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Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

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Writing about the madness of war reminded me of my first months as a second lieutenant in the Army. I was stationed at Fort Benning, the “Home of the Infantry,” to attend the Infantry School, a beginner course for lieutenants destined for platoon commands.

If you drove onto the post, located on the edge of Columbus, Georgia, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. The first thing you saw was a gigantic wooden thermometer with its red indicator almost to the top, indicating 99 percent participation in the United Way fund drive on the post. Then came immaculately groomed grass along the sides of the road and sidewalks lined with white painted rocks and headquarters buildings with American flags flapping atop white flagpoles and platoons of trainees in fatigues and spit-shined combat boots marching in formation along the roadsides.

Looking at Fort Benning’s obsessive neatness and the discipline of the troops and the neatly lined-up vehicles in the motor pools, you would be forgiven if you forgot that the war in Vietnam was raging thousands of miles away across half a continent and the Pacific Ocean.

Beneath the placid surface of things at Fort Benning and outside its gates, however, things were coming apart. In June, Life magazine had published its ground-breaking cover story, “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Inside were 10 pages of the photographs and names of 242 American soldiers who had been killed in a single week in Vietnam. Local papers around the country had been publishing photos of the boys from the small towns who had been killed as the deaths were announced, but this was the first time photographs of the war dead had been collected in a single place, and it was stunning.

It was as if the editors at Time-Life in New York City had finally decided to take a stand against the war. The dead were 19 years old, or 25, a few were in their 30’s, but their faces looked impossibly young. In the coming months and years, the Life cover with the faces of the dead would mark a turning point in support for the war. Richard Nixon, who had run for president saying he had a “secret plan” to end the war, had been in office only a few months, but even by then it was obvious there was no plan. We were losing the war in Vietnam, and more people were realizing that nearly every day.

On the post at Fort Benning, life went on as normal. At the Infantry School, we marched to and from classrooms and training areas with student platoon leaders marching alongside their platoons calling out the defiant cadence of the young and the doomed:

If I die in a combat zone

Box me up and ship me home

Tell my girl I done my best!

Lay my medals across my chest

Lay my body six foot down

Until you hear it touch the ground!

We rode in deuce-and-a-half trucks to the firing range; we spent rainy nights soaked to the skin on training maneuvers; we studied how to formulate mission statements and ops orders in classrooms in old World War II-era wooden buildings; we ate C-rations in the field and cold sandwiches and Cokes from food trucks on the post. Nobody talked about Vietnam. Nobody had orders yet; soldiers would be sent to brief stateside assignments, and then they’d get orders. It was far away in the future, the war, months away at least.

We read in the papers that in May, a great victory had been won at Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. A battalion from the 101st Airborne Division had driven a large unit of the North Vietnamese Army from a hilltop in the A Sau Valley near the border with Laos. The battle was part of the famed, or infamous, “search and destroy” tactics in the war, where U.S. army units basically went out into the boonies until they encountered the enemy and fought them. The battle of Hamburger Hill was supposed to interdict North Vietnamese supply routes into Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Back home, there were hints, rumblings that all was not well. Just before we graduated West Point in June, the Academy administration did something it had never done before. They brought a group of young officers back from the war, straight to West Point, and put on a panel in an auditorium to talk to my entire class about what it was like to be a young officer in combat.

During questions after their presentation, which could charitably be described as dispirited, someone I was sitting near asked about stories in the paper about drug use among soldiers over there. One of the older officers, I think he was a captain or a major, said the stories were false, liberal propaganda against the war. When the panel was over, one of the second lieutenants came down the steps from the stage straight over to where the questioner was sitting. A bunch of us gathered around as he said they had been ordered to deny stories of drug use, but it was a lie. Drug use was rampant in Vietnam he told us, sotto voce. Believe the papers, not the army.

