There are actual American heroes. Not a lot, and you don’t hear much about them, but there are a few.

I don’t mean working moms who spend their Saturdays spooning soup into winos. I mean classic citizen-soldiers who get it right every time, in battle and in everything else.  My favorite at the moment is Benjamin Grierson, because he not only led the finest cavalry raid of the Civil War (according to James MacPherson hisself) but managed to be right about everything, all his life—one of the few who look as good now as they did then.

The last straw for me, the thing that made me put “Grierson Column” on the topside of my hand (if I really mean to do something I write it on top of my hand; if I’m lying to myself I put it on the palm where nobody’ll see it) was when I went to what’s left of the library here and found a book actually called Heroes of the Civil War. Grierson wasn’t in it. Not even the index. I can’t forgive that. There’s an old song called something like, “If I ran the world,” and if I actually did a lot of writers would be standing against the nearest pockmarked wall.

If Grierson’s not a hero, nobody is. He looks as good today, maybe even better, than he did back then. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Heroes age pretty fast; a new issue comes up every few years, and these dead guys get vetted like they were running for office. That’s when the embarrassing parts come out: Forrest has Fort Pillow and the whole KKK thing, Grant had to go and ruin it by being President, and Sherman blew his chance to change the life of the freedmen.

But Grierson…I can’t find a bad thing about him. Even on the racial stuff, which is usually fatal to heroes from back then, Grierson comes off more heroic now than ever. I’d never believe that anybody could be that perfect, if it was somebody from these days. But those Victorians were all crazy, so when one of them was good—and there weren’t many who were—the good ones are crazy-good, a perfect mix of Dudley Doright and Subotai.

Even Grierson’s back-story is too perfect, movie-perfect. He was a music teacher in Ohio, a tall skinny Jimmy Stewart guy with the perfect comedy touch: He was scared to death of horses. What makes that perfect is that Grierson went on to lead what James MacPherson called the greatest cavalry raid of the whole war, riding from Tennessee 600 miles almost due south through enemy territory to land safe in Baton Rouge, LA, inflicting ten times the casualties he had himself—and then going on to be the one white officer who stood up for the black freedmen “Buffalo Soldiers” in the far West, at a time when America was using white-vs-black to heal up the raw North-vs-South scars.

It’s a script touch you’d drop if you were doing a movie, because it’s too much to believe.

But he had the scar to prove he came by this horse-o-phobia honestly. As a kid Grierson was kicked in the face by a horse, and carried the hoofprint on his face for the rest of his life, along with a good healthy fear of horses.

If you grew up in church, you get that story in a hot second: He was one of the Elect, horse-wise. God got him kicked, marked with the hoofprint to tell him he’d have to crawl to the ol’ rugged hoss, like it or not, and added the horse-phobia to make it more interesting. Although I’m not sure being scared of horses is even a phobia. It’s just common sense. Any animal with a tiny brain and an iron-tipped back leg cocked like a bear trap is a good thing to be scared of. I had some horsey relatives and every time they wanted to show us Gypsy or Joker, I’d be edging around trying to stay out of range of that twitchy back leg. I’d already read enough military history to know that horses killed and crippled a whole lot of soldiers. One thing I’ll say for cars: they may kill you but at least it won’t be personal. A horse can nurse a little grudge for weeks, then kick your brain out the back of your head.

Or the horse can stop short and send a rider flying into a log. That happened to Sherman in his early career, nearly crippled him. In fact there are still Civil War dudes getting hurt by horses, like these two poor guys, probably UPS drivers in real life, who were just trying to reenact the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, where Frank James got his start shooting people—except their horses weren’t as thrilled about making military history come to life as their riders were:

One man playing a Confederate cavalryman got pinned under his horse, while a Union cavalryman got injured when his horse stepped on his groin. Exactly how he got into a position where his horse could do that is unclear.

Yes, there it is, the tragedy of Civil War, brothers divided, one in gray and one in blue,  but both cursing their dumb drooling dinosaur-brained animals while they waited for the paramedics, with the groin-injury Union man groaning, “I regret that I have but two gonads to give to my reenactment society.”

Ridiculous as it sounds, they probably did a better job of reenacting the real battle than most, because real Civil War cavalrymen (and officers, who rode most of the time) got kicked, stepped on, thrown, rolled on, trampled and bit by their horses all the time. Having your horse step on your balls has to be the worst, because you know everyone’s going to make a joke of it when they’re with their friends. Even the reporter here can’t resist, with that chuckly last line about “Exactly how he got into a position where his horse could do that is unclear.” When something like that happened in a real war—and it did, all the time—they probably didn’t even bother to hide the laughs.

Grierson, growing up with a reminder on his face of what horses could do, just wanted to play his trumpet, make a little extra teaching music, and keep out of trouble. He was Southern and when the war started he said he couldn’t imagine fighting against his family. Besides, he was broke, deep in debt, with a wife to support.

Interesting thing about the best men in the Civil War: Most of them were lousy businessmen. It took the war to show what they could do. That backs up something I’ve been thinking lately, now that we’re all supposed to worship business: I don’t like business. Business is good for some people and bad for others, and the ones who are bad at it generally turn out to be the best soldiers.

Grierson finally faced the fact that he was going to have to go to war and started studying from scratch, recruiting a company, the 10^th Illinois Infantry. The way he backed into command was typical of a lot of Union officers, especially the ones from the West. In the newer states like Ohio, it all came down to local politics. That’s one big change between their time and ours. These days local politics is nothing, but in 1861 it made way more difference in your life who was the local postmaster or mayor than it did who was in the White House. And the bitchy fights over influence carried right over to the command of all the units that formed up in the early days of the war.

Grierson got caught up in the fight between Grant and Ben Prentiss. Grant took quick and hard dislikes to some people and Prentiss was one of them.  A good soldier—proved it at Shiloh—but Grant was elbowing for influence in the Western theatre and Prentiss was in his way. Since Grant was a natural power forward, he got the rebound and Prentiss ended up retiring mid-war, bitter about the whole thing.

Grierson was one of the extras in their fight and got bounced into the cavalry. Now this had to be one of the funniest moments in the whole war, this geeky, skinny music teacher with a hoofprint on his face and a huge fear of horses finding out he was transferred fro the 10^th Illinois Infantry to the 6^th Cavalry.

Grierson went from horse-hater to regimental commander because he lucked into another of those classic early-Civil War situations: The commander of the regiment, Col. Cavanaugh, was one of those hopeless drunks (Irish too, from the name) who from what I can tell made up about half the male population of the country back in 1861. Cavanaugh didn’t make much of an impression on the men, what with being gone most of the time and bombed out of his mind the rest, so they petitione the governor of Ohio to get rid of him and put the new guy, Grierson in his place.

He took to it in a second. God knows, maybe they found a horse he could relate to, or maybe he just had that insane duty-bound attitude that made battlefields like Franklin and Cold Harbor such unhealthy places for a few hours at a time. One way or another, he got back on the horse–like literally. And in a few months he turned into one of the few Federal cavalry commanders who stood out at a time when the Union cavalry was considered a joke by the rebels.

Grierson’s first assignment was chasing guerrillas in Tennessee, where his kin came from, under  Gen. Lew Wallace. The one thing everybody knows about him is he wrote Ben Hur, which I had to watch as a child because it was supposedly “Christian,” but Wallace was a pretty good officer, and he set Grierson to work hunting fellow Tennesseans. Here again Grierson is like this ridiculously perfect officer-and-gentleman type; he crushed the local bushwhackers but the Tennessee ladies loved him for his perfect manners. You don’t get that a lot from ladies you meet while hunting down their kin, but that was Grierson, Mister Ridiculously Perfect.

And he hadn’t even started the raid that won him the real glory. That came in the spring of 1863, one of the distractions Grant used to cover his cross-river move south of the city. Grant wanted Pemberton to look anywhere but downstream toward Grand Gulf and Bruinsburg, where the surviving riverboats from the big gun-running gauntlet ferried his men across to the Vicksburg side. So he sent Sherman to Snyder’s Bluff—and “bluff” was a good name for it because Sherman’s job was to pretend he was going to try his big failed Chickasaw attack again. To make sure Pemberton wouldn’t know where to send his reinforcements, Grant sent out cavalry expeditions in different directions.

The unlucky raid was commanded by Abel Streight, and the unlucky part of it was that he was tracked by Nathan Bedford Forrest. Streight started from Nashville with a brigade of about 1600 cavalry, tiptoed downstate to the Mississippi-Alabama line, and staggered east/southeast across ‘Bama. Streight’s diversion ended at Cedar Bluff, almost at the Georgia border, where Forrest bluffed Streight into surrendering by marching his few dragoons back and forth to make them look like a whole corps. Weird how these old tricks work sometimes, but you’ll notice they usually work better when they’re played by somebody like Forrest who inspired sheer terror in their opponents.

Misdirection was going to turn out to be crucial in the whole Vicksburg campaign, at tactical and strategic level. Grant’s strategy was to make Pemberton, commanding the defense of the city, fling units around against feint attacks while Grant landed the real force far to the south, on the east bank. Tactically, units operating in the West, where there was a huge territory to be covered by mostly small units, were fighting a more mobile force than the slow gyro-carving in Northern Virginia and had much more opportunity to use false moves, and old-school deceptions like Forrest’s in Cedar Bluff, to fool the enemy.

But capturing Streight took Forrest out of the Vicksburg campaign and left the second brigade under Grierson free and clear. Streight was set up to lose; his men got the nags, Grierson’s got prime horseflesh. You have to figure the choice of commanders went the same way: Streight wasn’t a bad officer, but he wasn’t a star either. Grierson already had a reputation.

And with Forrest busy chasing Streight, Grierson was up against some real C-League Confederate commanders, like Robert Richardson, whose only contributions to Civil War lore are a whiny letter home begging for more skillets and the fact that he survived the war just to get himself shot in the back outside a tavern, proving that even back then the most dangerous thing you can do is win a fight in a bar.

Subtract Forrest and the Confederate talent pool in the West is as shallow as the L. A. River. Pillow, Van Dorn, Price—it’s a hall of shame. Of course it didn’t help that some of their best, like Col. Rogers of the 2^nd Texas, were slaughtered early on or blocked for promotion by that fool Jeff Davis (Rogers had both those handicaps) but that waste of talent happened on both sides, so you have to go with the survivors.

Forrest, who made it through the war and had enough energy left to start the Klan and make a fortune, made some of his best military decisions when he disobeyed these fools’ orders, like when he carried 4000 troopers out of the wreck of Fort Donelson by himself, or near the finish of his career as a cooperative subordinate, when he told Braxton Bragg that if they ever met again, one of them would die and it wouldn’t be the guy who looked like Chuck Liddell in a bad mood. (Although Bragg was a looker himself–living proof that great-grandma Bragg had a thing for Neanderthals.)

Forrest, Definitely Not Gump

Chuck Liddell Looking Forrest-al

Grierson left Tennessee in mid-April 1863 with a brigade of about 1700 men from two Illinois and one Iowa regiments. From the beginning he was in enemy territory, which like MacPherson says is one handicap Forrest never had to face. Grierson used diversion to confuse the local snitches who tried to report his location and destination along the raid route. When he crossed a river, he did it at three or more different points; when he was

planning to move in force, he sent fake recon units galloping in all kinds of fake directions, knowing the locals would exaggerate the numbers and assume the worst, which locals always do when they spot enemy movements.

Grierson had a real genius for misdirection plays. Like Sherman did when he moved out of Atlanta, he culled all the weak or sick men from his force—but unlike Sherman, Grierson used the cull to fool the enemy. Instead of culling the force before he started out, he waited until he was well inside Mississippi and had already captured a major town before he sent his weakest 200 men back to base, along with all prisoners and surplus captured horses, giving the local spies the impression he was leading a standard short-range patrol. Grierson also pioneered the tactic of having picked men plant rumors, “disinformation” as the Soviets would have called it, in every town he passed about where the column was going. It must have been a great time for all the frustrated actors in uniform—staggering around drunk or weeping about a made-up relative who was in harm’s way, then adding a tearful beg to “tell Granma the Yankees is comin’ and she needs to git”—and then leaving the Confederate forces waiting all jilted outside granma’s house while Grierson’s troopers zigged the other way.

Grierson’s wildest, most effective juke was a false-flag operation worthy of the North Korean People’s Army. He dressed his best scouts in drab gray-brown outfits that could pass for standard Confederate irregular-cavalry uniforms and sending them ahead. If the locals happened to think these guys were fighting for Dixie, well, that wasn’t Grierson’s fault. A whole lot of useful info came to Grierson thanks to these spies, I mean scouts.

These misdirection plays let Grierson come close to doing the impossible: Conducting successful conventional warfare without atrocity in enemy civilian areas. And these weren’t the scared peasants you get in a lot of wars; this was the South back when it expected to win the war and took all Yankees but especially Yankee cavalry for hopeless cowards. Most commanders would solve this “problem of perception” the obvious way by burning villages and hanging all male civilians without a good alibi. Grierson never did.

Grierson, a softie (in some ways)  who hated making the local women cry and never let his men get rough or even search private houses, actually USED the fact that the civilians were agin’ him against them, by sending so many vanguards in so many false directions that any enemy force would be swamped with useless intelligence. An under-used tactic in low-impact CI warfare. Anybody know where else it’s been used and how well it worked? The obvious flaw is that you’d expect to lose a lot of men on these misdirection missions to casual sniping, but the level of gore around 1863 probably made that a non-worry. At that point they were worrying about losing whole units, not little individual lives.

Grierson headed straight south into Mississippi, scattering militia as he rolled into Pontotac, the first big town on the route. From 1862 on, any veteran unit—on either side—could crush pretty much any force scraped up from local militia, no matter how big it was. Grierson sent Hatch’s Iowa regiment east to threaten the Mobile and Ohio, which paralleled his line-of-march near the Alabama border. The few real Confederate regulars in the area fell for it and massed to the east, assuming this was just a standard cavalry raid with no aim besides brief tactical rail disruption (Grant on the subject: “Any damage inflicted on a railroad by cavalry is soon repaired.”)

Nobody got the bigger purpose, freeing up the territory around Vicksburg for Grant’s infantry. Nobody understood Grierson’s nerf-war CI tactics, either. But there was a bigger, maybe the biggest, strategic gain that was another year showing up in Sherman’s raid: Grierson was showing, by pushing right through the heart of Mississippi, what Sherman figured out a year later: “The South is hollow, all hollow inside”—over-mobilized and helpless once the outer defenses were beaten, classic defenseless-villager stuff that in any other country, any other era, would have meant rape’n’pillage galore. All that was holding the Union back from winning the war Mongol-style was a notion that white Americans weren’t fair game for the classic cavalry campaign, the kind that explains why Genghis Khan’s personal genes can still be found in some huge percentage of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Me, I’d’ve gone for it, mounting all Federal troops and giving them sabers, torches and compasses that pointe south—but then you wouldn’t pick Jimmy Stewart to play me.

Grierson was such a Jimmy Stewart softie—and such a damn genius at it—that when he actually wanted to stop locals from sending info to the enemy (instead of encouraging them the way he usually did) he managed that without hanging or shooting anybody. That happened when he reached Louisville, more than halfway down Mississippi. The fact that his men were in Louisville, on a line for the rail line running west to Vicksburg, was worth keeping as quiet as long as possible. So, taking advantage of the fact that most towns in Mississippi didn’t have working telegraphs, he sent small, disciplined cavalry pickets to the edge of town to make sure no public-spirited Rebs got the idea of playing Paul Revere. And, because he was one of these insanely fair officers you get in the Civil War, he kept other pickets along his men’s route through town to stop any pilfering. Again, it was me I’d be annoyed: We’re in their territory, and we don’t get so much as a gold watch? I mean c’mon, sir, you think we signed the enlistment papers for the generous wages or the medical plan? It’s like you don’t even want to kill people or something, all these
violence-prevention strategies.

But there you go—the Jimmy Stewart thing. Wannabe Bummers like me need not apply when Grierson was in command.

Grierson’s men hit the east-west railroad at Newton Station, where his “scouts” jumped a train just coming in full of supplies, commandeered it, and did the same to another right behind it. Then, for once, there was work for the guys like me in his command, a few hours to pay the locals back for all those saddle sores. The whole depot went up in flames along with all the rolling stock, and with only a few hours to enjoy the show—the ammo cars made some great fireworks, by all accounts—Grierson headed on south.

But the fun has to end sometime, and the Confederates were scared enough by this time to send troops south after Grierson. Here’s a classic moment between your standard tactically effective officer and a real genius like Grierson. A good officer with no imagination would go out with a bang, accept that he’d done his job in the big picture—drawing troops away from Vicksburg—and surrender on cue. Grierson had other ideas, and his nerf-Mongol style really came into its own as he faked and juked the Confederates right in their heartland.

With Pemberton’s forces slogging south after him, and another Southern force under Wirt Adams waiting for him to the south, at Union Church, Grierson did something Subotai would have loved, jumping into Wirt’s defenses as if he was going to plow through to the south, then sagging to the east, right out of Adams’ range.

Adams’ cavalry shadowed them south, so they couldn’t join up with the main Union forces pushing north to Vicksburg, so Grierson kept on south, burning rails and munition depots as he went. The most incredible thing about the whole raid is that he didn’t have to do a full-on frontal attack, thanks to all those feints, until he was at the Tickfaw River on the road to Baton Rouge, which was in Union hands. At the crossing he finally had to face what every commander hated most: A river crossing under fire from an enemy entrenched on the opposite bank.

Grierson crossing Tickfaw under fire–I love dioramas, ain’t ashamed to say it.

Grierson tried one attack which failed, then redeployed his men according to what Rommel discovered fighting in Rumania in WW I: “Two men in support-fire to one man on the attack.” That was enough to drive the enemy away from the crossing, since they were too stingy or stupid to burn Wall’s Bridge in the first place, which would actually have delayed Grierson a while.

