Dresden and Hiroshima? Examples of how, when we've had to, we've been willing to do what had to be done to defeat the enemy.
Victor Davis Hanson has this to say about the recent phenomenon of the US trying to "out-nice" our enemies:
We should accept that they are at war with us and cease the intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice that makes us worry about bombing during Ramadan in Afghanistan while our religious enemies seek to inaugurate these same holidays with the murders of Americans.
When you are at war and you care more about the sanctity of your enemies' religious holidays than they do, you are in serious trouble.
Emphasis mine.
With that in mind, consider this chilling message from another source:
There exist ways to compensate for such [intelligence] limitations, to be sure, but an army that would court-martial Lieutenant-Colonel Allen West for scaring a prisoner into a confession with a harmless pistol shot does not have the stomach for them.
If our commitment to the war on terror is less than our aversion to necessary tools of victory, we will most certainly lose.
UPDATE: And now I read the story of CPT Hornbuckle...who is evidently as legitimate war hero as SGT York or Audie Murphy...but his name is unknown to us, while that of PFC Lynch is known to everyone. Why is that? Well, we don't have a stomach for war...and we have come to somehow revere "victims", says this article:
Asked why the Army didn't do more to publicize Capt. Hornbuckle's feats, Richard Olson, a public-affairs officer for Capt. Hornbuckle's battalion, says the thought never occurred to him. "An aspect of a soldier is that he's trained to kill," he says. "And I don't know that the public is comfortable with that."
"There's a funny shift," says John A. Lynn, who teaches military history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We want to fight wars but we don't want any of our people to die and we don't really want to hurt anybody else.
I've kept my mouth shut about Ms. Lynch's book...but from an old soldier's perspective well, here goes.
I appreciate her honesty in not taking credit for things she didn't do. But that must then focus us on what she did do.
In various interviews and book excerpts we have learned that the "gun jammed", that she "never fired a shot" and that she "dropped to her knees and prayed".
A Soldier is a part of the team. The team is only as strong, to use the cliche, as it's weakest member. Every Soldier is a rifleman first. Every Soldier is trained in "immediate action drills" to correct a weapon jam. Any Soldier will tell you the number one cause of a jam is failure to maintain the weapon properly...to keep it cleaned and serviced.
I wasn't there. I've never been in a firefight. I may be as wrong as it is possible to be.
But if I'm on a team in a firefight and a team member fails to maintain a weapon and that weapon jams and that team member is incapable of the simple steps to clear the jam...if that team member does nothing to engage the enemy and contribute to saving the team...well, that team member is, to say the least, not helpful...and is in fact a detriment to the team.
My point: it seems a bit unseemly in my mind to be publicly rolling in the dough as a result of one's inaction which may have contributed to the deaths of other Soldiers on that team.
To criticise the Army as "manipulating" the story of the rescue and "using" you...to go on TV show after TV show...to publish a book, to authorize a movie...and the implication of your best message is "I failed as a rifleman when my fellow Soldiers most needed a capable rifleman" is unseemly.
Forgive me if you disagree with me. See my caveats above. But an instinct born of a lotta years in uniform leads me to these conclusions.
Go read the story of CPT Hornbuckle...a soldier's hero.
(thanks Smash, for the lead).
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