One day at Fort Benning, I ran into a classmate at the PX and we stopped to talk. He told me something strange had happened recently. He was sharing an apartment off-post with another lieutenant he had found advertising for a roommate on a bulletin board somewhere. A few days before as he and his roommate were getting ready to drive onto the post, his roommate had been arrested by the MP’s and taken away. He didn’t know what for, and he hadn’t seen his roommate since. I asked him what the guy's name was. “Rusty Calley,” he answered. I forgot about it, writing it off as some goof who was probably picked up for coming on to a colonel’s wife at a bar and run out of the army.

It wouldn’t be until November that Seymour Hersh’s stories about the massacre at My Lai hit the press. We were gone from Fort Benning by then.

There were rumblings in my student company at the Infantry School as well. A few weeks into the course, they started putting pressure on us to contribute to the United Fund drive. The battalion commander was demanding 100 percent participation. Just for the hell of it, a friend and I drove down to the United Fund offices after getting off that afternoon. We asked to see something that told us how the United Fund money was being used in the Columbus community. They gave us a list of organizations – Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, a small community theater group, that sort of thing.

We checked the United Fund documents we were given and saw that four Boy Scout troops were getting funds, a thousand dollars or something like that. We found the number for the local Boy Scouts office and learned that there were eight scout troops in the town. We went back to the United Fund and asked why four Boy Scout troops were getting United Fund money, but four weren’t. Unabashed, they told us those were the Black scout troops. We looked a little further into what the United Fund supported and what it didn’t and found that no Black organizations in Columbus received United Fund support.

The next day, we got our student company commander, who was Black, to announce to the whole company at morning formation that no money from the United Fund was going to Black organizations in Columbus. The United Fund was nakedly racist. He said he wasn’t contributing to the United Fund. We spread the word that we weren’t either. A few days later, the battalion commander came down and said only one guy in the company had contributed to the United Fund. Our lunch hour was canceled and we were marched over to an old World War II-era movie theater.

We were all seated when a major walked out on the stage and announced that Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the hero of Hamburger Hill, would be addressing us on why we should contribute to the United Fund. He was on some kind of tour giving speeches around the country to counter the bad reviews the battle of Hamburger Hill was getting in the press. With that, Honeycutt, a rather squat figure with a crewcut and thick neck in starched fatigues, strode across the stage into the spotlight. He made some short remarks about the big win at Hamburger Hill and then launched into a speech about discipline and morale and good order and how an army wasn’t an army unless everyone was on the same page, and on he went with boilerplate we had all heard a dozen times at West Point. And then he ended by banging on the podium and telling us that we wouldn’t be able to be good combat commanders unless we followed orders and gave to the United Fund!

The place erupted in applause. Honeycutt took it as applause for him and his speech, but the major who had introduced him got it that we were applauding for another reason. He signaled to Honeycutt from the wings to cut it short, but Honeycutt ignored the major and growled, “Questions, gentlemen?” There was a long silence, and then the guy sitting next to me, Strosher, got to his feet.

Strosher was a former sergeant who had been given a battlefield commission to first lieutenant two months previously in Vietnam because he had been the only guy in the 25th Infantry Division to blow an ambush in a year. Yes, that means exactly what you think it does. Soldiers had basically stopped fighting the war by the summer of 1969, and when they were sent out on night ambush patrols, they would just sit there. They wanted to stay alive more than they wanted to fight the VC.

Strosher said the ambush he commanded had been blown when one of his soldiers fell asleep and his head accidentally fell onto the trigger for a Claymore mine and set it off. A VC patrol happened to be walking past their position, and the rest of the patrol started firing and blowing their claymores and they killed a dozen enemy, and Strosher was a hero. He didn’t want to be promoted. He was happy as a sergeant, he told me, but the division commander insisted he take the commission, and he was sent back to the states to attend the Infantry School.

Strosher, who despite the silver bar on his collar, still looked and sounded like a sergeant and had the cocky attitude of a guy with 10 years in the service and two tours in Vietnam under his belt, knew the answer to the question he would ask Honeycutt before he asked it. He paused a moment and then introduced himself. “Sir, First Lieutenant Strosher. Can I ask where you were during the battle of Hamburger Hill?” He remained standing.