Grierson’s brigade reaches Baton Rouge

When Grierson’s men rode into Baton Rouge, half of them were zombies, since they’d been going on about three hours’ sleep a day for way too long. But they were heroes in the North, with an illustration in Harper’s Weekly and everything, and at a time when most of the opinion-makers in NYC were as on-top-of-it as they usually are, moaning about Grant being “bogged down in the mud before Vicksburg, no good to themselves or anybody else.”

As MacPherson said in Battle Cry of Freedom, Grierson’s raid outshines anything Forrest did (except maybe capturing steamboats with cavalry, but that’s more of a Buster Keaton novelty act than a strategic victory). Imagine Forrest riding 600 miles through New England with minimal casualties and ending up safe in Confederate lines, and you’ll have an idea of what a phenomenal accomplishment it really was.

It was a tactical victory, with far more casualties inflicted than suffered and huge amounts of materiel destroyed; it was a mid-range strategic victory, and a great one, preventing the reinforcement of Vicksburg at a key moment; and it was a long-term decisive demonstration that the South was over-mobilized, “all hollow,” as Sherman said. Most historians credit Grant’s return march after that earlier failed Vicksburg campaign with showing Sherman that a mobile force could live off the land, but Grierson’s raid showed something even more important: the fact that there was no defense worth mentioning inside the walls of Festung Dixie.

Grierson survived the war and fought Forrest twice, coming out of it with a 1-1 record, which was about the best anyone ever did against Forrest. But the rest of his wartime service was a letdown after the Raid, and it deserves the capital letter.

Grierson took a drop in rank when the war ended, like most Union officers. (Well, you could say Confederate officers took a bigger one.) Grierson was a brevet Major General in 1865, dropped back to Colonel after Appomatox. But it was while he commanded a regiment in the Indian Wars that Grierson proved he was more than a raider. He was one of the few Union officers who got the point that it wasn’t enough to free the blacks and leave them to hang with the surviving relatives of the people who used to own them down South. He volunteered as Colonel of the 10^th Cavalry Regiment, which Sherman had ordered formed from black Union vets. It was the usual Civil-War setup: White officers with black troops. The 10^th was posted to Kansas in 1866, assigned to protect the Kansas Pacific RR from Injun attacks, then Oklahoma (“Indian Territory” at the time) and finally the Dakota Territory.

10th Cavalry troopers

You didn’t get sent to Dakota if you were the brass’s pet unit. Once the Civil War was over, the race issue was done as far as most of America was concerned. Col. Hoffman, the commander of Fort Leavenworth, the 10^th’s first assignment, made it real clear to Grierson and his troops that they weren’t wanted by ordering them to camp in a swamp a mile from the fort. Just in case the blacks hadn’t got the message, Hoffman ordered them not to line up within 15 yards of the white units at Leavenworth. Grierson stood up for his troops and had a yelling match right in front of the assembled troops. Since Hoffman was base commander—and more important, Hoffman had the whole place behind him, nobody in the mood to let the blacks into their little club—Grierson pushed to get the 10^th transferred to another base, Fort Riley, as soon as he could.

There were gunfights between white and black troops—just like Nam almost exactly 100 years later, after Tet broke morale. The theatre commander was Phil Sheridan, who wasn’t exactly a racist—when he was in charge of reconstructing Texas, a job which would be right up there with reconstructing Afghanistan, he was disgusted by the white mobs who killed three dozen blacks and said, “If I owned Texas and Hell I would rent Texas and live in Hell.” But Sheridan was a total-war man; he’d proved that in the Shenandoah and he kept the same policy on the plains. If the Sioux were the enemy, starve ’em out, kill the last buffalo—no mercy. Sheridan gets called a racist and blamed for that “only good Indian” remark, but it’s not all that clear he really said it and my take is, if he’d been in any other war in history, he’d have said the same thing about the planter families of Dixie. He was just a natural war-of-extermination man.

Grierson leading 10th Cavalry

Grierson wasn’t. In fact, Grierson’s position on the plains makes Job’s troubles look like a casual Friday afternoon in a cushy civil service job. In the first place Grierson was trying to prove that black Americans could make good troopers, but he also sympathized hard with the Indians—who were the only enemy those black troopers had to prove their worth
as soldiers against. Dudley Doright would’ve shot himself, but Grierson stayed on the horse like he always did, did his best in a rotten world. He fought the other white officers who wanted his troops out of sight, out of the army, just plain out; but he fought for the Indians too, as much as he could.

There were a few decent people out there, and Grierson worked with them, especially this Quaker Indian agent. It’s kind of a constant: Over and over, in the worst place, you can count on the Quakers. Too bad they’ve disappeared. On second thought, that’s probably WHY they disappeared.

Grierson kept trying, picking the best spots he could to put the reservations, get respect for his buffalo soldiers, make the land-grabs that were bound to come a little less brutal. Sheridan thought he was a wuss, and his brother officers thought he was crazy for refusing a transfer away from the black regiment and the plains winters. He stayed on the job until 1890, which is not bad when you consider it was one of those situations where there’s no good solution. It’s got nothing much to do with that Wounded-Knee/bleeding-heart dumbed-down story of bad whities and good Injuns. When the power difference is as big as it was between the US and the Sioux, it’s going to end the same way if both sides are purple with green spots. But it’s not something you can feel good about.

Maybe that’s why it’s so much easier to think about The Raid than Grierson’s way longer time on the plains afterward. The Indian Wars could only end one way: Extinction of the Plains Tribes. The Civil War was one of the real few other kinds of war—the only other one I can think of is the English Civil War—when people who see themselves as being the same blood, the same language, the same everything, fight each other hard but clean, at least by normal standards—one of those rare wars where most encounters are actual battles, not massacres. Grierson, who doesn’t seem to have had either a weak or a mean bone in his body, was made for a war like that. The Plains wars brought out what you might call a more standard kind of warrior, people as messed-up as me.

The other Americans, the Griersons, are hard to believe in sometimes. There don’t seem to be a lot around right now, and they went away pretty fast after 1865 too, turned fast to a generation of bankers, like now—scum of the earth. Weird process, that quick turn, but we seem to do it over and over. The only Grierson I ever met was this big kindly Swede from Minnesota who taught my Social Studies class. He actually believed in democracy and debate, which in Bakersfield, believe me, put him in the world’s tiniest minority.

We laughed at him; he retired for psych stuff after his wife left him for another woman and it got around. We thought that was the funniest thing in the world. He told us on the last day, “I thought I was a teacher, but you have shown me otherwise.” That was his style, full-sentence with no contractions—raw meat for class-clown types.

Maybe there has to be what a bio teacher would call a habitat for people like that. Imagine a Grierson born in 1860, in time for the Robber Barons. He’d be ground up and sold to Purina, like Grant would—like both of them would if they were around now.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

Click the cover, buy the book!

I’m back, thanks to the don’t-call-it-a-depression. Thanks to this brief correction in the US economy, then. My new job lasted three months. I did all the right things, too, even smiled. Didn’t matter. I was the last hired, and you know how that one finishes up. They were sorry to see me go, and could you go right now, please? We need the monitor.

I missed a lot of great stuff in the war world these last few months. I’ll try to catch up, item by item, as often as I can. In between those application letters that make you feel even worse than usual, and getting the 12 or so hours of sleep that you need when being awake means remembering you’re totally useless, nobody wants you, just like you always figured.

Podcast originally aired on April 7, 2011.

Watch The Dylan Ratigan show weekdays at 4pm EST. Also, check out Dylan Ratigan’s podcasts–like this latest “Best of RFD” episode…

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here. The rest of his stuff is here.

Click the cover, buy the book!

The second I had to quit daily blogging they got Osama. That was just one of the joys of starting a new job: Seeing all that great material wasted on mainstream journalists who have got to be the dumbest, most gullible cage-raised pullets ever born.

I couldn’t do a thing about it. This new job is much tougher than the last one. All the new jobs are much nastier than the old jobs, from what I can see. They know we’re all scared to death, so they can push us all harder. And you better smile too, unless you want to join the Guatemalans standing by the offramp for yard work.

So I’m giving the job most of what little energy I’ve got. But it was hard focusing on civilian paper while all this Osama stuff was happening. I’d groan out of bed, stuff my gut into a starched office shirt and choke myself with the brightest most optimistic tie in the closet—I actually pick the ugliest ones because I figure they say “Cheerful employee!” more than decent ones–and head off to work. The commute was the worst, because I can’t drive without the radio talking to me and that meant I had to hear them talking about the Osama raid. Haven’t heard that much absolute sportstalk stupidity since 2003.

Oh, I planned lots of columns, believe me. I’d have a great idea and plan to write it down when they weren’t watching at the office like I used to. But then I’d catch a sight of my fat neck in the rear-view mirror and think, “God, I have to button that top button!” And I’d try, and realize that even though I buy these 18 neck shirts the damn thing won’t button, so I have to try to hunch the knot of the tie up to hide the gap and watch for sudden brake lights so I don’t rear-end some asshole’s giant truck. I’m the last man in town to drive a sedan, apparently if your car can fit under an overpass you’re a wimp, so I can’t see anything but brake lights at eye level.

And I can’t hear anything on the radio but “Osama Dies Yellow.” You ever hear that line, “Rocky Dies Yellow”? It’s from an old gangster movie, Angels with Dirty Faces—my grandma liked those Cagney things and I sat through them for her sake. Cagney plays this gangster who’s going to the electric chair, still tough as whitleather, and this minister who preaches to a bunch of slum kids (those Hollywood brat actors, they’re the “angels” in the title) goes to see Cagney in the Death House and says, “Rocky, could you please die yellow? For the kids, see.” Meaning: Could you act all chickenshit when they drag you to the chair so the sweet little bad seeds I’m pastoring, who all think you’re the toughest guy in the world and idolize you, will have this sudden Paul-to-Saul moment and go, “Jeez, foddah, I getcha now, dis whole gangstuh rumpus ain’t on da up-n-up”—I can’t do the dialogue but something like that.

Cagney doing “scared”

The preacher’s idea is if Rocky dies yellow, they’ll all be so disgusted they’ll change their ways, stop with the switchblades and go be lawyers and bankers like the guys who got us where we are—and what could be better than that.

So Rocky the gangster puts on a big show of being “yellow” when they fry him, all “No, please, help, Ma, Oh, I’m such a scaredy-cat!” They didn’t go in for underacting in those days. And so Rocky goes to Heaven, because he did it For The Kids. Or to put it another way, lying is fine when it’s for The Kids.

The only difference with Osama is that they shot him first, then yellowed him up. It was as corny, as obvious, as plain ridiculous as that Cagney movie.

The first thing you heard was that Osama used his wife for a “human shield.”

Any time somebody does that in a movie you know they might as well put up a subtitle, “deserves to die horribly” or “bad man.” Remember Heat, that fucked-up movie with de Niro and Pacino supposedly LA cops though they acted more like Hollywood producers with badges? Tom Sizemore was one of the hoods in that movie, and at first you like his character, seems like a good criminal–right up to the scene where Sizemore grabs a schoolgirl and uses her as a “human shield.”

That’s supposed to tell you: “Attention please, Mr. Sizemore’s character is now officially a bad man, so please cheer when Mr. Pacino’s character takes him out.”

One little problem: It wasn’t true. Here’s the headline from the same paper one day later: “Osama Was Not Armed and Did Not Use Wife as Shield.”

They put the little mistake down to “confusion.” But this kind of wartime “confusion” is a cheap out, like Keegan’s stupid cliché, the “fog of war.” While we’re at it, lemme tell you Keegan’s why Keegan uses that catchphrase all the time. His angle is simple: The Brits are always right. That’s hard to argue when you’re doing military history, because most European officers laughed out loud when you said, “British officers.” British troops, yeah—tough bastards, great fighters, but British officers? Waterheads.

So Keegan has a whole lot of idiocy to explain when he takes you through his favorite Empire’s various fiascos—and that’s how “The Fog of War” was born. Churchill wasn’t the dumbest military strategist of the 20th century—oh no, it was just “The Fog of War.” Gallipoli? Not noticing that machinegun bullets are faster than infantry? “Fog o’ War.” Total collapse of Singapore, Hong Kong…sending Repulse and Prince of Wales out with no air cover? F.O.W., F.O.W., F.O.Frickin’ W. Might as well call it “Fog of Sandhurst.”

It’s not fog, it’s smoke, as in “blowing smoke.” That’s what they were doing with the nonsense about Osama going out like Tom Sizemore, guns blazing, poor wifey held in front of him: Put the picture in the suckers’ heads first. Then, by the time you have to give the correction, everybody’s stuck with this Naked Gun scene of Osama shooting it out with the SEALs.

The only time you can blame the “fog” or “confusion” is when it goes the other way—first reports say Osama was shot unarmed, and didn’t use his wife as a shield, and then it comes out he did both. But don’t worry, that’ll never happen.

Next story was the reappearance of Goofy the Bounty Hunter, aka Gary Faulkner.

Faulkner negotiating: “How ’bout TWO million then?”

You might remember Faulkner if you follow news of the stupid. He was a one-hit character straight out of South Park, an unemployed Colorado mental patient who announced he was going to stalk Osama and kill him and claim the $25 million reward:

“Faulkner was found last year in the woods of northern Pakistan armed with a pistol, sword and night-vision goggles. The Greeley, Colorado, man says he believes he had a hand in forcing bin Laden out of the mountains where he supposedly was hiding.”

Faulkner is poster boy, an extreme case, of what’s wrong with the way American war nerds think. When they find him, he’s loaded down with gadgets, armed to the teeth right down to the Samurai sword from some Tarantino movie. But I will bet you anything you want that Gary Faulkner didn’t bother to learn a single one of the local languages before he loaded up for bear and started sneaking around Pakistan. That means the only way he’d ever find Osama is if he hitched a ride and Osama was driving. That’d be a good movie, like an update of that old movie Melvin and Howard where some hick picks up Howard Hughes in the desert and wants a chunk of the old nut’s billions: Osama and Gary, they could call it, and the big climax would be when Gary thanks Osama for the ride and saws his head off with the Samurai sword, which would be kind of awkward actually in a truck cab, not enough space for a real Samurai home-run swing (which is why people use knives, not swords, Faulkner, ya dummy!).

But in the grownup world, you couldn’t find the Fresno Chamber of Commerce by sneaking around with that gear.

Imagine a Pashtun tribesman who gets offered $25 million to go to Bakersfield and find some landmark, say the Barnes Cabin. This cabin is a big thing in Bakersfield, at least it was when the place was Okie. Barnes was an ex-Confederate who invalided out to Kern County—two sure proofs he was an idiot, he fought for the Planters and he moved to Kern County—but we went on a field trip, stood around looking at this Clampitt cabin going, “So?”

Mister Pashtun could try finding the old shed with night-vision goggles, an AK and a Samurai sword. But even if he didn’t get arrested, which he would—even if we just make a rule, “OK, this guy is also invisible to the police”—even then, he would never, ever find that cabin. He might bust into some houses in my old neighborhood where the people had gotten old and crazy because some of them looked a lot like a log cabin after about 40 years of senility and stray cats, but he wouldn’t find the official Barnes Holy Shack in a million years.

He’d wander around Bakersfield for eternity. Maybe that’s what Hell is, actually: billions of Pashtun ghosts wandering around Bakersfield. It’d be my idea of Hell anyway, especially in August. And when us Bakersfielders die, we have to wander around Waziristan like Faulkner. Nasty idea. Good thing Brother Archie never threatened us with that or I’d still be in the pews.

So how could Mister Pashtun actually find the cabin? Duh: He has to ask somebody. He has to schmooze. He has to bury that AK,sell the Samurai sword to the sodomite pawnbroker in Pulp Fiction so Willis can use it on him later in the movie, ditch the night-vision goggles and learn the local language, which in Bakersfield is English more or less—not Spanish, because Mexicans don’t get all weepy about old Anglo shacks. This Pashtun dude would have to shave, and smile like Mohammed Atta at the boarding gate, and come up with a good back story to explain why he’s there. My suggestion: He should tell them he’s a Christian Iraqi who was liberated by our troops. Do that, and the suckers would literally drive Mr. Pashtun to that cabin with tears in their eyes.

So this Faulkner—let’s pretend he was sane and intelligent for a second—would have to do the same stuff in reverse. Learn Pashto, schmooze–Above all,find some excuse for being there in the first place.

There are only two things that’d bring an American to that messed-up backwater; one’s CIA and the other’s opium. (Not that there’s a total split between the two—in fact, I wonder if they found Osama thanks to a drug connection: “Hey Hamid, we’ll let you send 150 keys straight to Manhattan if you give up the big guy!”)

So logically, the way to settle in to Waziristan would be marry a couple of the local girls, put a few hundred thousand into the opium business and sit in the tea houses bullshitting with your in-laws hoping to hear something. If Faulkner had a huge run of idiot’s luck, he might last long enough in the opium-smuggling business to maybe, maybe, hear somebody who couldn’t handle his high babbling about Osama. And if the idiot’s luck held, that one blurt might be the one out of a thousand that’s not bullshit. And that might get him somewhere.

Opium dealers talking product

So there’s another angle on irregular warfare nobody likes (or admits they like anyway): dealing drugs. A huge, huge part of most insurgencies. Pimping, dealing, joining the police or army—somehow or other, you’re going to have to do something totally sleazy. You say you’re ready to kill and die for whatever crap it is you believe in? Killing and dying, those are the easy parts. The clean parts. Not anywhere near the most important parts.

Irregular warfare is a social thing. That’s the last thing most of us want to face because most of you are like me, you don’t like people that much and want a nice clean war to cut down on them a little. I know, I know, me too, but if you want that you need a conventional army, which couldn’t find Osama either. If you want to do a job like that, it’s like my last boss loved to lecture me, “Gary, you can’t be afraid to talk to people.”

This leads me to maybe the most depressing thing I ever thought. You know who’d be good at guerrilla war? Ugh, I can’t say it. No, it has to be said. You know who’d be good at guerrilla war? Cheerleaders. What with the social skills and the pillow talk thing and…it’s too depressing and I’m not going to go on about it, but it had to be said. Jesus, what a world.

