Bryan Strawser

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Millions in the Field

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When I was a student at The Indiana Academy for the last two years of high school, I was fortunate enough to be a student of Mark Watson – an extremely gifted instructor of History. My junior year he taught American History – my senior year he taught Government – or maybe it was the other way around, I don’t recall exactly – it was eleven years ago afterall.

But I do remember my senior year Mr. Watson handing out a cartoon from World War I that showed the grim reaper stretching his scythe across a field of two opposing armies at the Somme – we had some discussion about our feelings about that cartoon – and the word that I recall saying was “useless”.

Fast forward to just a few years ago, I scored tickets to an open rehearsal of theBoston Symphony of a War Requiem. There were two fabulous soloists, a choir, and of course – the outstanding Boston Symphony. The writer, a soldier later killed in the war, had seen the carnage at several of the battles of World War I… but still I knew little of that war. The piece was hauntingly moving… and still I knew little…

Move forward to the present – this afternoon, just after retreating from lunch at the oceanside bar here, I reached page 260 of The Guns of August and read of the first major clash in World War I between the French and German armies.

It would be known as the “Battle of the Frontier”. It was a fight that stretched over hundreds of miles involving more than seventy divisions on each side – more than 1.2 million troops on each side – fighting over one huge stretch of land across the Ardennes Forest. In the four day fight, more than 160,000 soldiers fell – killed or wounded – more than twice the size of the British Expeditionary Force that had just landed in France.

That’s more men killed or wounded in one battle than we have in the entire Middle East right now — all fallen in the span of four days.

And, from what I do remember about the Great War, this was only the beginning of what was to come.

Washington Post: Guantanamo’s Background and Strategy

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Today’s Washington Post has an absolutely fascinating story about how Guantanamo’s holding area for enemy combatants and others came to be – including how the strategy was developed.. it’s a very interesting read:
There was little debate over how to classify those suspected of fighting for al Qaeda. The terrorist group was not a country and had never been a party to the Geneva conventions. Moreover, al Qaeda members intentionally killed civilians. Suspected terrorists captured by U.S. forces, the lawyers agreed, should be classified as enemy combatants and not given legal status as prisoners of war.

The status of Taliban fighters was less clear. Some lawyers reasoned that Afghanistan had signed the Geneva conventions and that the Taliban was recognized by some nations as a legitimate government, though not by the United States. These lawyers thought the Taliban fighters should be granted prisoner-of-war status, entitling them to certain rights and protections.

Other lawyers disagreed, arguing that the Taliban fighters should also be classified as enemy combatants.

“They were basically a criminal gang,” said a former Justice Department lawyer who participated in the strategy sessions and requested anonymity because of the confidential nature of the deliberations. “They massacred civilians. They summarily executed prisoners. If people violate the core notion of the law, they shouldn’t receive prisoner-of-war status. It’s reserved for honorable warriors.”

More later on my thoughts about this, I’m still digesting, and snorkeling awaits me….

World War I: The Guns of August

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I know little of the Great War (World War I) other than the small bit that one learned in high school during general US and World History classes. I could explain how the war started and why, though not in any great detail. I know a bit of the naval battles and an even smaller bit of the land battles – and I know hardly nothing of how the war ended. I do remember how and why the United States became involved – and I know my grandmother on my father’s side served in the military during this war – though I do not know the details of his service.

So when I was out looking for books with a gift card that some family had given me, I came upon Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic The Guns of August – a very detailed account of the first month of the Great War. While I am only 174 pages into the book, I am totally engrossed in its description of the pre-war diplomacy (or lack thereof) and of the interlocking alliances and loyalities that divided royal houses, countries, and families.

The book begins with this passage:

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the gun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens – four dowager and three regnant – and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again

And with that – no one knew that this entire assemblage of royalty would be at war with one another in just over four year’s time…. a horrible war with massive casualties – hundreds of thousands at the Somme – and over a million at Verdun. Tuchman writes of the first major encounter of the war – the neutral Belgians attempting to enforce their neutrality against a German onslaught at Liege, Belgium:

On August 5th, Emmich’s brigades opened the attack on the four easternmost forts of Liege with a cannonade by field artillery followed by infantry assault. The light shells made no impression on the forts, and the Belgian guns poured a hail of fire on the German troops, slaughtering their front ranks. Company after company came on, making for the spaces between the forts where the Belgian entrenchments had not been completed. At some points where they broke through, the Germans stormed up the slopes where the guns could not be depressed to reach them and were mowed down by the fort’s machine guns. The dead piled up in ridges a yard high. At Fort Barchon, Belgians, seeing the German lines waver, charged with the bayonet and threw them back. Again and again the Germans returned to the assault, spending lives like bullets in the knowledge of plentiful reserves to make up the losses. “They made no attempt at deploying,” a Belgian officer described it later, “but came on line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped on top of each other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble. So high did the barricade become that we did not know whether to fire through it or to go our and clear openings with our hands… But would you believe it? – this veritable wall of dead and dying enabled those wonderful Germans to creep closer, and actually to charge up the glacis. They got no further than halfway because our machine guns and rifles swept them back. Of course we had our losses but they were slight compared to the carnage we inflicted on our enemies.”