Honeycutt looked confused, as if he hadn’t been asked that question before. “Uh, I was in my C&C ship at my assigned altitude.” Honeycutt was referring to his command and control helicopter. Thinking to himself, doing a mental calculation, Honeycutt continued: “Uh, 2,500 feet as I recall.”

Strosher lifted a hand in a little wave and said, “Thank you, sir. That’s all I needed to know.” The place erupted in laughter. Honeycutt had done what we would today call saying the quiet part out loud. While 72 of his men were killed 2,500 feet below him, and 372 were wounded, he was circling the battlefield in a helicopter wearing a headset and microphone giving orders.

Wars aren’t lost on the battlefield alone. They’re lost in the countries that wage them with politics and posturing and lies and sending out puffed-up buffoons like Honeycutt to transform tragedy into heroism, loss into victory. Wars are lost by exercising racist policies and permitting, even rewarding, racist behavior and expecting no one to notice. Wars are lost by mistaking technology for genius, tactics for strategy, means for ends. If we take this hill and that town and kill that number of enemy soldiers and blow-up apartments and destroy hospitals and explode power stations and burn villages and kill civilians and damage and poison crops and call it a victory, then it will be, or so they think.

One year after I was at Fort Benning, I went back there to cover the trial of Lieutenant William Laws “Rusty” Calley for The Village Voice. He was charged with the premeditated murder of 109 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai in 1968. Calley put up the classic defense that he was just following orders. I was in the courtroom on the day that he testified. As I sat there, I heard whole paragraphs of the Infantry Manual come out of his mouth as he described the “standing assault” he and his platoon conducted that day.

Lieutenant Calley was a product of his times. He had been drafted into the army during Project 100,000, a program instituted by Robert McNamara to induct substandard men into the service at a time when they weren’t getting enough recruits and too many young men were dodging the draft. They lowered the IQ level necessary to serve, did away with the requirement for a high school diploma, and gave anyone serving less than two years in jail for minor offenses the opportunity to get out early if they would sign up for the army. Calley, who had dropped out of junior college, was one of the more stellar recruits and was sent to Officer Training School and became a second lieutenant in the Infantry.

This is what Calley told the jury in answer to a question from his own attorney on the day I was in the courtroom: “Well, I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so, sir.”

This is what losing looks like. This is Hamburger Hill. This is My Lai. This is Bucha. This is Mariupol. This is Kyiv. This is Odessa. This is Lviv.

This is the United States of America. This is the Russian Federation. This is war. There are no winners. Only the dead, and memory, if you can keep it.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

'What Madness Looks Like': How Ukraine Is Becoming Putin's Vietnam

'What Madness Looks Like': How Ukraine Is Becoming Putin's Vietnam

Here are some names for you: Svatore; Kreminna; Soledar. That’s where some of the most intense fighting is going on right now in Ukraine. All are towns in the Luhansk region near Bakmhut, the front-line town held by Ukraine where the heaviest fighting is. We’ll get to some of the rest of the fighting that’s taking place in Ukraine in a moment, especially the battles that have followed Ukraine’s victory in November which took the port city of Kherson in the south. But for right now, Russian forces are concentrating their heaviest, most brutal efforts around Bakhmut, south and east of the cities of Lyman and Izyum, which Ukraine took back from Russian forces in its September offensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

Why certain cities, or rivers, or even hilltops become strategic centers of military effort and end up as famous battles is one of the great mysteries of wars. In our own military history, the names of important battles roll easily off the tongue: Gettysburg; Hamburger Hill; the battle for Hue; the siege of Bastogne; the landing at Anzio; crossing the Rhine at Remagen; operation Anaconda in Afghanistan.

The reason some of the battles were strategically important is easy to understand. The landing at Anzio set up the assault that ended up with Allied forces taking Rome and led to the eventual defeat of the German army in Italy in April of 1945. The Union army defeated Confederate forces at Gettysburg in their only major offensive north of the Mason-Dixon line. Holding Bastogne was essential to victory in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes forest in Belgium near the end of World War II.

