Soldier

Podcast • September 17, 2010

Andrew Bacevich: how war without end became the rule

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Andrew Bacevich (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Andrew Bacevich is the soldier turned writer who’s still unlearning and puncturing the Washington Rules of national security. The rules have ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Andrew Bacevich (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3)

Andrew Bacevich is the soldier turned writer who’s still unlearning and puncturing the Washington Rules of national security. The rules have turned into doctrines, he’s telling us, of global war forever. He is talking about the scales that have fallen from the eyes of a slow learner, as he calls himself — a dutiful, conformist Army officer who woke up at the end of the Cold War twenty years ago to the thought that the orthodoxy he’d accepted was a sham.

Andrew Bacevich’s military career ran from West Point to Vietnam to the first Gulf War in 1991. The short form of the story he’s been writing for a decade now is: how unexamined failure in Vietnam became by today a sort of repetition compulsion in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington Rules is Andrew Bacevich’s fourth book in a project to unmask American empire, militarism, over-reach and what sustains them.

June 30, 2005

The War in First Person

  Sometimes I feel bad thinking about what could possibly happen to these people (the Iraqis) if this doesn’t pan out. Specialist Ernesto Haibi, 6/30/05 on Open Source In the electronic open letters from the ...

 

Sometimes I feel bad thinking about what could possibly happen to these people (the Iraqis) if this doesn’t pan out.

Specialist Ernesto Haibi, 6/30/05 on Open Source
In the electronic open letters from the troops in Iraq, it’s not a different war exactly, but the details are not what you see on television or in the papers. A medic writes about having to choose which to treat first: a GI or an insurgent. Answer: treat the enemy first, because he’s an Iraqi and we can get information from him. Beth, a Navy corpsman, writes: “Since my last post we had a mass casualty, for those who know what that means. Yet, another image etched in my soul forever. One of the patients had shrapnel go through his eye, another lost legs, and yet another an arm. Pretty scary stuff.” A soldier writes about the constant use of the word “awesome” – part of the numbing effect of war: my wife left me: “awesome.” Somebody dead: “awesome.” Another writes with embarrassment about the bad manners of tracking mud into the Iraqi home he just raided. From the fog of war, these writers in uniform may be the Tim O’Briens and Norman Mailers of this generation. On Open Source: from where we are to Iraq, engaging with blogs of war.

Spc. Jason Hartley

infantryman in the New York National Guard, blogger: Just Another Soldier

[in the studio in Cambridge]

CFO Gordon Cimoli

Helicopter pilot for the 12th Aviation Brigade, blogger: Cimoli.com

[by phone from Detroit]

Specialist Ernesto Haibi

medic in the 23rd Infantry Battalion, blogger: A Candle in the Dark

[by phone from Ft. Lewis, Washington]

SFC Kevin Kelly

sergeant in the 150th Combat Engineers Battalion, blogger: Dixie Sappers

[by phone from Forward Operating Base Dogwood, south of Baghdad]

Sgt. Chris Missick

communications specialist for the 319th Signal Battalion,

blogger: War Blog

[featuring audio excerpts from his podcasts]