"We either kill them or they give up." The Republican Guard is no longer a cohesive fighting force.

Kelly's Immortality. Martyrs' Day is up to 58 on Amazon.com.

"We are United States soldiers and we're here to protect you and take you home." More on the Lynch rescue.

Yale Profs on War. Donald Kagan has a new book coming out in May. Well, not entirely new. It's a one-volume abridgement of his classic of his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, The Archidamian War, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition, and The Fall of the Athenian Empire. The Peloponnesian War has much to teach us, and so does Kagan.



Victor Davis Hanson has a nice review in April's New Criterion, although the article is not online.

A rising star among military historians, Mary Habeck also has just had a book published (based on her Yale dissertation), The Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919-1939.


Worth a look if tanks are your thing.

Michael Kelly, RIP. I was saddened to learn of the death of columnist and editor Michael Kelly while reporting in Iraq. I looked forward to his columns in the WaPo--always insightful, sometimes angry (some obituaries are saying "caustic" and "savage"), but always well written. What I didn't know was that he was also a first-rate reporter. That had started to come out in his more recent columns, filed from the front lines, but I had no idea, for example, that he rose to fame as a reporter in the first Gulf War in 1991. I will soon (I hope) be reading his book on those experiences, Martyrs' Day. (The book, as of this writing, has climbed to 109 over at Amazon. It's unfortunate that many people will discover his writing now that he will produce no more.) I have also spent some time with those articles written back in 1991 for the New Republic. Some particularly stunning excerpts:

The one-sidedness could be seen in the air. In the nighttime raids, the anti-aircraft fire would begin a few minutes before the bombers came, in scenes of incandescent hysteria and beauty, the tracer shells tracking lovely curves, and Ss and parabolas of orange-red light against the backdrop of a blacked-out city skyline. Only every fifth or sixth shell was a tracer, which created a spacing that gave the ack-ack trails a pleasingly deliberate, almost lazy look. You could see the tracers hit their apogee and then explode in delicate bright-white starbursts, like the better sort of fireworks. You could hear the defense too, in a big sweeping wash of noise, the sharp staccato bursts of the lighter guns punctuated by the thuds of the big ones. ("Blitzed," TNR, February 11, 1991)

Captain Douglas Morrison, 31, of Westmoreland, New York, headquarters troop commander of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Division, is the ideal face of the new American Army. He is handsome, tall and fit, and trim of line from his Kevlar helmet to his LPCs (leather personnel carriers, or combat boots). He is the voice of the new American Army too, a crisp, assured mix of casual toughness, techno-idolatrous jargon, and nonsensical euphemisms -- the voice of delivery systems and collateral damage and kicking ass. It is Tom Clancy's voice, and the voice of the military briefers in Riyadh and Washington. ("Highway to Hell," TNR, April 1, 1991)

Ten days after what George Bush termed a cessation of hostilities, this road presented a perfectly clear picture of the nature of those hostilities. It was untouched except by scavengers. Bedouins had siphoned the gas tanks, and American soldiers were still touring through the carnage in search of souvenirs. A pack of lean and sharp-fanged wild dogs, white and yellow curs, swarmed and snarled around the corpse of one soldier. They had eaten most of his flesh. The ribs gleamed bare and white. Because, I suppose, the skin had gotten so tough and leathery from ten days in the sun, the dogs had eaten the legs from the inside out, and the epidermis lay in collapsed and hairy folds, like leg-shaped blankets, with feet attached. The beasts skirted the stomach, which lay to one side of the ribs, a black and yellow balloon. A few miles up the road, a small flock of great raptors wheeled over another body. The dogs had been there first, and little remained except the head. The birds were working on the more vulnerable parts of that. The dead man's face was darkly yellow-green, except where his eyeballs had been; there, the sockets glistened red and wet. ("Highway to Hell," TNR, April 1, 1991)

