"The right thing and the necessary thing are not synonymous"

"It is important to equip journalists with the specialized knowledge needed to comprehend complex subjects," wrote Columbia Journalism School President Lee C. Bollinger recently. He was talking about the school's new master's program, and we wish them luck, but here's a better idea. Go to the source. When it comes to the complex subject of warfare, listen to the voices -- past and present -- of those who've been there and done that. Norman Lewis's Naples '44 diary of wartime occupation, with "its ability to bring out the worst, and often the best, in human nature" (left) and Audie Murphy in "To Hell and Back," autobiographical B movie of his life as the most-decorated soldier in US history.

"As more accounts of civilian killings come to light, the pressure is likely to grow on the Bush administration to bring home the troops, not just to save their lives, but to rescue their honor and decency," write a dangerously clueless and smug Evan Thomas and Scott Johnson in "Probing a Bloodbath," a Newsweek International travesty chock full of tendentious, BDS innuendo and willful ignorance of human nature and that old-fashioned soldierly virtue, honor. You don't "rescue" honor and decency by cutting and running. A brief fisking of selected bits:

But Haditha, that was different. In the fall of 2005, when Kilo Company arrived in the flyblown city in Anbar province, three hours from Baghdad, up where the jihadists slipped across the Syrian border, the young Marines were worn out.

"Worn out"? How about "battle tested"?

This was their third tour in Iraq in three years, but they were not quite sure what to expect. The place was alien, sinister.

"The place was alien, sinister"? What battlefield isn't? [Also, where is your editor?]

Only now, in the late spring of 2006, when the Iraq war has been spluttering along for almost as long as the time it took America to win World War II, is the military finalizing a draft of a manual on counterinsurgency.

"Spluttering along"? Who's spluttering along? We'd say it's the likes of Newsweek's Thomas and Johnson & Company, "missing in action -- the privileged class of America staying out of uniform and out of harm's way," in the words of Tom Brokaw, praising Frank Shaeffer's  AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from the Military and How it Hurts Our Country. In a WaPo op ed today [via Clive Davis], Schaeffer compares his son's letters from the front in this war with quotations from Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy by the late Norman Lewis, noting that "Even in 'good wars' things go horribly wrong":

All our troops confront the tortured "morality" of war. My son wrote this from his first combat tour in Afghanistan as a Marine intelligence noncom: "Date: 9/25/03 8:27:01 PM Dear Mom and Dad: I have learned that the right thing and the necessary thing are not synonymous, rarely are they even in the same ballpark. It's very depressing to see the results of some necessary actions, it's never pure, and there is no purity here . . .

"In a natural state a human will kill, and kill not always for necessity, but for convenience as well. The only way that I know I am still me is that I hate that fact; I hate it more than anything I have ever known."

"In this war, we do not have enough political leaders and opinion-makers receiving soul-searing letters from their children," writes Schaeffer. The least the Thomases and Johnsons of this world could do is bone up on the subject by lending an ear to those like Schaeffer and other writers past and present -- not to mention milbloggers and Iraqi bloggers and others who've been to Hell and back or know and love people who have.

Comments

[goomp]

While you haven't been over there, you have listened to those who have and show a grasp of what war is that escapes a large portion of the Boomer generation and their offspring. Since the end of World War II life in the USA for these people has been without recognizable threat from war and from dedicated enemies. They have not studied history and have an abysmal ignorance of how war pursued by those dedicated to our destruction must be conducted. Their survival depends on their gaining some idea of what they face from the desendants of those who were humiliated by the Crusades.

[Teresa]

"This was their third tour in Iraq in three years, but they were not quite sure what to expect."

And they know this how? Did they talk to all the Marines in that company? OR did they once again make up what they "think" the Marines "must have felt"? Who can tell? They make up so many things, they might as well be writing fiction.

"It is important to equip journalists with the specialized knowledge needed to comprehend complex subjects,"

Hey, I have an idea - quit calling "journalism" a major in college - make them take a degree in another discipline, make them learn about something other than how to throw together a "story" in 30 seconds or less. Then again just think how many people would stop trying to be journalists because actually learning about things would be too hard for them.

[Laura Lee Donoho]

Wonderful post Sissy.

[hNAV]

really appreciated this post...

thank you...