Moving Backwards in time?

11/08/2004
In light of recent events (not to mention the Marine Corps) surrounding the Iraqi city of Falluja, I am moved to quote from David Rees, author of the fantastic on-line comic Get Your War On!

"Jesus Christ, are we fucking MOVING BACKWARDS IN TIME???"

I know that may seem like an obvious question, but I just had to ask it. Because after God knows how long of the Bush administration (and others) furiously castigating anyone who even used the words "Viet Nam" and "Iraq" in the same sentence, after the mainstream media only reluctantly breaking the self-imposed ban on using the "Q-word," Jim Krane of the AP tells us that the Marine Corps is explicitly making the comparison for us:

"Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, the top enlisted Marine in Iraq, told troops Sunday the coming battle of Fallujah would be ''no different'' than...the bloody assault to remove North Vietnamese troops who occupied the ancient citadel of Hue in the 1968 Tet Offensive. ''You're all in the process of making history,'' Kent boomed in a clarion voice. ''This is another Hue city in the making."

Why does that not reassure me? Maybe because the last time we mounted an urban assault of this size, it was, indeed, Hue? Maybe because in that assault, large portions of Hue were completely leveled? Maybe because virtually the entire fucking population of the city was left homeless? Maybe because the horrific civilian casualties in Hue were one of the things that finally turned America's collective stomach back in 1968, and led to us pulling out of that country, leaving it to collapse into the misery we had helped create?

Or maybe because of what I read in the Daily Texan today, the newspaper of my very own University of Texas at Austin.

I was just sitting there, minding my own business in the break room, when I happened upon a copy of the Texan, open to the op/ed page. And there was a letter from one Seth Harp. Seth is a junior (economics) at the university. He's also an Army reservist stationed in Iraq, and he's apparently been sending a series of letters to the Texan talking about his experiences.

Two things struck me about his letter (which I advise anyone interested to read in its entirety). First of all, I had somehow, in the back of my mind, nurtured the misapprehension that there was something special about this war–that because we were the superpower, and they were peasants armed with AK-47s, we were just kind of picking them off with night-vision goggles and laser-guided bombs, and it wasn't, somehow, "really" a war from our point of view. Seth Harp's letter disabused me of that notion. War sucks, no matter how technologically superior your side is. It's about sweat, and filth, and misery, it's about "I can't wait to get the fuck out of here" and looking people in the eye as you decide whether or not to kill them. Like I said, read the letter.

But that's just my own personal (embarrassingly late) revelation. The second thing I read in Harp's letter, down towards the bottom, was a passage that ought to make anyone old enough to remember the first quagmire very, very frightened. If you're not old enough, or if you've forgotten, there was a term called "Vietnamization" which referred to the policy of slowly training up a professional South Vietnamese army that would defend the fledgling democratic institutions that we were simultaneously training up in the country. Sound familiar? Yes, it's our exit strategy in Iraq. It is, barring a radical policy shift, the only way this administration can hope to get out of Iraq without a failed state, a terrorist haven, an anti-US Islamic theocracy, horrifying civil war, or all of the above.

Well. If you set the wayback machine for 1968, what you'll find is that US troops almost universally despised the ARVN soldiers that they were training and fighting beside. Moreover, they openly distrusted them, and with good reason–the ARVN was well-infiltrated by the Viet Cong, the sandal-wearing, AK-47 wielding, shadowy guerilla army that we were fighting last time. And then I come upon the following in Harp's letter:

"The assault to re-take Samarra included several thousand Iraqi troops, and our exit strategy relies on their ability to maintain security, but our leadership admits the fledgling Iraqi military is heavily infiltrated by insurgents. As a professional courtesy between nominally allied soldiers, I refrain from pointing my weapon at them, but I trust them even less than I trust civilians."

Oh, shit.