Bill Whittle - On Fire and On Target!

Every once in a while you will be lucky enough to read something that will rock you back on your heels. It may be a religious publication such as a bible, a history, a biography or an autobiograpy, a novel, a screen play or, in this case an essay.

Bill Whittle is the author of Eject! Eject! Eject! I first came across this guy's blog quite some time ago, early 2003 I believe, and shared his essay's with Tad, a great friend and a retired Marine. Tad's note when I sent him the first link was "Where did you find this guy, he is amazing."

I can't disagree with Tad one iota.

The first essay I read was simply titled "Victory". and as I noted at the beginning of this essay, it rocked me back on my heels. Each and every essay by Bill Whittle has done exactly the same thing. This guy is amazing! An exerpt from Victory:

I can’t describe to you what that felt like that night. You really did have to be there, I guess. Not only did you have to be there, you had to know the history, the frustration, the humiliation and the almost unendurable, relentless disappointment that had been part of being a Gator fan for so many years.

You could have watched it on TV, but you’ll never know what it was like to have that grin branded on your face, to walk up to homeless people and 85 year-old alumni and street thugs and kids and adults and everyone, everyone deliriously happy and dancing and hugging each other and just filled with such joy and elation and community. We had suffered together, lost together, come back year after year after year through endless defeats and dreams snatched away right under our noses, hoping together, and now, finally, this night had come. Next Year was here, at last.

I was honored to have done the video tribute to the team a few weeks later, in a celebration that drew 65,000 to the stadium just to say thank you. And when Steve Spurrier got on stage and said, “This one’s for all those Gator fans up in heaven,� I remember thinking, God, if that is not the corniest thing I’ve ever heard before a giant sob leapt out of me and I looked up at 60,000 people crying like babies.

Just like me.

Now it is worse than folly to compare this to the feeling on the streets of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, when the statue came down and it began to dawn on Iraqis that the son of a bitch was really, truly gone. It is an insipid, indeed, an insulting comparison.

So why did I make it? Well, because it’s all I’ve got. And that, in a strange and wonderful way, is exactly the point I want to make, for we have created a society so long immune from fear and repression, a safe and free and prosperous haven so encompassing that the deepest sense of liberation and victory that this American ever got to experience was when my college team won a stupid football game against the guys up the street.

We have been so safe, and so free, for so long, that it has warped our sense of history and human nature. It is, of course, a trade I am happy to make, but this isolation from the true horror and depravity that are everyday experiences in many parts of the world has imbedded in it, like a particularly lethal virus, the seeds of our own destruction. And it is this threat, much more than that from fundamentalist Islam and its organs of terror, that we must look at – closely, and deeply, and often.

I believe that many of those who opposed the war did so because they simply could not -- or in many cases would not – imagine what life under real oppression is like. Remember, these are the people who say, and seem to believe, that we in the US live in a police state, under a murdering dictator, where propaganda is spoon-fed to us like willing idiots and political opposition is crushed mercilessly.

If you say such things long enough, and you spend all your time in the company of similarly tinfoil-hatted comrades, then you actually begin to believe that life in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein wasn’t that much worse than life in Berkeley under the racist, election-stealing, Wellstone-murdering, Earth-destroying Republikkkan administration."

On returning from the cruise my bride and I recently too, I read his more recent essay "Sanctuary, Parts I and II" and it too rocked me back on my heels; and has taken a few days for the whole concept to sink in. A taste:

"What’s worse than crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage?

NOT crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage.

I’ve been away for a while, doing a little thinking. Usually, my thoughts for these past few years have started at home and then taken me to Iraq, and the war. Lately, though, I have been thinking about Iraq, and my thoughts turn more and more to home.

I started thinking along these lines six months ago, after a young Marine shot and killed a wounded Iraqi in a mosque in Fallujah

The ideas behind this little adventure we are about to embark upon have changed enormously since then. I have, quite frankly, been at a loss to know how to put so many wide-ranging snapshots together into this montage, this image, this idea of Sanctuary that I think holds the key to many of the problems we face today.

Stay with me -- our first stop is not our destination, but it is a necessary one. So let me first take you on that original journey, and show you how events in Iraq can show us how to fight and win a much wider and deeper conflict, right here at home."

