The Blog of Record

This article first appeared back in September, but it is worth re-reading today, on Victory in Iraq Day, as it tells about the respect Americans in uniform earn from European soldiers who share the dangers of combat duty with them. An excerpt:

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine – they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them – we are wimps, even the strongest of us – and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.

[...]

And they are impressive warriors! We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how. Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seem to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles on top, their sight unmoving in the directions of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues nights and days….

And combat ? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay…. [T]hey switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later – which cuts any pussyfooting short.

We seldom hear any harsh word, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit. A passing American helicopter stops near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright; an American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is – from what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a beautiful and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.

To those who bestow us with the honor of sharing their combat outposts and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to those who pay the daily tribute of America’s army’s deployment on Afghan soil, to those we owned this article, ourselves hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and to always continue hearing them say that we are all the same band of brothers.

It would be nice to hope that when the terrorists in Afghanistan are defeated and the American, Canadian, French and other troops are ready to come home, we will not have to fight a wall of silence in the media to declare the Afghan War won as we have to do now, after the Iraq War. It would be nice to hope that the troops’ sacrifice will at least be recognized with an official victory day. That would be a nice hope indeed - if it had any basis. As it is, though, we know that someone like the blogger who started the V.I. Day movement will again have to shout a rallying cry to give the heroes their own victory day – V.A. Day.

(Link to the quoted article via the Mudville Gazette.)

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