In the old bucolic days the concrete and corrugated tin barns held beasts. Now they hold humans treated like beasts. Each building has been divided into pens, with sheets of tin tied together with twine. The pens fill the barns and the people fill the pens. I counted twenty-three in one ten-by twenty-foot square. The refugees sleep in the pens, on worn and dirty blankets on the concrete floor; the children play in them; the women cook in them, on crude kerosene stoves that are tipsy on the uneven floor. The sick lie still, staring or sleeping, and the others fit themselves around them, in a squalid, squirming zigzag. Rain leaks through the roof and through the windows and doors that are covered only with plastic sheets. The air is fetid and close, rich with the stink of sweat and kerosene and the shit that is everywhere, and that peculiar smell of apple-sweet rottenness that emanates from the lungs and pores of the gravely ill. ("The Other Hell," TNR, May 13, 1991)

The world has lost a fine, fine reporter, whose gifts for describing the reality of war--in all its bloodiness, all its devastation, all its strange, unsettling beauty--were truly great. And because of his loss, the story of this current war will never be complete.

"Evil men triumph when good men do nothing." Writes columnist Jeff Jacoby to his six-year-old son:

The truth is, Caleb, if it weren't for war, you would not exist. In the spring of 1945, my father was near death in a Nazi concentration camp; he survived thanks to the bombs and bullets of the Allies, who managed to destroy Hitler before Hitler managed to destroy every Jew. Men with guns saved your family from extinction. Never forget that.

"Fighting to the Death." From the WaPo:

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

"She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."

They raise 'em right in places like West Virginia and Alabama and Kentucky. And train 'em right in places like Fort Bliss and Fort Lejeune.

"No longer credible forces. The Baghdad and Medina divisions of the Republican Guard have been broken. Let us hope that the same can soon be said for the rest.

She deserves every penny. West Virginia University is apparently offering financial assistance to Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued POW and WV native. Bravo to WVU. I hope they give her a full ride.

Quote of the Day. "Europeans are antiwar, but they are pro-commerce." --US Lt. Col. Duke Deluca, noting that mines cleared near Najaf had been made in Italy (from the NYT)

The Media and Iraq. In a NYT story today, citing a senior commander at CentCom: "Those who have lived for decades under what he called Mr. Hussein's totalitarian rule tend to discount, even distrust, American promises of liberation and relief aid." "What he called Mr. Hussein's totalitarian rule"? That description is only the source's opinion?

Idiot of the Day. Stephen Funk, who joined the Marine Reserves and is now seeking conscientious objector status. He had this to say: "War wasn't a part of it at all for me. I never even thought about it. I thought it would be like Boy Scouts." Something about the Marines' Hymn seems to stick in my mind...what is it...oh, yes: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,/We fight our country's battles in the air, on land and sea,/First to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean,/We are proud to claim the title of United States Marine." Maybe he was absent that day? And not only are his comments stupid, but they're offensive. Try telling a real Marine, especially one who has served, or is serving, in war, that the Marines are "like Boy Scouts." Those weren't Boy Scouts who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. They were men. They were soldiers. They were Marines. Mr. Funk would do well to heed these words from the Hymn: "In many a strife we've fought for life and never lost our nerve."

We owe them much, much more. But the least we can do for the dead is read their names and look at their faces. We owe them that much. And more.

The New Generation. Among other points about The American Way of War, Victor Davis Hanson says, "Criticisms of the present generation are misplaced. In fact, in this last decade of wars our youth shows signs of being the best fighting cohort of Americans since that of World War II." I have to concur. I myself have been quick to criticize this generation (my own). Having come of age in the boom years, the Clinton 90s, they've been accused of laziness and materialism, of apathy and selfishness. Called the MTV generation, they're said to have no sense of reality or sacrifice, to be obsessed with sex and vulgar music. If the 60s gave us Clinton and others like him, we are told, what leaders will the 90s leave us in twenty or thirty years? Some of this may be true; all of it might be true of some folks.

And yet members of this same generation, maybe 18 to 24 years old, fight for us on the other side of the world--and not simply fight, but fight hard and well. We read the news reports--these men and women are not lazy or materialistic; their understanding of freedom is not passive, and it does not imply license. They give of themselves to this country and to the Iraqi people. We read the names of the fallen, see their pictures. People just like us, just like me. People I might have gone to high school with. People younger than I, too, the freshmen we might have maligned as high school seniors. People it was easy to look down upon because they went to vo-tech to learn a trade, because they didn't want to, or couldn't, go to college. Now dead. For a noble cause. For God and country, for family and freedom. For us. For you. For me. The words that come to mind: Honor. Courage. Duty. Selflessness. A far cry from what we, and I, thought.

