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At Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon, the main entry point for
American troops, the first whack of reality was the heat. We walked down
the stairs from the plane into the boil of the Saigon humidity, weighted
by duffle bags and weapons, swaddled in fatigues and canvas boots.
This was going to be awful.
But the one thing that kept us mildly sane was the knowledge that it
would last only a year. That was guaranteed. You could, you told
yourself, put up with anything for a year. Three months later,
especially in combat units, you weren't so sure. Even so, it was the
knowledge that every day brought you closer to deliverance from the heat
and the noise and the violence and the death that kept most of us from
losing it.
This week, the Pentagon informed the 3rd Infantry Division troops in
Iraq that they would not be going home on the dates previously promised.
In fact they will be extended in their duty "indefinitely."
Errors of judgment and planning have been made in the Iraq operation,
but I can think of no other error so grave. What this means to the
average soldier, being cooked by the Iraqi summer sun under his flak
jacket and helmet, is that there's no longer any schedule against which
they can hope for escape.
This Baghdad hideousness, this confusion and the damned heat will go
on and on. It means, further, that the U.S. government, which acclaimed
them heroes a few months back, has failed in its predictions about the
war and is solving the problem by leaving them there to pay for the
failure.
In Vietnam, every soldier had his short-timer calendar, carried in
his plastic wallet. These curious documents, which counted 365 days like
weird little advent calendars, were often humorous and sometimes ribald,
drawn up by local wags with artistic talent. Every morning meant
crossing off another day. And the calendars held the promise that if you
could just get through however many days were left, then regular life --
with families and cars and air-conditioning and cold beer -- would start
again. If you got down to less than three months you were termed
"short," the cartoon for which was a helmet sitting on two
boots.
The Army could guarantee this one-year tour because there was a draft
in place. There were always more infantrymen and clerk-typists coming
along. But now, of course, there aren't. And those on the ground in Iraq
are paying for the ultimate and cleverly disguised truth about George W.
Bush's war. Nobody really wanted to fight it. Not really. We want to
extend American power and smash terrorists, mostly by listening to the
radio and cheering. But actually going and taking part in the miserable
day-to-day work, well, no thanks. Let somebody else's kid do it.
Somebody else's kid doesn't want to do it. The enlistment numbers are
down. They don't want to be there for the one-a-day lottery that the
casualty reports have become. They've seen this war on TV, and they
prefer the video game. The White House has asked for help among the
coalition of the willing, the Pakistanis, for example. They don't want
to go. They've asked among the coalition of the unwilling, Germany and
India, for example. They are still unwilling. And slowly but surely the
willing are being transmuted into the unwilling. So what happens now?
The Pentagon can't extend the 3rd Infantry forever. In truth, it
can't even extend it for more than a few months without serious reaction
from families, some of whom have already begun bringing this unsolvable
problem to the attention of their members of Congress. Congress members
do not like this question.
Besides, as Donald Rumsfeld has told us, the Vietnam syndrome is
over. This isn't Vietnam.
He could be right. It might actually be worse.
(Danziger is a political cartoonist; he served as an intelligence
officer with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam in 1969-70.)
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