****
Good grief, I've done it again. Right in the middle of a very important interview in Iraq, I got brain freeze.
Remember last October when I was granted that exclusive interview with one of the most powerful sheiks in Anbar province but couldn't think of ANYTHING to say? Well, the same thing happened to me the other day when I finally scored an interview with the commanding officer of the Marines' Fifth Regiment, charged with keeping the peace in western Iraq -- and then couldn't think of a single question to ask him.
And on a more personal level I coulda asked the colonel about his own experiences with war, had he served in Bosnia, was he present during the second Battle of Fallugah, what were his own hopes, dreams and aspirations for Iraq, how was he handling being in the unique position of having turned the corner here from fighting for one's life 24/7 to being able to set up a true Marshall Plan and working with the Iraqis as partners in the new Anbar reconstruction movement -- and has he personally ever killed anyone in battle?
Katy Couric herself would have drooled at the thought of being in my shoes! And all I could come up with was, "Er, hi...."
However, the colonel apparently hadn't become a colonel without having learned enough people skills to deal with reporters whose brains had just left the building and it wasn't long before he had put me at ease as he talked about his life as a citizen-soldier in the long-standing and honorable tradition of American citizen-soldiers.
"I was raised on our family's farm in upstate New York," the colonel told me, "getting up at 5 in the morning to do the chores, milk the cows." And then what happened? How did he end up becoming a Marine....
"I come from an Irish immigrant family of farmers and military men. My father and uncles and brothers served in the military and I simply followed their lead, starting out as an enlisted man and then when my tour of duty was up I went on to college under the GI bill, graduated in sociology and then became an officer. That's what I like about the Marines. They don't discriminate against enlisted men moving up in the ranks. If you meet the requirements, you become an officer. And that's that."
I'd heard that said before about the Marines' open promotion system. When I was in Haditha last fall, I'd met a captain who had also worked his way up through the ranks. I'd always intended to write his story but never had time. He was a Puerto Rican who had enlisted as a private and now he was a captain -- or was he a major? I can never figure out what those little tiny patches on the uniforms mean. Maybe he was a colonel too? In any case, he had come up through the ranks, going from the very bottom rung to rather close to the top -- solely based on his abilities.
"So. How's the reconstruction going?" I finally managed to squeak out.
"Let me tell you about reconstruction," said the colonel who I was supposed to be interviewing. "Reconstruction takes money. And money is a coward. It never goes where it's not safe. And now that there is relative safety here in Anbar province, we've been actually able to start putting reconstruction money to work."
Then the colonel looked me straight in the eye. "Make no mistake," he said. "We Marines are the sledgehammer of war. We are killing machines. My regiment, the legendary "Fighting Fifth," was at Guadalcanal and Okinawa. We are warriors and we do what warriors do. But do you know what a warrior's job is?"
"Er, no...."
"A warrior's job is to protect. And that's what we do. We project combat power -- but there is a limit to what combat power can achieve."
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