It has been about 20 years ago now that I had my conversation with uncle Bill. Uncle Bill is not really my uncle, he is one of those close family friends that is so close (perhaps within that circle of the 10 people in your life that you know will drive halfway across the United States to help you no matter what) that he ends up being adopted by you as part of the family at large. He and his wife are close friends of my mother and father and have remained so for over 2 decades.
The conversation started out in an inquisitive fashion on his part, “Todd, what do you plan on doing after college.”. I had of course plenty of answers to this question. I think a lot (too much some people might argue) and frankly a bachelor’s degree in Biology didn’t really satisfy my need for the sky. “Well,” I answered, “I would like to become a professional pilot.”. Uncle Bill considered this for a moment, looked me squarely in my ‘coke-bottle’ glasses and said, “Todd, how many 747s are there in the world?”. I was thrilled because I actually had a vague idea. “I suppose around 900.”. “Yep, and Todd how many pilots are there in the United States qualified to fly those airplanes?”.
Tougher question. See Uncle Bill had spent a lifetime flying for the State of California and he knew of such things and he had actually raised and fed a family on his ability to control rudder, aileron and elevator so I wanted to impress him. I took a stab, “About 50,000.”. He looked a bit surprised and then said, “Yep. And how many of those 50,000 people want to fly them?”. My mood was growing more somber, “All of them?”. “Uh huh. Are you getting what I am getting at?”. Suddenly I started to see that my future was not going to be easily found in flying for hire. Then he gave me the advice that more than anyone else before or since served to change my professional life.
“Todd, forget flying for a living, go to medical school and then buy an airplane. It will be the best thing you ever did.”
Now this might seem an unusual segue for what I am about to talk about but it really ties into everything very well. Because you see had I gone to work as a flight instructor and then a Fed Ex feeder pilot and then a regional pilot and likely by this time an FO or junior Captain working for Southwest or some other soon-to-be-bankrupt airline I would never have been able to experience the wide variety of things that I have in life or even aviation. It is true. It is because of my profession that I was able to have the interaction with the person that I am going to tell you about and it is what leads me to the topic of this blog.
I noticed first the “Dragon Lady” embossed onto his polo shirt. The pilot was a high time gentleman who had come to me to seek an airman medical exam. I asked him about it and he told me that he wore the shirt because he had been a U-2 pilot in the 1960s. For those of you who immediately think of a front-man named ‘Bono’ when you see U-2, this has nothing to do with that. The first U-2 was and is one of the most remarkable aircraft ever designed. Kelly Johnson at Lockheed basically stuck sailplane wings on an F-104 Starfighter and in the process created a remarkable reconnaissance platform that has continued to soldier on long after its cousin the SR-71 was mothballed. The U-2 is remarkable in that it goes to altitudes in excess of 70,000 feet, stays there upwards of 12 hours, takes on demand high resolution photographs and then comes home and lands. It is one of my favorite airplanes. So much do I like it that I keep a picture of its descendant, the TR-1, flying over the Sierra Nevada mountains of California,, in my office. I showed the gentleman this photo and the next two hours were filled with stories of the Cold War and Vietnam and forced landings and…well, you get the idea.
After all of this he paid me for my office visit and remarked that we should go down to my airstrip to see if it would support his Aeronca Champ.
We walked down to the field and we chatted. It seemed to come as somewhat of a shock to him that I was as high a ranking military officer as I am, but once he accepted that notion it opened up more of the inwardly held feelings that all veterans of wars have but seldom share outside of a close circle of fellow warriors. I allowed him to speak freely and he spoke of Vietnam and his experiences there. His final remark was something and resonated with me, “How did we lose that war?”.
How did we lose that war?
I thought for a moment, listening to the wind rustle the changing autumn leaves around me, “WE didn’t lose the war. Just like WE are not going to lose the current war. Our countrymen did.”.
His comment brought back a flood of memories from Iraq. Reading Stars and Stripes and wondering what war they were referring too and just what was my family seeing on TV back home because it sure wasn’t what I was seeing on the ground in Iraq. Iraq to me was like South Central Los Angeles; a place with families and stores and businesses and also a place to be respected because if you lost your situational awareness it could get you hurt. But Iraq was not to me like the chaotic disaster that is now such a cliché and worn out on the nightly news. I saw a lot of Iraq and I never saw what I see on the nightly news. What I saw mostly was a burgeoning democracy flavored with the Middle East and a people who were trying to figure it all out.
