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23 October 2008 If... If only AOL had not done something to their version of webmail, I could insert a picture of the smoking hole where the Marine Barracks near the International Airport in Beirut had been, 25 years and a few minutes ago. I don’t know what they are up to. The new look is blue, the way things used to be, but clearly something is very different and I am not used to the feel of it. It was that way with many things. I had been part of the great military circus that attended the birth of the Iranian Revolution a few years before, and missed the debacle of DESERT ONE by a few months. I was headed west again when it happened, in San Francisco, passing through on the way to Seoul, and still remember a phone booth and piles of coins on the little stainless ledge trying to find out what had happened and who had died. A year or more in the land of the Morning Calm distracted me from the bad guys- the real ones- since the Northerners were bad enough in their own way. They killed some of us, from time to time, which served to remind us that they had once killed an awful lot of Americans along with their Chinese pals. If only we had managed to figure it out, the thing about the Iranians. They are smart and energetic and quite ruthless. They had a clever idea, quite Persian, which was to use others to do their dirty work while they were occupied in the war with Iraq- what they called the Imposed War that they believed the United States had instigated. Maybe we did. I was elsewhere, and far to junior to know anything about it. They gambled that the Shia malcontents in Lebanon could do something to make the Paper Tiger go away, and they were right. Those 241 Marines and the 58 French Legionnaires died that Sunday and are still un-avenged. If only we had done something. It was a Sunday morning then in the eastern Mediterranean. I was half a world away, in Hawaii. I have no recollection of the event, which suggests to me that I may have been doing something on Saturday night with a new family. It must have been an accomplished fact by the time my watch rotation came around again. Which happened in real life, too. It was six years later before I was planning my own strikes on the Syrian-sponsored Hezballah camps in the Bekaa Valley, following the twisting roads up from the coat into the rugged hills, estimating the aim points for the cruise missiles. We didn’t do anything at the time, nor would we. I often wonder how many have died since because we did not. I had to think about the Rudyard Kipling poem this morning, or the rhyme about the nail in the horses shoe that brought down the kingdom. Kipling had it mostly right, though the conventional wisdom of his Empire did not survive the fields of France: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or, being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise… The poem goes on a few more stanzas, and is a bit sugary for today’s ironic world. It is quite touching in its way, and is about the wisdom a father imparts to his son. It is wisdom distilled from an age of confidence. They say that Kipling was not the same man after his son was killed in France in the First One. I don’t blame him. He was old then, and I am not sure how I could survive if something happened to my guys. The problem is that it is the things we did not do could very well wind up being the undoing of us all. Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra |