winterbadger | (no subject)

I was flipping channels (which I rarely do) and ran into a show on The Military Channel called Alpha Company: Iraq War Diary which I found rather well done. It was a documentary without a particular axe to grind and showed a group of Marines who reminded me a lot of the guys I knew when I worked with the Army. I don't know, but I suspect it shows a pretty good picture of what life is like for actively patrolling US military units: danger, boredom, frustration, and very ambivalent relations with the local population.

I saw more or less exactly what I expected to see, given what I know about US soldiers, the conditions of the war, etc. These are guys who are (mostly) young men, aggressive (especially since the unit involved are not just soldiers but Marines, and not just Marines but Recon Marines, who are the guys who go 'out in front' when Marines deploy in combat), highly trained for combat, unforgiving of each other or the native population, who expected to fight a conventional war as soldiers and are instead fighting a counterinsurgency as policemen. They are doing their best to carry out the mission alloted to them, and they maintain their discipline well, but most of them deeply resent and distrust the people they operate among and the best they can do is work to keep a lid on things. The solution to overall security needs to come from the political and social interaction of Iraqis themselves, and from the soldiers'-eye view of the war, that seems pretty hopeless. Sunnis hate and distrust the Shiites, and since most of the Iraqi security forces are or are controlled by Shiites, it seems hard to imagine a situation in which national reconciliation is going to be undertaken or that the two camps are going to live together in a spirit of amity, rather then oppression of Moen by the other.

Military is doing another series called My War Diary that is airing pieces made by the troops themselves; I haven't seen any of them yet.