American Dreams

American Troops Can Handle a Ground War in Kosovo

-- if American Politicians Let Them

by Robin Miller

G21 Irregular

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I'm going to tell you a dirty little secret about the U.S. Army: many of the people in it want a war in Kosovo.

The Generals at the top -- the ones you see on TV with grave faces and stars on their shoulders -- may talk publicly in ponderous tones about "entanglements" and "unsustainable missions," but inside the heads behind those grave faces, and in the hearts between those star-spangled shoulders, internal voices are saying, "Let's quit fucking around and go kick some Serb ass! I want to go killa whole lot of those sorry Serb motherfuckers and personally stick a .45 in that Milosevic asshole's mouth and pull the fucking trigger!"

It's not just the Generals saying this. In fact, I heard the above statement, verbatim, from the mouth of a mild-mannered Army reservist I'll call "Ron," who earns his full-time living retouching 19th century photographs on a 17" computer monitor.

Ron was in the Gulf War, and it was the most exciting time of his life. He was a crewman on a med-evac helicopter, which is one of the most hazardous jobs you can have in the whole Army, and Ron knows that if he goes to Kosovo, he'll be in mortal danger on every dustoff mission, not just from enemy fire, but from the essentially hazardous nature of anylow-and-slow helicopter flying in rough terrain.

I'm not using Ron's real name because he doesn't want his wife, or most of his friends and coworkers, to know that he actually enjoyedwar so much that he wants more of it. He's only comfortable sharing his bloodthirsty feelings with guys like his uncle and me, who he feels will understand them -- because we've felt them ourselves.

The Army and Marines are, by definition, run and populated by men who long for excitement, and there is no excitement in the peacetime military, where combat arms units spend days on end shooting at human-shaped targets with assorted weapons, practice torniqueting stumps of severed limbs, learn how to avoid artillery fire while driving various vehicles, and take part in "war games" where they practice "command and control" scenarios in which every commissioned officer is killed or wounded, and low-level enlisted men must do all their own planning and thinking without help.

Soldiers learn how to put bodies in body bags with one dog tag clamped between a corpse's teeth and the other one -- the one on the short chain -- chained around the corpse's ankle.

I learned how to correctly place dog tags on a corpse myself -- and I've done it in real life more than once. So have Ron and his uncle.

I'm 46, and haven't been in the Army for a good while, but if I was ordered to go to Kosovo, I would. I would kill Serbs without a second thought. And I would probably never admit it to anyone except a few fellow soldiers, but I would enjoy going to war.

After putting your life on the line, and surviving a human enemy's attempts to kill you, nothing else really seems to matter. I can say this safely, since by the time the Army got around to calling up someone my age, in my physical condition, we'd be doing some real barrel-bottom scraping. But Ron will almost certainly be sent to Kosovo if we get into a ground war there, and he looks forward to a war's thrill more than he fears being killed in action.

Note that I portray war as essentially a male activity. You can put all the women in the military you want, but it will be men who lead the actual fighting, and other men who do almost all of it.

This is another military secret: that when all is said and done, no matter what laws are passed by Congress, and no matter how many civilian commentators say women are equal to men in every way, ground combat will still be a man's job, not a woman's.

If I am making the Army and Marines out to be a bunch of sick, war-loving misogynists, that's too damn bad. Military men aren't supposed to be sensitivity-trained peace-lovers who walk around saying, "Can't we work this out instead of fighting about it?" We pay them, and train them, to kill our country's enemies on command, at all hours of the day and night, however they can, and we expect them to calmly accept the risk that they, themselves, might be killed at any moment by an enemy soldier whose attitude is no different from their own.

The only thing that can hamper the U.S. Military in ground combat -- other than running up against a superior force, which is unlikely in today's world -- is a political holdback. It is not fair to ask soldiers to risk their lives for fuzzy goals like those we had in Iraq, Vietnam, and Somalia, and now seem to have in Kosovo.

The expression, "unleash the dogs of war," is apt. Once you set a hound on a scent, it's hard to pull him back until he's located its source, and you run the risk of destroying his morale if you do.

Indeed, Ron's only worry about going to war in Kosovo is that "...we won't be allowed to finish the fucking job, just like we pulled out of Somalia when we should have got revenge for the Marines they killed, and the way we pulled back and left Saddam alive when we should have wiped his ass all over the desert before we went home."

Robin Miller doesn't often discuss, and almost never writes about, his own experiences in the U.S. Army, in which he served with neither great distinction nor any visible enthusiasm.

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