I’ve been watching the HBO television series “Band of Brothers,” which tracks a company of paratroopers from their basic training through to the end of World War II.
It’s a hard series to watch, because the war they portray is hard and brutal, and in the process it hardens and brutalizes the men who, over the weeks, you come to know and care about.
But amidst the mayhem, the war still had certain clarity. The enemy was Germany and the German people, and the company’s job was to destroy them. The company never cared what the Germans thought, how they felt, whether the war was just, whether the Germans were willing volunteers or draftees.
It was irrelevant.
They hated the enemy because the enemy stood between them and going home. Their casualties were not reported on the 6 o’clock news, nor did any general ever think about collateral damage. They used everything they had, any way they could to achieve victory at a time when we accepted the possibility that there could be something called victory.
Now, 50 odd years later, we’re in another war, but our civilization has moved on. We are the most powerful nation on earth and yet we seem to have lost our clarity.
We’re unsure of our purpose, and reluctant about our methods.
We’re trying to fight a war without getting anyone angry. We’re trying to fight a war without any civilian casualties.
We’re living a myth that technological war somehow is different.
We’re trying to sanitize war and organized it to only kill the combatants on the other side.
We’re trying to fight a war without sustaining any American casualties.
We’re trying to fight a war in which we don’t lose any of those very expensive pieces of equipment, like billion dollar aircraft.
We’re trying to fight a war without radicalizing the entire Muslim world.
We’re trying to keep an alliance of dubious value together and the price we pay is we have to keep so many countries happy our tactical hands are tied.
We’re trying to fight a war and keep the oil flowing.
We’re trying to fight a war as if national boundaries have meaning when we have an enemy that’s global.
We’re trying to fight a war and look good at the same time; however, all the public relations people in the Western world are not going to be able to do that.
I suspect what we want to do is not going to work. The signs are already there.
Despite all the hoopla, the Northern Alliance has hardly moved and, frankly, does not seem overly anxious to get themselves killed.
High altitude bombing doesn’t appear to be working very well, no matter how many press conferences we hold.
The Taliban have been tougher than we expected, and I don’t know why we are surprised. Almost uniformly, people who are attacked close ranks behind their government, even if they hate that government.
Winter is setting in and I suspect war will go on hiatus.
Don’t misunderstand me. I strongly believe that we have to fight this war. We’ve been attacked and we have to respond appropriately, which means firmly, and we have to stay the course. If we don’t, the war will continue and the weapons will only escalate.
Unfortunately, we have to do what we did in World War II and other wars-that is, put everything back on the table.
Wartime rules apply now, not peacetime rules. That means spying, espionage, sabotage, assassination and all of the black arts we thought were in the past.
We need to use our money, our muscle and our contacts. We have a country full of immigrants and they speak the languages, know the cultures and represent a great strategic asset. We’ve got to find the ones we trust and recruit them.
And most of all, we have a younger generation of Americans who are not so sure about any of this. For as long as most of them have been alive, the country has been secure and prosperous and required no sacrifice on their part. Vietnam was something they heard about in high school history class or in a Coppola movie. Now they’re being called upon also to sacrifice, and we need their commitment.
There really are evil people in this world who are out to destroy us just because we are who we are. We’re vulnerable because they don’t believe we have the backbone to stay the fight. We’re going to have to prove we do, or they’re going to keep trying. We need to show the world we will defend ourselves and do whatever we have to do, no matter what the cost, no matter who is hurt, no matter where the battlefield.