Lone survivor

SEALs, by our nature, training, and education, are not very stupid. And along with everyone else, we read the newspaper headlines from all over the world about serving members of the armed forces who have been charged with murder in civilian courts for doing what they thought was their duty, attacking their enemy.

Our rules of engagement in Afghanistan specified that we could not shoot, kill, or injure unarmed civilians. But what about the unarmed civilian who was a skilled spy for the illegal forces we were trying to remove? What about an entire secret army, diverse, fragmented, and lethal, creeping through the mountains in Afghanistan pretending to be civilians? What about those guys? How about the i

We all knew that we’d chosen to do what 999 Americans out of every thousand would not even think about doing. And we were taught that we were necessary for the security of our nation. We were sent to Afghanistan to carry out hugely dangerous missions. But we were also told that we could not shoot that camel drover before he blew up all of us, because he might be an unarmed civilian just taking his dynamite for a walk.

And how about his buddy? The younger guy with the stick, ru

We wouldn’t hear him reveal our position, and neither would the politicians who drafted those ROEs. And those men in suits won’t be on that mountainside when the first grenade explodes among us and takes off someone’s leg, or head.

Should we have shot that little son of a gun right off the bat, before he had a chance to run? Or was he just an unarmed civilian, doing no harm to anyone? Just taking his TNT for a walk, right?

These terrorist/insurgents know the rules as well as they did in Iraq. They’re not their rules. They’re our rules, the rules of the Western countries, the civilized side of the world. And every terrorist knows how to manipulate them in their own favor. Otherwise the camel drovers would be carrying guns.

But they don’t. Because they know we are probably scared to shoot them, because we might get charged with murder, which I actually know they consider to be on the hysterical side of laughable.

And if we did shoot a couple of them, they would be on their cell phones with the speed of ten thousand gigabytes, direct to the Arab television station al-Jazeera:

BRUTAL US TROOPS GUN DOWN

PEACE-LOVING AFGHAN FARMERS

US Military Promises SEALs

Will Be Charged

Well, something like that. I’m sure you get my drift. The media in the United States of America would crucify us. These days, they always do. Was there ever a greater uproar than the one that broke out over Abu Ghraib? In the bigger scheme of things, in the context of all the death and destruction that Muslim extremists have visited upon this world, a bunch of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated does not ring my personal alarm bell. And it would not ring yours either if you ever saw firsthand what these guys are capable of. I mean, Jesus, they cut off people’s heads, American heads, aid workers’ heads. They think nothing of slaughtering thousands of people; they’ve stabbed and mutilated young American soldiers, like something out of the Middle Ages.

The truth is, in this kind of terrorist/insurgent warfare, no one can tell who’s a civilian and who’s not. So what’s the point of framing rules that ca

Also, no one seems clear on what we should be called in Afghanistan. Are we a peace-keeping force? Are we fighting a war against insurgents on behalf of the Afghan government, or are we fighting it on behalf of the U.S.A.? Are we trying to hunt down the master terrorist bin Laden, or are we just trying to prevent the Taliban from regaining control of the country, because they were the protectors of bin Laden and all who fought for him?

Search me. But everything’s cool with us. Tell us what you want, and we’ll do it. We’re loyal servants of the U.S. government. But Afghanistan involves fighting behind enemy lines. Never mind we were invited into a democratic country by its own government. Never mind there’s no shooting across the border in Pakistan, the illegality of the Taliban army, the Geneva Convention, yada, yada, yada.

When we’re patrolling those mountains, trying everything we know to stop the Taliban regrouping, striving to find and arrest the top commanders and explosive experts, we are always surrounded by a well-armed, hostile enemy whose avowed intention is to kill us all. That’s behind enemy lines. Trust me.

And we’ll go there. All day. Every day. We’ll do what we’re supposed to do, to the letter, or die in the attempt. On behalf of the U.S.A. But don’t tell us who we can attack. That ought to be up to us, the military. And if the liberal media and political community ca

The truth is, any government that thinks war is somehow fair and subject to rules like a baseball game probably should not get into one. Because nothing’s fair in war, and occasionally the wrong people do get killed. It’s been happening for about a million years. Faced with the murderous cutthroats of the Taliban, we are not fighting under the rules of Geneva IV Article 4. We are fighting under the rules of Article 223.556mm — that’s the caliber and bullet gauge of our M4 rifle. And if those numbers don’t look good, try Article .762mm, that’s what the stolen Russian Kalashnikovs fire at us, usually in deadly, heavy volleys.

In the global war on terror, we have rules, and our opponents use them against us. We try to be reasonable; they will stop at nothing. They will stoop to any form of base warfare: torture, beheading, mutilation. Attacks on i

And I ask myself, Who’s prepared to go furthest to win this war? Answer: they are. They’ll willingly die to get their enemy. They will take it to the limit, any time, any place, whatever it takes. And they don’t have rules of engagement.

Thus we have an extra element of fear and danger when we go into combat against the Taliban or al Qaeda — the fear of our own, the fear of what our own navy judge advocate general might rule against us, the fear of the American media and their unfortunate effect on American politicians. We all harbor fears about untrained, half-educated journalists who only want a good story to justify their salaries and expense accounts. Don’t think it’s just me. We all detest them, partly for their lack of judgment, mostly because of their ignorance and toe-curling opportunism. The first minute an armed conflict turns into a media war, the news becomes someone’s opinion, not hard truths. When the media gets involved, in the United States, that’s a war you’ve got a damned good chance of losing, because the restrictions on us are immediately amplified, and that’s sensationally good news for our enemy.

Every now and then, a news reporter or a photographer gets in the way sufficiently to stop a bullet. And without missing a beat, those highly paid newspeople become national heroes, lauded back home in the press and on television. SEALs are not churlish, but I ca