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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (135212)	6/1/2004 8:33:42 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

"Friendly fire" is sad, but it's also a disgrace in the Information Age. There should be a way to know whether the people you are shooting at are on your own team.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (135212)	6/1/2004 8:50:25 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Respond to of 281500

If the job had been left to highly paid professionals instead of amateur footy players, maybe the mess wouldn't have happened. Maurice, war's a funny thing. Firefights are so fluid and so unpredictable that you can only train so much; the real ability lies in a person's native ability to conquer their fear of death, to move quickly and precisely with their feet and with the handling of their weapons and especially to separate their emotions from their judgement so they can make quick and accurate assessments in the middle of mayhem and confusion. And then there's luck; some have it and some just don't. In my experience it's a talent. Tillman had been in the service a long time, he had the best training that the army provided and he'd been around combat and maybe even shot at before. He might have been a really talented soldier. Given his athleticism, his attitude and his apparent intellect I'd have been surprised if he wasn't. Of course he may have bought into the "invincible" special forces bravado and taken a chance he shouldn't have. In real war, however, the bullets catch even the good ones. The other guys are good too and the number and seriousness of screwups from the REMFS (rear echelon MFers) are much higher than we're led to believe. One of the things that always kept me humble when I was in Vietnam was a war story I'd heard. The story was that some new guy was just sitting in triple canopy waiting for the line to move through the jungle when an NVA walked right into him and he killed the NVA. When they went through the dead guy's pack they found all kinds of medals and citations. The dead guy was one of the talented ones; he just let down one time and stumbled onto death. In war death doesn't respect training, religion, right or wrong or what kind of life you've led. It only respects those who humbly recognize their own mortality, those who fight for every second of life and those who never, ever miss an opportunity to do the right thing when the world comes apart in a firefight. And sometimes it doesn't respect them either. John Wayne or Rambo would have lasted less than 2 seconds in a firefight in the jungles of Vietnam if they'd done their "tough guys don't crawl" bullshit. By the way, Silver Stars stopped counting for much when the U.S. services started too frequently awarding them to officers for actions that enlisted men did all the time. But they do look good on an officer's resume.