Maybe actually it’d be better to hire a high-price hooker, instead of a cheerleader. Yeah, that’s not so depressing somehow. Parachute someone like that into Waziristan and she’d get them talking…no, wait, they like boys—well, the male equivalent.

Or one of these expensive lesbian whores that specialize in women producers in LA. “Portia, America needs you to go to Waziristan! Ellen will wait for you and besides you might learn some stuff she’ll like from them Muzzie girls!” I bet there’s a lot of dykey angry multiple wives in Waziristan and I bet they know a lot more than their idiot husbands think. Slip one of them into the local chief’s harem and see what you get. I The Turkish lobby rented one to screw-and-blackmail Jan Schakowsky, a bleeding-heart Illinois crony of Obama. If it’s good enough for the US congress, it’s probably good enough for illiterate Pashtun wife-stock.

Jeez, I’m going to stop talking about this. War is one thing, drug dealing, OK…but pimping, that’s where I draw the line. I can do that, because I’m just an armchair irregular. But a real guerrilla can’t afford to draw that line or any line. A guerrilla NEEDS to be a pimp—among a lot of other things. A people person, in all the worst ways.

Gary Faulkner was not a people person, unless you count talking the voices in his head. And even if he had been, he was something like 40 years old when he hit Pakistan. He’s going to learn Pashtun at that age, when he’s probably never learned another language in his life, even menu Spanish? Ni modo.

He’s going to do what he ended up doing: Wandering around the hills—the only reason they didn’t shoot him must be they were laughing too hard—seeing if Osama shows up better when he put on his night-vision goggles. It’s the ultimate in gadget-fan stupid: “I got these cool goggles so if Osama is around he’ll light up like ultraviolet rocks!”

Sorry, Faulkner. All credit to you for having the titanium gonads to claim $7 million in reward money for not finding Osama, though. That’s real laser-bright logic: He says he “had a hand in forcing bin Laden out of the mountains.” Yes sir, you forced him to hunker down in a giant mansion in a vacation resort. That’s some forcin’ Faulkner.

Ever hear the joke about the elephant repellent? It ought to be the official joke of the whole counter-terrorism profession, engraved on the CIA’s HQ at Langley. But it fits Faulkner even better than the rest of the phonies. Goes like this: A guest asks asks, “What’s that weird ornament hanging there?”

The host say, “It’s elephant repellent.”

“Elephant repellent? There’s not an elephant in 10,000 miles of here!

“See? It works!”

Once Faulkner did his comic relief bit, the news people got back to the supposedly serious business. Which turned out to be nothing but more gadget-worship. For a day or so, all you heard about was the helicopters they used to get in and out of Abbottabad.

And there were lots of pictures of them, mostly from Pakistanis’ cell cameras. Because, uh…one of these top-secret hi-tech wonders of engineering, uh, kinda…crashed. Whoops!

Wizbang Chopper in Osama’s Yard (with privacy fence)

Now, I’m not making fun of the choppers or pilots or even claiming anybody messed up; choppers are inherently air-worthless under anything but perfect conditions, and the official explanation that it was high temperatures and altitude that sucked the air from under the crashed helicopter makes perfect sense.

Still, it was weird how everybody was looking at the pictures of the crashed helicopter like relics of a higher alien technology. They landed three and lost one; no reason to treat these machines like miracles.

The miracle, if there was any miracle in finding a guy who’s 6’5” (can’t exactly melt into a crowd at that height) after ten years of trying, belongs to whoever told the US where he was. It’s a people thing, in other words. But all we heard was gadgets, the magic choppers.

Jeez, It’s a machine, it’s just a muffled Blackhawk, “stealthed” up to be a little quieter and smaller on a radar screen than the production model, that’s all. And if you have to worship any chopper, why not the standard-issue Blackhawk? That is a truly fine craft, a real success, and nobody worships it. I’d bet any three Blackhawks off the assembly line could have done as well as the fancy souped-up models they sent.

But the hard part wasn’t killing Osama—Gary frickin’ Faulkner could’ve killed him. He looks pretty much dead already on the home video they released. I could’ve walked up and killed him, and I breathe hard going up three steps.

The hard part was finding him. And no chopper, no buffed SEAL, no cool NSA traffic analysis found Osama. A snitch did. Some sleaze of an informer fingered him, that’s how he was got.

It was like somebody finally half-figured out that this was about people, not gadgets, because the next phase of news nonsense was definitely people-focused. But in an embarrassing, totally off-base way, naturally. This was when the Navy SEAL cult that’s been perking along for a while finally percolated down to the great mass of dummies out there.

And what they want is Rambo all over again: muscles. Ripped. For a while it was like the whole world was doing gay porn. Just check out this bit from the Washington Post (I’m noticing that it’s always the Post that runs the most embarrassing, fake stuff. I thought they were respectable, but not from what I see). This is a Post writer quoting the idiot who wrote something called Rogue Warrior on what a Navy SEAL would look like. The guy seems to be just making up something from his own lousy book:

“He’ll be ripped,” says the author of the best-selling autobiography “ Rogue Warrior .” “He’s got a lot of upper-body strength. Long arms. Thin waist. Flat tummy.”

This gets me down even more than squeezing into work clothes. It’s bullshit anyway; Subotai was fat, damn it. Audie Murphy was 5’7.” The average VC had less muscle tissue than a Safeway chicken. They just won’t face the fact that the real hero here was a snitch, a snitch whose name we’ll probably never know. (He better hope we don’t, because if we know, both Talibans know too.)

It’s worth imagining that the snitch was the ugliest, fattest, wheeziest, lyingest, most treacherous Waziri you can imagine. Which he probably was, because snitching isn’t an aerobic exercise. He made it happen, this fat unwashed money-hungry, probably opium-dealing, sleaze. Keep that in mind. It cures you of all this gym-bred muscle-worship.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect the Hell out of the Seals. They’re very good, and unlike those three-letter agencies, they really do stuff, all the time. A lot in the middle east that you only vaguely hear about a long time later. Guy I know in one of those three-letter agencies wrote me years ago, “Frankly, if one of our guys says, ‘We’re doing a lot you don’ t hear about,’ you shouldn’t believe it. But when the Seals say that, you can believe it.”

The news creeps sniffed around for more dirt on Osama’s “compound” for days. As far as I know, they didn’t come up with much. Some of the funniest bits were the “vanity” thing, and the porn.

The vanity charge came from a home video clip released by the CIA showing Osama looking at old TV pictures of himself after 9/11. Whoever shot the video thought he was a great director because it starts out with just the TV screen and then pans back to Osama on the couch. The camera—I think whoever made the video, Mrs. Osama or one of the bodyguards, thought this was a funny joke or something, “Look! First here is Osama on television, now we follow the tv wire and look, ha ha, at the other end of the wire there is Osama himself, live and in person! Ha ha, what a funny joke on the Americans!”

As part of the whole smear-the-dead-guy routine, this video was supposed to show you what a conceited jerk Osama is. That was the official talking point, and it got around so fast that in a few days it was a talking point that you could use for anything else you wanted to talk about. Like here’s a column about, I don’t even know, reality shows or some girly crap like that, and this “humorous” lady writing it drags in Osama watching tv:

“Even Osama, lurking in his bunker, had his eyes glued to the television, huddled in the seasick glow of his own image. It was the one indelible moment of the last week.

Forget Norma Desmond. He looked like Gollum.”

Man, that’s writing, lady. That’s some kick-ass writing you did there, like “lurking in his bunker…” Except, uh, not to quibble, Ma’am, but that “bunker” was a goddamn mansion next door to an official Pakistani military academy, with a lot more than lurkin’ room. (We’re not going to have to rehash the “Did Pakistan know?” question here, are we? Of course they knew, Jesus).

She just goes on with the capital-R riting: “…had his eyes glued…huddled in the seasick glow of his own image.” Whoo, “seasick glow”! I bet you were an English major. Cuz we all know TV looks different when it reflects on terrorists, they’re like vampires that way.

And finally, “Forget Norma Desmond.” OK, fine. Easy, because I don’t know who she is and I’m not even going to google any name brought up by an idiot like this. So instead of our pal Norma, “He looked like Gollum.” Well, at least I know who Gollum is, but here’s a little witty repartee, Ma’am: no he fucking didn’t look like Gollum! He didn’t look like Gollum at all! He hardly even looked like Osama. Gollum looked pretty cool in a starved dangerous way; Osama just looked old and sad, like any Pakistani grandpa. If they say that was Osama, OK, it’s possible, maybe likely, but not on visual ID. On visual ID, that could be about a hundred million sick old Paki or Indian men. Maybe it’s the Nehru hat, I don’t know, or maybe because I used to go over to this half-Pak guy’s house as a kid and he had a grandpa who sat just like that in front of the tv. Same blanket over his shoulders even though it was Bakersfield, same drool, same whole thing, you’d say “Hello Mister Bhullar!” and he’d go, “Eennh” and sort of half wave his good hand and then it was back to Wheel of Fortune.

That’s what Osama really looked like: A sick old man. And he didn’t look vain, he looked depressed as Hell, for obvious reasons: There’s a younger and healthier Osama on TV climbing around Tora Bora in the video (although he didn’t look too spry even back in that video) and here I am now, a trembly old grandpa wearing a blanket in the heat. If this is great movie-making here, it’s the classic “poor old dude remembering his days of greatness” deal.

By this time, a chimp could have programmed the next step in the Osama Dies Yellow story: Some kind of sexual dirt. And right on time, out it came: “Porn Found in Osama Hideout.” And not just porn, either, but “Hardcore Porn.”

Of course Osama had several bodyguards who were young guys, stuck in a compound where all the women belonged to the big fella, so it’s not totally surprising one of them brought some videos to do one-handed curls with. But that’s not the way the story played. It was “…could fuel accusastions of hypocrisy,” which is chickenshit press-talk for “Osama was a perv phony.”

It was hard watching all this when I couldn’t talk back. Doing that blog was getting very comfortable to me, made me feel like I could laugh off all the lies because I got to talk back to them. But with work, no time. So I had to sit there in traffic with a tie choking me and just take it. Suddenly it was angry-world all over again. I’d just sit there waiting for the turn light to go green so I could legitimately honk at the idiots who take three seconds to move, like they need official verification that green means go, and grind my teeth wondering, When did everybody get so stupid?

For some reason I notice it most when I’m driving. I thought when I got to be over 40 I’d notice me slowing down and everybody else getting faster but people half my age drive like grandma. And they think worse than they drive. The same way, but worse: like old ladies. Safe and ultra-cautious and happy to be slow-witted. Safe It’s like if you’re not dumb and super-cautious and scared of being called “inappropriate” now, you feel weird.

What got lost in all the gibberish was what Osama’s death means, what Al Qaeda amounted to—the real questions. I want to talk about them next. If I make it through the week.

I got there all right, but 45 minutes late. Great way to be introduced to your new co-workers. I had to change in the car, a great way to remind yourself of your waistline. I made the horn go off at the worst possible moment, reaching for the shiny new pair of shoes with the pants not as up as I thought. Parking Lot M hasn’t seen that much fun in a long time.

Then they took me around the office. Helpful. Seems my coat collar was up in back. Fixed that.

I couldn’t stop sweating. That’s what happens when a fat man runs through an office complex looking for his new building.

Nobody else was sweating. They looked like they could have leaned back and had a nap, they were so relaxed. But I kept wiping the sweat off my forehead, fixing my pants, and trying to use all the cheerful/team player lines I’d rehearsed on the 87-mile detour Google took me on.

They haven’t said I’m fired yet, so maybe the impression will wear off. Gonna come to work early, lose weight, all the usual lies.

But anyway, the upshot is I can’t blog today. I’ve done my best, 40 days and 40 nights, but you have to give me the weekend off. For the next two days I’m not going to be able to hear much except the yuppies laughing when my belly made the horn go off.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here. The rest of his stuff is here.

Click the cover, buy the book!

The IMF: “Liberte, Egalite…Just Give Us the Frickin’ Money!”

It was a lively weekend. Down in Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo was ruining the script by holing up in his urban bunker in Abidjan, even though the IMF and their French errand boys had officially declared the upcountry Muslim Alassanne Ouattara the new President.

The French tried to do it the new low-profile way, letting Ouattara’s troops force Gbagbo out, but it looks like Ouattara’s troops aren’t good for much except killing civilians. So the French had to do it themselves in the end: a convoy of French light tanks (they love those light tanks, the French—some of them look like tank turrets on a 1992 Jetta chassis)

Jetta Tank Conversion Kit

smashed their way into Gbagbo’s bunker, dragged him out…and then handed him over to Outtara’s throat-slitters.

The idea is to get the European troops on and off stage as fast as possible, make it look like Ouattara’s doing it all by himself. But the French didn’t even handle that part very convincingly. It’s kind of hard to hide a tank attack in the middle of a crowded city where half the world’s press corps is hanging around commenting on the heat and waiting for something to happen. And those tanks were clearly marked as French Army vehicles. Although maybe it’d be more honest if they re-stenciled them with the IMF logo, with a new motto—instead of the usual French “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” mantra they paint on everything, make up something more in line with their new job as debt collectors for the big bankers. Something like, “Pay up or we break your thumbs,” or something more like the original three-word motto: “Austerity, Usury, and We’ll Break Your Thumbs Anyway.”

The weirdest part is the way the French made a point of handing Gbagbo’s poor fat ass over to Ouattara’s thugs as soon as they siphoned him out of his bunker. They’ve got to assume that Outtara’s men will kill Gbagbo. They’re not squeamish; they just killed a thousand-odd civilians up north, as even their UN/IMF backers admitted. So why make such a big point of giving them Gbagbo?

This being Africa, and French West Africa at that, there are all kinds of possibilities. Like: They didn’t give him to Outtara at all; that’s just a lie to tone down the colonialist feel of the whole episode, with white troops smashing down the presidential palace. Or they gave him to Outtara, but with a bodyguard of French Special Forces who have orders not to let anybody get all Samuel Doe-van-Gogh on him.

Samuel Doe, Meet Prince Johnson

Maybe Gbagbo’s still in French hands and they have other plans for him—a job teaching Cicero in one of those fancy high schools the French love so much. That’s where the poor dweeb belonged anyway, some nice quiet teacher job. Word is, it was his dragon of a wife who pushed him into politics and out of his depth.

Or maybe Gbagbo is a liability, a big mouth prone to blabbing about all the sleazy deals he cut with the IMF and Paris while he held power. In that case, making a big show of handing him over to Outtara is your classic Pilate move: “Employees must wash hands after throwing Coastal-Tribe Leader to the pangas.” In a day or so, the French will be shocked, shocked, shocked to learn that Gbagbo’s body head has been hacked open like a drinking coconut.

Ordinarily I’d bet on some duller, slower method, like sending him into exile and letting him drink and eat himself to death. But this Ivory Coast thing has had a weird feel to it all along; sort of rushed and messy, as if they’re making it up on the spot. The other feature you see in it is a surprising lot of violence, with no apologies and no flinching. Somebody out there wants it finished fast. I’ve never seen the western press less interested in a nice juicy massacre than they were in the ones Outtara’s forces have been doing on the way south to the sea. The UN has a reputation for being flinchy and weak, but not this time. They shrugged off the massacres and hugged Outtara twice as tight.

I’d still bet against Gbagbo getting murdered within the next few days, but I wouldn’t bet an arm or an ear on it.

I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to do the Sunday blog on war books. The only problem is, there are so many great ones it’s hard to decide which one to start with.

I’ve noticed one thing about war books, kind of a rule: the more messed-up the war, the better the books. That’s why there are so many great books about Vietnam but no really good ones about the US forces in WW II. In Nam we had no strategy, so we sent small units out into the bush to trigger ambushes. Terrible way to fight a war but a great way to start a million stories. Whereas in WW II we were doing intelligent large-unit combat with a coherent strategic plan, which made for a great victory but no good books I know of. Maybe I’m wrong there; anybody know any great war memoir by an American soldier in WW II? If you do, I’ll bet you in advance it’s by an American who was involved in one of the less successful, more messed-up theaters of the war.

The best WW II memoir I know about The Sergeant in the Snow, by Mario Rigoni Stern.

Mario Rigoni Stern

Just proves my bad-war-equals-good-memoir theory, that the best WW II memoir would be by an Italian, because you can’t get much more messed up than Italy’s adventures in WW II, and this guy went through the worst of them, the encirclement of the Italian forces in Ukraine in the winter of 1942-43. Mussolini had sent a small Italian contingent along on Operation Barbarossa. So did almost every European country east of Germany; when the Wehrmacht has just conquered all of Western Europe while losing only 30,000 kia in the process, they sure look like a winner, and everybody wanted shares in the company. Nobody in Europe discovered that “Fascism is a bad thing” until Stalingrad fell, when they all sorta had the big born-again moment while pissing their pants in terror.
So in the Summer of 1942, the Italians doubled down on their Eastern Front contribution, sending almost a quarter of a million soldiers to man a section of the Wehrmacht’s line along the Don River in Ukraine. Some of those units were good, especially the Alpini.

Alpini on the Eastern Front

The Italian Army had developed very good mountain troops and tactics fighting the Austrians in the Alps in WW I, and the three divisions of Alpini Mussolini sent east could have made a real contribution if they’d been assigned to the Caucasus, where they were supposed to go. But the Germans were always too arrogant to use their allies effectively, and they did it again this time, sending these mountain troops to hold the line in flat farmland along the Don where all their training was wasted, and their small, portable weaponry was guaranteed to be outgunned by massed Soviet armor.

Mario Rigoni Stern, the man who wrote The Sergeant in the Snow, was a sergeant in the Tridentina Division of the Alpini, the best of all. His book describes the quiet time, almost happy, when he and his division held the line by the river, and then the collapse of the whole line in mid-winter. Only a few of the Italians on the Eastern Front made it out of “the Bag” the Soviets caught most of the Wehrmacht’s allied armies in that winter. Rigoni Stern was one of the few to escape, and to his dying day (he lived until 2008), the thing that made him proudest is that he led a group of 70 Italian soldiers out of that bag without losing a single one.