Other battles made practically no strategic sense at all. The battle in Vietnam for Hamburger Hill lasted 10 days and cost 72 American lives, with 372 wounded. The hill was abandoned by the 101st Airborne Division days after it was taken from the North Vietnamese army. Like so much combat in Vietnam, the battle seemed pointless to begin with, pointless when it was over, and Hamburger Hill came to symbolize the futility of the entire war.

The Russian effort to take Bakhmut makes little strategic sense unless it’s looked at in the context of Russia’s entire war effort. The war in Ukraine is effectively a two-front war at this point: the combat front lines stretching from the Russian border east of Kharkiv to the Black Sea near Kherson in the south; and what might be called the rear lines in major population centers in the country’s central, southern, and western areas.

Much of the reporting nearly a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine explains what’s going on in terms of Vladimir Putin’s pique. His army lost a huge swath of territory in Eastern Ukraine, thousands of square miles, so he got very, very mad and sent hundreds of guided cruise missiles and drones into Ukraine’s population centers like Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odessa, taking out apartment buildings, churches, museums, shopping areas, schools, and other civilian targets. He ordered an equal number of missiles and drones to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in an attempt to deny most of the country’s population electricity, heat and water over the winter.

Putin’s major problem after nearly 11 months of war is that he cannot just order his army to win its battles on the front lines in Ukraine’s east and south and take more territory. He set out last February wanting to take over the entire country. That was what the offensive against Kyiv was about. His generals and intelligence agencies told him that he could quickly take Ukraine’s capital and force the collapse of the government. President Zelensky would flee, Putin could install a puppet government, and Ukraine would be his.

Look at Putin now. The news is filled with reports of the brutal fighting around Bakhmut and Donetsk and the Russian army’s defense of its positions in Zaporizhia east of Kherson, trying to prevent Ukraine from cutting off Russia’s land-bridge to Crimea. Putin is sitting there in Moscow reduced to fighting for little towns in the middle of agriculture fields in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is resembling more and more the United States invasion of Vietnam with regular army and Marine forces in the mid-1960’s. Putin had no good reason to invade Ukraine. He made a couple of stabs at strategic excuses before the war, giving unhinged speeches about the threat of NATO and how Ukraine was “historically” part of Russia. Nobody believed him. He just wanted to do it.

Similarly, Lyndon Johnson ordered hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to go to war in Vietnam with no reason any sane person accepted. There was the “domino theory,” of course. Johnson didn’t want to be blamed for “losing” Southeast Asia in the way that American leftists and “commies” were blamed for “losing” China after World War II. It was bunkum, all of it, from the very beginning right through to the Vietnam war’s ignominious end.

This week’s battle for Bakhmut seems to fall squarely into the Hamburger Hill analogy. Taking Hill 937, our army’s map designation for that piece of Vietnam real estate, had no strategic importance other than it was there, and it was occupied by an army we didn’t like, the army of North Vietnam – a false construct if there ever was one, like the DMZ dividing North and South Korea. Major General Melvin Zais, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, admitted as much after the battle was over and the dead were being packaged up to be shipped back home. “This is not a war of hills. That hill had no military value whatsoever,” said Zais. “We found the enemy on Hill 937 and that's where we fought him.” And then they left.

The American “victory” at Hamburger Hill caused a great debate in Congress over the war, and it led to a major change in tactics by the overall American military commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams. The American effort in Vietnam went from something called “maximum engagement” with the enemy to “protective reaction,” which was essentially to defend American troops who came under attack by NVA or Vietcong forces. On June 10, 1969, five days after the 101st abandoned its positions on Hamburger Hill, President Richard Nixon announced the first troop withdrawals from Vietnam.

