Dave Long wrote:
[...]
The odd assumption here is that a more courageous fighter will always be
a more effective fighter. The ancient greeks wrote of the need to
temper courage, and the invention of the machine gun has only made it
more obvious.
Apropos of nothing except the trigger words, I've been wondering what
exactly it is that makes a technologically advanced army like the US
Army falter when faced with a rabble of guerrillas and insurgents.
I believe the missing element is human courage. There is a rather
interesting book on the Tunnels of Chu-Chi (of the same name), which
plays out the lives of the tunnel warriors of Vietnam in detail even if
the authors were really attempting to cover the lives of the tunnel rats
of the US Army.
The tunnel rats venturing into the underground tunnel networks of
Chu-Chi were hard men, volunteering for a daunting task that not many
had the stomach for. They were treated reverentially by their mates for
they fought the battle on the enemy's turf. The tunnel rats went into
the tunnels usually only when gas and grenades didn't work. They spoke
of inhuman conditions below ground and had to recuperate after every
visit to the tunnels.
This is all very fine unless you consider that whole villages of Vietnam
were living in those inhuman tunnels with their children, buffaloes and
rice crops. They braved snakes, cave-ins, vermin and suffocation every
day. They feasted on earthworms and rats, using the little rice that was
grown underground to nourish the sick and the infants. There were many
who spent 12-24 months underground without ever seeing the open sky for
more than a few minutes in a week or standing straight for the whole time.
When you consider that the modern warriors of the US Army live in air
conditioned comfort in the Iraqi battle zone listening to their ipods
and playing on their XBoxen while fighting a war they don't believe in,
it is clear that no amount of hardware can match up to real human
courage and will.
The Vietnamese had the will, the Iraqis and Taliban seem to posses it,
whither the Americans who plainly state that less than 4% of the force
on ground in Iraq constitutes the fighting force?
Cheeni
- Re: [silk] No Sleep Till Hammersmith Srini RamaKrishnan
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