You might notice that his name isn’t classic Italian: “Rigoni Stern.” He was a mountain kid, from the quasi-German mountains in Northern Italy, where the people are tough and don’t have the tradition of bowing and scraping to the aristocracy the way they did further south. You have to remember that until 1945, most of Central and Eastern Europe either was German or was pretending to be German or had an ambition to become German some day. Rigoni Stern was from one of those parts, and it can’t have been much of a stretch for him to find himself in the battle-line with the Wehrmacht. But like I said, the Third-Reich vintage Germans were totally arrogant and stupid about their allies; they could have had all Ukraine on their side, the way Stalin tried to wipe the Ukrainian peasantry out, but they treated the locals like garbage…which is why after 1945, instead of everyone from Zagreb to Alsace claiming to be German, you had people from Dusseldorf trying to convince everybody they were “Swiss.”

The Sergeant in the Snow is one tiny story in that huge long disaster, but it doesn’t waste any time on the big picture. It’s told from the view of Rigoni Stern himself, and like most of my favorite war books it’s mostly about food. Seriously, this is one thing I’ve noticed: one thing you can count on in a good war book is some great descriptions of food. I guess because food is so iffy, and so precious, when you’re on the front. Food and warmth, those are the big things in this book, which is natural when the author’s describing an army retreating through a Russian winter.

The first part of the book is almost happy: Stern and his fellow Alpini are dug in along the Don, making the best of it, trying to find better food, telling stories, keeping watch, doing all the things guys in a small unit do to keep busy on a static front. Nobody is that eager for combat, not the Italians, or the Rumanians and Hungarians beside them, or even the Russians emplaced across the river. Everybody’s hoping things can stay static.

They don’t, of course. But once you’ve read this part, you’ll never forget the weird dreamy happiness of just having a good meal in the bunker, laughing at the weird way guys from different parts of Italy say things, passing the time. Maybe war makes people appreciate the little stuff more; I don’t know. All I know is that in English class you have to read novels about people like that Gatsby who have everything, they’re young, rich, cool, etc.—and they’re totally miserable. In most war novels the guys are filthy and scared and can’t even shave, but they can talk for a page about how wonderful a piece of cheese from home tastes and make you feel it too. I’ve noticed prison stories are the same, nobody really wants to talk tough, they want to talk about the time somebody brought a package from home.

Then the book shifts gears fast. The line collapses for a hundred miles on either side and the Alpini have to get out. On foot, mostly. Stern is great describing walking through the snow. In fact the book starts with a line like, “My head is still full of the sound of snow crunching under my boots.” The Alpini are tough guys, and they stay out of “The Bag” long enough to get back inside the Wehrmacht’s new defensive line. But the real fun reading this is the little stuff Stern goes through along the way. You realize what a multi-ethnic quilt of an army the Wehrmacht was on the Eastern Front. You don’t see many Germans in this book. You meet everybody else east of the Rhine: Hungarians, Croats, Rumanians, Czechs, all the little pilot fish that were happy to swim along with the German shark until it got netted.

The fighting in the book is like the rest of it, almost drugged out, slowed down in the cold. Nobody really wants to go outside and fight. They want to go inside somewhere and stop marching, have something to eat, to keep the furnace going, keep the core temperature up. Once Stern ducks into a hut and finds a coed Soviet army squad slurping up the borsch. They can see he’s one of the enemy, but this is a serious war book, meaning it’s about comfort and food. So they shove him a bowl and keep slurping.

Stern made it out and kept his men with him. About 140,000 of the quarter-million men the Italians sent east weren’t so lucky.

But then “luck” was kinda relative if you were in Eastern Europe in 1943. There wasn’t a lot of luck to go around. Stern made it out of the Soviet trap all right, but then the Italians decided to hang Mussolini upside-down on a meathook and the Germans got peeved. The Wehrmacht that had “rescued” Stern sent him to an internment camp. Well, even so, that probably was good luck by the local standards.

In some ways The Sergeant in the Snow reads like a fantasy story. That’s how gone that world is. It doesn’t seem like there ever could have been this cold European world where little countries actually did things, sent their wacky soldiers to the big army like the more outlandish tribes in the Persian Empire. When you’ve finished this book, you don’t really think about battle maps or military history; you remember that crunch of the snow and the long, long convoys in retreat, and all the weird little tribes jabbering at each other in a dozen languages in the snow, and how great food is.

Ouattara: Whattarya, A Muslim Militant…

Things are popping on the comment front.

First I got an email from Mark Watson, letting me know that this magazine ChangeObserver, which seems to be for people who like cool designs, has an article on what a great design the RPG-7 is. They mention its “simplicity, functionalism, durability and ease of use and maintenance” and even give yers truly a little mention for a column I did in praise of the RPG.

The only trouble with letting peace-oriented types in on the beauty of weaponry—and don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends, if I had any friends, would probably be peace-loving people—but the thing is, they can’t help contaminating a holy weapon like the RPG-7 with a lot of dirty stuff, like this commenter in ChangeObserver who wants to turn the RPG-7 into a sex toy. He comes up with a new weapon—I guess you couldn’t call it a “weapon,” so call it a device, the RKG-11…well, I’ll let him describe it:

“RKG-11: Accelerated Kiss Giver, 2011. Would shower 200-1000 people with in less than 45 seconds with 5x6cm kisses from 2-100 meters. Wow!”

I try to be broadminded, but like my dad used to say when he’d come through the living room while the TV was on, “Some people just have their minds in the gutter.”

Let’s move on to something more elevating. A lot of the comments on yesterday’s blog (“One Homme, One Panga”) served up theories on why the French are backing the Northern/Muslim leader Ouattara, even though his guys have admitted committing massacres on their way to Abidjan. One commenter reminded me of something I should’ve remembered: way back in November 2010, the Ivory Coast Air Force, fighting for Laurent Gbagbo at the time, bombed a French “peacekeeping” force in a Ouattara stronghold. Nine French soldiers were killed along with an American missionary. (One less missionary is sort of the opposite of “collateral damage”; I guess you could call it “collateral Yay!”)

In retaliation the French blasted what was left of Gbagbo’s air force, the one effective force he had against Ouattara. When I read that I started getting a little wary of this story as pure righteous anger over dead soldiers. For one thing, old Europe powers like Britain and France only get sentimental about dead soldiers when it serves the state’s purpose. The rest of the time, it’s more like Napoleon’s attitude looking over his KIA: “Ah, what the Hell, one night in the brothels of Paris will replace them.”

I got even warier when I looked over the story carefully. First obvious question: What were these French troops doing guarding Ouattara’s forces? You have to remember, the only real, combat-effective troops in Ivory Coast are the French and the UN. So it’s more likely these French troops were protecting Outtara’s men than keeping them peaceful. If they weren’t protecting them from attack, they were preventing Outtara’s machete-men from chopping up civilians, which frankly is all his troops are good for. They don’t actually fight; they leave that to the French or UN. That’s pretty standard in West Africa: “troops” aren’t for battle, they’re for killing and scaring civilians.

So you end up where you started: Why are the French siding with Outtara in the first place? And I got another comment that really queased me out about that. Here it is, complete:

“Propaganda. You’re writing propaganda without intending to. Why? Because every last English language journalist writes laughable lies about CIV.

Good guys vs bad guys—that’s the main problem with most stories. But if CIV has a bad guy it’s the French. And if Gbagbo isn’t a good guy, he’s the closest thing in West Africa.

One massacre? Ha, more like #185, only it’s hard for even the AFP propajournalists to ignore hundreds dead. The rebels have a non-stop history of rape, torture, and execution, month by month. Google for it in French, because you won’t find one word in the English-speaking world about it. Yeah right, the noble FN slip up by committing their first ever completely out of character machete massacre—and go for a 1000+ high score. The rebels are carrying AKs, RPGs, and machetes because…uh machetes are a backup tool for clearing unarmed weeds?

Are the French waging online propaganda war? There are pictures and videos of the real war, almost all in French. Weirdly these images seem to keep going down, 404s, redirects, whole websites vanished.

One video can refute a lot of bullshit. The “rapid rebel advance” is lead by UN APCs.

Quick responses to the media bullshit you’ve read:

1. The vote. The vote was comically rigged. The UN’s “official results” came from Ouattara’s hotel. Hunting challenge for you: find the actual detailed election numbers.

2. Gbagbo called for a recount. UN disallows. wonder why? The media lies by omission: no mention of a recount or fraud.

3. Remember this news? “United Nations accused Belarus of defying an arms embargo against Ivory Coast by delivering three attack helicopters” Interesting psywar BS. Because it was actually the UN importing Hinds: “Ukraine has sent to Ivory Coast Mi-24 helicopters.”

O: Employed by the IMF to implement austerity, privatized government assets for sale to French corporations.
G: Nationalized healthcare, education, French banks, and part of the cocoa industry. Ended all IMF programs and refused to pay the foreign debt.”

Daaaaaaaamn! This is the kind of comment that sends me reaching for the Maalox, because it’s obviously from somebody who knows the situation in his bones and is pissed-off and maybe crazy but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. In fact, it’s such a creepy, depressing analysis of the whole Ivory Coast deal that I suspect he’s right.

And that makes me all defensive. What’s he mean, I’m writing “propaganda”? I thought I was the only guy in the world taking Gbagbo’s side. I thought I said the French were the bad guys here, along with the UN. I thought I said the UN was doing Outtara’s fighting for him. Why these lefties always gotta be so rude ta people? No manners, that’s why everybody hates’em.

Like they say: Tough crowd.

Some of what he says I can shrug off as leftie paranoid stoner stuff.  Like those disappearing online vids—they get pulled for a lot of reasons, sometimes it’s just schoolmarmy squeamishness, not a big conspiracy. And hey, if you Ivorians wanted to get your message out, whyncha getchaselves colonized by somebody had the sense to speak English like normal people?

But other things he says have the depressing, miserable, disgusting smell of truth about them. I’ve learned to sniff it from far off, like a dead skunk on an offramp. You can develop a nose for truth easy enough: just think about the difference between mystery novels and true-crime books, or detective shows vs. real crime shows like my favorite, The First 48 Hours. The made-up stories are all about brilliant handsome rich suave people who almost get away with it; the real stories are about stupid, mean pigs who confess the minute they get brought into the interrogation room. Just scum killing scum, for some dumb reason or no reason at all. That’s the smell of truth.

…Or IMF Stooge?

So when this commenter says that Ouattara’s the man the French picked because he’s willing to sell out his own country to the big bankers, I get that depressed feeling that I’m hearing something true. So I looked it up and it checks out completely. Ouattara’s own official bio lists him as “former deputy managing director, IMF.” Muslim militant my ass. Muslim front man for the bankers, more like.

Gbagbo as “good guy”? That’s not so clear to me. There isn’t usually a good guy in world news stories…not even when they’re datelined stateside. Some people are arguing that Gbagbo’s not a good guy but not as obvious an IMF stooge as Ouattara.

From what I can see, it does seem to be true that Gbagbo threatened to nationalize French banks a couple of months ago, which would account for the way the French hate him.

I’ll tell you what’s happening here, guys. We’re coming up against that swamp none of us want to go into, the one marked “Economics.” Hell, if we wanted to live in that stinking place we’d never have become war nerds. Any decent war nerd gets bored and antsy when he hits the chapter about “economic causes” of whatever war he’s researching. But I s’pose you have to face it sooner or later, there’s usually some damn econ reason behind even the coolest wars, and has been ever since those mangy Greeks decided to break the Trojans’ monopoly on the Black Sea trade.

Captured Mercenaries in Libya: Sure, the money’s great, but…

One of the more interesting questions out of Libya is the tangled problem of who’s who, and who’s on who’s side. I’m starting to get some idea of who’s against Qaddafi—basically the young men, the East, and the tribes loyal to the king he booted out to take power.

But who’s fighting for him? I found one interesting answer in a crazy Ghanian blog called “The Ticklish”

According to these ticklers, “Jinns (genies to all you cartoon fans) and dead saints” are fighting for Qaddafi.” I can’t help thinking of that hammy genie in the Aladdin movies yukking it up with Muamar every time he pours his big blue face out of the lamp, all Robin-Williams patter: “Hiya, Mu-man, who’d ya want me to kill today, or shall I just give you some fashion advice—the field marshal’s cap? Burn it, baby.”

But then The Ticklish is not what we in the responsible journalism business call a respected news source. I think all’a us responsible mainstream journalist types can agree that if it was just a matter of genies and dead saints on Qaddafi’s side, even these “Where’s-the-trigger?” rebels would have a good chance of forcing his retirement.

Qaddafi actually has some more serious supporters. Or anyway his money does. Qaddafi has “touched a lot of lives,” as they say, in his 42 years of messing with people. Mostly he’s touched them in what we’d call inappropriate ways, and a lot of them he’s ended, like the poor civvies on the Lockerbie flight. But he’s also tossed a huge amount of cash to groups all over the world. Say you were a Basque separatist and you wanted a kilo of Semtex: Go see Muamar. Suppose you were Robert Mugabe, sulking because the West was always scolding you and you needed a shipment of free gasoline: Muamar again. Suppose you were a Chadian officer with a business plan that involved pissing off Sudan and taking power in N’Djamena…yup, your best bet was making a powe-point presentation to Big Q in Tripoli.

Qaddafi has always had two qualities that count for a lot in politics and war: He has no pride at all, zilch; and he’s willing to spend any amount of money it takes. He’d make a good Western celebrity with a personality like that; too bad he wasn’t born here or he’d probably have his own show.

Qaddafi’s Everybody-Welcome Recruiting Style: He’s Even Going for Serbs! Yeah, you better keep that burqa on, Branko!

Not having pride is a huge advantage in the nasty, treacherous politico-military world. Take the Chadian dictator, Idriss Deby, who’s probably Qaddafi’s biggest ally right now. He and Muamar got to know each other back in the 1980s, when Deby took over Habre’s Chadian forces resisting Qaddafi’s push into Chad, pioneered the technique of high-speed massed raids in technicals on Libyan bases—he was kind of like a Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Sahel there for a while—and ran Qaddafi’s Libyans out of Chad.

But when his boss Habre decided Deby was getting a little too popular and conquering-hero like for his boubou, Habre put out a contract on his favorite field commander (perfectly standard practice for every dictator ever born, and it always amazes me that these generals never seem to expect it when the boss turns on them). So Deby fled. Guess where. Yup: Libya.

And he was welcomed there. Qaddafi throws away the lives of his soldiers without a flinch, without even a memory. That’s not surprising. What is surprising, to me at least, is that he’s just as casual about his own rep. So he was shown up by Chad—by CHAD! That didn’t bother him, just like groveling to the US and the Brits didn’t bother him. He has no shame, and that’s why he’s lasted so long.

Now Deby is in power in Chad, and he’s sending fighters to Libya to shoot protestors for Muamar. You can be sure Deby gets a cut for every warm body he sends, just like the little princes of Hesse-Kessel got a few pieces of silver for every Hessian they sent during the Revolution.

Mugabe is helping out too, with about 500 Zimbabwean soldiers and bodyguards. The bodyguards are there to shore up Qaddafi’s famous all-girl Praetorian Guard. I guess Qaddafi realized that the Fox Force Five bodyguards were one of those Tarantino ideas that’s too cool to resist in peacetime but when the plaster starts falling you kind of want some big bodies between you and the people trying to kill you.

But the basic appeal of fighting for Qaddafi is much simpler than all these old networks. After all, Qaddafi’s friends are sort of a losers’ club, people who don’t like each other that much but know in their bones that they’d better stick together because nobody else likes them at all. It’s not what you’d call a warm, happy group. What holds it together is plain old money. Qaddafi has it, and unlike a lot of dictators he’s willing to spend it. In fact, I don’t get the feeling he’s in it for the money, exactly. He’s more of a drama queen, an attention whore. He’ll spend anything to produce his own movies, starring himself, and that’s what he’s doing right now. Because if he loses this one, he’ll be lucky to survive in obscurity somewhere. Me, I’d love that, be an ex-dictator with a few female bodyguards bringing me drinks in hollowed-out pineapples on my private island, dictating my memoirs about why it was everybody’s fault but mine—but that’s not Muamar’s idea of a good time. He likes the spotlight.

And he’s willing to pay his extras. You know how much a Qaddafi fighter makes these days? Supposedly it’s from $300-$1000 per day. Per DAY! That’s up in Blackwater (excuse me, XE, or “Lovely Harmless Angels” or whatever those scum are calling themselves now) territory.

That’s big money in California. Think what it’s worth in a place like Zimbabwe. Hard currency. You could buy your home village with that. And the people you have to shoot are total strangers, don’t speak the same language, don’t mean a thing to you…and best of all: can’t fight. Pretty sweet deal, until you get captured.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Rebels doing what they do best: fleeing.

Libya is such a pitiful mess that it should keep the scriptwriters going for years.

For the dummies, you’ve got a good and evil story, with Qaddafi as the bad guy. Somewhere in Hollywood, producers are hitting scriptwriters on the heads to help them come up with an inspiring title for the upcoming Libya flick. I’m betting they’ll go for something automotive, thanks to all those pictures of Libyan rebels commuting to battle in their SUVs.

So the scriptwriter’s sweating it out: “Uuuuuh…The Peugeot Crusade? No, nobody wants French…oh, that Volkswagen thing, the Touareg? No, won’t do it, there’s apparently these actual people called that…What’s a sympathetic SUV? Something affordable that says, ‘I’m the chassis of an unfolding democracy?’…Better ask the receptionist, she might drive some piece of crap like that…” So he sends his P.A. to the receptionist who breaks the bad news that Hyundai uses southwestern place names like Tucson and the scriptwriter has to pop another handful of ritalins to get over the depression. Then his boss tells him the studio has a tie-in deal with Ford Motor Co. and the lightbulb goes on: “Libya: The Flex Revolution!” It’s a model Ford’s pushing, it drives on sand, sort of, kinda, and the product-placement’s settled. Besides, “Flex”…it’s got a nice ipod casual vibe to it, revolution of the kool kids against the stiff old military models.