Putin hasn’t announced any troop withdrawals yet. Instead, he just did it, permitting his forces which failed to take Kyiv in the early weeks of the war to withdraw into Belarus and across the border into Russia. There, they were reconstituted and redeployed into other areas that Russia had taken but which already needed defending, like Kharkiv and Kherson. They proceeded to lose most of the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine and Kherson in the south, and now Putin’s forces are hanging onto Donetsk by their fingernails and fighting one bloody engagement after another trying to take back Bakhmut and other small towns along the frontlines in Ukraine’s northeast that they lost in September. Sounds like our “protective reaction” in Vietnam, doesn’t it?

The other way Putin’s invasion of Ukraine compares with our invasion of Vietnam is that his soldiers are fighting on foreign ground against an army comprised of the people who live there. It’s their land, and that’s why Ukraine isn’t having any problems with discipline and the will to fight with its army. They want to be there. They are volunteers fighting for their country. Putin’s army, on the other hand, is today filled with ill-trained conscripts, at least some of whom had to be rounded up and forced to serve. Our army in Vietnam was full of draftees who didn’t want to be there who were fighting in a foreign land against people who knew the territory and fought fiercely to take it back from the American aggressors.

Russia is reported to be desperate for victories, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the British Defense Ministry, which have been very good at deciphering Russian intentions in the war. The ISW reported on Saturday that a White House source claimed last week that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian billionaire who owns the mercenary operation The Wagner Group which is fighting in Ukraine for Russia, appears to be intent on exploiting part of eastern Ukraine for profit. Prigozhin is said to be planning to extract salt and gypsum from deep mines in the Bakhmut region. According to the ISW, in the south, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is apparently trying to exploit industrial parts of Mariupol for his own business purposes.

Russian military bloggers, who have become hugely important in the war because they reflect Russian right-wing attitudes about the war, have been critical of Prigozhin and Russian commanders on the front lines because the battles to take Soledar and Bakhmut are causing such heavy Russian losses. And today Putin showed he’s listening to the military bloggers by announcing that he is replacing his top ground commander, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, who was one of the key architects of the war. Good luck with your new fall-guy, Vladdy.

But beyond these hints about Russian intentions from bloggers and rumors from inside Russia, it's hard to know on a day-to-day basis how the battles being fought in Bakhmut and Soledar are going to go, or why Russia is fighting so hard to take these specific small towns, especially when so much damage has been done over the last 10 months of the war. “Everything is completely destroyed. There is almost no life left,” President Zelensky said of the fighting around Bakhmut yesterday. “The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like.”

And yet the madness continues.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Afghan evacuees at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.

Leaving Afghanistan Shows Wisdom, Not Weakness

The suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 169 Afghans was an atrocity that evoked horror in Americans of every political persuasion. But among those who want to continue the war, the loss was taken as proof that the U.S. should have persisted in a mission that had previously claimed the lives of more than 2,400 Americans.

Had we been willing to go on spilling American blood to stay in Afghanistan, we would not have had to spill blood leaving it. The logic is peculiar.

But the hawks always find a way to justify endless war. They can't very well pretend that we could win in Afghanistan, now or ever. So they find boundless reasons to criticize the manner of our withdrawal, which was bound to be a messy, dangerous process.

They also resort to hollow cliches. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused the administration of "weakness." Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), asserted that "China and Russia will look to capitalize on Biden's weakness." Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass said the outcome "will reinforce questions about U.S. reliability."

Some of our European allies joined the chorus. A Conservative parliamentary leader in Britain said the withdrawal is "the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez" — as though the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not gargantuan catastrophes.

Carping about alleged displays of weakness and loss of credibility is the familiar fallback of those trying to sustain a pointless military undertaking. They insist that ending it will have harmful effects on how others perceive us — a claim so vaporous it is impossible to disprove.

Their logic is that if we do something stupid, we have to keep doing it no matter what, because, you know, only weak people repent of their stupidity.

But if committing 20 years — as well as nearly 25,000 American casualties and more than $2 trillion — didn't persuade other governments of our resolve and staying power, it's hard to believe that Year 21 would be a game-changer. Foreigners might instead marvel at our willingness to lavish so much for so long on a mission that did little or nothing to enhance our security. They could deduce that when genuine U.S. interests are at stake, the sky is the limit on what we'd be willing to do.