Now let’s consider this; 11 years. 11 years you might wonder is exactly how long it took for us, a western culture with centuries of philosophy and ideas emerging from the Greeks and Romans and other stable cultures of thought, to get from Declaration of Independence to Constitution. The Iraqi people have done that same journey in just over 2 years and all the time surrounded by radical Islamic nut-jobs who think blowing up women and children is part of Allah’s greater calling. I hate to tell you this, but such things ARE part of Allah’s greater calling.
See the big fat pink and purple polka-dotted elephant in the room is the fact that Islam if adhered to religiously is very specific that Allah is the one God, Mohammed is his prophet and anyone who disagrees with this should be coerced, subtly or violently into accepting such a ‘truth’. Those that don’t are best disposed of. There is no mercy in Islamic culture because it is absolute fatalism. Allah blessed whom he will and he curses whom he will. No rhyme or reason. This is why charity is such a fleeting thing in Arab countries. A rich Muslim sees a poor Muslim and the thought is, you (poor guy) are in your straights because Allah is mad at you. I shouldn’t get to close to you because then Allah won’t like me much either. Ever heard the statement Insh’Allah? It peppers every conversation you have with Arabs. It means “If Allah wills it.”. When they say this stuff it is held close to home. Muslims don’t think anything happens without the hand of Allah.
So some well educated in the ways of the Q’uran (Koran if you will) youth sees that a martyr for the sake of Allah, gets immediate access to paradise, he looks around at his plight and the absolute chaos of the middle east and he can be better understood when he straps 50 pounds of high explosive to himself and walks into a line of 200 Iraqis trying to join the police force. Better understood as to why he might think that is a good solution. We can run from it, try to change the perception, do whatever but those of us who have been there and seen it aint buying. Islam as practiced fundamentally is about a war between the forces of Allah and those of the rest of the world. They believe it and embrace it and live…and sometimes die…by it. It takes only a reading of the Q’uran and the Hadith to know that what I am telling you is true.
So I am really proud of these Iraqis and their progress toward self-governance and freedom. Notice as well that nobody protested the constitutional referendum even though the press would have you believe that every Su’uni in the place was against it. Nobody is crying unfair election, they have accepted it and are moving on. They also ratified a Constitution that expressly states that Iraq is a country under Islamic law. Try that here. Where is the ACLU right now, screaming and gnashing its teeth? Just the lone tumbleweeds I see blowing across the road. Nothing.
So all this American driven change is really a fiction. We showed up, we took out the lunatic that was the single biggest destabilizing element in the entire region and we have helped the Iraqis to start on a path toward a different future. All in just under 3 years. I remind you that we took 11 and we didn’t have suicide bomber and CNN trying to vilify everything that the USA does as anathema to good and decent behavior. We also had Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin at the helm.
So ‘WE’ as in the military and our leaders, are not losing this war. WE did the job we arrived to do and let me tell you having a few thousand US military members parked in a place where we can watch Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia is not a bad thing at all. I drive a small Honda and I turn off my lights but I am under no delusions. I use oil every day. It has been woven into the fabric of my everyday existence. The difference between me and my all-too-ready-to-criticize-but-not-too-ready-to-actually-do-something anti-war friends is that I don’t hide my head in the sand and pretend that I do not use oil. I prefer to discuss a future without it and hope and pray that elected leadership will aggressively pursue paths to divest ourselves from any dealings with anyone of these states on the basis of their only valuable resource. But in the meantime it is what we have so we have to deal with it unless we all want to burn cow dung to cook our dinner.
I chuckle when I see young college students in synthetic coats protesting outside an army recruiter’s office. So easy to make a fool of oneself.
I have walked in Khurdistan. I have been to Baq’uba and Baghdad. I spent at least 2 days a week talking with Iraqis and driving in their towns and seeing their lives. It wasn’t like I relished being their either, but in my life I did something other than spew whatever I had read on a blog or heard on TV. There are plenty of Non Governmental Organizations that need help. You don’t have to carry a gun to participate (although like in some parts of the USA it might be better if you do) you can be a complete pacifist and sign up to help the thousands of poor and illiterate Iraqi people who were made that way by a guy who felt that oil money was best spent on tanks and Uranium Yellow Cake. I had total respect for the NGO people over there even if they thought we were totally wrong for the invasion. They were not spewing, they were living in the now. I did my best to try and work with them so we could help Iraqis together.
