Today is my second day at Fort Jackson.  Yesterday went well.  I was a little nervous the Army was going to start chewing us out like you see in the movies.  They didn't.  Saying "Hooah" all the time is going to take some getting used to.  That's the standard Army response meaning, "Yes, I understand."  Nothing against my Army friends but I don't think it sounds very intelligent.  The Navy's "Aye Aye," is much preferable.  By the way, for you etymologists, "Aye Aye," is derived from the phrase, "I understand and I will obey."  Nobody really knows where Hooah came from.

Tomorrow they are going to issue us our weapons, cold weather gear, and body armor.  I may not be able to sleep well tonight with that kind of excitement at hand.  It's like Christmas Eve.  The bad part is that we're responsible for hauling all of our gear around on our bodies and I already have a huge duffel bag full of goodies plus my carry-on and computer bag.  By the time we get out of "Relaxin' Jackson" (Thanks Gary) we should have two more duffels.

One of today's briefs was delivered by a wry commander of a Military Police unit that worked convoy security in Iraq for over a year.  If you couldn't guess, that's probably one of the most dangerous jobs in the military.  After he introduced himself he went on to give one of the most sobering talks I've ever heard.  He talked about his men who didn't come home, about a dozen, and the ones who were wounded, about 150.  Among many other anecdotes he spoke of a young man who, after being struck multiple times by enemy fire refused to come down from manning the .50 caliber machine gun turret atop his up-armored HUMVEE.  Their convoy had been ambushed and was being pursued by enemy vehicles through a gauntlet of small arms fire and RPGs (rocket propelled grenades).  Eventually an RPG struck the back of this young man's vehicle and detonated, sending fragments of hot metal into his body and brain.  He lived long enough to be evacuated to a hospital where this commander was with him as he died of his wounds.

This commander went to the house of this man's parents where he saw their fence festooned with yellow ribbons and a huge picture of their young soldier.  He attended the funeral in a small town in Pennsylvania where the whole town turned out. 

His point was not to be morbid, although everyone's attention was rivetted and where I had been dangerously close to dozing off, I was now wide awake.  His point was that this is a war zone to which we are headed.  Some people there want nothing more than to kill Americans.  Our enemy there (adherents to a militant, pantheistic Islam) sees this as an epic battle between ideologies and they have a 100 year time line to meet their objectives.  What kind of timeline do we in the United States accept to see them defeated?  After just a few years and a three thousand dead we have largely lost our resolve.  If they beat us in the front lines of this war, Iraq and Afghanistan, or rather, if they don't lose, they will be bolstered by having faced down the sole super power remaining in the world and chased it back to its own shores.  They will no longer have anyone to fear and they will then move on to Southeast Asia where they are already establishing a foothold.  Imagine trying to rout an enemy from the thousands of nameless islands in the Indonesian archipelago.  Impossible.  And they will continue to spread, subjecting their conquered lands to a tyranny characterised like all tyrannys by manipulation, paranoia, fear and violence.

So we must also see this as an epic battle between ideologies.  We can't ignore this.  How well does it work to ignore the murderous and psychotic individuals in the world, whether manifested as rapists and serial killers or despots and dictators?  Eventually they must be dealt with.  They can't be negotiated with and they won't compromise any more than you can negotiate or compromise with a deadly virus.  What does that leave?  Only two options; containment or anihilation. 

Does anyone see a third option?  I'd like to hear it.  Have a good night.