Election Day

The many men, so beautiful, and they all dead did lie.
And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I.
-Coleridge

Rough couple of days out here. I feel kind of spent emotionally. We had some guys wounded. None of them life-threatening, and none of them my soldiers. It still hurts, though, and enrages. Rage is not a descriptive enough term, though. An almost physical yearning to visit abject suffering on the enemy, I guess, is more accurate. We’re trying to help these poor people vote. That’s all they want to do: determine their own fate. But a handful of oppressors don’t want that to happen. I can’t come to terms with it. It’s completely alien to me. I may disagree fervently with the viewpoints of many on the left in our own country, but no matter how liberal or socialistic your views are, you should be allowed to express them, and to vote on them.

I think we’re such a great and strong country precisely because we allow our crazies and crackpots a venue for legitimate discourse. Think of all the people who changed our history, and whom we now idolize, that were regarded as crazy at the time. Amelia Earhart. Albert Einstein. Teddy Roosevelt. Henry Ford. Al Edison. Hemingway. Steinbeck. Kerouac. Salinger. Oppenheimer. Rockefeller. Lincoln. Martin Luther King. Washington. Adams and Jefferson. Sam Houston. Both Lee and Grant. Not all of them were thought of as actually insane, but all of them were eccentric and controversial. What if we’d silenced or killed all of these people before they could make their mark? No civil rights, no science or industry, no beautiful literature, no government, no courage, no brilliant military victories. We are a nation of outcasts and rebels, and it is what has made us strong.

I hope we leave this country in good shape. I am afraid that Syria or Iran may exert pressure through former Baathists in exile there, funding insurgents. I am not one of those who thinks the entire insurgency, or even most of it, is controlled by foreign terrorists. It’s mostly Iraqis. But they’re getting help and being propagandized from outside this country, and I hope that we will not make the same mistakes we made thirty years ago. We need to fight this enemy wherever he hides. Anti-war nutjobs like to compare Iraq to Vietnam, and they’re all wrong, but in one way they may be right: Iran and Syria are very much like Cambodia was then. I’m not a policy wonk or a planner, but I hope the American people have the stomach for this fight if it takes us elsewhere. For all they may deny it, France is still reeling culturally from the debacle that was the Algerian war, because the French anti-war nutjobs became so vitriolic that it nullified the military victory and prevented final steps to control the insurgency there. I hope this doesn’t happen to us here.

Incidentally, a bunch of the officers got together and watched The Battle of Algiers the other night. Apparently somebody else here sees the parallels. Good for them. I did my thesis on Modern Insurgency using Algeria as my case study.

I will update again as soon as the opportunity arises. BTHO Oklahoma St.