WE would win this war by continuing the support of the emerging government, providing aggressive presence along the Iraqi borders to interdict young disenfranchised youths who want to drive cars full of explosives into crowds of Iraqis trying to go to work and waiting for the day when the Iraqis will say, and they will, okay, we can do with a 1000 less Americans this month…
It takes time, it takes patience and you cannot expect a McWar out of this. You cannot drive up to the border of Iraq, throw 100 billion dollars in, get a Constitution and a side-order of security to go; and then drive on into the next place of interest. You have to go in, clean house, get a good look at the place and then by person start rebuilding and changing a people to see the world as something different that the horror-freak show that it was under Saddam. You have to teach people who were not part of the “little-circle-of-trust” how to read. See Saddam understood history, an educated people is a population that is hard to control. So, just don’t educate them. Seen it first hand over and over again.
30 years they lived under the ruthless and indiscriminate despotism of Saddam and the Ba’athists. A person accepted that if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time a Ba’athist intelligence officer might just blow their brains out to make a point. Happened, I know a guy who was doing just that. But unless you go there and deal with it and unless you talk with families who lost members to the Saddam Inc. family of sadists you could easily be lulled into the idea that we did everything wrong. Why else would people blow themselves up? Well, life outside of the USA is almost always quite different from life inside the USA and the salient truth everyone needs to understand is ‘IT IS NOT ALL OUR FAULT’. Soldiers get this, why average Americans do not is beyond me.
We didn’t create Islam, Iraq or Oil. We built a nation and have tried to protect its interests and as much as we might like to think that our leadership has all the answers, well the truth is that it doesn’t. Accurately predicting human behavior in response to natural and manmade activity makes picking stocks look like child’ play. It aint that easy. So to criticize and cajole and Monday morning quarterback all of this really comes across to those of us who have been there and done that as so much self-serving rot.
WE didn’t lose Vietnam. I told my friend that I am not a policy guy so what I have to say means little to nothing in the greater scheme of things. I have my feelings as to why things went badly in Vietnam for us but since I wasn’t there and have only my readings and the opinions of fellow warriors I will not comment on it. I will say that if I was a policy guy, which I admit that I am not, but if I were, part of winning in Iraq would mean an immediate shut down and expulsion of all media short of print. I would make the entire nation of Iraq one big ‘information black hole’ and leave the sound bite 24 hour news people so in the dark that they would be experiencing post traumatic stress syndrome from lack of information. Until they can tell the good with all the bad and until they can get off the American ‘body-count’ kick I would say, “Nope, you are not coming in, period.”.
Then I would go out and I would find the finest and top graduates of the most prestigious University literary and English programs. NO JOURNALISM MAJORS ALLOWED. Journalism has nothing to do with telling a good story and everything to do with agenda. I would give these other writers substantial bonuses, like big money in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to enter the military and then empower them with everything they need to tell stories. Tell stories of the people, the soldiers, the country, the government, life under Saddam and life in the Islamic world and that would be the only thing that would leave my information black hole. I would censor nothing short of specifics on operational security and names in the event that it could harm the principles of the story. In short I would force the balance of good and bad and I would make sure that it reflected the reality of Iraq and told the story of the lives of the people there. I guarantee that it would make the non-soldier really wonder what they had been getting fed for the last 3 years.
So why you might ask am I putting this in my blog? Well I am a veteran. I was there and like most others I am now a different person than I was before I left. I am a different person from my military peers who have never been in combat and I do not like talking about such things outside of the circles of those who understand me. But I also have a solemn duty to guard the truth without agenda. For you see I could really care less what happens in Iraq. I have no more concern for the country of Iraq than I do the country of China. I care for the people and their future, but governments come and go. My concern is for my country and my Constitution and how I can protect the two of them from threat. Because the reality is that Iraqi democracy will be very different from ours and you know what, that is just fine. As long as in the end the security interests of the United States are met and my countrymen are safer, then I am doing my job and all is good. What is problematic is that right now, in the midst of people who have the primary concern of toppling administrations and finding more power for themselves, the truth, the truth that will help protect and defend the Constitution that I risked my life to look after, is being sold out for personal agenda.
Personal agenda trumping truth that is the threat and that is why you, as American civilian citizens, may lose the war while WE as American soldiers will not. The key is demanding the truth, the ENTIRE truth and ignoring anyone who speaks for the sake of personal gain on any level. I would love to change the paradigm myself, but as I said before, I am not a policy guy…
More on flying later.
FF
