A Few from the Front
By Callimachus | Related entries in Blogging, Military, The War On TerrorismThe blogosphere is an expanding universe, but like all things exploding the parts lose touch with one another. It’s inevitable, I suppose, that the blogroll of blog X will mostly consist of people who think and write the way blogger X does. And the sites he most often links will be those most like his own.
Which is fine, but even within the galaxy of people who think and write alike, different arms spiral out from the center, and often are ignorant of one another. There are gay blogs, for instance, that feature wonderful and trenchant writing about world affairs, having nothing to do with sexuality.
Then there are the milblogs. I have emphasized before how necessary it is to read them from time to time. I don’t know the background of the other posters here, but I suspect none of us has a military background. But that’s no excuse for overlooking the men and women in uniform. Especially in this war, where the big media seems increasingly hotel-bound and caught up in preconceptions, and where the Internet allows every private to be his own Ernie Pyle.
Here’s someone with a story to tell:
What followed was a mildly amusing (but not so funny at the time) comedy of errors involving EOD driving right past the designated linkup point and then breaking down (we sent out recovery assets to drag the broken vehicle to FOB Gabe and have our mechanics get to work on it), but any frustration was validated when EOD got to the scene of the possible VBIED and blew open the trunk using a charge emplaced by their cute little EOD robot. The charge blew open the trunk and scattered several artillery rounds from the trunk onto the road — as many as 5-6 were in there. Bottom line, it was clearly a VBIED and it would have made one heck of a big boom if it had gone off.
So why didn’t it go off? Because our guys and the Iraqis identified it right away, set a proper cordon, and never gave a lucrative target. The triggerman was probably hoping an IA truck with 15 people crammed inside would drive past and bugged out when the IA spotted it.
As everone knows by reading the news, this tactic has worked for insurgents in the past — attack something not necessarily intending to do much damage but then setting an IED or VBIED along the route that first responders will take. We vary our routes in order to reduce the effectiveness of this tactic, but the IA is still catching on to the fact that you can’t blindly rush out the gate in response to an attack. You have to calm down, take a minute to think, make a quick plan and then go.
The IA must be getting at least a little better, though, because they did the right thing this time. Hopefully we see this trend continue.
See? You probably just learned something small but significant about the war. Maybe not so small.
Many of you probably have read Donald Sensenig’s blog posts. He’s truly one of the decent men of the blogosphere. Did you know he recently bid godspeed to a son bound for Iraq?
Yesterday my eldest son, Lance Cpl. Stephen Sensing, deployed with his unit to Iraq. His mother, brother, sister and I traveled to Camp Lejeune, NC, to see him of. Cathy’s dad, from Durham, went with us also.
Keep him in your devotions.
Here’s someone else you probably didn’t read about in your newspaper, but perhaps should have.
And Michael Yon has an update on heroic LTC Erik Kurilla. If you need to know what’s wrong with the media coverage of Iraq, consider that Cindy Sheehan is a household name and Erik Kurilla is not.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 and is filed under Blogging, Military, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 15th, 2005 at 5:53 pm
Don’t sell yurself short. You have more readers than you imagine an a lot of us do have a military background.
Everything about this story rings true – some troops missing a rally point, but being saved because their vehicle breaks down. I once served under a great boss who said he would rather be lucky than good. This may be an American talent, I don’t know.
Field Marshal von Model once said of us:
“War is chaos and the Americans excel at war because they practice chaos on a daily basis.”
September 15th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
Lol to von Model.
Along a similar line, there’s an old saying in journalism — which could as well apply to other activities: “There are lucky reporters, and there are lazy reporters, but there are no lazy, lucky reporters.”