Then the writer’s PA has to go and kill the light: “Yeah, but Jerry, come on…a Ford Flex? I don’t think anybody in Libya drives one.”

And that’s why the P.A. got fired and wasn’t invited to the premiere of what they ended up calling “Libya: Flex against the Machine!” Soundtrack tie-in, first-person shooter game, “Dune Combat Libya!” the works.

Meanwhile there’s a little problem: our cute little rebel friends can’t fight worth a damn. They’re fleeing again. Again! US and NATO air stacked over the beaches like commuter flights from LAX to SFO at the start of a three-day weekend, satellite data bounced down to every part-time Che Guevara picnicking on a sand dune between “battles”—and they still can’t fight. It seems that some Qaddafi loyalists, the dirty fascists, are actually firing back. Well, it’s clear these guys didn’t get the memo at all. The script clearly calls for our baby rebs to roar across the beach from Benghazi to Tripoli and be welcomed by the best-looking available local girls. NATO probably has C-130s full of rose petals on standby at airports across Europe.

You can’t help imagining that Tom Cruise producer character from Tropic Thunder stomping out onto the sand dunes in Libya and yell, “Cut!” like an angry director. “Who’s firing those weapons? Who told you to fire? ‘Qaddafi’? Well let me tell you Mister Rambo, Qaddafi isn’t paying for this production! Somebody find this Qaddafi and punch him in the face for me!”

You can see mission creep turning into mission zoom, mission flood, day by day. First the idea was, we’d take out a few of Qaddafi’s heavy armor because that’s what was holding the rebels back. Fine—smoking tanks all over the desert. Oh, but he also has planes, and that’s no fair because the rebels don’t have planes (or they do but they keep shooting down their own planes) and that’s sooooo unfair. So boom, the whole country’s a no-fly zone and we crisp any fighter that tries to take off.

Now it’s clear that these SUV rebels won’t fight if there’s any opposition at all. And I mean AT ALL. Utterly worthless troops. Don’t tell me they’re outgunned. They’re overgunned, if anything, with heavy Soviet machineguns, ZSU-23s, RPGs, Grads, and all-you-can-stall of North Africa’s most important weapon, the Toyota pickup. The Cong kicked ass against real troops with a lot less. God, can you imagine what one VC battalion would do in Libya right now? I say we give’em a shot, call for volunteers at the closest Ho Chi Minh City unemployment center, and tag along. What a movie that’d make!

Even the mainstream reporters who are suckers for any military version of The Mighty Ducks—you know, brave hard-luck rebels overcoming professional military—even they started reporting, “Uh, it’s kind of odd, but we noticed the rebels keep taking time out from battle to…uh…have lunch. Are they supposed to do that?” No they’re not, airbrush boy, but never mind, you’ll still do your bullshit shots of Qaddafi’s statues coming down and hammer this weird funny mess of a story into your little good-guys-win-again! Story line.

Now the support has gone from just intercepting Qaddafi’s heavy weapons to softening up his ground defenses for the rebels. We’re using “Spooky,” those AC-130 gunships that hose down whole neighborhoods to kill anyone inside the grid. We’re sending A-10s against Qaddafi fortifications, to blast a nice clean interstate for these delicate rebels to drive through in their SUVs.

But even that’s not enough. The headline today is “Obama Considering Covert Aid.” What? When we’re already embarrassing ourselves with totally overt aid to a bunch of pussies, what the fuck is this about “covert” aid?

I love getting my picture taken lookin’ all tough’n'deserty. Combat, not so much.

And then I got it. “Covert” means we just plain shove the rebels out of the way—which I don’t think they’d mind very much, you know, like yuppies when they sort of pretend to fix something just so you’ll get frustrated enough to shove them out of the way and say, “here, I’ll do it”—they always make some little “Yeah heh heh I’m no good with tools” remark to remind you that they’re a whole class above you.

It’s a damn movie, a big show, so naturally it makes sense that after trying out the local talent, one of those coked-up Hollywood green ideas “Let’s have ACTUAL LOCAL PEOPLE” play the “rebels,” you know? The hard-ass producer steps in and says, “Fuck these idiots, I’m hiring a Marine division.” And that’s how I imagine it’ll play out, with real troops hitting the beach, though they might be disguised with little desert scarfs and expensive French winter wear (it’s probably a freezing 60 degrees on those dunes) and shades and two days’ beard to make them look like Libyans.

I can see it now, the Marines looking embarrassed coming off those landing craft in civvies, assistant director hissing “Psst! Look more Libyan!” Marine asks, “How we do that, man?” Director: “Look like a scared idiot, damn it!”

But one thing, one big issue, the Obama administration wasn’t going to bend on: no Euro SUVs. Those troops are going to hit the beach on Ford Flexes, damn it, or we’ll let those bad Qaddafi men who actually shoot guns at people wipe you losers out.

This is one of those moments that bum you out as a war nerd, even if you can see how it’ll work for the big-money guys. Of course they’re in favor of “rebels” who can’t fight. They like weakness, because weak rebels will owe them everything once they’re in power. And any time that sorta rebel gives you trouble, you just remind him he can’t fight and he caves again. Lowers the price of crude and promises not to tell anybody so you can keep the retail price ballooned up there. Just threaten him with another platoon of real troops hitting the beach and he’s your doggie in a second.

That’s what’s in it for them. But what’s in it for us? No decent combat, “our” side is worthless cowards, and we lose the whole Qaddafi family, who for my money were a lot more fun than all the lame reality shows ever made. The world loses on this, I’m telling you.

While we wait for Egypt to finish cooking, there’s some great footage to watch. It may not be warfare as practiced by Lee and Grant, but it’s weirdly close to what urban combat must have been like before firearms. If you watch this clip from Al Jazeera—and let me say now, thank God, Allah or Odin, whoever, for Al Jazeera. Best network around, actual reporters on the ground in places other networks are too cheap or chicken to go.

What you’ll see in this clip is the quick transition from “peaceful demonstration” to urban warfare in Tahrir Square, the big zocalo in Cairo. Of course these transitions from “peaceful” to violence aren’t all that clear down at street level. Even before rocks start flying, you’ve got a huge crowd of young males screaming as loud as they can, pushing each other to do something. And in a place like Egypt, just standing out in the street facing the cops is doing something in a big way. You can die that way, like one demonstrator did in another video from Egypt. It’s a classic video. What it shows you is the answer to the question, “Who’d be the first to die of all the guys you know?” And the answer, unfortunately, is, “The bravest one, the one who really believes in what he’s doing.” That’s what you see here: this guy doesn’t notice that all his friends have slunk off, and he keeps flinging rocks at the cops. Then there’s one shot. He falls down with a bullet in his head. It’s funny, you know: you could make an argument against war from that, you could say that the first thing war does is weed all the bravest guys out of the gene pool. It would explain a lot, actually, like what happened to the Italians. Maybe the Romans just used up the brave ones.

You can’t help thinking of Ancient Rome when you watch this riot video from Cairo. What you see is humans re-learning the lessons of ancient warfare. And they do it in a matter of minutes! I swear, this video had me more upbeat about the species than I’ve been for a long time. It’s not that we’ve lost our edge, we’re just rusty.

We still know how to do it. First rule: mass wins. You get your side together and stay together. Second: deploy skirmishers. Those are the hotheads throwing rocks about 30 feet ahead of the main mob. They’re to provoke the enemy, absorb the enemy’s first counterstrike. It’s a suicide job, so it’s a favorite in the male age 12-20 demographic.

A tight mob standing in the street is just dead bodies walking, of course, if you’re using 21st-century weapons. But the Egyptian Army has bowed out of this one. In fact, you’ll see the head of the Army making a very, veeeeeeeeery careful speech midway in this clip. He actually says to the demonstrators, “We [the Army] are with you, of you, by you and under you” or whatever, then adds, “We will be there no matter what changes occur….” Man, if I was Mubarak I would not be Mubarak (happy) hearing that line from my enforcers. But if I was a rioter it’d cheer me up no end, because it would mean I wouldn’t have to worry about automatic rifles, APC cannon, anything at army level.

Instead, the best Mubarak’s remaining goons can do is organize a cavalry charge. I kid you not. About ten seconds into the video you’ll see a real live cavalry charge by a dozen riders, some on horses, some on camels. This is Mubarak’s response: amateurs on livestock. Sad.

I can guess exactly how it happened, though. Mubarak’s having a scotch in his office, scowling at the local news show, when an Army liaison officer hunches in, all greasy smiles and apologies. Mubarak starts screaming:  “Where’s my army? Where’s the security police? What do I pay you guys for?” And this sweaty officer, who got this job because the other colonels hate him or because he drew the short straw, breaks the bad news as politely as he can (after all, you never know; Mubarak might survive after all, best to be polite): “Your excellency, we, ah…feel that the honor of the armed services should not be…ah…stained, yes, stained with the blood of our fellow citizens.” That must’ve made Mubarak’s jaw sag for a second. As if the Egyptian security service from Ramses II’s palace guards to the GDSSI ever had a problem spilling the blood of their fellow fucking citizens! Mubarak’s not dumb, though, he knows what it means: “You’re on your own here, your former excellency.” Mubarak gulps another mouthful of Glenlivet and says, “Fine then, I don’ need you fucks anyway…get outta my office.” And the little uniformed rat scuttles out of the big air-conditioned office. This is when guys like Mubarak start thanking God for that account in the Cayman Islands and get on the private cell to tell the pilots to get that Learjet warmed up.

But he’s not giving up just yet. He can still call on the whole network of locals who owe their fat bank accounts to his dynasty. He gets the phones working and a few minutes later gets a call: “Uh-huh…Yeah…Camels??? That’s the best you can do, Camels? Are you fucking kidding me, you idiot?…What do you mean, ‘there are some horses too’? Horses and camels? I want F-16s with napalm and you give me camels, you dog!”

But even camels and horses are intimidating at first, if you’re on foot at street level.  So when the Mubarak Loyalist Petting-Zoo Squadron comes clopping down the cobblestones, the mob/infantry falls back and this tiny cavalry force charges down the pavement. But these guys are untrained in cavalry charges. They do what every incompetent cavalry force in history does: they lose cohesion and get overwhelmed by infantry. The camels and horses charge at different speeds, so they get separated. And they have no commander, no clear objective. They’re armed only with whips, a very short-range non-lethal weapon. And these horses are not battle-conditioned, so when they see a wall of humans ahead of them, screaming and throwing shit at them, they stop. That’s what happens when you use a nag that’s been dragging tourists to the smoggy sights of Cairo for years gets call on to do a charger’s job.

With the horses stopped dead, the cavalry is doomed. And what happens next is beautiful to watch. It restored my faith in humanity: even after centuries, these brave Cairo guys know exactly what to do against cavalry. We still got it! They let the riders pass through, then, when one of the horses rears and pivots around, disorienting his rider, the rioters converge on the horse from behind, from the sides. They pull the rider down and start kicking him to death. Play this video a few times and you’ll see that one man in the crowd, a big guy it looks like, is a natural warrior. He just seems to know instinctively how to deal with a mounted enemy: he bounces like a guard on defense, waiting for the horse to make its move, then grabs for the bridle from the side. That kills all movement and gives his friends the guts to attack, pulling the rider down to the pavement. That’s a great, also kind of a horrible moment, when the rider gets pulled down. Reminded me of that great scene in Dawn of the Dead when those arrogant bikers try to ride through the mob of zombies and get their intestines eaten tartare style. You can’t overestimate the power of cavalry, especially if it’s not ruthless enough to ride through, not at, not towards, the crowd.  It’s a scene that’s happened so many times over the centuries: the peasants take their revenge on the cavaliers, the horse riders. Cavalry that’s stopped is dead cavalry. That’s what happened to the Bradleys in the slums of Baghdad, and it happens much, much faster when all you’re riding is a little horse. (Notice, by the way, how the camel, much higher and harder to reach, survives much better than these little cart horses.)

It’s amazing how the idea of the cavalry charge keeps coming back as the preferred tactic for breaking up crowds when the state just doesn’t have the balls to machine-gun them. I saw the same thing during the demonstrations after that rigged election in Iran, only the Iranian state has more real bedrock support than Mubarak, among the silent fascist Iranian majority from the slums and villages. So instead of a dozen sad sacks on farm animals, the Iranian riot police sent amateur thugs on motorbikes, with clubs. It didn’t go much better, though: the bikers lost momentum and were overwhelmed, pulled off their bikes from behind. And then they cringed on the ground while the infantry tried a little soccer practice on their heads. Unfortunately, the problem with the Iranian protestors is that they’re mostly the educated nice types, so they dragged away the few sensible people who were trying to do the logical thing: kicking the bike guys to death. No way to win a war, you poor Tehran yuppies. We’re just primates here, and the best thing you could do is bash your enemies’ head in while you got the chance. Ah well, too late now.

From what I saw of the Cairo cavalry charge, it didn’t look like the Cairo protestors were as squeamish as those overcivilized Tehranites. They were giving them a good fatal-looking beating when the cameras, clearly manned by wimps, veered away at about the 28-second point. I guess the violence-level was approaching PG level, or maybe a mob beating just doesn’t film well, too many people in the way.

As the camera moves away it finds something else for carnivores to enjoy: a few stragglers on foot being mobbed. This is another ancient, actually timeless, strategy: find a small group of the enemy separated from the main force and annihilate them. Around the 50-second point you see these few Mubarak supporters getting a serious beating from the crowd outside a mosque, while the muzzein’s mic keeps insisting, “Alllahu Akbar!” I mean, why not? It’s one point everybody on both sides can agree on, probably, unless some Copt was dumb enough to get involved in the goyim’s arguments. Allah may be akbar, but that won’t help you when it’s 30 to one. Reminds me of an old Oi song I used to love—used top be a big Oi fan—about the joy of being a soccer hooligan:

We have ourselves a smashing time

We really have some fun

Especially when the odds are ours

25 to one, to one!

Precious mem’ries, how they linger. I kind of outgrew the whole Oideology behind all that, but at least those lyrics teach you a good lesson about mob war: never, never get separated from the main group. There are no Chuck Norrises in a mob fight, there’s just the weight of numbers and who’s got their crazy on.

A little past the 1:00 mark, the scene shifts to another ancient warfare scene: light skirmishing with missile weapons—rocks, in this case. Two groups are standing about 40 feet apart throwing rocks at each other. The range suggests they don’t have much respect for the general level of throwing in Cairo. No MLB arms in this crowd. Both main bodies are hanging back, letting the skirmishers show off, waiting to see which side will break. That’s always been one function of light infantry, like the Greek slingers, the peltasts, the original rock-throwers, or the Roman velites: testing the enemy’s nerve and cohesion, seeing if they break. A mob will break either by charging or by running, and either way is a bad idea. If the velites provoked a German or Celtic mob/army to attack, the Romans were delighted, because it’s much easier to destroy. If they ran, you unleash the cavalry.

Unfortunately we don’t get to see the end of this skirmish. But you can pretty well guess who’s going to win. If you watch carefully you’ll see that the mob on the right side of the screen, I’m guessing the pro-Mubarakers, are cringing, walking backwards, beginning to break.

Then at about 1:20 we break for a commercial, meaning a spokes-officer for the Army makes a little speech about let’s all be nice, you’ve made your point, we all love our dear Egypt. It’s so lame I doubt it was even designed to calm down the rioters. What it does seem designed to do is make it clear to every dog in the streets of Cairo that the Army isn’t taking sides on this one. The officer says, “We [the Army] will be there, whatever the changes.” The message is, “Hey, if you guys can take down Mubarak, then we’re going to be just delighted to work with you…as long as the paychecks come on time.”

The army commercial lasts to about the 2:10 point, when we get back to the real stuff. I swear to God, every damn second of this footage is great. First you see a charge by one side, showing the other side has broken. Then another standoff, with a skirmisher in a white shirt throwing rocks 25 feet ahead of his mob, daring the other side to hit him. While he’s at it, look at the awning to the left and you’ll see something you find in every riot shot ever taken: a bunch of guys just standing around. These guys at least have the sense to stand in a doorway, protected from rocks, but I’ve seen many riot or urban-warfare shots where some goon is just standing still with a grocery bag in his hand, looking the wrong way while the wrath of Khan is breaking loose two doors down. I don’t know why. Deaf? More likely dumb.

Then around 2:20, we are privileged to see a great event: the revival of the testudo. I mean that: it’s an honor to see brave, smart humans re-learning all this so quickly. The Testudo (tortoise), like most of you war buffs know already, was a Roman formation for advancing under missile fire, using each soldier’s shield to form a shape sort of like a turtle’s shell. Well, here come a bunch of rioters in Cairo, early 21st century, and to respond to the sort of situation the legions would have faced advancing on a fortress or massed archers, they come up with something pretty damn close to the testudo: big squares of sheet metal. The front rank carries these upright and the smarter rioters wedge in close behind them. Survival in a battle like this…well, “survival” might mean staying home if you had sense and watching it on tv…but I mean, if you’re going to join the dance, then survival means noticing second by second what will keep you alive. And my point is that at this second, what would work would be staying as close as possible to that front rank, because the rocks are going to fall on the people a few yards back, unprotected by the sheet-metal.

The goal of a Testudo advance would be getting close enough to use your gladii, the long knives the Romans relied on for serious slaughter. I wish we could see the moment when these guys struck the enemy formation and dropped their sheet-metal shields for close combat—if they did. Just as likely they faded under rock bombardment.

We’ll never know, unfortunately, because the producers at Al J decided to waste my time by cutting to Ban ki Moon, the Korean who fronts for the UN these days and the man whose bland flat face could put a weasel on speed to sleep. He comes on to say he’s “deeply concerned” about the rioting. Yeah, me too: deeply concerned your little sermon is keeping me from seeing how the Testudo turns out. What’s the point of these sermonettes anyway? Did anybody expent Ban to say, “I rove dese liots! Anybody give me five to one on Mubalak?” We all know it’s his job to tsk-tsk, we get it, why waste riot time on it?

