smith in the news

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A family member gave me a heads-up that a Reuters photographer named Goran Tomasevic has put some photos of Capt. James Smith in Afghanistan.

So I did a Google search and found:

All of which made me wonder, when will Capt. Smith get to come home, along with the bulk of the 218th? I’ll let you know when I know.

Harry then and Harry now

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A news item this week provided an unusually striking opportunity to trace the descent of the King’s (or potential King’s) English:

First, Shakespeare’s Harry:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:

And then, our own latter-day Harry expressing the same sentiment:

    "It’s nice just to be here with all the guys and just mucking in as one of the lads."

Oh, well. The real Henry V might have said it much the same way, the Bard notwithstanding.

Harry

Meanwhile, Britannia no longer rules waves

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As long as I’m on a naval-news kick today, this was in the Daily Mail — you know, the paper the "Paperback Writer‘s" character’s son worked for:

    Iran turned up the heat in the propaganda war with the West yesterday by parading a Royal Navy boat through Tehran.

    The boat had been captured in 2004 together with six Royal
Marines and two sailors in the Shatt al Arab waterway that divides Iraq
and Iran.

    To outrage in Britain, Tehran humiliated the servicemen by
parading them blindfolded on TV and forcing two to read out apologies
after alleging they had strayed into its territorial waters – claims
categorically denied by Britain.

    Yesterday Iran sought to embarrass Britain once again, trundling the boat through the capital raised up on the back of a lorry.

In the back of a bleeding lorry, of all things. This being too late for Jack Aubrey to conduct a cutting-out expedition to get it back (sorry, but I’m going to keep trolling until I find somebody who’s read those books), I suppose we and our special-relationship chums will just have to keep a stiff upper lip over it all.

Of course, it’s kind of pathetic that the Iranians are so proud to have captured something so small that a post captain’s coxswain would be mortified to see him riding ashore in it (yes, that was another esoteric stab in the dark). On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised were the Admiralty to ask the Cousins for some help in developing an anti-Ahmadinejad missile.