Because the “Spigot is the ‘Spigot, let’s note before the calendar changes that today is December 7, the anniversary (on this side of the International Date Line) of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that finally dragged the United States into the global conflict that had already cost millions of lives in Europe and Asia. The same week of the attack on the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, the Soviets stopped the German advance on Moscow — German units made it into outlying areas of the capital –and threw the invaders into a retreat that nearly became a rout.
By Tandem to L.A.
Here’s a beautiful little story by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Steve Rubinstein (a fine reporter and writer who you have a sense from the outside has been a little misused over the years, or maybe that’s just me projecting) about a tandem bike trip he took with his 13-year-old son from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. There’s a nice, relaxed feel to the writing, and the trip sounds fun, too:
For seven days we were 15 inches apart. During the teenage years, that is very long and very close. Perhaps the seating plan helped. On a tandem, the teenager cannot read his father’s facial expression, and the father cannot keep an eye on the teenager at all. We invested in a pair of squirt guns to improve father-son communication, especially when the midafternoon heat kicked in.
The Wounded
Found this listed on Kottke.org: The Purple Hearts Gallery. Portraits of American troops seriously wounded in Iraq, with brief accounts from each about what happened, how they feel about it, and what their lives are like now. Another aspect of the war that most of us know exists but never see.
"But like here in California, nobody really knows what the soldiers are going through, what’s happening to them. They see on TV, oh yeah, two soldiers got wounded today and they think, yeah, he’ll be alright. But that soldier is scarred for life both physically and mentally, but like they don’t understand. They see one soldier wounded and they’ll forget about it like as soon as they change the channel, you know." (Army Specialist Robert Acosta, Santa Ana, California)
(Note: The gallery contains selections from "Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq," a book of pictures and essays on Iraq.)
Beleaguered, Deceased, DUSTWUN
Noodling around with some research on how our military reports casualties — ultimately, I’m interested in just how they’ve accounted for Iraqi casualties since the war started — I happened across a trove of public but obscure documents outlining rules for handling casualty reports and the casualties themselves. It’s strangely absorbing reading: They cover everything from how to identify mutilated bodies to how NOK (next of kin, in militaryspeak) notification should be handled. And the juxtaposition between the messy, imprecise methods of war and the meticulousness of planning for its inevitable outcome is almost weird. (Actually, the meticulousness is probably a good thing; I found a story online that noted that during the Vietnam War, the military authorized taxi drivers to deliver casualty notifications to next of kin).
From Army Regulation 600-8-1, “Army Casualty Operations/ Assistance/ Insurance” (224 pp., PDF):
Item Name/Description: Casualty Status (11x)
Instructions: Enter one of the following casualty status codes.Codes:
BESIEGED—Besieged by a hostile force. The type casualty code must be hostile.
BELEAGUERED—Beleaguered by a hostile force. The type casualty code must be hostile.
CAPTURED—Captured by a hostile force. The type casualty code must be hostile.
DETAINED—Individual is detained in a foreign country. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
DECEASED—Individual casualty is dead. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
DUSTWUN—Individual whereabouts unknown. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
INTERNED—Individual is interned in a foreign country. The type casualty code must be nonhostile.
MIA—Individual whose whereabouts and status are unknown but are attributable to hostile activity. The type casualty code must be hostile.
MISSING—Individual whose whereabouts and status are unknown, provided the absence appears to be involuntary. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
NSI—Not seriously injured or ill. Treated at a medical facility and released. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
RMC—Returned to military control. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
SI—Seriously injured, wounded, or ill. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
SPECAT—Special category patient, usually an amputee. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.
SPEINT—Special interest. Not seriously injured or ill. Incident could be news worthy. The type casualty code must be nonhostile.
VSI—Very seriously injured, wounded, or ill. The type casualty code can be either hostile or nonhostile.Format Example:
03. DECEASED
03. VSI
From Army Regulation 638-2, “Procedures for the Care and Disposition of Remains and Disposition of Personal Effects” (141 pp., PDF):
Visual recognition of remains must be done with extreme deliberation and care. The unit commander may identify remains by visual recognition only when the remains facial features are not disfigured. The commander’s identification must be based upon a close and direct examination of the remains by a person or persons who knew the decedent well (roommate, squad leader, close friend). The visual recognition is recorded on DD Form 565 (Statement of Recognition of Deceased). A sample DD Form 565 is located at figure 3–1. DD Form 565 is an enclosure to DA Form 2773 (Statement of Identification).
In those circumstances where the reason for a member’s absence is uncertain and it is possible that the member is a casualty whose absence is involuntary, but there is not sufficient evidence to determine immediately that the member is missing or deceased, the member should be designated DUSTWUN [Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown]. This procedure is particularly useful when hostilities prevent the immediate determination of a member’s actual status, or when search and rescue efforts are ongoing.