It's easy to criticize the young and to heap scorn upon them, and maybe we will always be critical of the youth of every generation. Maybe that's just what we do as a society to make sure the future is secure. No generation, and least of all this one, is beyond reproach. But with a generation that produces those brave men and women who fight for us the world over, we need not worry. The country's defense is in good hands, the best hands possible. Its future, though not certain, is promising. This generation makes it so. And, though I have a far lesser calling than those who serve us at home and abroad, I'm proud to be a part of it.

From Our Honored Dead. One of the most beautiful things I've read in a long, long time, the last letter home from Army Pfc. Diego Fernando Rincon, 19, who was killed in Saturday's suicide bombing in Iraq:

Hola Mother,

How are you doing? Good I hope. I'm doing OK I guess. I won't be able to write anymore starting the 28th of this month. We are moving out. We are already packed and ready to move to a tactical Alpha-Alpha (in Iraq). Once that happens, there will not be any mail sent out. We will only receive mail that is less than 12 ounces. At least that's what they said. I'm not sure where exactly we're going be at yet, but it is said to be a 20-hour drive in the Bradleys.

So I guess the time has finally come for us to see what we are made of, who will crack when the stress level rises and who will be calm all the way through it. Only time will tell. We are at the peak of our training and it's time to put it to the test.

I just want to tell everybody how much you all mean to me and how much I love you all. Mother, I love you so much! I'm not going to give up! I'm living my life one day at a time, sitting here picturing home with a small tear in my eyes, spending time with my brothers who will hold my life in their hands.

I try not to think of what may happen in the future, but I can't stand seeing it in my eyes. There's going to be murders, funerals and tears rolling down everybody's eyes. But the only thing I can say is, keep my head up and try to keep the faith and pray for better days. All this will pass. I believe God has a path for me. Whether I make it or not, it's all part of the plan. It can't be changed, only completed.

Mother will be the last word I'll say. Your face will be the last picture that goes through my eyes. I'm not trying to scare you, but it's reality. The time is here to see the plan laid out. And hopefully, I'll be at home in it. I don't know what I'm talking about or why I'm writing it down. Maybe I just want someone to know what goes through my head. It's probably good not keeping it all inside.

I just hope that you're proud of what I'm doing and have faith in my decisions. I will try hard and not give up. I just want to say sorry for anything I have ever done wrong. And I'm doing it all for you mom. I love you.

P.S. Very Important Document.

Your son,

Diego Rincon

How people, now and in the past, could not support these men and women, how they could spit on and curse them, I will never, ever know.

The Long View. An EXCELLENT piece on history and life during wartime, on the necessity (sometimes) of war and of this war, on the struggle for freedom. One reason this war is right:

[A}ctivist Susan Sarandon...asked, "I want to know what Iraq has done to us." There are two reasons to fight this war. One is so that History will never be able to answer that question. I don't ever want to read about the VX attacks that left 16,000 dead at Atlanta Hartsfield airport. I don't want to see the video of makeshift morgues inside the LA Coliseum as more anthrax victims are emptied from the hospitals. And I don’t want to look at helicopter shots of a blackened, radioactive crater where Times Square used to be, or of millions of dead bodies burning in funeral pyres, like columns of failure, dead from starvation and disease in the worldwide depression that such an attack on New York would produce.

But he author also goes deeper and puts things in historical perspective. He writes of his trip to Civil War battlefields some years ago, and especially of his visit to Gettysburg. This is an excursion I myself have dreamed of making someday--packing the bags and Shelby Foote's trilogy and heading south, and hitting all possible sites. Antietam. Bull Run. Appomattox. Fredericksburg. Cold Harbor, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania. Shiloh. Kennesaw Mountain. It takes a history major, or Civil War buff, to dream such things, but I've often imagined making this tour on my honeymoon (long in the future as it might be). I'll make the trip eventually, but finding the woman willing to spend her honeymoon at Civil War battlefields--that's another story.

