Friday, July 30, 2004
Britt Blaser on how war really is . . .
Wow. Britt Blaser describes the evacuation of Kham Duc in 1968 with a C-130 pilot's-eye view. Two C-130s full of evacuees -- civilian and military -- were shot down on take off. Hundreds died. Then Britt flew his C-130 into the carnage and escaped with an overloaded plane full of lucky ones. To quote:
It was an authentic shitstorm . . . not just the fog of war, but also the FUD of command.I won't attempt to excerpt the story that Britt has told. You should read it yourself. It concludes:
Ah, the endless stream of FUBARs that is the wellspring for the black humor that sustains combat troops everywhere. A management fuck-up in the Fortune 500 is a sad waste of human potential and an inspiration for Dilbertian farce. A management mis-step in war kills hard-working young Americans and maims ten for every KIA . . .*snip*
. . . These are the reasons that people with a memory–like Dwight Eisenhower–are slow to go to war. Combat is always a sad, desperate monument to man's inability to get it right, either diplomatically or tactically. The wise but uneducated people in a culture generally clean up the messes created by the over-educated fools who just know they can manage a war better than the similar idiots who screwed it up last time.
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