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Subject: No One Asked Us
    6/28/2004 11:23:09 PM

by Stan Coerr

George Bush coalesced American support behind invading Iraq, I am told, using two arguments: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the capability to deliver them, and Iraq was a supporter of Al-Qaeda terrorism, and may have been involved in the attacks of 9/11. Vicious words and gratuitous finger-pointing keep falling back on these points, as people insist that "we" were misled into what started as a dynamic liberation and has become a bloody counterinsurgency. Watching politicians declaim and hearing television experts expound on why we went to war and on their opinions of those running the White House and Defense Department, I have one question. When is someone going to ask the guys who were there?

What about the opinions of those whose lives were on the line, massed on the Iraq-Kuwait border beginning in February of last year? I don't know how President Bush got the country behind him, because at the time I was living in a hole in the dirt in northern Kuwait. Why have I not heard a word from anyone who actually carried a rifle or flew a plane into bad guy country last year, and who has since had to deal with the ugly aftermath of a violent liberation? What about the guys who had the most to lose? What do they think about all this?

I was there. I am one of those guys who fought the war and helped keep the peace. I am a Major in the Marine Reserves, and during the war I was the senior American attached to the 1 Royal Irish Battlegroup, a rifle battalion of the British Army. I was commander of five U.S. Marine air/naval gunfire liaison teams, as well as the liaison officer between U.S. Marines and British Army forces. I was activated on January 14, 2003, and 17 days later I and my Marines were standing in Kuwait with all of our gear, ready to go to war.

I majored in Political Science at Duke, and I graduated with a Masters degree in government from the Kennedy School at Harvard. I understand realpolitik, geopolitical jujitsu, economics, and the reality of the Arab world. I know the tension between the White House, the UN, Langley, and Foggy Bottom. One of my grandfathers was a two-star Navy admiral; my other grandfather was an ambassador. I am not a pushover, blindly following whoever is in charge, and I don't kid myself that I live in a perfect world. But the war made sense then, and the occupation makes sense now.

As dawn broke on March 22, 2003, I became part of one of the largest and fastest land movements in the history of war. I went across the border alongside my brothers in the Royal Irish, following the 5th Marine Regiment from Camp Pendleton as they swept through the Ramaylah oil fields. I was one those guys you saw on TV every night ? filthy, hot, exhausted. I think the NRA and their right-to-bear-arms mantra is a joke, but by God I was carrying a loaded rifle, a loaded pistol and a knife on my body at all times. My feet rested on sandbags on the floor of my Humvee, there to protect me from the blast of a land mines or IED.

I killed many Iraqi soldiers, as they tried to kill me and my Marines. I did it with a radio, directing air-strikes and artillery, in concert with my British artillery officer counterpart, in combat along the Hamas Canal in southern Iraq. I saw, up close, everything the rest of you see in the newspapers: dead bodies, parts of dead bodies, helmets with bullet holes through them, handcuffed POWs sitting in the sand, oil well fires with flames reaching 100 feet into the air and a roar you could hear from over a mile away.

I stood on the bloody sand where Marine Second Lieutenant Therrel Childers was the first American killed on the ground. I pointed a loaded weapon at another man for the first time in my life. I did what I had spent 14 years training to do, and my Marines -- your Marines -- performed so well it still brings tears to my eyes to think about it. I was proud of what we did then, and I am proud of it now.

Along with the violence, I saw many things that lifted my heart. I saw thousands of Iraqis in cities like Qurnah and Medinah -- men, women, children, grandparents carrying babies -- running into the streets at the sight of the first Westerners to enter their streets. I saw them screaming, crying, waving, cheering. They ran from their homes at the sound of our Humvee tires roaring in from the south, bringing bread and tea and cigarettes and photos of their children. They chattered at us in Arabic, and we spoke to them in English, and neither understood the other. The entire time I was in Iraq, I had one impression from the civilians I met: Thank God, finally someone has arrived with bigger men and bigger guns to be, at last, on our side.

Let there be no mistake, those of you who don't believe in this war: the Ba'ath regime were the Nazis of the second half of the 20th century. I saw what the murderous, brutal regime of Saddam Hussein wrought on that country th

 
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Subrata    RE:No One Asked Us   6/29/2004 9:44:24 AM
So when are Stan Coerr and his marines moving on to North Korea to remove Kim Jong-Il, who has done all those things and more to his people, and is now developing nuclear weapons? When are they going to Rwanda? Uganda? If he learned anything at Duke and Harvard, he knows why it will never happen.
 
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bombard    RE:No One Asked Us   6/29/2004 1:17:51 PM
I agree with Stan Coerr. And he's perfectly right about why the marines and RIR fought: Their cause was right. They were the teeth, and they were on the throat of Sadamm. Removing Sadamms regime was what they were in a hole in Kuwait for. They were told that they were there to fight terrorism, to remove WMD. 'Yeah, right.' They knew that they were there to remove sadamm. However, the world, the american people, and the UN were fed the WMD line, and the Terrorism line, and fed a soup of half truths and uncooked intelligence. Yup, we can make a list of Mugabe, of Kim, of various fruitcases all over the world who wont be removed. But its still right, when it happens. The war was right, the reasons given were wrong.
 
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citybilly    RE:No One Asked Us   6/29/2004 2:14:00 PM
We will go when there is a political will to go.
 
