I'm just a lowley SFC. I ain't got me much o' that book larnin' but I have a few things that I learned during my tour.

1. Speaking the language is nice and all but nothing can substitute for having a really good local national terp. It is nice to talk about everybody learning to speak the language but that is neither practical nor possible. Sure everybody can learn a few key phrases and some can learn to speak it well enough to have simple conversations but that's about it unless you want to send everybody to DLI for 18 months to learn Arabic and even then you will still need terps to help you with cultural issues.

2. John Q. Public has ADD. Keeping him focused on anything has become more and more difficult as the years go by. Combine that with the fact that most Americans have neither served nor know someone well who has served and you get a public who has neither the knowledge nor attention span to understand what is going on over there. Now add to that all the "experts," cherry picked facts and good old fashioned bull#### thrown in by partisans on both sides of the issue and John never really had a chance. I don't think John is a moron (although the excruciating popularity of America's Top Model and other shows of that ilk certainly give me pause) but he really just does not have the tools to understand all the issues at stake. There was a poll recently (I can't find it now) that showed that a significant number of Americans actually believe that the US Government had advanced knowledge of 9/11 but did nothing to stop it, either because of massive incompetance or because POTUS wanted it to happen or whatever other load of conspiracy theory they happen to believe. Now, having said all that, the powers that be have done a monumentally poor job of explaining things to John and that has allowed the partisans bury John under a giant pile of crap.

3. One of the key things to remember about dealing with a foreign culture is that it is foreign. When I hear a LTC stating that he just can't understand why the locals will turn out en-mass for a tribal militia headed by their own tribe but won't come out to join the IP (which happened to be dominated by another tribe) it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. RTK points out that Iraqis want what we want, safety and security for their families but there is a whole tribal angle to everything that is entirely alien to most Americans. Some commanders try to incorporate that into their operations with varying degrees of success, some just ignore it and some think that they can undo 4000 years of tribalism in a few short years.

4. The US military is notoriously poor at thinking all the way through a problem. Case in point, a few years ago one of our guys was killed while wearing Paraclete armor. A piece of shrapnel penetrated the side and entered his heart. The backlash was immediate, Paraclete armor had not been evaluated by NATIC and it was therefore banned until it could be evaluated. It seems like common sense, after all it may have contributed to the death of an American soldier. The problem is that the Paraclete he was wearing was an armor carrier. The actual armor inside was the stuff he had taken out of his issue armor. Nevertheless we were stuck with the ban and we were even disallowed from ordering Paraclete pouches on our DSORs. Another case is Underarmor shirts. There is a possibility that shirt will melt to the skin in a flash fire ergo it is banned, problem solved right? Well, no. First of all, it doesn’t take into account the reason that people wear them in the first place. It is probably pretty easy to get stats on how many people have been affected by the flash burns but how many studies are there about positive effects of Underarmor and equivalent clothing? Does it cut down on heat casualties? What about things like prickly heat? Does it make Joe pay a little more attention because he isn’t sucking quite so badly? How often do these flash burns happen? I’m guessing that happens less than heat injuries. It probably makes sense to ban these types of clothing in aircraft or armored vehicles but what about the rest of us? And while we are on the subject, this whole issue has focused on the Heat Gear Underarmor but personally I have not been issued any cold weather gear that wasn’t synthetic in many a year.

5. Practicality often trumps morality. This is not a popular concept but that is the fact of things. The dissolution of the Iraqi army is a prime example. An argument can be, and has been, made that the army was one of the primary instruments of Saddam’s reign and that the moral thing to do was to disband it. Most of us here also agree that it was a really dumb thing to do. We are beginning to realize that in order to get things done in Iraq we are going to have deal with elements that we had considered terrorists. Certainly that is not going to be considered the high moral road but it is becoming increasingly clear that that is what is necessary for us to achieve an acceptable outcome in Iraq. I’ll be honest, the moral arguments against torture have much less effect on me than the practical.


SFC W