He’s not even any good at acting concerned. He looks bored, which is how he always looks. You want to see a concerned Korean, try  coming up two cents short at your local AM/PM minimart. Ban’s cousin looking at me like I’m a fattened-up Antichrist.

The only interesting thing about Ban-ky’s speech is the way he tilts it toward the demonstrators: “Any attacks on peaceful demonstrators is unacceptable.” Now that was interesting. I love the guys rioting in Cairo, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve seen the UN get the vapors over much smaller and milder riots than these. Why are they so worried about the demonstrators this time around?

Put that together with the Egyptian Army guy’s try at schmoozing the demonstrators and you get a pretty clear picture of the Vegas odds on this one: Mubarak off the boards, no more bets. I’m not saying the UN and the Army are right; bigwigs guess wrong all the time, and the Army guy’s speech left a back door open in case Mubarak pulls out of this dive. I’m just saying it’s clear the smart money (which isn’t always smart) says he’s gone.

Well, if he’s outta there, I say we still let him buy a condo in Florida. We’ve done it for creepier clients than him, God knows. And besides, he gave us the best footage of ancient combat ever filmed.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

Click the cover, buy the book!

This article was first published by AlterNet.

If you didn’t know better, you’d get all excited reading about the Army’s new shoulder-fired cannon, the XM-25. It’s being hyped as a “game-changing” weapon that will literally blow the Taliban out of their hiding places and turn the tide in Afghanistan.

The XM25 is the kind of weapon a kid likes to dream about. It’s basically a “smart,” user-friendly shoulder-fired grenade launcher. It shoots 25mm fragmentation grenades that explode at a pre-set distance. And you don’t need to be a math prof to calculate the distance; the weapon talks to itself, the laser sight basically telling the round when it has to explode.

So suppose I’m a soldier trying to deal with a sniper firing from behind a window in an Iraqi city, or popping up from behind some adobe wall, irrigation ditch or boulder in  Afghanistan. In that situation you could blast away all day with a pure line-of-sight weapon like a typical automatic rifle, and you’d just make a lot of dust without hitting anybody.

What you need in a situation like that—and it’s a very common situation in war, especially urban or mountain war, and we’re fighting both at the moment—is a weapon that can kill an enemy who’s behind cover. If we were fighting in a wood-frame battlefield, like say an American suburb, you wouldn’t need to worry about this so much, because American walls and doors are very thin and most modern rifle rounds will go right through them. But Iraqi and Afghan houses are built of thick mud or concrete. They make pretty good cover for a sniper.

So instead of trying to shoot through the wall, you want to get an air burst of some kind through the window, or over the boulder or whatever it is the enemy’s behind.  There are all kinds of ways to do that, and most of them involve lobbing an explosive round over the wall. Armies have been doing this for centuries. A catapult is designed to handle an enemy behind a wall, by lobbing its load over the wall into the enemy town. A siege mortar is designed to lob a shell over a fort’s walls into the enemy’s ranks. A hand grenade can be lobbed the same way at short range, and for longer range you could use the U.S. Army’s standard grenade launcher, the M203.

You’ll notice all these are small arms, very “light” weapons in military terms. When a first-world army wants to wipe out an enemy city without taking casualties themselves, they just call in the artillery, like the Russians did in Grozny in Chechnya, or air strikes like we did in Fallujah. If these first-world armies really wanted to use their full firepower, they could just nuke whole Afghan mountains or Iraqi cities.

But they don’t. That’s not what this generation of warfare is usually like. These are colonial wars, like the ones the British fought on the same territories, Iraq and Southern Afghanistan, and like the Brits we’re fighting them at a low level, basically small arms. So what you want is a small arm (a weapon that can be carried and fired by one or two soldiers) with the firepower of artillery. That’s what the XM25 is supposed to provide. It looks like a stubby shotgun, which it is, basically. What separates it from your home-defense 12-gauge is the rounds it fires and the aiming system. The standard round is an explosive 25mm shell. When it explodes, it sprays deadly metal strips in a room-sized sphere pattern. If you’re in a room where one detonates, you’re dead.

Of course that wouldn’t mean much if those shells just hit the adobe wall or boulder where the sniper’s hiding, it wouldn’t have much effect. That’s where the laser sight and computer ranging come into play. The XM25’s laser sight measures the distance to the target and lets the soldier set his rounds to explode before, on, or (most likely) behind the target. So, if you’re trying to kill a sniper in an Iraqi house, you set the shells to explode one meter inside the window. The sniper (and anybody else in the room) gets riddled with white-hot metal fragments. If you’re dealing with a half-dozen Taliban firing from behind an irrigation ditch at a patrol that’s just left their village, you set the 25 mm rounds to burst above and behind them. Even if they’re well-shielded from direct fire, they’re dead.

That’s the hype, anyway, the story being peddled by media whores like Rick Sanchez, who did a gee-whiz story on the XM25 a while back.

My basic rule is that if Rick Sanchez said that water is wet, I’d start to doubt it, so I’ve got a couple of doubts about this story. First, it’s very hard to tell if the XM25 works as well as we’re hearing, because U.S. armed forces procurement is a big, sleazy business and involves more lies and propaganda than Stalin’s show trials ever generated. There are proven cases of Army officers working with contractors from the big weapons companies to rig tests to make new weapons systems look good. If you take a look at this recent video of the XM25 putting on a show for the tame media, you’ll see what I mean.

Most people have no idea how to read a video like this, so here are a few pointers to make you a smarter shopper next time you need to buy a weapons system. First, you’ll notice that the reporters are told what’s going to happen by Col. Tamilio, the Army’s public-relations honcho for the new weapon. And he tells them, “You’re not going to see anything” because the XM25 is firing dummy rounds, training rounds, non-explosive. After the soldier handling the weapon fires two rounds, Tamilio tells them the test went “two-for-two,” but they’re taking his word for it. All they actually saw was a guy shooting the thing twice.

Next, notice that after the first round is fired, a civilian in a baseball cap comes up, tinkers with the XM25, and whispers something in the shooter’s ear. I’d bet my lunch that’s a consultant from the companies that produced the XM25, telling the shooter how to baby the weapon to make it look good. You have to realize that in a lot of American high-tech businesses, everything from hip-replacement surgery to weapons testing, a lot of the the hands-on work is done not by doctors or soldiers but by industry guys who never get mentioned in the official reports. So this is not a combat-style firing by an ordinary GI; not only does the shooter have industry help right over his shoulder, but the shooter is identified as a major, and you can bet he was hand-picked for this demonstration.

It’s a matter of money—big money. Defense contracts are the sweetest you can imagine, which is why defense contractors bribe the hell out of everybody from congressmen to foreign dictator’s nephews to get them to buy. If you want a classic example of what defense procurement sleaze looks like, take a look at the career of former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, now better known as “Federal Inmate Cunningham.” There are thousands of lobbyists and “consultants” who spend their whole lives greasing the Federal procurement process. Naturally the weapons nuts who follow news like the XM25 don’t have a clue about this stuff, but the real grownups in DC pay very close attention to it.

The XM25 has a typical history for a big-money American weapons system. By the time suckers like Rick Sanchez get brought to the proving range to see it shown off, this weapons system has been through a career as sleazy as Duke Cunningham’s. It all starts when one or more of the Armed Services comes up with a “need” for a new weapon. In this case, Plan A was a fantasy weapon called OICW, “Objective Individual Combat Weapon,” that would combine the power of an automatic rifle and a grenade launcher. That program failed, and was split into two parts: one for a new rifle to replace the M4, and another for a rapid-firing grenade launcher, Program XM29, which ended up with the XM25. Along the way, the program ran into more corporate and political interference than you can imagine, especially because some of the competitors were foreign companies. Colt Industries, the company that makes the current M203 grenade launcher, actually called in a rule that the Defense Department had to use American corporations in certain cases, so they could get a piece of the procurement pie.

That’s pretty standard  Defense contractor behavior: if you’re losing out to a foreign competitor, and you can’t just bribe some tool like Rep. Cunningham to step in on your side, then play the “Buy American!” card.

Sometimes good weapons come out of all this sleaze, sometimes not. And even when the results are good, you can count on the fact that some contractor who loves to wave the flag made some obscene profits by gold-plating the winning weapons system, loading it up with expensive options. It’s not hard when the armed-services officers in charge of signing off on the money know they can go right to work for the contractor as soon as they retire.

So maybe, just maybe, the XM25 will do what it’s supposed to do. But even if it does, it won’t be a “game-changer” in either of our wars, because irregular wars like Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t decided by superior weaponry. If they were, we’d already have won both those wars about a million times over. The Taliban use old Soviet AK rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and get to battle on foot or bouncing along in the back of Toyota pickups. But in spite of this humongous gap between our tech and theirs, the senior British commander in Afghanistan went on record in 2008 saying the Taliban will not be defeated militarily–and he should know, because the Brits have been fighting the Pashtun irregulars for two centuries now.

Let’s take the best-case scenario and say that this new weapon, the XM25, makes every American infantry squad so lethal that the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents lose a huge number of men and can’t afford stand-up fights any more. What that would do is force an accelerated evolution in the same direction guerrilla war’s been evolving for more than 100 years: away from trying to fight the invading army on its own terms and toward assassination, bombs, betrayal—all the ways insurgents love to fight and conventional armies hate. In practical terms, that means more Taliban enlist in the Afghan Army and wait for the chance to mow down the Western soldiers who are supposedly their buddies. Or more Taliban go home and wait until we lose interest and go home, then dig up their buried guns and go stomp their less-militant neighbors. Or, worst and most likely of all these scenarios, more Taliban forget about chancing a firefight and stick to IEDs.

According to the U.S. Army’s own newspaper, the Army Times, IEDs now account for 75 percent of American casualties in Afghanistan.

Most of our GIs are not dying or being wounded in the kind of firefight the XM25 is designed to win. They’re dying in a much nastier way: getting blown up by remote control while they patrol rural Afghan dirt roads.

And unfortunately, the only effect a gee-whiz weapon like the XM25 is likely to have is raising that figure closer to 100 percent.

I know, I know, I’ve been AWOL a long time. Shoot me. No, seriously. I wouldn’t object. It’d be great to get shot, as long as it was quick and fatal, not somewhere like the shin, where you scream like a raccoon from the pain and don’t even die. Shot nice and quick by a firing squad, that’s the dream. When that redneck demanded capital punishment by firing squad in Utah, I was as jealous as I used to get reading about Hannibal and Forrest. Lucky bald-headed Aryan Brotherhood bastard: what a way to go! He suckered those Mormons all the way. Lethal injection, now that’s scary: die on a table with tubes going up your elbow? That’s too much like how I’m going to die for reals (and how you’ll die too, even if you don’t want to think about it). But getting shot in the heart—that’s making something of yourself. Be shot.

I was so close. Take this Michael Hastings guy. He’s the biggest thing in military reporting right now because he broke the supposedly big McChrystal mouth-off story for Rolling Stone. OK, it isn’t really that big a story; how do you think soldiers talk about the politicians they have to kowtow to, especially when they’re stranded in a bar with a reporter for a week thanks to that harmless volcanic ash cloud the EU made into a fake crisis? Naturally they’re going to bitch about the pols like soldiers have been doing since the Neanderthals learned to make noises with their mouths.

But what hurts is that I got interviewed by this same Michael Hastings guy way back when my book came out. I talked to him for hours about war, about Iraq, about Fresno, about Afghanistan and even about how all the coolsters in Manhattan laughed at his book about his girlfriend getting killed in Iraq. (Which to be fair he should’ve expected because he titled that book I Lost My Love in Baghdad, possibly the worst title ever until some studio cokehead came up with Knight and Day.)

We maybe didn’t bond—that’s not my field, like the Georgia slaves said to General Sherman’s torch squad—but we had I thought a pretty decent interview, and when it was over I had a long shower and groaned for a few hours remembering every stupid thing I’d said the way I always do after these interpersonal things, and went to sleep expecting to wake up with a story in Newsweek and a rating in Amazon books in something like three digits.

Instead—instead, because the Gods of War hate me worse than they hate Poland—instead I get a nice personal email from my new pal, buddy, Vulcan-mind-meld soulmate Michael Damn Hastings saying he’s just quit Newsweek. The bastard took the buyout and ran—straight to Rolling Stone and the biggest story (as far as the sucker mainstream press is concerned) since Tet.

Hastings’ blog: imagining the War Nerd while getting famous

I should’ve learned my lesson and left the mainstream jerks alone, but then the New York Times itself came calling. I kid you not, the NYT called me. I didn’t go looking for trouble; it seemed pretty obvious to me that Brecher was a bad match for the windbags who run the NYT’s Opinion Page. But I have the emails to prove it. Out of nowhere, I got an email from a guy who said his name was “Mark Lotto” inviting me to write an article for this series the NYT was running called “Summerscapes.” Yeah, that’s right, “Summerscapes.” Pretty pukesome name, I grant you, but the exposure would sell a lot of books, I figured, so I swallowed the vomit and agreed to write something.

Then I went online and actually read some of the unbelievably lousy stuff people had done for this “Summerscape” series.

What is wrong with people from the East Coast? See, reading all these “Summerscapes” articles was my first try at East-Coast print culture or whatever they call it, and I came away pretty sure those people left their brains on the subway sometime during Eisenhower’s first term. Every lousy article was about vacations in a cottage “at the lake” or “on the shore,” meaning somewhere on that pissant excuse for an ocean, the Atlantic. Digging clams on Cape Cod. I personally don’t believe that Cape Cod actually exists, and even if it does, like my grandma used to say, “There’s no need to dwell on it.”

Every June these geniuses write the same little essay about going to the cottage. 1500 words on unpacking the deck chairs and sweeping all last year’s sand out of your cottage. It helps if you can throw in some sappy family-dynamics thing from an after-school special about how this year was Grandpa’s 37th trip to the dear old lake and gosh darn it, he’s not as quick as he used to be sculling over the lawn bowls, but his spirit and love of life are as bright as a button in spite of it all.

It was like ninth-grade English, where they make you read stuff so awful that you start to think it must be your fault: “Duh…I must be missing something, the nuances or whatever, or maybe I don’t speak English after all.”

This was when I started seriously wondering if it was a prank. I mean, how likely is it that I’d get an offer from the NYT, especially from somebody named Mark Lotto?

“I’ll add some ethnic spice to your parent’s bland WASP-y summer home.”

But after I read more of these things online, I had to face the fact that they were just plain stupid. There was one that had me laughing out loud, which doesn’t happen every decade. It was a totally typical “back to the summer cottage on the lake” essay, but that wasn’t the funny part. The kink was that instead of being written by some three-name WASP from the Hamptons, this essay was by a gay Sri Lankan Tamil novelist named Selvadurai. He probably could’ve done something interesting about summer in Sri Lanka, like how anybody survives it for example, but nope, they had him do the classic “back to the lake” scenario, him and “my partner Andrew.” This is the first sentence, uncut, I swear to God: “Every year my partner Andrew and I go to Northern Ontario to open his family cottage.” The whole thing’s full of the same crap people were writing in their “What I Did on Summer Vacation” essays back in Teddy Roosevelt’s day:

“From the cottage garden, I could see Andrew going about the holiday home he had known since childhood, tidying up, taking down the curtains, cleaning the windows…When I went into the bedroom above the boathouse, I saw that the shelves were filled with the things of his past—magazines for teenagers, a tattered Scrabble game, yellowed paperback Daphne DuMaurier novels, a Mennonite quilt.”

Then the guy starts crosscutting between Andrew’s WASP cottage in Ontario and his family’s cottage on a lake in Sri Lanka. That one had crocodiles and Tamil-hating Sinhalese neighbors, of course, who burned it down eventually—the Sinhalese, I mean, not the crocs.

Scene #1: Two guys unfolding their L. L. Bean lawnchairs on a lake in Canada.

Scene #2: The Sri Lankan guy’s family relaxing by the lake in Sri Lanka, throwing chunks of curried goat to the crocs in the lake, watched by a sullen crowd of Sinhalese locals itching to tear their throats open. Ah, those glorious summer vacations back in ol’ Ceylon!

Scene #3: Ontario again, with the guppies having a chuckle about how the woodrats have made their little nest in last summer’s beach umbrella.

Scene #4: Sinhalese villagers whooping it up around the burning ruins of the Sri Lankan lake cottage, with the crocs doing a conga in the background. Oh, the humanity! Who could have expected that the Tamil-Sinhalese hate-fest would go so far as to disrespect personal property and the sacredness of the vacation home!

That was his whole schtick: quick cuts between his boyfriend’s cottage in Neil Young country and his family’s torched place in the Sinhalese backwoods. That was his whole take on the amazing war in Sri Lanka. He had a ringside seat and all he can do is whine about how the Sinhalese burned up HIS little boathouse bedroom with the novels by Daphne Whoever.

Some gimmicks are so simple it takes a long time to see them. Like it took me a long time, looking over this ridiculous article, to realize that it’s just a way for NYT readers up in the suburbs of NYC to feel even smugger, if that’s humanly possible, about their little lake cottages by comparing their neat, safe little boathouses with the burned ruins this whiner from Ceylon is going on about. It must make them feel good the way going to Ethiopian restaurants in the eighties, when there was that huge famine in Ethiopia, made the yuppies feel: “Haw, I bet those poor suckers in Addis Ababa wouldn’t mind a bite of this glop on this Styrofoam bread, even if it does taste like crockpot chicken run through a blender and served on bubble wrap!”

You’ll notice, by the way, that all those Ethiopian restaurants closed down after the famine “ebbed,” as they say, in Ethiopia, meaning the locals got two handfuls of UN weight-gain mix, torn from the poor suburban steroid kids who were clamoring for it, instead of just one. Once people in Seattle found out the people who cooked this glop weren’t starving anymore, they realized, “Hey, this tastes like diarrhea!’ and went on to sushi, which was roughly like replacing McClellan with Ambrose Burnside.

