For all you folks who think war is clean, cut and dry. This is camera footage from an AC-130 gunship over a camp in Afghanistan. I've seen their destructive capability from this angle before, but back in my time, we would have been camped out somewhere, directing the gunners' fire on the targets.
As you can imagine, being caught in the middle of this on the ground is no pleasant experience [It don't happen like the movies or TV. The guy who gets knocked down in the middle of the road from the vehicle explosions is most certainly dead. You'd be amazed what shrapnel can do and where it can go. Your TV hero would have survived it without a scratch]. Now, I'm not making a judgment of whether these guys are innocent or not, but, as you can see, from a Spectre sitting up there doing pylon turns around the target, it's pretty difficult to tell good from bad. It's pretty hard to tell good from bad a hundred yards away, at night, on the ground.
It's why I get so incensed when people take war, and going to war, so lightly. People die, mostly in horrible ways, and it's just too difficult to tell combatants from innocents. As all you vets know, intelligence is far from infallible. If you're going to go to war, you'd better be doing it for the right reasons.
We're running the same kind of operations in Iraq, a war we shouldn't be in at all and the collateral damage is piling up. Too many innocents have been injured or killed in our fight against the 'insurgency' over there. A 500lb bomb or 155mm HE shell can't tell good from bad either.
It's time to end this occupation of Iraq and turn our attention back to the people who killed 3000 of my friends and neighbors, whether they be in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The next time someone declares 'mission accomplished', they'd better have Osama's head on a pike.
No comments:
Post a Comment