A Death in Iraq
The Department of Defense says that one of the soldiers killed over the weekend (and one of the 16 who have died so far in December) was Army Staff Sergeant Cari Anne Gasiewicz, 28 (according to the Army Times, she’d been promoted from specialist just this fall). She was in a convoy hit by two IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs. The Buffalo News reports she was from Cheektowaga, New York, spoke fluent Arabic, and was serving in a military intelligence battalion.
A soldier who was riding in Gasiewicz’s truck and who was wounded herself in the attack has blogged an account of the incident. (Later: And here, another soldier blogger describes his acquaintance with Sgt. Gasiewicz in Iraq before she was killed.)
In May, the Buffalo News interviewed Gasiewicz as part of a story on the challenges facing military women stationed in Iraq. From that story:
“Cari Gasiewicz, a Depew native who holds the rank of specialist in the Army’s Military Intelligence Battalion based out of Fort Gordon in Augusta, Ga., speaks Arabic fluently. She has been working as an linguist in Iraq since earlier this year.
“Her job is to talk to the Iraqis about their feelings on the American presence there, the war effort and similar subjects.
“Children, especially, seem very open to the women soldiers, she said.
” ‘The children love talking to American soldiers. They are amazed that American females know how to speak Arabic,’ said Gasiewicz, who attended Canisius College for three years before joining the Army.
“Gasiewicz said she hopes to be home early next year.
“One day, while on duty, she said, she made friends with a group of Iraqi children — and was amazed by their reaction to her.
” ‘They were talking to me like crazy,’ she wrote in an e-mail from her station in Iraq, just west of Baghdad. ‘Right before I left, one of the kids tapped me on my arm and gave me one of his marbles as a gift.’ ”
” … Women soldiers face much the same challenges as male ones. Of course, there are a few dilemmas that are unique.
“Marriage proposals, for example.
“Gasiewicz, 27,received three proposals from Iraqi men in the past few months.
” ‘They were all very young,’ Gasiewicz wrote in an e-mail. ‘I think one was 15 — the time they get married here — one was 22, and the other was 35 and had three wives already. So I had to let them down nicely.’
She’s the 28th Army woman to die in Iraq, including one from the Army Reserve, four from the Army National Guard, and a civilian Army employee.
Updated 12/9/04
How to Get Me …
… to quit reading a book.
You could argue that it’s not that hard. In one of my many guilt-ridden dimensions, the guilt grows out of not getting through as many books as I’d like to. Last one completed (a couple weeks ago): “To Conquer the Air,” by James Tobin (the Wright Brothers’ saga). As soon as I’d finished Tobin, picked up a book called “They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus,” published in 2002 by Elizabeth Weil, a writer I’ve respected (used to see her stuff in Fast Company magazine, and in one of my former incarnations, as an editor at Wired News, I tried to get her to write some stuff for us, but she said she was too busy).
“They All Laughed” is the story of a failed space start-up called Rotary Rocket. The company tried to build a reusable launch vehicle to go to orbit and back. It turns out it’s not as easy as it looks, and the effort just barely got off the ground, in a literal sense, while burning tens of millions of dollars. On forums like Amazon’s reader reviews, “They All Laughed” got a mixed reception. Insiders from the new private-space launch community felt she’d caricatured their efforts, to some extent. But worse, in their eyes, she’d just gotten important facts wrong. I thought the comments sounded like sour grapes. So I bought a used copy online for about five bucks.
I got to page 47 (of 230, including two “acknowledgements” pages). I may get farther, but I’ve found reading the book to be disspiriting. It’s just deflating to see something so ambitious and promising so full of simple factual errors. I actually outlined a few of the simple space-related ones on Amazon. But what makes me feel like quitting is the appearance of errors on workaday details such as the names of roads. We’re told that there’s an exit off Interstate 5 for Mercy Springs Road — no, actually, it’s Mercey Springs Road; or that the town of Mojave, very colorfully described as permeated by “a mood of repressed violence,” is on Highway 57; well, no, it’s actually Highway 58. And why should I take the author’s word about the town’s moods or the characters’ quirks or how a rocket works or anything else if she can’t get this elementary stuff straight?
