The quotable Marine
Ran across a couple cool quotes from Marines today. In Niall Ferguson's Colossus, this from Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni referring to the first Gulf War:
Desert Storm worked... because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically, with less of everything, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait.
And this from Robert Kaplan's amazing book Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground - Capt. Jason Smith, to a Iraqi resident of Fallujah during the first assault on that town:
Sir, we are truly sorry that we had to ask your family to leave the building. You can all go back in now. We will compensate your for the inconvenience. We are United States Marines, a different breed than you are used to. We do not take kindly to people shooting at us. If you have any information on the Ali Babas, please share it with us. If you know any of the Ali Babas personally, please tell them to attack us as quickly as possible so that we may kill them and start repairing sewers, electricity, and other services in your city.
Just so you know, Ali Babas was Marine slang for the jihadis who were the targets for the assault.
And speaking of war, Victor Davis Hanson has a new one out, A War Like No Other : How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. NRO is publishing chapter ten online, in four parts, available here: one, two, three, and four.
Hanson is one of the best military historians going. He has an encyclopedic command of military history as a whole, and his classical training informs not just his wonderful discussions of Hellenic warfare, but also of more modern conflicts. His study of Sherman in The Soul of Battle is on par with Lidell Hart's study, and along with Sherman's own autobiography, an absolute must read. (Autobiographies of Civil War generals are really amazingly good reads. Grant's is justly considered one of the best memoirs ever written.) Based on the excerpts, this most recent Hanson work looks to be fully as good as the others.
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I have a friend who served in
I have a friend who served in Iraq in a civil affairs unit. Their camp had never been attacked during his time there. At one point, Marines took over security for their base camp for several weeks. The Marines looked for people worth shooting and managed to get into a firefight every single day.
When the Marines rotated out and the Army took over for security again; no more firefights.
I had to laugh because my old Marine unit managed to get into firefights with terrorists prior to ever leaving our base in Saudi Arabia. It helped pass the time while waiting for the ground war.