"So why were the Taliban and Al Qaeda and Fedayeen insurgents treated so differently? Why the hoods and shackles? Why the humiliation at Abu Graib?

It is not because these men shot at US soldiers. Regular Iraqi units, NVA units, North Korean Units, Germans, Japanese, Confederates and Redcoats have shot at American soldiers and upon their surrender their treatment has been, on the whole, exemplary. Why are these different?

It is not because they are opposing us. It is – to put it as bluntly as possible – because they are cheating – cheating in a way that none of the above ever did.

They have willfully and repeatedly broken the covenant of Sanctuary.

Let’s speak to the Perennially Outraged as if they were the fully grown, post-pubescent children they pride themselves on being.

What is the obvious difference between an enemy Prisoner of War, and an Unlawful Combatant? Suppose two of them were standing in a line-up. What one glaringly obvious thing sets them apart?

That’s right! One is wearing a uniform, and the other isn’t.

And why do soldiers wear uniforms?

It certainly is not to protect the soldier. As a matter of fact, a soldier’s uniform is actually a big flashing neon arrow pointing to some kid that says to the enemy, SHOOT ME!

And that’s exactly what a uniform is for. It makes the soldier into a target to be killed.

Now if that’s all there was to it, you might say that the whole uniform thing is not such a groovy idea. BUT! What a uniform also does -- the corollary to the whole idea of a uniformed person – is to say that if the individual wearing a uniform is a legitimate target, then the person standing next to him in civilian clothes is not.

By wearing uniforms, soldiers differentiate themselves to the enemy. They assume additional risk in order to protect the civilian population. In other words, by identifying themselves as targets with their uniforms, the fighters provide a Sanctuary to the unarmed civilian population."

A final tease (before I command you to read the rest):

"They violate the Sanctuary of the Uniform. They violate the Sanctuary of Surrender. And the most reprehensible of all is the violation of the Sanctuary of Mercy.

Throughout the insurgency, and especially in places like Fallujah, enemy fighters with real or feigned wounds have called for aid. Not often does a soldier who has been in combat look down upon the wounded of either side without horror and sympathy. In places like Fallujah and Iwo Jima and Antietam it is an easy thing to see one’s own reflection in that grimace and that agony.

So when a soldier out of uniform, who may have faked surrender to kill unsuspecting Americans, calls for aid and then willfully kills medics with a concealed grenade… where does that leave us? What unplumbed depths remain? When mercy is used as a weapon against the merciful, what horrors and abominations remain unplayed?

THAT, dear left-wing Citadels of Conscience, is what we are up against. That is what you support against the decency, honor and kindness you mock in your own countrymen as they build schools and hospitals and, indeed, an entire democracy. That is the definition of “Unlawful Combatant.� It is not a legal nicety, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a pattern of ruthlessness, deception and murder. And regardless of your motive, it is the side you find yourself taking.

These are the kind of men in Guantanamo. Who controls such men? And when busloads of men from Afghanistan and Syria and Jordan and Egypt and Iran, men without uniforms, men not under the control of any officer, men who follow no code of conduct other than an oath to kill any American, anywhere – who among us with a gram of understanding and perspective can be surprised when such men are hooded and shackled on air transports? And being left to sleep in the open air is one thing in Northern Germany in the winter of ’44, and something else entirely in the middle of the goddam Caribbean! I mean, for the love of God, some of the people screaming themselves into a lather over such an outrage will pay tens of thousands of dollars for the same privilege a few miles away on a catamaran anchored off the coast of Jamaica."

I've deliberately teased you with a bit of Bill Whittle, hopefully, if you are as smart as I think you are, you will go read the rest of Sanctuary. It will take about an hour, only an hour, 1/8760th part of a year. It will also take a couple of days for it to really sink in.

Thanks Bill, once again you have provided me and hundreds of others food for thought, nurishment for our minds, and for most of us, reason spread on the tossing waves of confusion, hyperbole and hysteria of those who cannot see the way clear to beating down these islamofascists.

A note to my beloved readers: Read the whole thing before commenting, and when you comment, just share what thoughts you had in your heart of hearts. Oh, and one more thing, take time to read the comments too.