The War in Pictures
Checking around for recent blog entries on Kevin Sites the other night, I came across a reference to a month-old blog called “Fallujah in Pictures” (the title’s since been changed to “Iraq in Pictures”). It’s a roughly executed collection of news-service war pictures. I could do without some of the repetitive images and the heavy-handed attempts at anti-war irony (the power of the images is what they say themselves to each viewer, not the spin you try to put on them). The caveat for anyone who goes to the site is that much of what’s shown is quite graphic; not what we’re used to seeing on the news or in the paper. But that’s the main point and what makes the site valuable: To the extent we, the people care what’s happening over there, we’re getting a cleaned-up version of events. Occasionally, we’ve gotten some fine front-line reporting on our troops’ experience. Beyond that, we get precise casualty counts for our guys. We get a rough though probably unreliable accounting of the number of enemy fighters we’re killing. The press gives casualty tolls for the intensifying insurgent attacks across Iraq. We get foggy, inconclusive numbers for civilians killed in the continuing festivities. We get senior officials and military officers downplaying the extent and severity of the insurgency and pretty much refusing to talk about the impact on Iraqis unless it serves our purpose. The pictures have a way of cutting through that, and the site has a way of cutting through our news media’s reluctance to show the public the whole face of the war we’re engaged in.
The link: “Iraq in Pictures.”
Our Iraq Mystery
A late night Iraq thought: One of the strangest things about the war is that we know virtually nothing about the people we’re fighting. Over the past couple of weeks, someone’s been slaughtering dozens of police officers, members of the Iraqi national guard, and other, near the city of Mosul. On Friday and Saturday, someone launched a wave of attacks that killed more than 50 and wounded scores more in Baghdad and Mosul. Someone attacked U.S. troops Friday and Saturday, too, killing at least half a dozen. Last month, we sent thousands of troops against someone we wanted out of Fallujah. Dozens of our troops died there along with hundreds of enemy fighters.
But just who’s carrying out all these attacks? How are they keeping this thing up after 20 months of fighting? Where do they get the fighters? The weapons? The money? Honestly, after reading the accounts of fighting for the past few months, it’s mostly a mystery. The labels attached to our enemies vary and have evolved: They used to be thugs, gunmen, and noncompliant elements; or sometimes Saddam loyalists or dead-enders. Now they are insurgents, rebels or anti-Iraqi forces (as well as the catch-all label, terrorists and murderers); sometimes guerrillas or even “resistors” as I saw on one web site. But those are all just labels. Some try to be neutral. Others are loaded with political or emotional spin. None really gets us to the nature of the people we’re trying to deal with.
Based on a story The New York Times ran the other day on intelligence our military says it gathered in Fallujah, here’s what we know about who’s responsible for all the above: Overwhelmingly, the fighters are Iraqis, with a sprinkling of foreigners mixed in. There are 8,000 to 12,000 “hard-core” insurgents, with another 8,000 closet insurgents rendering aid, for a total of 20,000. They are said to be a mix of ” former Baathists, radical Sunnis and Shiites, foreign fighters and criminals.” They get money from former Baathists and Saddam’s relatives; “Islamic charities” (the term the story uses) and donors in Saudi Arabia also move cash to the fighters through Syria. The story makes this unqualified and unattributed assertion: “The insurgency also has had no trouble recruiting new foot soldiers.” The article closes by saying that Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined to speculate on the size of the insurgency. He did say that former Iraqi army and Republican Guard officers (cashiered en masse by the U.S. authorities soon after “mission accomplished”) pose the biggest security threat in Iraq now.
Does all that add up when you look at the continuing or growing ferocity of the insurgent attacks? That a group of guys who show up to fight in masks and tennis shoes, like a street gang that likes to pray a lot, a group of guys about half the size of the New York Police Department, is thwarting the will of the World’s Only Superpower and spreading mayhem over thousands of square miles on a daily basis?
At this point, you stop expecting anyone in the president’s group to talk straight to the public about what’s going on in Iraq. But you also start to wonder whether they talk straight among themselves about it, or whether they have any better idea of what they’re up against than The New York Times does.
Countdown
It just struck me: Only 1,509 days until Bush’s second term ends. It’s not too early to start a countdown.
Slice of Berkeley Bird Life
A constant feature of Berkeley life since I arrived here in the mid-’70s: lost pet posters (and all sorts of other fliers) on our local telephone poles. This one’s a little eye-catching. "Lost Congo African Grey Parrot." So we’ve got lost birds here pretty often, too. In fact, there’s a flock of feral parrots that sometimes makes an appearance in these parts. Lots of loud squawking and flapping and ganglike avian activity when they’re around. What interested me about this poster is what was going on when he vanished last Friday: "When last seen, Hannibal [editor’s note: the bird’s name] was being attacked by a hawk."
Yes, there are some little falcon-like hawks around town that dine on some of less fierce feathered types. One evening when my brother John was out here, we were walking up the street and saw feathers floating to the ground. Atop a telephone poll, a Cooper’s hawk was pulling apart a morning dove it had just caught for dinner. Urban wildlife. You could probably pitch it as a subject for a community-access TV program.