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More Soldier Stories
Instapundit linked up this first-hand account of the battle of Fallujah:
3/5 began the actual attack on the city by taking an apartment complex on the northwest corner of the city. It was key terrain as the elevated positions allowed the command to look down into the attack lanes. The Marines took the apartments quickly and moved to the rooftops and began engaging enemy that were trying to move into their fighting positions. The scene on the rooftop was surreal. Machine gun teams were running boxes of ammo up 8 flights of stairs in full body armor and carrying up machine guns while snipers engaged enemy shooters. The whole time the enemy was firing mortars and rockets at the apartments.
Nice to read an old-style "the only good enemy is a dead enemy" account that doesn't try to disguise what's going on or get vapors over the morality of it all. The place was a roach nest of bad guys doing awful things, and now they're gone. End of story.
Too bad most of the bad guys had moved on to other places while we were waiting for the election to be over. I think we should go in and smash them like bugs but we don't seem to have the troops to do this.
I have noticied they are not showing body bags on the evening news like they did in VietNam In fact it is hard to even find out the body count now much less the number of very seriously wounded soldiers.
The post does, every single day in the "international" section.
Posted by: scott on November 22, 2004 10:35 AMI actually think the entire Fallujah fracas was part of a much more clever strategy than anyone is ever going to give the Administration credit for. Think about the situation there for a minute... We have a force of terrorists, trained in the art of asymmetrical warfare and fanatically devoted to their cause, who must be beaten down without harming any of the innocents they use for shields. The Iraqi police could do it, but they are both overwhelmed and thoroughly infiltrated. What can an army of outsiders do to defeat an enemy that can strike without warning, vanish into the population at will, infiltrate your forces at all but the highest level, and is nearly immune to infiltration itself?
Posted by: Tatterdemalian on November 22, 2004 10:03 PMThe answer so far, which I really can't format properly because I'm typing these comments using a cheapass cell phone, is: 1) let the Iraqi police try to handle it, and make note of where they fail most spectacularly; those cities are likely to be the most heavily infiltrated. 2) Let the terrorists have free run of the biggest failure for a while. Use negotiations brokered by the (corrupt terrorist-infiltrated) city leaders to convince them that they have a safe haven there. 3) The hard part: stand back and let the terrorists commit all the atrocities they want, until they feel confident enough that they no longer try to hide, and have moved nearly all their capital and manpower into their new haven. 4) Descend upon their stronghold like a sledgehammer on a fly. Kill their soldiers, destroy their weapons, and capture a treasure trove of information. It's an ugly strategy, but it's one of the few ways to deal with people whose strategies go way beyond ugly.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian on November 22, 2004 10:38 PMI do so wish it was the end of the story. Sort of like Bush, in full flight gear, on the deck of a carrier declaring that the war was over with that famous grin on his face. Sorry, I swore I was not going to mention this again.
Posted by: Pat Johnson on November 24, 2004 06:33 AM