It just doesn’t taste as good without a little salsa picante on it, as in somebody else having their cabin burnt down while yours is appreciating at a steady ten percent per annum. Which is why they invited Mister Gay Sri Lanka to do a column. Absolutely the lamest strategy since MacMahon in 1870: hire a “visible minority” squared—gay and brown—and then you can just crank out the same crap. It’s the print version of that Damon Wayans sitcom My Wife and Kids, where the gimmick is they do all the gags Leave It to Beaver thought were too corny for the 1950s and get away with it cuz the main characters are all black!  It’s even got the same sadism, come to think of it: make the black folk suffer through a ten-year run of Damon’s stage kids’ hijinks before you let the poor suckers know that sitcom family stuff was never funny even the first time around.

But even though these “Summerscape” articles made me sick to read I wrote one when they asked me. I’m an American, damn it, and I’m supposed to try to make it. So I swallowed the bile and did my best, wrote a short article on summer in Bakersfield the way I remember it: getting beat to a pulp by some jocks from my high school when they saw me chopping weeds by the road on my summer job with the city weed-cull program. I talked about how bummed all my relatives were that I didn’t fight back, how they thought it was a sign of the decline of the white race, or maybe the Okie race; on my mother’s side of the family they don’t make much of a distinction—and how it made me sort of a fatalist in military matters. I called it “The Military History of Bakersfield,” went on about how the same jocks who stomped me faded into obscurity like the Hittites, superseded by later empires, in this case the Mexicans, who had a higher birthrate and less to lose, and then the Salvadorans, possibly the only empire since the Mayans (same people, come to think of it) to intimidate enemies with armies of soldiers less than five feet tall.

I thought it was funny and my pal at the NYT, Mark Lotto, actually agreed, sent me a contract and a bunch of praise and told me it’d be coming out soon. I should live so long, as they say in New York. First they told me that the summer was over and it’d be published next summer. Next summer this NYT intern named “Honor Jones”—another name that made me think it was all a big prank—sent me a couple dozen emails saying my article was going to come out any day now, just be patient—until she finally admitted that her editor David Silbey didn’t like it. Silbey is a mainstream war guy, more like a war dweeb than a war nerd, so no wonder he nixed my downer of a story about getting beat on without a happy ending or movie revenge. Of course he was going to kill the story: we’re in the same business only I’m about a thousand times better at it than that Gerbers-baby-food version of a war historian. But the capper: the NYT didn’t even send me the kill fee they promised. I didn’t get a penny for sucking up to the bastards.

That’s the problem with selling out, in my experience: you cover yourself with stinking shit and then don’t even get paid. Even as a kid in Bible study I knew Judas was a fool. He was never going to get those thirty pieces of silver. When he went to collect they laughed in his stupid red face. That’s why he hung himself. That was always my take on the New Testament, and you’d think I’d have applied it to this going-mainstream program, known better. But the truth is nobody ever knows better.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Summer Reading: Banquo’s Ghosts, by Richard Lowry and Keith Korman, Vanguard Press (2009), 352 pages.

You have to feel a little sorry for the two neocons who co-wrote Banquo’s Ghosts. The idea seems simple enough: a Tom Clancy-style thriller about a plot to kill an Iranian physicist before he can cook up a nuke for the mullahs. The problem is, where do you get your hero these days? Back in the day, when Clancy was keeping Reagan awake way past 9 pm with Hunt for Red October, it was easy to make US agents like Jack Ryan look good; after all, they were going up against the dregs of the poor old USSR.

It’s not anywhere near as easy to convince readers nowadays that our spooks are superhuman, not after Iraq and especially not where Iran is concerned. The grim fact is that Iran has outplayed us since I was a kid. I mean that literally. Some of my earliest and nastiest memories are from the hostage crisis in 1979, scared blindfolded hostages, then the wreckage of Desert Storm, a greasy mullah holding up the roasted arm of a dead American solder. From Carter to Bush Junior, it’s been one embarrassment after another at the hands of those sneaky Persians.

So Lowry and Korman have changed with the times. Their patriotic agent characters, Banquo and his lieutenant Wallets, are sort of tired and weak in this book, bummed about the way Iraq turned out. When you meet Banquo, he’s looking over a lot of high-tech surveillance of Nasrullah, the Hezbollah leader—except Banquo realizes the guy wearing the chemically-dyed turban may be a body double, or a nobody. Banquo is bummed, realizing all the satellites in the world won’t make up for the fact we’ve got no humint worth mentioning in the Middle East: “‘We’re losing,’ Banquo whispered to the walls.”

Yes, Banquo’s world, Tom Clancy’s world, is going to Hades. The CIA isn’t what it used to be, thanks to all this new touchy-feely crap:

…’voluntary’ sexual harassment and racial sensitivity seminars. … Delays and overruns had slowed the men’s bathroom renovations—an installation of two hundred quality Care Bear changing tables ‘for your convenience.’ When what—Mr. Mom wet himself? … And … at 4:30 pm, the Agency employees lined up in the Langley parking lot, shuffling off to their minivan carpools for their suburban commute home.

Minivans! Diaper-changing tables! Car pools!  With friends like that, it stands to reason that poor Banquo can’t count on the usual allies to take on the Iranians.

But the biggest blow to Tom Clancy’s world is pretty clear, as this book admits in a weird, very interesting way. We’re in Banquo’s office, while the depressed old agent thinks about why “we’re losing.” He settles on a poster:

I was amazed to read that bit in a novel by the editor of a neocon outpost like National Review. It’s about as close to admitting, “We messed up,” as these guys are ever going to come. And it helps to explain the big plot twist in the novel. Since the neocons and the CIA are so bummed, depressed, and discredited, you can’t just find a Jack Ryan and put him on the bad guys’ trail. You need to find a new kind of hero. And that’s where these two co-author dudes really outdid themselves. See, they need someone to kill that pesky Iranian physicist, but their boys are weak, car-pooling losers. Where’s the energy, the drive, these days? Why, across the aisle, among those damn lefties and peaceniks. They’re the ones on the attack. So Banquo recruits an antiwar Lefty, a Brit reporter named Peter Johnson, who took Saddam’s money and spends most of his time telling TV audiences that Iran is harmless, and only wants nukes for peaceful energy.

It’s pretty clear, if you’re an old CNN fan like me, than this Johnson character is a pretty obvious take on Peter Arnett, the reporter who got fired after the first Iraq war. Johnson character is a drunk, a slob, an all-around mess, and an America-hater from way back—all the stuff the Pentagon said about Arnett.

But Johnson is only a leftie on the surface. Inside, he’s sick of himself, ashamed of having served the forces of evil all his life. And just in case you were in any doubt that they really are the forces of evil, there’s a long scene at a snooty Manhattan dinner party where the reader meets Johnson’s lefty boss, Josephine Parker von Hildebrand. Josephine is just about the evilest witch-queen since Snow White: “Josephine had practically every desirable personal characteristic, except wisdom and mercy.” Gee, that sounds like she actually isn’t a nice person at all! Well, this isn’t one of those subtle type novels. If it had a soundtrack, it’d be heavy on the Count Dracula organ notes every time Josephine appears.

The scene at her snooty dinner party is maybe the worst in the novel. Basically, all the cool lefties at the party turn into rabid Jew-hating Nazis after their second glass of wine. It’s the old line that anybody who ever criticizes Israel can’t really mean what they say; they must be secret Nazis just waiting for some pretext to spew up their hate. Even Johnson, the peacenik, is outraged at what he hears: “But of all the Jew-haters he despised—more than any neo-Nazi skinhead—were the pointy-headed intellectuals, the sophisticated, sleight-of-hand Jew-haters, the let’s-adopt-the-Saudi-peace-plan, and gosh-aren’t-these-people-awfully-pushy-and-greedy-for-such-a-little-country? Jew-haters.” Right. Meaning, anybody who ever quibbled with any Israeli policy. Ever. Well, that settles that. To show you how evil these non-neocons truly are, they start talking like little Hitlers. Now, I can’t speak from personal experience here—contrary to what you might expect, I don’t get invited to all that many cool Manhattan parties—but it’s a little hard to believe that this New York leftist magazine is secretly staffed by a bunch of Hitlerites. . .

READ THE REST OF AT TAKIMAG.COM →

It took me a while to figure out why everybody was nagging me to do a column on the Iranian elections. Everybody seemed to think it was all mysterious and world-shaking. Finally I realized, you’re all het up because every news service in the US and England has been selling these riots like a new Star Wars episode, and people are just trying to figure out what’s going on and what it all means.

Well, I can answer that in one note: nothing much is going on, just letting off steam; and what little is happening isn’t mysterious at all. Basically, this is simple steam release, something the Mullahs have to allow now and then when the kids, and there are a lot of young adults in Iran, need to remind everybody they’re tired of being bossed around. There’s a huge, huge difference between that kind of “revolution” and the kind that has a real foundation in tribal differences or religion or city/country, the real fault lines. What’s going on in Iran now is a lot like the big fizzle in Lebanon after Hariri’s assassination in 2005. So if y’all will permit me to digress, let me take you back to the Cedar Revolution that supposedly “gripped” Lebanon. All that really happened was that some of the few Christian/Sunni elite Lebanese kids who hadn’t emigrated yet got so pissed off at the Syrians for just blowing Hariri away in broad daylight that they came out and waved the Lebanese flag–the one with the Cedar tree on it. Well, you’d have thought the Berlin Wall had fallen all over again. The same Anglo news networks that are declaring an outbreak of democracy in Iran now were screaming into microphones all over Lebanon, just so touched by these rich Christian/”Phoenician” Lebanese kids announcing that no durn Hezbollah Iranian-puppet thugs were gonna repress their craving for freedom…and discos, and wearing about a quart of perfume, and all the other accessories that go with what they call a Western orientation in the Middle East.

These are the kind of people Anglo news crews glom onto like horny refrigerator magnets: young, well-dressed, a lot of them speak English, and they talk about nice familiar stuff like “freedom” and “democracy.” They make great TV. But they can’t win a war. You win wars with poor people, numbers and toughness and discipline. Hezbollah proved it had the numbers by producing counter-demos with a million people cheering the Syrians and asking Allah to zap the West and Democracy and that Cedar Tree. If democracy means “we got more people with us than you do,” that should’ve proved Hezbollah beat the Cedar All-Stars, but that story never came out much. Hezbollah’s demonstrators weren’t the kind of people the BBC or CNN really felt comfortable around. It’s hard for a Western news crew to relax with a huge crowd of agitated lower-class Shia. Their way of making a point is by getting bloody, showing off wounds and cuts and shaving nicks, whatever they’ve got. Nobody at CNN wants that to be the future; nobody wants to go to commercial with a bunch of shrieking Shia mothers like hysterical Hefty Bags proudly saying they hope their 14 or so sons become martyrs, and the sooner the better. No, what you want for an upbeat TV story is a bunch of taller, skinnier, paler, English-speaking rich kids.

Which brings us to Iran. Iranians aren’t Arab, but they are Shia, and excitable. Keep that in mind. Different countries explode at different temperatures. There are places where yelling is a declaration of war. If a Norwegian raises his voice, Hell is about to break loose. If a Canadian yells at you, get a restraining order. But Iranians will scream at each other over how to cook an egg, and be all chummy and laughing the next minute. They used to keep that hysterical side in control with opium–the whole country was on the pipe until the sixties–but it’s harder to get now, so they just keep yelling.

So when Iran has a national election, it’s going to be loud. People are going to yell in the streets, people are going to shoot guns off, sometimes in the general direction of the opposition, and anybody who gets hit is going to tweet his bloodstains, youtube his bulletholes, and send it all over the world.

And if the people doing the demonstrating are mostly that same Cedar-Rev demographic: rich young city kids–then duh, they’re also the ones who are going to be web-savvy tweet freaks. In fact, Iran has probably the biggest dissident blog network in the world. I don’t read Farsi–I wish I did–but I read this pretty decent book, I Am Iran, about the anti-mullah blog scene there. Check it out if you want a better idea of who the opposition is, the people flooding the streets in Tehran. They’re sick of it, which is easy to understand; living in the Islamic Republic of Iran must be a lot like going to a Catholic school where you never, ever graduate, where kissing is a felony and not wearing the uniform is a crime against God. Hell yes, they’re sick of it, and they have every right to be.

But, to get coldblooded about it, so what? They’re not going to overthrow the state. I don’t usually like that word, “the state,” but I’m using it here because it works better than “Ahmedinajad.” He’s the official bad guy here, the classic bigmouth runt who wants Israel turned into a gravel pit and America turned into a colony of Venezuela. Hell, he’s all kinds of obnoxious, down to the ratty beard and beady eyes and the way he dresses like a hungover Soviet janitor.

But he’s not the Islamic Republic of Iran.

He’s only the president. The way the Iranian government is put together, the Prez is more like a noisemaker, official annoyer-of-the-Anglos, than a decider. Way, way above him is the “Supreme Leader,” sort of an Ayatollah version of the Pope, Khomeini’s official successors. Right now the Supreme Leader is Ali Khamenei. He doesn’t talk to the press, or make official trips to hug Chavez. He just sits there in his big black turban and says “No” every time somebody asks for a little relaxation of all this pious crap. He’s seen’em come and go, these reformer types; he crushed Rafsanjani, Khatami, anybody who even suggested that the way Khomeini laid it down in 1979 might not be good enough for all eternity.

See, that’s the pattern I’m talking about: the people who matter in Iran won’t talk to foreign news crews, and the people who will, the ones in the streets right now…well, they may be brave, noble people, but they don’t have a chance in Hell.

That’s because the IRI government is a bunch of rival militias, intelligence agencies, and religious committees. There’s even a legislature, although nobody takes that seriously. If you remember the way the Iranian side was organized in the Iran/Iraq war, you might have a better idea how the people at the top like things to run: always with rival forces competing for power. That’s because Khomeini was thinking coups in 1979. So alongside the regular Army he set up the Revolutionary Guards, hardcore jihadis loyal to the Supreme Leader, not the Army Brass. To make sure the Revolutionary Guards weren’t vulnerable to a sudden decapitation by the army or anyone else, their cadres were placed with every agency, like Islamist commissars, and they set up militias in every city in Iran.

You get the same thing in any new militarized state, even tiny Hellholes like Duvalier’s Haiti, with the Ton=ton Macoutes balancing the army, bypassing the official channels so they could kill at Duvalier’s command.

Kandy Man with long name who fought the Brits.

Key fact: in Sri Lanka heroes were allowed to get fat, another reason to like the place.

You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read something sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet. It’s an article by a posh little limey named Jeremey Brown condemning the Sri Lankan government for being too messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop buying the cheap textiles the poor Sinhalese make their living churning out.

What’s sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed the Sinhalese people completely. Completely and purposely, sadistically. Stole their land, humiliated and massacred their government, made it Imperial policy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left.  You can talk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as gross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of British-Sinhalese relations. If you can even call them “relations”; I guess a murder-rape is a relation, sort of.

But nobody knows about it. Weird, huh? Nothing weirds me out more than the total news blackout the Brits have managed to put on all the sick shit they did to brown and black people all over the world. They had a system, and it worked. They’d grab some paradise island in the tropics, use the Royal Navy to wall it off from the rest of the world, and crush the local tribe. If the locals resisted, the Brits would starve them to death, shoot them down, infect them with smallpox or get them addicted to opium–whatever they had to do to gang-rape the locals so bad that they’d lose the will to resist.

And to this day, they don’t catch even a little bit of Hell for it. Everybody thinks the Brits are all cute and harmless. You’re all a bunch of suckers for those suave accents, you suckers! The truth is that compared to the Brits, the Nazis you’re always yammering about were a gang of eighth-grade stoners who ran around spraypainting swastikas on school property. The Nazis lasted one decade; the Brits quietly ran their extermination programs for three hundred years, and to this day they wouldn’t even think of feeling guilty about it. Wouldn’t cross their minds.

That’s what made me want to puke battery acid when I read Mister Jeremy Brown’s sermon on the naughty Sinhalese: this pig Brown has no clue about why Sri Lanka is so fucked up, no hint at all that it’s the result of British Imperial policy. Not “mistakes” or “a few bad apples” or “regrettable excesses” but clear, cold, ruthless British policy.

One of the funniest bits in Brown’s little Anglican sermon to the Sinhalese is when he mentions Arthur C. Clarke, the Brit sci-fi writer who moved to Sri Lanka. The reason that’s funny is that a few years back, when he was too senile and drunk to watch his tongue, Clarke admitted in an interview that the whole reason he moved to Sri Lanka is “for the boys.” As in, he liked to rape little boys, and they were cheap and pretty in the dear old ex-colony. The fucking Brits wouldn’t stop raping the Sinhalese even after their troops were forced off the island.

Jeremy Brown wouldn’t know that, of course. To him, Clarke is a wonderful example of all the wonderful things British people have done for po’ little Sri Lanka:

“Britain has…helped to rebuild Sri Lanka’s tourist industry: Britons accounted for 18.5 per cent of the foreigners who visited the former colony’s famous beaches, wildlife parks, tea plantations and Buddhist temples last year. Only India sends more tourists. Many Britons also own property there, especially around the southern city of Galle, not far from where Arthur C.Clarke, the British science fiction writer who settled in Sri Lanka, used to love to scuba dive. [Is that what they’re callin’ it these days? GB]

So the question facing British shoppers and holidaymakers is this: should they continue to support Sri Lanka’s garment and tourist industries?

Don’t you love that last sentence: “Sadly, the answer must be no.” Anybody who can write a sentence like that without blowing his brains out at the monitor is a hopeless twit anyway, but let’s help Jeremy out a little bit, folks, let’s go back in time and take a quick look at all the wonderful things the Brits did for these rotten, ungrateful Sinhalese.

The pattern you see in the colonizing of Sri Lanka is a real familiar one, if you study the European naval empires: the Portugese, the greatest sailors and explorers, came to Sri Lanka long before the Brits, claimed the place, but couldn’t hold on to it. The Portugese lost the island to the Dutch, those up’n’coming Protestant go-getters, in the mid-1600s. That’s another pattern you see everywhere, the old Papist powers losing out to the Protestants, who were just faster and smarter.