But Gettysburg's battlefield I have frequently walked, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain has been one of my favorite Americans and, quite truthfully, one of my heroes for some time, probably since I saw Gettysburg. I wrote an essay about him in eighth grade, arguing that he saved the Union at Gettysburg. My adolescent mind might have taken the point a bit far, but he did much for the cause of Union and freedom, as Whittle points out. He did much, indeed, in the face of tremendous adversity, against the odds. The movie makes this point well, especially when, low on ammunition, Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) orders the bayonet charge. Chills still shoot down my spine when he shouts, "BAYONETS!!!" (How many times I've replayed that scene, I don't know.) On my last venture to the battlefield, now two summers ago, I specifically sought out the 20th Maine's position. After hiking around the Round Tops, my friends and I finally came upon the marker of the 20th's actual position, which is set back deeper into the woods than the larger, more impressive monument to the regiment. Two small, simple pieces of stone mark the left and right of the position. "20th ME. INF'Y, EVENING, JULY 2." And you just stand their, in awe really, knowing that there, the extreme Union left, hinged the fate of the battle and maybe the war. Brave men fought and died there, and a brave man--a professor--led there.

Today more brave men (and women now) again fight for freedom, for this country, for us. In many ways, it's an old story for Americans. Americans have been there before, at home and abroad, fighting and dying for freedom. Concludes Whittle:

But of one thing I am absolutely certain. Despite all the switches in the rail yard, there is a flow and a direction to history that cannot and will not be denied.

It is the slow, uneven, grasping climb toward freedom. There are markers on Little Round Top, on the beaches at Normandy, and in the sands of Nasiriyah that show us where men have fought and laid down their lives, and willingly left their wives without husbands and their children without fathers, all for this idea. It is an idea bigger than they are, bigger than self-centered movie stars, bigger than cynical and bitter journalists, bigger than Presidents and Dictators, bigger, in fact than all human failure and miscalculation.

It is the idea that people--all people--deserve to live their lives in freedom. Free from fear. Free from want. Free from despair and hatred.

My country has, again, taken up that banner, and the behavior of our young men and women under unimaginable stress and provocation have filled me with fierce and unremitting pride. We fight, nearly alone, alongside old and true friends, British and Australian, themselves decent and honorable people, long champions of freedom who have their own Waterloos and Gallipolis and cemeteries marked with fields of red poppies, rolls of sacrifice and honor that should fill all American hearts with pride. For friends like this are worth having, and I will always prefer the company of one or two solid, dependable friends over legions of fashionable and trendy and unreliable ones.

And someday, centuries from now, in the world we all hope for but which only a few will fight for, all of this death and destruction will be gone. All that will be left will be small markers in green fields that were once deserts, places where Iraqi families may walk someday with the same taken-for-granted sense of happiness and security I had in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

And perhaps they will read the strange-sounding names, and try to imagine a time when it was all in doubt.

It's long, but read the whole thing.

Stupider Like a Fox? Sparked by an NPR story saying, "Life imitates art, if you can call a Fox prime-time TV show 'art,'" Lileks has the goods on the FNC Iraqi Freedom logo, and on the general decline of The Simpsons. Plus, he has this great observation:

Perhaps most accurate metaphor for this war occurs whenever the news runs a feed from an Arabic language station. Our crawl runs in one direction; theirs runs in the other. You almost expect the crawls to twine like DNA and start fighting - and in that case, the English language would lose. Arabic is so spiky. However lovely the poetic sentiments might be, it still looks like knives and swords to me.

I'd never thought of it before, but Arabic does look like knives and swords.

The Human Side of War. There's so much going on in Iraq right now that it's difficult to keep apace--the troop movements, the skirmishes, the bombardments. Of course, that's important and interesting stuff, particularly to a student of military history, as I consider myself to be. But I've found myself, at least in recent days, most captivated, and most moved, by the stories about the "human" side of things--the interactions between US troops and Iraqi civilians. These accounts are important since so much of our strategy is based upon being greeted as the liberators we want to be (and are). But they are also fascinating in what they tell us both about the Iraqi people and our own troops.

