“Yesterday, our sources tell us the escaped American vice president has officially promoted your opponent. This Marine, Asher. He is now a lieutenant colonel. And gentlemen, I have to tell you . . .” General Tympkin leaned in closer to the men and signaled them to come nearer. “I must tell you, I would have done the same thing. He and his band of merry men are real fighters. The kind of citizen insurgents our grandfathers became in the German invasion of our country in the winter of ’42.
“Do you know what else I believe?” said the general, a crafty smile now on his face and an uptick in his voice, as if he were about to reveal the secret to it all. Nikolaevich and Kolikoff shook their heads.
To everyone’s surprise, Captain Shenkov grabbed Colonel Nikolaevich by his rifle and pulled him swiftly out of his seat. Nikolaevich, arms flailing about, tried to grasp an edge or a surface as he wrestled against the stout Russian special forces captain. He seemed about to catch onto something when General Tympkin struck his boot sharply against the colonel’s forehead.
The boot tipped Nikolaevich off balance, but maybe it was more the shock of his boss giving the coup de grâce. As Nikolaevich fell through the hatch, he gave the most horrendous, bloodcurdling scream over the intercom. Then the cable snapped. Even then, his screams were still audible a second more from outside the helicopter as he plunged to his death.
The helicopter’s crew chief looked back into the cabin to discern the source of the noise, but the general signaled him to land, staring at the still-horrified Kolikoff.
“This is now your mess, Kolikoff. Do you understand your new duties and the consequence of any further failure?”
“Yes . . . yes, I do, General,” he stammered, nodding violently.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were
born is to remain always a child.
For what is the worth of human life, unless it is
woven into the life of our ancestors
by the records of history?
—MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO
When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, we fell asleep to a living nightmare every night. A real, live enemy who lived just over the oceans and who wanted to kill us all in a firestorm of destruction. The seemingly unstoppable Soviet Bear.
In a very Orwellian sense, everyone at my school had a common bond. A fairly simple feeling of a vast togetherness through the shared looming and personal deaths we all expected from a nuclear attack. Or, if we survived, through a cold and ever worsening nuclear winter. We all talked about what we would do if the “Russkies” invaded. Calling someone a “Commie,” or a “Pinko” was a universal slam. It didn’t matter if you loved U2, wore tie-dye T-shirts, and wanted to save the whales with world peace now; there was an inevitability to the Soviet threat.
They didn’t care about our beliefs, because they believed our whole system was a malfunction and it was their sworn destiny to root out our government, our religions, and our people. While we practiced “duck and cover,” we made pacts on what we’d do when the war began. It seemed always on the horizon. We talked about what a post-nuclear landscape would look like. Movies like The Day After and A Boy and His Dog gave us examples of what to expect.
We made lists of which weapons we would take. I was supposed to bring a Louisville Slugger and a Crosman pellet rifle, a Buck knife, and three boxes of C-rations I’d bought from the army-navy surplus store. These boxes had cigarettes in them, and we learned to smoke as we hiked the mountains. Every weekend was another chance to explore which parts of the Rockies would sustain us for the longest period in extreme weather of summer and winter while we hunted and fished to survive. Our parents had sung protest songs in the ’60s, but even they seemed to believe the Soviets were a threat to every American and their allies, regardless of their beliefs. They were too old to make it, we knew, so we just accepted the fact that they’d have to stay behind and deal with a Soviet occupation while we fought from the hills. Then the movie Red Dawn came out, and we all now had an example of what to expect and how to fight back and win.
It was a foregone conclusion that we would never surrender to an occupier. It was also a foregone conclusion that we would fight and harass the enemy to the bitter end, even if it meant giving up our lives to do so. We knew nothing about combat besides what we’d read and seen in movies, but that was enough to keep a fire going. That and the simple lessons we got from our government and history classes that America was something great, something bigger than us, and held an ideal that we could not let die. Something our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on had fought for and, when necessary, died to defend. We had a purpose beyond survival from attack. A duty to ensure the continuity of our way of life. A boyish naivety, to be certain, but it was what we believed.
