No
One Asked Us
By
Major Stan Coerr, USMCR
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 boots 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 airstrikes and artillery, in concert
with my British artillery officer counterpart, in combat along the Hamar 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 us, the first Western army to arrive. 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 through his party and
their Fedayeen henchmen. They raped, murdered, tortured, extorted and
terrorized those in that country for 35 years. There are mass graves throughout
Iraq only now being discovered. 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, out of Camp
Pendleton, liberated a prison in Iraq populated entirely by children. The
Ba'athists brutalized the weakest among them, and killed the strongest.
I saw in the eyes of the people how a generation of fear
reflects in the human soul.
The Ba'ath Party, like the Nazis before them, kept power by
spreading out, placing their officials in every city and every village to keep
the people under their boot. Everywhere we went we found rifles, ammunition,
RPG rounds, mortar shells, rocket launchers, and artillery.
When we took over the southern city of Ramaylah, our
battalion commander tore down the Ba'ath signs and commandeered the former
regime headquarters in town (which, by the way, was 20 feet from the local
school.) My commander himself took over the office of the local Ba'ath leader,
and in opening the desk of that thug found a set of brass knuckles and a gun.
These are the people who are now in prison, and that is where they deserve to
be.
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.
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. To us, it was
simple. The world needed to be rid of a man who committed mass murder of an
entire people, and our country was the only one that could project that much
power that far and with that kind of precision. We don't
make policy decisions: we carry them out. And none of us had
the slightest doubt about how right and good our actions were. The war was the right thing to do then, and
in hindsight it was still the right thing to do. We can't overthrow every
murderous tyrant in
the world, but when we can, we should. Take it from someone
who was there, and who stood to lose everything. We must, and will, stay the
course. We owe it to the Iraqis, and to the world.
(Stan Coerr is a SuperCobra attack helicopter pilot and
Forward Air Controller, and was recently selected for Lieutenant Colonel in the
Marine Corps Reserve. He lives in San Diego)