29 March 2003

Operational Pause

I am headed for the office this moist rich Saturday morning. I did not got my full shot of news all at once, instead it trickled in around the sides, filling up with the caffeine. Snippets instead of a tapestry and I cannot bring myself to turn on the television this early. It is the weekend for many people and the radio is playing music instead of the BBC. I get only snippets at the top of the hour. A car bomb has killed five Marines, a suicide attack on a check point in the south, men dressed as civilians in the vehicle driving up and then "boom," just like in Israel.

The ground force is taking a breather out in the Gulf, or that is what the top-of-the-hour claims. There is a nod to the emerging pandemic of the flu-like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. So far there are no deaths in America, but there are a number of cases. The death rate worldwide is around four percent. Which sounds like a small amount, but if 100,000 people got it, a minuscule percentage of the population, that is more dead than in the Trade Towers. The great Influenza Epidemic of 1919 killed about the same percent. Everybody got it, near about, and the death toll was 12,000 in America alone. There will be more on that story, and goodness knows what will happen if it gets loose in the Gulf. Other things are loose there. A SCUD fell on an upscale mall in Kuwait City, a haphazard gift of the wacky Iraqis despot, and somebody at the top of the hour said our boys and girls are "taking the gloves off" in the Gulf, and there is either an operational pause or there is not, depending on who you listen to.

I assume that a journalist who is assigned to a unit that is digging in, rather than driving along, would know the differences, but I am one of the ultimate Rear-Echelon Mother Fuckers (or REMFS, as they used to call those who skimmed the best supplies off the supply chain). Some are claiming that there will be something spectacular after the pause and some are saying there is going to be spectacle right through.

I have not idea why you would try to fight with gloves on, not after they found the blood-soaked fragments of a US Army uniform in the "hospital" with the chemical suits and the automobile battery next to the cot where Saddam’s Fedaheen apparently conducted medical experiments. More troops are flowing forward from the States, all part of The Plan according to the Secretary of Defense, nothing to be concerned about.

I get the strangest feeling that I have lived this all before. Only it seemed like it took longer the last time. This seems to be analogous to the Vietnam era, only each year is compressed into a single twenty-four hour news cycle. The boisterous enthusiasm of the first day or so, the demonstration of Shock-and-Awe, the sudden disillusionment, the horror at the prisoners, demonstrators taking a harder and harder edge at home, the treacherous acts of regional neighbors and sometimes friends.

Must be a function of the information age, this all-war, all-the-time on CNN. Even more pervasive than the last Gulf conflict. Seems like we have been rocketed from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the Tet Offensive in a single week. But the past, even when it is accelerated and distilled, is only prologue. They arrested some Iraqis in Amman, Jordan, who seemed to have an interest in a hotel where Americans stay. There are reports that volunteers to help Saddam are starting to stream into Iraq from the West, and the infamous Badr Corps, the Iranian-sponsored legion of Iraqi dissidents, have been seen to the East.

Secretary Powell was quite stern with both directions yesterday.

I don’t know who in their right mind would be headed into Iraq now. But of course that is probably the point, isn’t it?

I need an operational pause right here. I have an apartment to clean up and shirts to buy or I can’t get through the week. I won't get to the dry-cleaners until another Saturday flies by and that is just the way it goes. Life during wartime, even for REMFs.