The numbers of deaths, the gulags, the hellish purges, the men or women who bravely stood up but then disappeared in the night because of their beliefs, the athletes and generals who defected from behind the Iron Curtain—all of them told tales of corruption and oppression. These were enough to ensure we felt righteous and just in our beliefs.
But then, in one remarkable summer, the Russian coup of 1991 ended with the complete shattering of the Soviet Union and the collapse of what most of us saw as one of the most deadly and repressive regimes the world has ever seen. And all of a sudden, we were the world’s sole superpower. Righteousness and right had outlasted oppression and intolerance.
In the giddy times that followed, I joined the Marine Corps, believing I needed to do my bit as an American in the new world. Believing it was my job to ensure we remained ahead of any emerging versions of fascism that might arise, and even just to support our new role as the peace broker in an age free from tyranny.
But to all of our amazement and my amusement, I soon discovered that we (the U.S. military) were still training to fight against a Soviet-like army in our military schoolhouses and maneuvers. When the War on Terror (and it was a war) began, we modified how we trained and how we fought to curb the threat of a collapsed nation’s former military forces and the angry youth of an entire region. Anger at poverty, anger at inequality, anger due to religious perceptions, anger due to history. The anger and the rise of an insurgency was predicted by all, but still we trained to fight a Soviet horde, believing a large-scale army on one or two fronts (China and Russia) to be the most pressing threat to our nation and its allies as a whole.
As a student of history and literature, none of the twists and turns of our new war surprised me. The urgent grasping for solutions to fight COIN (counterinsurgency), the major challenges of logistics, fighting a determined, predominantly civilian-based army, or even the lawlessness of a distributed combat environment in Iraq or Afghanistan. In my early years, I had read widely in military history. I studied great historic battles, watched endless war films, and especially listened to the sonorous and quietly spoken backroom reminiscing of veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The visceral shock, the bitter sting at loss and injury, and the gravity of decisions that caused them, were not a surprise; they hurt tremendously, but on some level, I had expected them. But the disconsolate gloom that followed, our constant struggle to fight a faceless enemy, and our seemingly unaware—or even uncaring—public came as a shock.
As Marines, we had a saying we repeated often in combat—one of many maxims that I believe only soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen can conjure up when faced with futility, terrible burden of life and death, constant fear, and the inevitability of our own deaths not just on a daily basis, but on a minute-to-minute basis. It went like this: “America is not at war. America is at the mall. The Marine Corps is at war.” There was truth in that simple statement. And, I wondered often, what happens when the next war comes?
My officers and men earnestly believed in the new war, one in which we fought in cities and hamlets to expel an ideological equal. This was the way we would fight, they thought, now and forever. And we rebuilt the military schools and thinkin
g to ensure everyone knew how to fight in a COIN environment and could help us win that last war.
The trouble is, we never will fight a last war. Our newly minted Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen believed this, and that we would never again fight a war on our own soil. They listened to us, the men and women who fought in the previous war, and they felt it a certitude that fighting small but long wars would win over a population. But the truth is, history repeats itself, and there is nothing new under the sun, and time and again, we foolishly believe the pacifist doves that Neville Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” is achievable (as we believe the hawks in wartime).
Quietly, stealthily, enigmatically, war will come creeping back to our doorstep. History does not lie. And through all of recorded history, war remains as likely as the clouds above and the dirt below. So we dare not ignore the things that amputees after the Civil War knew, that men with collapsed lung knew after World War I, that men with shell shock after World War II, that men with frostbitten hands knew after Korea, and that men who were spat on after Vietnam knew: you may not want war, but war will find you no matter how deep you bury your heads in the sand.
So what war are we prepared for now? For some kinds of war, yes. But if history is our teacher, we are very well prepared for the wrong kinds of battle. Our enemies are always watching us and thinking of new ways to fight. And if we take the last lesson from military history, we would know that our next war will look nothing like the last, and we will remain unprepared . . . until it is too late.
Assault by Fire Page 30