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proudnavybrat    RE:No One Asked Us   6/30/2004 8:31:08 AM
Thank you Mr. Coerr, sir, for your outstanding commentary! I agree 110% and I have sent a copy of your much needed words to everyone I know. I am so very tired of the liberal left view splashed all over the media. I have wondered why more of those on the front lines who are doing the ultimate sacrificing do not have a voice...well unless of course they disagree about what is happening. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your willingness to serve and protect. I know what it is all about. My father served an outstanding miltary career as a Navy Chaplain and I am so very proud of him and each of you who selflessly serve others!
 
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PaulG    RE:No One Asked Us   7/2/2004 4:14:01 AM
It’s a stirring piece that seems to want to strike a clear and righteous moral tone, but in fact to me it raises a tangle of moral issues. It also has a few rather astounding passages. For example: “I can speak with authority on the opinions of both British and American infantry in that place and at that time. Let me make this clear: at no time did anyone say or imply to any of us that we were invading Iraq to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction, nor were we there to avenge 9/11. We knew we were there for one reason: to rid the world of a tyrant, and to give Iraq back to Iraqis. None of us had even heard those arguments for going to war until we returned, and we still don't understand the confusion.” How could this be? Was Lt. Col. Coerr living in a vegetable crisper for the 6 months before the war? How else could he have missed these arguments? They were everywhere. The administration’s people were all over the talk shows all the time with visions of mushroom clouds. You’d have to avoid newspapers, TV, radio, even right-wing radio. You’d have to tune out the President’s addresses to Congress and the U.N. in the fall of 2002, and the State Of The Union Message, and Colin Powell’s presentation at the U.N. in early 2003. Granted, he’d been mobilized by the time of the last two speeches, but are the Marines so isolated that they don’t get their own commander in chief’s internationally televised speech beamed to them? And contrary to his claim that “I don't know how President Bush got the country behind him, because at the time I was living in a hole in the dirt in northern Kuwait,” he didn’t get to Kuwait till very late in the run-up to the war, and it seems he was still stateside when Bush spoke, according to his own timeline. Wouldn’t he be just a wee bit curious about what his commander in chief was going to say on the occasion of his being ripped out of his civilian life and sent off to a foreign land to fight and possibly die for his country? And why would a guy who majored in Political Science at Duke and graduated with a Masters degree in government from the Kennedy School at Harvard become so completely incurious about politics in the midst of a profound national crisis, one which could easily result in his being called to active duty? And the same questions apply to all the other soldiers he came into contact with. Something bizarre is going on here. And if he didn’t hear these arguments made before the war, he sure has heck shouldn’t be “confused” by the controversy now – he’s had plenty of time to catch up on what his commander in chief was saying all those months before. No use attacking people who engage in “vicious words and gratuitous finger-pointing” if he hasn’t bothered to inform himself about what that finger-pointing is about. How does he know the finger-pointers aren’t right? And I find it quite morally ambiguous his implication that it’s okay that Bush presented a very different set of arguments to the American people than the soldiers were given. Why? The administration didn’t trust the moral compass of its own citizenry? So it was double-dealing? Yikes! And then there’s this passage, which I think is morally explosive: “I killed many Iraqi soldiers, as they tried to kill me and my Marines.” Why were these Iraqi soldiers trying to kill Coerr and his Marines? Could it be that their country had been invaded and they were being shot at? He condemns the Ba’ath regime, but what crime did these underpaid, underfed, underequipped and and undertrained conscripts commit? They were unlucky enough to be drafted? He may be “proud” of what he did but his account leaves me just a tad squeamish. Maybe it WAS the right thing to do. Or maybe not. Or maybe it was but it wasn’t the right way to do it. It’s tangled. Finally, there’s his little story that makes everything clear: “The analogy is simple. For years, you have watched the same large, violent man come home every night, and you have listened to his yelling and the crying and the screams of children and the noise of breaking glass, and you have always known that he was beating his wife and his children. Everyone on the block has known it. You ask, cajole, threaten, and beg him to stop, on behalf of the rest of the neighborhood. Nothing works. After listening to it for 13 years, you finally gather up the biggest, meanest guys you can find, you go over to his house, and you kick the door down. You punch him in the face and drag him away. The house is a mess, the family poor and abused? but now there is hope. You did the right thing.” He’s left out the fact that when kicked the door down and dragged the violent man away, you inadvertently killed one or two of his children. There was a price. Perhaps 10,000 Iraqis never got to know what freedom was like because we killed them in the process of liberating them. The situation was closer to Waco than his neat little analogy. There’s going
 
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Thomas    RE:No One Asked Us   7/2/2004 4:56:07 AM
That is one of the reasons people study history: To find out long after everybody are dead, who was to blame and who deserved praise. Most of the blame will be distributed; but little of the praise. The grates value to me is, however, the apprehesious fawning of the other dictators, that have followed the Gulf War II. The more or less quite arrest of would be Al-Qaida terrorist, that have followed 911 and the wars is a side bonus not to be underestimated, as mad preachers realise, that their retirement plan is in danger. We see and hear the squeaky hatefilled voice, but don't hear those that have thought better of it. We are oh so nerveous about those that might be provoked, but can never count the dangerous opportunists, that have estimated the scales have turned against them. We will never know for certain what the effort in Iraq has spared us for.
 
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