The entire book is about only the first month of the war – but I will need to read a more comprehensive history of this war – any recommendations?

On Being Silent

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My good friend Kerri has often asked me to debate more often – that I’m too unwilling to not argue – and she’s right. I am tired of arguing with those who simply won’t see the illogic beliefs that they hold.

I am exceptionally passionate about gun control – I refuse to back down from this issue and belief that I’ve held for nearly twenty years – and I still won’t change my position. And I’m also just as sick and tired of arguing about it.

But an article in yesterday’s National Review Online, although written on another subject, by Victor Davis Hanson made me rethink my position:

More challenging still, our own military — as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan — is so skillful, so adept in accomplishing its mission that it can defeat the enemy abroad with the appearance — I emphasize again the appearance — of so far not incurring costs of the magnitude we saw in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. But it would be a terrible mistake, in this age of our greatest affluence and leisure, to trust in such a misconception, to turn our attention inward precisely when the best citizens of our nation are fighting so well and so long and hard in such difficult places in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We must support them with all the material and spiritual aid we can muster. We must think of them daily, hourly and hold them in our prayers. We must make the needed sacrifices here at home to ensure that the unpleasant and often deadly task we have entrusted to them can be accomplished with every full measure of our love and support.

What would such sacrifice and responsibilities entail? All Americans with pride and confidence must confront in spirit and speech those who would caricature and misrepresent our struggle — that it is unnecessary, that it is wrong, that it is against Islam rather than the distorters of Islam. Yes, Americans must take on this new apparent phenomenon of anti-Americanism, learn about it, and then refute it with all their being, explaining that it is the United States who preserves the peace, whether that be in the Persian Gulf, the Korean Sea, or on the Mediterranean.

We seek no tribute, no colonies, no blackmail for ensuring that the seas are open and nations are free to pursue their own destinies without fear of attack by their neighbors. Whether it is stationing troops in the Balkans or in Japan, or providing billions of dollars in help for the victims of AIDS, or being a loyal and militarily powerful ally to Europe and a friend to large nations like Russia and India or protectors of the smaller like South Korea, the United States is a proven force for good in this world. And so the world depends on us to defeat those who would bring it back from the present horizons of modernism, global prosperity, and new friendships to the rule of the jungle of the Dark Ages.

I’ve grown tired of debating the anti-war forces – here and abroad – in the blogosphere – and in the real world. I was about ready to stop arguing about it.

But I’m not going to.. there’s too much at stake in the marketplace of ideas on this issue. I won’t back down – I can’t.

Not when there are men and women prepared to do violence on my behalf so that I can sleep safe and secure in my bed at night.

UMass President Bodyslams Student Author over Tillman Piece

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Yesterday’s Boston Globe reports on this shit from the left:

A college newspaper columnist who wrote that NFL player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman “got what was coming to him” when he was killed in Afghanistan triggered a furor at the University of Massachusetts yesterday, drawing hundreds of angry responses from across the country and a scathing statement from Jack M. Wilson, new president of the University of Massachusetts.

Writing in the UMass-Amherst Daily Collegian, graduate student Rene Gonzalez, called Tillman “a `GI Joe’ guy who got what was coming to him.”

Tillman, who gave up a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after Sept. 11, was killed in a firefight in eastern Afghanistan last week.

“That was not heroism; it was prophetic idiocy,” Gonzalez wrote. His piece, which ran on Wednesday, was paired with a second column praising Tillman’s heroism.

[…]

The controversy roused Wilson, named president of the UMass system a month ago. Wilson issued a statement yesterday recognizing Gonzalez’s right to free speech, but called his comments “a disgusting, arrogant, and intellectually immature attack on a human being who died in service to his country.”

Wilson called on Gonzalez to apologize to Tillman’s family and friends. Gonzalez did not reply to phone and e-mail messages yesterday.

Only in my state…

Bluntness

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This is why I love Donald Rumsfeld – from today’s press stakeout on Capitol Hill following Rumsfeld’s testimony:


Q: What about the operations [Inaudible] outside of [Inaudible] ?

RUMSFELD: What’s going on is some terrorists and regime remnants have been attacking our forces and our forces have been going in and killing them.

It doesn’t get any more direct than that.

John Phelps

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John Phelps the father of LCPL Chance Phelps, who was killed in action in Iraq earlier this month, has posted some information on his webpage.

If you have time, take a few minutes to watch the video from PBS about Chance’s funeral and the town of Dubois, Wyoming. A fascinating look at a town not unlike where I grew up in Indiana.