"I don't begrudge them..."
"...We'd do the same thing if some foreign dudes rolled into San
Diego and set up shop.
—
A Marine
officer in Fallujah
"I also started thinking that the insurgents sure didn't look like
terrorists from my vantage point on the truck. They didn't seem like radicals
or hard-core fighters. They were people shooting from their bedrooms, their
prayer rooms, their rice paddies and their mosques. They were people defending
their land."
— NY
Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman
"If an Iraqi division was rolling up I-85 through Greensboro on
its way to overthrow some hypothetical despot in Washington, I’d like
to think I’d have the wherewithal to pick a couple of the bastards off
along the way."
— Ed
Cone, a peace-loving journalist
"Jerry, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's worth doing!"
— Lt. Britt
Blaser to Lt. Iverson, 1967
When I was a 24-year-old Lieutenant hauling guns and butter around Vietnam
in C-130s in October, 1967, my fiancée was demonstrating for peace in
Washington, DC. Between the two of us, I felt we were getting it about right.
We saw our higher purpose not as assembling a bundle of illusory reinforcements
for a narrow point of view, but rather to do what needed doing, competently,
while understanding our context, competently.
Or, as Tom Wolfe related in The Right Stuff: "Shut up and
die like an aviator." He was quoting an experienced Naval aviator
advising a young pilot to stop yelling about the MIG on his Six and to start
doing what he'd been trained to do.
The common thread in these anecdotes is that, if there is such a thing as right
action, it places a demand on your resources whether or not your intellect
or your gut buys into it. That is the essence of trusting your instruments rather
than your inner ear. It also suggests that, when you must do things that seem
threatening to your survival, it's OK to keep your perspective.
In fact, it will improve your odds of survival.
[I penned this last night without the benefit of Ed
Cone's similar
post. Honest.]
1:50:15 PM 
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