WAR Diary:
1000 Hours: Beginning of Week Two and life for us ordinary Americans goes on, while our soldiers fight, die, and are wounded in an increasingly hospitable foreign land. It all still seems surreal to me despite the fact that I watch, and read, and listen to reports about the WAR almost every waking minute. NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The BCC, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angels Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post; these are just some of the news outlets I drink my daily dose of murder, mayhem, and madness from. I find myself listening to the daily 6:00am est., briefing from CENTCOM (Central Command), and marveling over how truly useless it is. No real information is passed out; the reporters there would gather a broader, more developed picture of the WAR from reading my sources.

But like I said above, life goes on, and I have to try and pull my thoughts from this maddening affair, and turn them instead to work, school, and family. I finally received and offer letter from EDS. I have been waiting forever it seems. Now I can get healthcare, and get my teeth cleaned! My off-spring are straying and like the Shepard I must bring them back into the fold; again! “Why can’t they just act right,” I find myself asking, well, myself, over and over again. I was never, well hardly ever, a problem for my mother when I was a teenager. I did what I was supposed to do when I was supposed to do it. The world I knew owed me nothing, and I expected nothing from it; I had enough disappointments in my life, without expecting the world to come knocking with riches and solutions. Now days it seems, most of the teenagers want to be grown, but want their parent to take care of their needs; i.e. food shelter, transportation, clothing, spending money, etc. In other words, they want to make their own decisions, but want Mom and Dad to back-stop them with they fuck it all up, which invariably they do, because they know only a fifth of what they think they do! And yet, despite the time we (parents) have put in on planet Earth, we know less then nothing about the way it, and life work. Isn’t that amazing!?

Sometimes I become so tired of it all. I want to shout at the top of my lungs, “GET OUT, LEAVE US ALONE, LIVE YOUR LIFE AS YOU WILL, AND DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT, EXPECT US TO BE HERE WHEN YOU FALL!” But of course I don’t, I have to keep it together, I’m the father, the man, the rock, a moniker I wear with pride most of the time, but occasionally wish to discard with extreme prejudice. So go on, plodding, one day at a time, repeating the same old mantra into ears that only half listen, and mind that care not at all, about the real world. Did I say I was tired? But I know I cannot rest until the last of my off-spring is out the door for good. Then can I divorce them? But I digress…

2200 Hours: No plan survives its first brush with reality! I said the two days ago, and it is proving very true as the second week of the WAR slides into the timeline. The critics have been blooming on the airwaves like buds on a tree in early spring. All have a problem with the U.S. battle plan, but it was a gamble and we lost! Our venerable and barely tolerable Secretary of Defense distanced himself from the Battle Plan yesterday, laying it formation, and execution at General Tommy Franks doorstep! I wonder if General Franks has removed the considerable shank from his backside yet? Make no mistake; General Franks was following the dictates of his civilian head and his foolhardy quest to open the chapter on a new type of warfare, one which relied too heavily on gee-wiz munitions, and not enough on tried and true stratagems of war fighting. Seeing the writing on the wall Rumsfeld’s mentor in all of this mess, Richard Perle, resigned yesterday as chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, an independent group that advises Rumsfeld on defense related matters. He says he resigned because of conflicts of interests, but I think he stepped down rather than stand by the plan the two had championed in the considerable months leading up to the war. “Perle, a strong conservative advocate for the Bush administration's hard-line approach to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, said he was resigning because ‘I cannot quickly or easily quell criticism of me based on errors of fact concerning my [business] activities.’ CNN On-line (http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/27/perle.resigns/index.html)

The pieces of the Iraq warfare jigsaw puzzle plan did not all fall into place like a well written Hollywood movie. This is real life, and “shit happens” it was hard to slip the (23?) millions Iraqi’s a copy of the scrip, though we tried hard enough, and harder still to get them to follow it, so that we could have an easy, and clean victory! WAR is never clean and never easy, and it should be, less it become even more commonplace then it already is.

But the U.S. and British forces have adapted to the changing conditions admirable. They are now clearing out the cities little by little, trying to avoid civilian casualties, but they have to be mindful of the seasons…

Email me: thebard62@earthlink.net