(The interior of the al Firdos District Command and Control (C3) Bunker in Baghdad on the second anniversary of the strike. The big hole in the roof was opened up by one of the two Guided Bomb Units (GBU-27 PAVEWAY III laser-guided munitions) on Feb 13, 1991. The impeccably executed strike we learned the next morning was on a C3 target that also served as a local air raid shelter).

There has been a growing fondness between legal counsel Amanda and the Old Salts and venerable Ladies at the Fire Ring at Refuge Farm. Amanda was charged with keeping the group out of trouble after the government announced it was going to prosecute retired military personnel for being critical of members of the establishment they had served.

The Chairman had decided that assigning Amanda to keep an eye on us would be enough to keep his organization out of trouble. That may have reflected a part of the Lawfare that infests all sorts of things in our nation. This morning there was news about nuisance suits being funded by private parties to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to sue Government to get pre-determined results determined by shopping for the judge with the correct orientation to deliver the desired ruling.

Splash laughed from his comfortable rock “I am a disabled veteran with injuries suffered by ejecting out of defective airplanes. Maybe I should sue McDonald-Douglas and not have to live in the Bunk House.”

Loma frowned, still serious about the original topic. “It doesn’t work that way. Mickie-Dee has a battalion of attorneys ready to claim it was your improper operation of a wonderful and reliable wartime tool that made you reach down for the lower handle of the Martin-Baker ejection seat instead of reaching upward for the preferred initiation of the rocket located directly under your butt to punch you through the elegantly crafted canopy.”

“So, you ae saying that trying to sue someone with more resources would just bankrupt me and not them?”

“If one of them happens to have an inexhaustible reservoir of lawyers.” Rocket shook his head and rose slowly to get more coffee. “You have heard that the fighter community of aviators has been reporting cancer in dramatically higher levels than ordinary people who don’t strap themselves within a couple feet of an extremely high-power radar system endlessly sweeping the skies ahead of them?”

“Unintended consequences, we are told. Plus, you had the same rocket under your butt that Splash had to use, correct procedure or not.”

“See the confusion? PTSD.”

There was general laughter to that, since the original term for the mental and spiritual impact of surviving a traumatic event was more accurate.

“You mean ‘Shell Shock?’ Or “Combat Fatigue?” I had a buddy I worked with in the last Balkans fight. He got a chance to visit Kosovo after the air campaign and see some of the results of his planning handiwork and target analysis close up. You know, dropped bridges, smashed barracks. He said it gave him an idea of how many people got killed as a result of his expertise. It made him think about what he had been part of. He said it was a sort of PTSD. Mild, since it hadn’t been close up. But real.”

“Yeah, I felt the same way after we took the planning results for a great target in Iraq all the way up to the Chairman and the SECDEF. We had great intelligence on the place, the construction blueprint, all the elements to plan the right weapons to use and all that stuff. Both of those senior officials and their horse-holders had been pleased with the precision of the effort. Then, the next day we had to explain the part we missed.”

“What was that?”

“It was filled up with family members of the regime who thought it was a safe place.”

“Jeeze.”

Melissa sat back, knowing a little more about the complexities of some of the ordinary experience of being female in this world than the grizzled old guys. “I read one of the Washington Post reporters said she had PTSD from some of the mean tweets she got after revealing the home address of someone she didn’t like in the newspaper.”

“I think maybe we ought to stop using that term and restrict it to people who have actually had to walk up to the line of death and work there for a while.”

“Remember our pal who wound up being like the second-to-last Yank on the ground in South Vietnam and trying to figure out how the hell to get out of there before the North Vietnamese tank column arrived?”

“That would be enough for me,” said Melissa. Everyone else who had been in the business of administering lethal force looked thoughtful for a minute.

Loma suggested we go back to using “Shell Shock,” since being encompassed by the blast of high explosive didn’t require a lot of qualification to it. “Besides,” he said. “We ought to have another term for the results of bad decision-making that don’t involve direct kinetic-induced concussion.”

DeMille was eager to get on with building the open-source information Weather Report for the week, so we got on with all the other stuff that has people pretty worked up already. “The first Ukrainian corn export made it to a port in Romania,” said Buck hopefully. “They had to ship it by train, so it was a good news story. Some corn made it out of the country.”

“That doesn’t sound like a bunch of good news, considering it is only one ship-load and you can take a train out in all sorts of ways.” That was Loma, whose specialty had once been a thing called ‘Targets That Count.’ He sometimes joked that it was better than the ones that didn’t, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way.

“It is a complex business. It gets even more complicated when one of the factors is to ensure that it makes a simple blunt kinetic statement with minimal collateral damage.”

“Maybe that is what we ought to call ‘mean tweets.’ There is plenty of shock to go around. Does anyone see how we can get to some kind of peace? I’d like to go back to ordinary trauma rather than be part of someone else’s collateral.”

There was general agreement on that point, but a growing sense that we might be seeing something emerging from the violence that was going to shock us all. Even the ones who had done some shocking things on their own.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com