25 March 2003

Hot 'Lanta

I am up and a half hour into the war. I have reviewed the NY Times and am current with the BBC and swelling up with information from National Public Radio.

There was a massive fight-fight on the front of the Custer's Seventh Cavalry, hundreds of Iraqis are reported killed in action. No U.S. casualties are reported. The body-count is swelling by the minute, and it is either true or a manifestation of Vietnam syndrome, the inclination to find good news anywhere in the face of adversity.

The media is publishing a box-score now, of the Allied dead and captured. The Brits are even with us, 20 and 20, despite the relative imbalance in the size of the force they contributed. Iraqi State TV has popped back on the air after a brief shutdown inflicted by heavy bombing of its headquarters last night. They are broadcasting patriotic songs, pictures of the great leader and a parade of newsreaders in military uniforms.

I am not as groggy as I could be but slightly out of sorts. I am back from a quick trip down south. I left Monday, late afternoon and was ensconced in the Emory Inn in Buckhorn not long after nine PM. There was a time when I would have headed out to the student haunts, the $2 Dollar Cafe and the rest of the campus hot spots, but decided that rest away from the capital was the better part of valor. I wound up watching Ted Kopple describe a hiatus in the great sandstorm and life with the 3rd Infantry Division (Mech) south of the Karbala Gap and the Republican Guard Medina Division. It was quite a juxtaposition. In a normal world I was used to tuning in to Kopple's Nightline to see what he thought about what the government was up to. Now he was part of the news himself, embedded in it, in his desert-camouflage coat.

I was in Georgia for a day's meetings with officials in Atlanta, Georgia, the great communications and rail hub of the South. Part of the trip involved driving around the metro region to look at facilities. A building inspection, if you will. The area is exactly like everywhere else these days, strip mall of Old Navy and Staples and Starbucks. They seem to have a regular life cycle, too, the older strips going downscale in business and eventually to forlorn vacancy and the opportunity for ultimate renewal. Back home they want to build strip malls on the Chancellorsville Battlefield, the County Commission fight the third one over the placid green fields. I can no longer tell any of our cities apart, unless there are mountains that loom in the distance.

There is one here, the great looming bulk of Stone Mountain. There is something else, too, and that is the memory of Sherman and the great burning. It didn't come up until mid-afternoon, riding in a Government van past a Walmart Super Store that could have been exactly anywhere. I don't know if it was the urban sprawl or the war, but our host and guide mentioned the first great destruction of modern war. Sherman had been cut loose from the war in the upper south and directed to bisect what remained of the Confederacy. He marched in a wheeling series of engagements to the southeast, eventually to the sea. He brought no logistics with him, living off the land, pillaging the wealth of the countryside as he came.

When he got to the hub of Atlanta he was methodical, almost unemotional as he decided to shock and awe the people of the South. He was determined to break their spirit and he burned the heart of the city to ashes, Atlanta burning bright, the original Hot 'Lanta. The fires burned so hot they melted the steel of the railroad tracks into pretzels. Then Sherman marched on, right to the sea.

Shock and awe lives here, even in the strip malls. Even in a gentle Southern cadence they say Sherman's name as an epithet. Makes you think, it does. I have listened to the pundits talk about the post-war Iraq, just like our kids have already dug the zealots out of their holes in front of Baghdad. I wonder if the pundits have a plan for strip malls in Basra?