21st Century Willie & Joe

Not that there is any relation between the War in ah Babylon & WWII, but Bill Mauldin's "Up Front" single panel, which featured two inrantrymen named Willie & Joe, summed up the G.I.'s point of view in WWII: "Don't look at me, lady. I didn't do it."

Mr. Peabody (check the comments) brings to our attention a 21st century grunt (Do they still call themselves that?) writing from Mesopotamia/Babylon (at least until the Pentagon weasel-dick monitoring this "web log" finds out & shuts him down) "Army of Dude." None of that WWII pencil & paper crap, censored & known only to the family & friends of the writer. (Until Ken Burns gets ahold of it & has a voice over artist read it over pans across some still photos.) "Dude" has a laptop, & must have access to a satellite link, or Wi-Fi, or a landline to a server somewhere. And he has a digital camera, photos available hither, under the name "˜leavethegun."

Never did read the Scott Beauchamp stuff in TNR (possibly hidden behind the subscription wall) but we wonder what the warlovers & chickenhawks will make of Dude. It's all required reading, but these seemed like the best excerpts:

Do you know what the light at the end of the tunnel is for us?

Food.

Yeah, food. When we're on patrols and house clearing missions, what's keeping us going is not the promise of freedom and democracy in Iraq. It's the vision of hamburgers, fries and ice cream. I can live without a market based economy in the Middle East, but I can't live without a toasted ham sandwich.
Several times we have raced back to the base to get to the dining hall as it closed. Something to eat is the high point of the day. Imagine the low points.

[...]

As Kurt Vonnegut suggested, our morale is shot to pieces. The few tattered remains left were eviscerated when they extended us four months. The most devious trick the media and the government has pulled in the last ten years is suggesting to the public that the soldiers believe in the mission and the war itself. In my unit that is definitely not the case. We just fight for food and friends, and the hope of getting home. I know a few people who still believe in the cause. I would know one more, but he died when I was on leave.

[...]

Readers, fear not! Despite the caustic undertone of this entry, I am glimmering with hope. The dining hall opens in ten minutes for breakfast, and they make some killer omelettes. [graphic from the hideous MoveAmericaForward.org.]

The military is obsessed with taking something and renaming it with a totally different term. A jumping jack is a side straddle hop, and any Islamic terrorist not affiliated with Al Qaeda is a concerned local. When a mission is complete, there is a rollup of killed enemies and found weapons. A rollup is another term for a summary. So I present my own summary (er, rollup) for the time my company has spent between June 2006 and June 2007:

525,600 Minutes Passed

Countless Enemies Killed and Captured

3 Destroyed Strykers

Dozens of Rifles, RPGS and Mines Found and Destroyed

2 Fatherless Baby Girls

Thousands of Rounds of Ammunition Found and Destroyed

9 Figure Severance Paycheck to Dick Cheney, Courtesy of Halliburton

3 Cleared Cities

2 Dead Friends

100,000 Contractors Making Five Times My Pay for Doing Laundry and Serving Food

Thousands of Cleared Houses

1 Quagmire

A year later and this is what we have to show for it. A year later and we care about the survival of each other more than a fledgling democracy in the Middle East. To officers and officials influencing policy, our goal is to stimulate the economy and prop up competent Iraqi Security Forces. To the unwashed enlisted in the muck, we’re just trying not to get blown to fucking bits. A year later and we have realized finally: we’re biding time until the next unit comes to replace us. That’s it. Rotate in, rotate out. A year’s worth of sore backs, twisted ankles, near death experiences, shootouts, blown up buildings, fires, mangled corpses, dead kids, dead soldiers, cold desert nights, hot desert days, shit covered boots, trash filled streets, unfulfilled dreams, stagnant aspirations and murdered futures.
A year well spent.

AH

"They call the boys who shovel our shit in Viet Nam shitshovelers."
End the occupation. Now. The military will never be able to impose a "political" solution to the charnel house we've created, and now that the talk is of replacing the elected Prime Minister w/ yet another buffoon, Allawi (who, by all that is unholy, has hired Washington lobbyists to pimp for his appointment as P. M.) the Viet Nam analogy is complete.