Biden has shown a dedication to strengthening our alliances that his predecessor did not. President Donald Trump showed much fonder feelings for Russian President Vladimir Putin than for German Chancellor Angela Merkel or French President Emmanuel Macron.

Trump, in fact, bitterly resented our support of NATO. He even raised the possibility of refusing to honor our obligation, under Article 5 of the alliance treaty, to come to the defense of any member of the alliance who was attacked. Privately, he repeatedly expressed his desire to pull out of NATO.

Biden, by contrast, proudly wore a NATO lapel pin to a summit with European leaders in Brussels and declared: "Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation. I want NATO to know America is there." His principal difference with Merkel and Macron at that meeting lay in his desire to take a tougher line against China.

History offers additional evidence that ending a foolish, costly war will not degrade our international standing. Hawkish types said our 1973 withdrawal from Vietnam would speed the march of communism throughout the world. But it somehow failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, or the capitalist transformation of China.

Our adversaries have good reason not to test the proposition that the Biden administration is weak. Our military spending, after all, amounts to more than that of the next 11 countries combined. Our Navy has a dominant worldwide reach that no other country can come remotely close to matching.

Our ground forces have decades of combat experience that Russian and Chinese troops lack. Our peerless air power is a deterrent to adversaries from Tehran to Pyongyang.

Ending our involvement in Afghanistan doesn't weaken our posture against our adversaries. It strengthens it, by letting us direct our resources and attention to matters that directly implicate our national security. Biden, for better or worse, is not presiding over a retreat from our role in the world — merely a sensible reshaping of it.

Thursday's bombing was a disaster. But staying in Afghanistan would only have guaranteed more like it.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com

The Arrogance That Led Us To Iraq Infects Washington Again

The Arrogance That Led Us To Iraq Infects Washington Again

Is anyone here old enough to remember the urgent warning issued in a speech to the National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 by an American vice president who had artfully avoided the military draft during wartime? Dick Cheney, after acknowledging he was convinced that Saddam Hussein would “acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon,” went on to beat the war drums: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

There was not then, and there never would be, any stockpile of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs to be used against us. It was worse than “fake news”; it was taking his country into war under false pretenses, leaving as its legacy death, disillusionment and, yes, despair. But let us also recall the wise, if unheeded, words of a former Marine Corps company commander in Vietnam who there earned the Navy Cross, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts; he posed the consideration the Republican administration sending American troops into Iraq refused to broach with the American people: “whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years.”

That was Jim Webb, who would later be elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia as an anti-war Democrat. He warned, “wars often have unintended consequences — ask the Germans, who in World War I were convinced that they would defeat the French in exactly 42 days.” Today, 75 years after World War II, the U.S. still has troops stationed in both Germany and Japan, and 67 years after the Korean War ended, American soldiers remain on dangerous watch in Korea.

Does anyone else remember the young Army captain in Vietnam who had held in his arms a young soldier who had stepped on a landmine and was dying? Colin Powell knew firsthand how painful it was to write condolence letters to the grieving next of kin. That led directly to the doctrine that would carry his name; it says that the U.S. should commit men and women to combat only as a last resort and after policy options have been exhausted — and then only 1) when a vital national security interest of the nation is at stake, 2) when the U.S. force employed is overwhelming and disproportionate to the force of the enemy, 3) when the mission and military action are both understood and supported by the American people, and the mission has international support, and 4) when there is a clear and plausible exit strategy for the U.S. troops sent into harm’s way.

Maybe you recall the gentle rebuke Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had for the fawning flatterers who lionized him after his successful leadership in the Persian Gulf War. He said: “It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.” These thoughts all come back when an American president, our only chief executive never to have served a single day in either public service or military service before coming to the White House, again confronted a hostile Iran by sending more American troops into harm’s way in Iraq. Now is the time to be sure to remember.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.