Blood Stripes
by
William S. Lind
by William S. Lind
 David
Danelo’s new book, Blood
Stripes, comes on the market at exactly the right time.
Just as Americans are trying to understand what might have happened
at Haditha, where Marines may have killed as many as fifteen Iraqi
civilians, Danelo offers a thoughtful and insightful look into the
Iraq war through the eyes of enlisted Marines. Until recently a
Marine Corps infantry captain, Danelo served at Fallujah and obviously
thought a great deal about what he saw there.
Unusually
for a first-hand, "live reporter" style author, Danelo
picks up quickly on one of the most important issues in military
theory, the contradiction between the military culture of order
and the disorderliness of war. In Blood Stripes’ first chapter,
he writes,
Non-commissioned
officers…assume responsibility for imbuing the (Spartan) Way’s
sacred tenets of Order and Disorder into every young boot that
crosses their path. Finding the balance within this dichotomy
is tricky; both cultures exert a strong pull on Marines. The twins
call like sirens from opposite banks of a river, singing for the
Marine to listen to their virtues and ignore their vices.
The culture
of Order is the Marine in dress blues, spotless and pristine,
medals perfectly measured, hair perfectly trimmed…these types
of things comprise the culture that is Orderly, functional, prepared
and disciplined…
However,…combat
is filled with uncertainties, half-truths, bad information, changing
directives from seemingly incompetent higher headquarters, and
unexplained explosions. War is chaos, the ultimate form of Disorder.
Blood
Stripes quickly immerses its reader in the chaos of infantry
combat in Iraq, which, too often, is combat against an unseen enemy.
Barely three
weeks into their deployment, 3rd Platoon had already
discovered several IEDs throughout Husaybah. Thus far, they had
managed to find a couple of them using an unconventional, dangerous,
and effective technique: kick them….
(Sgt.) Soudan
approached the plywood. He was standing about eight feet away.
BOOM!!!
Everything
went black…
Because the
explosion was close to the base, the medical evacuation (MEDEVAC)
happened quickly….
The patrol
stepped off. They were heading east, father away from base camp.
Three minutes
passed.
BOOM!!!
From the
sound of the explosion, Soudan knew this latest IED had hit south,
on the street 3rd Squad was patrolling….
Link called
Soudan. "We’re on our way."
Ten seconds
passed.
BOOM!!!
Link’s squad.
Experiences
like these at the small unit level – by the end of the patrol, these
Marines had been hit by five IEDs – provide some context in which
those of us stateside can put events like the supposed massacre
in Haditha. So does a story later in the book, where Marines engaged
mujahideen in a prolonged and vicious fire-fight:
Sergeant
Soudan, Corporal Link, and Lieutenant Carroll were standing in
the back of a humvee. After triaging the wounded from the dead,
they had placed the bodies of Gibson, Valdez, and Smith in the
humvee with VanLeuven. The Recon Marines ran up, muscling the
body of the other dead Marine into the vehicle.
Soudan, Link,
and Carroll looked at their fallen comrade.
Their faces
went white.
Captain Gannon.
Lima Six
was dead.
They killed
our company commander. Pain switched to fury and an immediate
demand for vengeance. These -------- killed Captain Gannon.
Blood
Stripes does not paint a picture of an easy war. As a Marine
officer said to me many years ago, "If your unit is the one
getting ambushed, it’s not low intensity war." The Marines
whose stories Danelo ably chronicles, and the thousands of others
like them, have gone through hell in Iraq, a Fourth Generation hell
where enemies are nowhere and everywhere. No military, not even
the Marine Corps, can endure that kind of hell endlessly without
beginning to crack, at least around the edges. It should not surprise
us that cracks are now appearing, three years into the war.
 One
personal note: Danelo rightly reports that Marines, inspired by
Steven Pressfield’s brilliant novel Gates of Fire, like to
see themselves as Spartans, which in some ways they are. As an Athenian,
I have to point out that the battle of Themopylae, however deathless
a tale of valor, was nonetheless a Persian victory in the end. In
contrast, at Salamis, Persia was decisively defeated by Athenian
deception and maneuver. Sometimes, it helps to think as well as
fight.
June
14, 2006
William
Lind [send him mail]
is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free
Congress Foundation. The views expressed in this article are those
of Mr. Lind, writing in his personal capacity.
Copyright
© 2006 William S. Lind
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