For example, there were several articles in the NYT today covering the Iraqi civilians: "Warily, Iraqis Get Acquainted With Marines" and "US Troops Meet Iraqis Peacefully" and "Candies and Aspirin for Those Who Fled Their Embattled City".

The depth and, at the same time, the simplicity of these folks (mostly Shiites thus far) and their feelings toward the US are striking. On one hand, they are somewhat wary of the United States--not, it seems, out of the "usual" Arab-world resentment over imagined oppression at the hands of so-called imperialists, but because of the US's turning its back on the Shiite revolt in 1991. The fear of being abandoned once again, or the notion that the US won't "finish the job" this time around, appears in several of the articles. One young Iraqi said, "If the Americans want to get rid of Saddam, that's OK with me. The only thing that would bother me is if they don't finish the job. Then Saddam will come back, like he did in 1991." On the other hand, these people--long oppressed, long suffering--just want the most basic of things: food and water, medical treatment, their water pumps fixed. Said one of our boys: "These people don't care about Saddam Hussein. They just care about getting by." Securing the support of Iraqis will no doubt require more than candy and Tylenol. But it seems that many positive strides can be made simply be re-assuring these people that we have come to liberate them, that we will finish the job, that we will not, or ever again, turn our backs on them. Their support and trust won't and can't be won overnight. But these small things, laid as a foundation for larger efforts to come, shouldn't be underestimated

A final word concerning our troops: It goes almost with saying that the success of the liberation, and its reception, depends upon them. The picture of our soldiers that has consistently emerged is one of caring and humane people, selfless and giving. In short, exactly what we have come to expect from our men and women in uniform. They know their mission. Almost without fail, those who are asked realize that they are liberating an oppressed people, that that is their task. They take time to listen to the Iraqis, to fix their broken water pumps, to provide medical care--all while the threat of suicide bombers and soldiers disguised as civilians looms. They give their own food to the Iraqi people, even at the risk that they might go hungry should they get lost in the desert (as two soldiers recently did). Much depends upon them, as it always has. And, like always, we have no reason to doubt them and the success of their mission.

At War Post-a-Note. If you haven't done so, check out NRO's page of pictures and messages from friends and family of our troops. It's almost overwhelming.

Coalition of the Whining. About pessimists in the media and elsewhere, Mark Steyn is right on target, as usual.

Civilian casualties? So low that Western correspondents in Baghdad can personally visit each one.

The seething ''Arab street''? The sleeping giant that Anglo-American imperialism would supposedly provoke? The largest Arab demonstration to date was a fifth the size of the last anti-American protest in London. When the Arab street is more somnolent than a leafy Wimbledon cul-de-sac, you can safely disregard it.

The ferocious Republican Guard? Broken down into free-lance urban commando units, apparently. Not a good idea. You can't turn an orchestra into 40 soloists.

Iraqi TV's still on the air? Great. Why take it out when it provides the best window on Saddam's physical well-being, or lack thereof?

Humanitarian catastrophe? Oh, come on, you guys tried that in ''the brutal Afghan winter,'' and it was all hooey back then.

They'd just love for this to turn into another Vietnam, wouldn't they?

Rallying for the Troops. In Miami. In Cleveland. In Honolulu. In Louisville. Near Savannah. In Jacksonville. A big one in Harrisburg. Even in San Francisco. It warms my heart, it really does.

Supreme Command. "President Keeps the Battlefield Close at Hand," reports the NYT. The President asks the write questions, watches the news reports, and receives daily three-hour briefings. On the decisions of March 19:

With his closest advisers surrounding him, Mr. Bush spoke to General Franks and the other commanders in the field by videoconference and asked each if they had everything they needed to win. Then the president gave the order, an administration official said, concluding with "may God bless the troops."

"May God bless America," General Franks replied, as Mr. Powell, the chairman of the joint chiefs during the first gulf war, reached out and lightly touched the president's hand...