The next stage was also totally by the book: the Brits, the canopy tree if you know what I mean, come along and force the Dutch out. There were times the Brits sort of liked the Dutch; they were Protestant, at least, and blonde/blue-eyed. But business was business, and the Brits realized, by the end of the 1700s, that Sri Lanka was worth taking. Of course they didn’t say that in public; the official reason was that they had to boot the Dutch to guard the island from the nasty radical Frenchies.

That way of stealing islands, making it sound like you had to take them for the greater good–that was classic Brit strategy. They always made it look like they were forced, against their will, to grab this or that colony. I dunno if y’all ever saw a movie called Erik the Viking, but it has a great scene with John Cleese playing this insane bloodthirsty warlord who orders people tortured to death in this tired, disappointed upper-class voice, and then whines, “It’s the stress that gets you”–all put upon and harrassed, like Attila the Hun meets The Office.  That’s a perfect image for the way the Brits booted the Dutch out of Ceylon, tsk-tsking while they stole every shed, cannon and bale of tea on the island.

With the Dutch trade rivals gone, the Brits had only one problem left: the damned natives, the Sinhala, or “Kandyans” as they were called back then. That dumb name, “Kandyans,” came from the fact that their main city was Kandy, up in the highlands in the south of the island, the fat part of the teardrop. The Sinhala lived in the highlands for the simple reason that it was a little cooler, not as totally malarial, up there compared to the stinking coastal marshes.

By all accounts, the Sinhala/Kandyans were harmless slackers, who didn’t need or want much from the outside world. All they asked was for people to leave them alone up on their big rocky highlands to do their Buddhist thing. Unfortunately that wasn’t British policy. It irked the redcoats that Kandy still had a king, an army, all this impudent baggage that went with independence. The British decided to break the Sinhalese completely, crush the whole society.

You have to remember that by this time, the early 1800s, the Brits have perfected their techniques in little experiments all over the world. Those Clockwork Orange shrinks were amateurs compared to the Imperial Civil Service. They had dozens of ways of undermining native kingdoms.

British administrators were trained to do a kind of rough, quick sociological sketch of the natives, get a sense of the fault lines and then figure out how to exploit them. The Brits saw fast that the Kandyans were a sluggish bunch of people divided into rigid castes in the classic subcontinent pattern. That made it easy: the Brits made two big castes their official pets and shunned the others, setting up a violent hate between different parts of Sinhalese society. That guaranteed that if the diehard Sinhalese/Kandyan nationalists ever revolted, the teacher’s-pet castes would have a good selfish reason to help massacre them.

Then there was the Kandyan king himself. The Brits weren’t dumb in the way Paul Bremer was dumb, “de-Baathifying” Iraq. They loved corrupt local rulers. Much easier and cheaper to bribe one fat old degenerate on a throne than negotiate with all the commoners. So the Brits started playing with the nervous, dumb-ass Kandyan royals, scaring them with the threat of losing everything and then teasing them with the possibility of the safe, soft life of a Brit puppet.

This was the major leagues of Colonialism. To give you an idea of how important Ceylon/Sri Lanka was back then, try this on: in 1802, when French armies were kicking British and Prussian and Italian and Russian ass all over Europe (weird how nobody remembers that, huh?), the Brits were so terrified they tried to give Napoleon all their colonies except Sri Lanka and Trinidad. Those were the two they needed to keep.

Velupillai Prabhakaran: LTTE’s Guerrilla Generalissimo

One thing you have to give the doomed Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka credit for: their supporters sitting in comfortable first-world cities have no shame when it comes to begging for help. Militarily the Sri Lankan Tamils are o-vuh, but when it comes to demanding favors from people who have every reason to hate their guts, these guys are world-class. For some hilarious examples of propaganda from a doomed army, check out the LTTE’s glossy but totally insane website, Tamilnet.

Today’s headline on their site is this little classic: “99% of Norway Tamils Aspire for Tamil Eelam.” “Eelam,” y’unnerstan’, is their fancy name for the independent Tamil state they want to create in Sri Lanka, the “E” in “LTTE.” Anyway, what this headline means is that they rounded up the Tamils living in Norway and herded their frozen asses into a Sons of Knute meeting hall in Oslo and lo’n’behold, 99% of those poor flotsam (should that be “flotsam” or “flotsams”? Not sure) turned out to be in favor of dear old Eelam. The fact that they were ten thousand miles away from Sri Lanka, where the government artillery was shredding the last backyard-sized scrap of land in “Eelam,” didn’t faze those Norwegian diehards one bit.

These guys have no shame at all. They’d probably be willing to go on Flava Flav’s “Workfare for Overage Street Ho’s” show, they’re so shameless. They even, believe it or not, called for the US to save them with “gunboat diplomacy.” I kid you not.

After decades of playing the bold revolutionaries, they’re actually screeching for American destroyers to rescue them. Ah, it’s a fun world as long as you remember we’re all garbage at heart.

Now that the Tamils’ great Sri Lankan kingdom has been whittled down to about ten acres of blasted scrub, they’re so desperate they’re even tying up traffic in Toronto by way of attracting attention to their sad little plight that they totally brought on themselves. The Canadians are giving it their typical mealymouthed cowardly PC response, “We understand your frustration,” while these losers tie up the biggest freeway in Toronto.

But my favorite little desperate gesture from the Tamils is the way they’ve reached out to Sonia Gandhi, the big Indian politician, to ask for help.

Which is funny because Sonia happens to be the widow of Rajiv Gandhi, who was killed by a suicide bomber in 1991. And who sent the bomber? Nobody but the LTTE, the Sri Lankan Tamils’ great liberation army. Yup, they didn’t like Rajiv’s policy on Sri Lanka so they sent him the LTTE version of a strip-o-gram: a zombie girl who shimmied right up to Rajiv at a rally and pulled her own string. It stripped her all right; it stripped the flesh off her and Rajiv and anybody else within the blast radius. Scorched-earth erotic dancing. The ultimate Bollywood closing number.

And now that the LTTE is cornered like a weasel with its foot in a trap, they actually have the gall to ask for her help. This is why I could never be in politics: you have to have the ability to forgive people. I’ve never forgiven anyone in my life. I don’t even get the concept. If something was bad, something offended you, then it stays that way. It doesn’t turn nice because a little time has passed. I never did get that idea. But Sonia just sat up on a dais in Chennai and listened to a bunch of old LTTE supporters read poems about the glorious Tamil martyrs—you know, like the girl who erased Sonia’s hubby—and politely remind them that India can’t interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, bla bla bla. I guess that would’ve been sweet, in a quiet way, but me, I’d want to offer the Sri Lankan army the full support of every fighter plane the Indian AF can send down there. “Oh, I’ll help your friends in the LTTE, all right: I’ll help them all be reincarnated as tapeworms after we send the Indian Air Force down there to wipe out your last-ditch bunkers! Oh yeah, my little Tamil buddies, we’re gonna put on a little air show for ya, we’ll call it the Rajiv Gandhi memorial air munitions display because after all my hubby was a pilot back when he was alive before you turned him into blackened meat, remember little buddies? Yeah, and anyway the Indian arms industry needs a showcase, let the world media see what our new air-to-ground munitions can do to a bunch of losers who tried to set up a 19th-century rebel empire and found out it’s not so easy any more.”

That’s what I’d do. But Sonia’s a patient sneaky lady, a good politician, and she remembers that her party owes a lot of its power to the fact that it carried all the Tamil districts in the south. So she just smiles while the Sri Lankan army grinds the LTTE to death.

There’ll be many a dry eye when those bastards are gone. All over the world, governments are quietly chortling, even while they tsk-tsk in public. The Tamils got way above themselves, and nearly everybody is happy to see them fall.
The real question is, what happened to turn a really impressive, powerful guerrilla army like the LTTE into this pathetic dead-ender comedy skit, hanging on to its little “sovereign state” in somebody’s backyard banana grove while the army arty shreds the leaves?

I’ve written about the LTTE before, used to admire the bastards for their sheer ruthlessness and the way they bridged the gap between conventional and guerrilla war-making methods (read this and this), but it’s beginning to look to me like that strategy of the LTTE’s where they try to cross over from guerrilla force to a “sovereign state,” with its own uniformed armed forces and government and liberated territory, backfired real bad on them. They’d have been better off skulking in the scrub hoping to cause enough trouble to be bought off. Now they’re going to be just plain wiped out. That’s the trouble with doin’ it old-school: the old-school end game for a defeated conventional army is total annihilation.

The LTTE was doing so well as a guerrilla army that it did what winners usually do: find some way to push its luck and turn victory into defeat. It’s weird how you see that pattern everywhere you look, from corporations that are good at doing one thing they make tons of money and then put it in some totally unrelated business they know zero about, to armies that figure winning a battle is a sign you should go pick on some bigger, badder enemy (See Wehrmacht 1941).

The LTTE started way back in the 1970s, when guerrilla armies were a growth industry. They won over the Tamils in Sri Lanka by being more hard-ass than any of the older Tamil militias, and they proved it by just plain wiping out their wimpy rivals, like the TELO.

You have to remember how different the world looked when people like the LTTE’s Dear Leader Prabhakaran made the career choice to become a guerrilla generalissimo. And you have to remember that in the kind of hellhole he grew up in, it really was a career choice. There weren’t many others, and guerrilla had a rockstar appeal compared to the other options, like starving schoolteacher or smalltime farmer. This was before the IT industry turned the Tamil part of India (basically the SE quadrant of the Subcontinent) into Silicon Valley East. Back in them days, the quickest way to have dinner with the big folks was to control a bunch of malaria-ridden skeletons waving AKs.

There’s a new TV show called Warriors running on the History Channel that’s a current favorite of mine. I hesitate to mention it, because no doubt it’s pretty basic stuff. I hate to think what Gary Brecher would say about it—the merest ABCs of warfare!—but it can be riveting for those of us who never got a lot of schooling in war, for all sorts of reasons. These are some sample reasons:

1) You check the box marked “female.”

2) You, like Dick Cheney, had “other priorities.”

3) You bought the crazy notion that even thinking about violence is bad.

Fortunately, these impediments to warfare-knowledge can all be overcome, and Warriors is a good place to start. The show investigates a different warrior culture each week, Vikings, Spartans, Samurai, all the usual suspects. Host Terry Schappert, a former Green Beret, is sent around the world to examine key battle sites, interview the experts, test out the weaponry, and recreate scenes of combat. The weaponry/combat parts are the best. Schappert is supposedly a Special Ops guys now and knows several martial arts and all sorts of badassery like that, but it doesn’t help him much with some of the old-style weapons. Trying to shoot an arrow using a samurai bow, for example, he sucks at it so hugely he winds up apologizing, through a translator, to the master at the art who’s showing him how.

(To be fair, it’s a crazy bow, with the grip not in the middle of the bow curve but lower down, so there’s two-thirds of the bow above the arrow placement and one-third below. That’s so you’re not whacking the bottom of the bow on the horse you’re riding while shooting at your enemies, if you’re a samurai. They do a demo with a guy in full samurai gear galloping down a rutted dirt path firing arrows at small wooden targets and hitting them all, just in case you’re inclined to say it can’t be done.)

It’s a consistent highlight of the show, Schappert getting his ass kicked by some quiet little combat expert who actually knows what he’s doing with a jo staff or whatever it might be. These quiet little combat experts always, always radiate greatness of soul. Why can’t we start a new religion based on the behavior of quiet little combat experts patiently teaching schmoes how to handle weapons? Because if that isn’t god-like, I don’t know what is.

Schappert’s willingness to get his ass kicked for the good of the show is his best quality. He comes across as big, loud, and dorky, nobody’s idea of a warrior. Well, not mine, anyway. He talks too much, he’s embarrassingly sentimental, he’s got that exclamatory Howdy Doody American taint that makes people from other cultures seem calm and dignified by comparison. But I have to admit, he cranks up the proceedings. His lemme-try eagerness around weapons and his gee-whiz reverence for bravery punch across what’s riveting about big historical battles better than more sophisticated approaches.

Take the Battle of Agincourt, for example. I must’ve seen three different versions of Shakespeare’s Henry V and never got what the big deal was, even with all that splendid we-few-we-happy-few-we-band-of-brothers stuff. Something about Laurence Olivier’s snooty delivery, maybe, but somehow the salient details never came across. Like how Henry V bet everything on archers vs. cavalry—how the English were hopelessly outnumbered and figuring on dying, and Henry had his crown welded onto his helmet and stood in the center of the line with his men, making himself the obvious target—how the English won by breaking the rules of chivalry, using maneuvers like getting a French knight on his back so several English guys, definitely not knights, could swarm him and stab at his unarmored points, like dispatching a helpless turtle.

I know, old stuff, no fresh meat here for the War Nerds among us, but for newbies, it’s pretty exciting.

This week they’re doing the Zulu warriors annihilating the Brits at the Battle of Isandlwana. And who can resist such a heartwarming spectacle?

(Editor’s Note: Since this article was published yesterday for subscribers, Mr. Brecher has published a big follow-up which we post below after this article.)

I’ve been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating targets, and that they were doomed.

But now I can tell you exactly how they’re going to die. I’ve just read one of the most shocking stories in years. It comes from the US Naval Institute, not exactly an alarmist or anti-Navy source. And what it says is that the US carrier group is scrap metal.

The Chinese military has developed a ballistic missile, Dong Feng 21, specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers: “Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.” That’s the US Naval Institute talking, remember. They’re understating the case when they say that, with speed, satellite guidance and maneuverability like that, “the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased.”

You know why that’s an understatement? Because of a short little sentence I found farther on in the article—and before you read that sentence, I want all you trusting Pentagon groupies to promise me that you’ll think hard about what it implies. Here’s the sentence: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.”

That’s right: no defense at all. The truth is that they have very feeble defenses against any attack with anything more modern than cannon. I’ve argued before no carrier group would survive a saturation attack by huge numbers of low-value attackers, whether they’re Persians in Cessnas and cigar boats or mass-produced Chinese cruise missiles. But at least you could look at the missile tubes and Phalanx gatlings and pretend that you were safe. But there is no defense, none at all, against something as obvious as a ballistic missile.

So it doesn’t matter one god damn whether the people in the operations room of a targeted carrier could track the Dong Feng 21 as it lobbed itself at them. They might do a real hall-of-fame job of tracking it as it goes up and comes down. But so what? Let me repeat the key sentence here: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.

Think back a ways. How old is the ballistic missile? Kind of a trick question; a siege mortar is a ballistic missile, just unguided. A trebuchet on an upslope outside a castle is a ballistic weapon. But serious long-range rocket-powered ballistic weapons go back at least to the V-2. A nuclear-armed V2 would have been a pretty solid way of wiping out a carrier group, and both components, the nuke and the ballistic missile, were available as long ago as 1945.

A lot has happened since then, like MIRVs, mobile launchers, massively redundant satellite guidance—but the thing to remember is that every single change has favored the attacker. Every single goddamn change.

You know that Garmin satnav you use to find the nearest Thai place when the in-laws are visiting? If you were the Navy brass, that should have scared you to death. The Mac on your kid’s bedroom desk should have scared you. Every time electronics got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, the carrier became more of a death trap. Every time stealth tech jumped another step, the carrier was more obviously a bad idea. Smaller, cooler-running engines: another bad sign for the carrier. Every single change in technology in the past half a century has had “Stop building carriers!” written all over it. And nobody in the navy brass paid any attention.

The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. Hell, they even look the same. Take that Wagoner ass who just got the boot from GM and put him in a tailored uniform and he could walk on as an admiral in any officer’s club from Guam to Diego Garcia. You have to stop thinking somebody up there is looking out for you.

Remember that one sentence, get it branded onto your arm: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.” What does that tell you about the distinguished gentlemen with all the ribbons on their chest who’ve been standing up on carrier bridges looking like they know what they’re doing for the past 50 years? They’re either stupid or so sleazy they’re willing to make a career commanding ships they know, goddamn well know, are floating coffins for thousands of ranks and dozens of the most expensive goldplated airplanes in the history of the world. You call that patriotic? I’d hang them all.

That’s why it’s so sickening to read shit like the following:

“The purpose of the Navy,” Vice Admiral John Bird, commander of the Seventh Fleet, tells me, “is not to fight.” The mere presence of the Navy should suffice, he argues, to dissuade any attack or attempt to destabilize the region. From Yokosuka, Guam, and Honolulu, the Navy is sending its ships on missions to locales as far away as Madagascar. On board the Blue Ridge, the vice admiral’s command ship anchored at Yokosuka, huge display screens allow officers to track the movements of any country’s military vessels cruising from the international date line in the east to the African coast in the west—the range of the Seventh Fleet’s zone of influence.

That’s the kind of story people are still writing. It’s so stupid, that first line, I won’t even bother with it: “The purpose of the Navy is not to fight.” No kidding. The Seventh Fleet covers the area included in that 2000 km range for the new Chinese anti-ship weapons, so I guess it’s a good thing they’re not there to fight.

Stories like this were all over the place in the last days of the British Empire. For some dumbass reason, these reporters love the Navy. They were waving flags and feeling good about things when the Repulse and the Prince of Wales steamed out with no air cover to oppose Japanese landings. Afterward, when both ships were lying on the sea floor, nobody wanted to talk about it much. What I mean to say here is, don’t be fooled by the happy talk. That’s the lesson from GM, Chrysler and the Navy: these people don’t know shit. And they don’t fucking care either. They’re going to ride the system and hope it lasts long enough to see them retire to a house by a golf course, get their daughters married and buy a nice plot in an upscale cemetery. They could give a damn what happens to the rest of us.

The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia

By Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

Yea, the Lord has heard thine prayers, and He, in His infinite Sadism, has answered thee: back on sale, newly printed up, is the record of The eXile’s early beginnings. It’s The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove), first published in 2000. Click the cover to order it through amazon, or order buy it from your favorite overpriced neighborhood bookseller.

The War Nerd

By Gary Brecher

Pleasant Hell

By John Dolan

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine

By Mark Ames

Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!