Memorial Day, D-Day and Independence Day came at me in a rush this year, maybe because of the violence in Iraq. Whatever the reason, the holidays stirred up memories and reflection about war.

You see, once upon a time not so long ago, my friends and I were warriors, boys who became men as we marched toward the sounds of the guns. Clear eyed in our youth, we were tireless, some thought invincible. A few even sang as they manched. All that changed in the first fire-fight. Our foes were like a flash flood in a mountain stream: Koreans from the hills south of the Yalu River, Chinese swarming from the steppes of Outer Mongolia, Vietnamese fresh from victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. They came at us mostly at night, in waves of hundreds, eventually thousands, driven into our lines by the whistles, drums, bugles, lights, and shouts of their leaders. As they threw themselves on our barbed wire, we used artillery, mortars, mines, machineguns, grenades, rifles, and bayonets to kill them by the hundreds, eventually by the thousands. The North Vietnamese now tell us that we killed more than a million of them. That number made no difference, for they had an apparently inexhaustible supply of expendable soldiers. Our guys were neither expendable nor plentiful, but in the ten years of combat in Korea and Vietnam, in places like the Chosin Reservoir and the Ia Drang Valley, we lost over a hundred thousand. In the process, our enthusiasm changed to an acceptance of death. The gleam in our eyes became a blank, unfocused stare, and our hope was then that we would be permitted to live just a few more days and eventually be alloweed to go home, preferably in one piece and not in a box.

Why were we there? In Washington, they told us we were stoppintg the spread of communism and saving millions of Koreans and Vietnamese. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and sometimes I wonder about the intentions of those who sent us to fight in Korea and Vietnam. When I was a cadet at West Point, one of my professors told us that we must never wage a land war in Asia. That part of the world has too much land and too many soldiers, and their leaders do not believe in the Geneva Conventions. I also recall that just before the North Koreans attacked, the American Secretary of State announced that Korea was not in our national interests. Did he induce the attack? Later, another Secretary of State forecast that if South Vietnam were to fall, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like a set of dominoes. Was he a shill?

I cannot answer those questions, but I can tell you that America's real adversary in East Asia was and is China. The Chinese were the ones who almost killed my father at the Frozen Chosin. They were the ones who twice shot down my college roommate in North Vietnam. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, remember that the Chinese and the Vietnamese have been fighting each other for a thousand years. Shortly after Saigon fell, moreover, they fought still another border war. Sometimes I play the game of "what if" and I wonder what might have happened if someone in Washington had been smart enough to use the Vietnamese hatred of China against the Chinese? Would that have saved fifty-eight thousand American lives? What if Truman had not relieved MacArthur? Would North Korea today be an outlaw country bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them to our shores? What if Congress had not cut off funds for the South Vietnamese? Would that have eliminated a million boat people from fleeing Southeast Asia?

More relevantly, what if we had studied the lessons of the Philippine Insurrection before we went into Iraq? Both my great-grandfather and my grandfather fought in the Philippines, and the similarities to Iraq are many. We defeated the Spanish in the Philippines in about the same amount of time that we took to defeat Saddam Hussein's Republican Guards. In both countries, however, we blew the aftermath. We had promised the Filipinos their independence, but a few senators in Washington decided that we would instead occupy that country. That decision angered the Filipinos and started an insurrection. After three years of ambushes, booby traps, atrocities, snipers and diseases, President Teddy Roosevelt gave in to public and political pressure. Declaring victory he brought the American army home, leaving military advisors to train the Philippine Constabulary in defense of their country. If that scenario sounds anything like Iraq, consider the following: the soldiers we were fighting in the Philippines back then were the Moros, Muslim warriors. Today, a hundred years after Teddy's withdrawal, descendents of those Muslims are still fighting an insurrection in the southern Philippines. Now they are called Abu Sayyaf, and they are part of Al Qaeda. 

Sometimes in the stillness of the night, when the world around me has quieted, I think about the Philippines and Iraq. Then I pray for more wisdom in Washington than I have seen in quite a while, and I ask that our leaders learn from history and refrain from casually committing citizens to combat in faraway countries. My hope is that fifty years from now, another old colonel will not reflect on the deaths of an additional hundred thousand American soldiers.

Then, because it is late, I give thanks for one more year, just as I thank you now for reading my ramblings. God bless.

Hawk