Agitprop

It isn't what we say or think that defines us
but what we do, 
--Sense and Sensibility,  
 Jane Austin 
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Since the recent movie theater shooting occurred at a what was to have been a showing of  the film "Lone Survivor", we will address the event in two ways: today, the film as a misbegotten film effort to apotheosize a failed mission, and next, as the sort of media which serves as an irritant to a society whose attention is already stretched thin.

Marcus Luttrell's "Lone Survivor" turned a failed mission (Operation Redwings, 2005) into a celebratory media momento mori. But the the deaths of the 20 fine United States Special Operations Soldiers served no military function, therefore the fight served nothing of value to the outcome of the war. The operation was actuality a dereliction of leadership and a morally bankrupt interpretation of soldiering values. When myth, entertainment and propaganda steal the truth from an event, we are delusional.

Ranger asks -- in opposition to the "Code of Conduct" and the creeds of an imagined warrior caste in the U.S. military-- "What if the SEALs of Lt. Murphy's team had surrendered?" There is precedent for this sort of action (an entire U.S. field Army surrendered at Corregidor and Bataan.) When there is no military purpose served, then why fight to the death? Surely Murphy's team knew they were dead when the hostiles gained contact.

In previous RAW commentary on Redwings, we have written that the Murphy team should not have launched this mission. However, once engaged and the the odds were clear, surrender was an option, even if a risky one; "slim" is better than "none". 

The reasons for not surrendering are to prevent routs, penetrations and all those things that were not present at this fight. No other American units would have been endangered if the Murphy team had surrendered. So what were they fighting for? This must be determined before sending Soldiers into harm's way.

"Lone Survivor" is posed to become a hit, in the same way as did the the Navy's Disneyfied film, Act of Valor; as did the propaganda film "Hurt Locker", by our own Leni Riefenstahl (dir. Bigelow.) Symbol and reality are separate, and when the story is better than the reality, we will always go with the tall tale. 

But soldiering is an act of logic and cold calculations that should not be mixed with romantic warrior ethics of fighting to the death. Our Soldiers are not Ninja, Samurai or Kamikaze, yet they are depicted as such. 

In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, we prefer the comfortable and reliable bland to the real, and we have become complicit in broadcasting the simulacrum through our media. In our Age of Spectacle, we will always prefer the performance to the actuality.   

We could not win the war, but we could take a trivial, tragic defeat and transmogrify it into a heroic, death-defying battle. Defeat then becomes a mythic victory when the man who could be the truth-teller becomes complicit in his own dream.

This is alchemy, and it can only occur in a setting of willing blindness.

Ninja II

Us and them
And after all we're only ordinary men
Me and you
God only knows it's not what we would choose to do
"Forward" he cried from the rear and the front rank died
And the General sat, and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side
--Us and Them, Pink Floyd

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To recap the first failure of Ninja (Operation Red Wings), the action for which Patrick Murphy earned the Medal of Honor: the recon team had been discovered by local goatherds, and instead of immediate radio request for exfiltration, the 4-man team maneuvered position and were ambushed the next morning by possibly 200 Taliban.

The next major failure is shattering, and even Miniter cannot draw a halo on it.

Twenty minutes after the helicopters were dispatched, "the pilot had bad news":

"The two Black Hawks, including Healy's were too heavy to vault over the peaks of Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province. . . . the choppers diverted to Jalalabad, where 16 men were ordered off the Black Hawks. With more than 10 minutes lost, the two helicopters decided to outrun their slower, armored escorts. Contact with the trapped SEAL team had been lost."

How can this be? This is the supposed 80-man team at-the-ready. These are Night Stalkers -- an elite SOF asset -- and we are to understand they do not know the load limits of their birds, nor the elevation of the terrain involved? This is a tragicomedy, a Chinese fire drill.

When the Black Hawks enter the landing zone, Taliban fire an RPG round, which explodes inside the first helicopter.

"The SEALS onboard the second Black Hawk were horrified to see the lead chopper explode, tilt its nose upward and spill men to the ground. The remaining air crew, belted in, were trapped inside a flaming comet, plunging down into a boulder-choked ravine. Healy, McGreevy and a dozen others were gone."

Why would any leader attempt an insertion under enemy fire without the suppressive fire of gunships? This is plain foolhardy and cannot be justified even as a desperation measure. If the recon team just got destroyed, it is a safe assumption that there will be heavy anti-aircraft fire to include automatic weapons and RPG's.

Miniter assures us the SEALs inside the 2nd copter "desperately wanted to land and make the enemy pay. But the radio gave different orders: leave now." Fortunately someone was now making decisions on a rational rather than emotional basis.

One cannot make the enemy pay. You can kill them, but that won't return the 19 friendly KIA's to life. This is not a computer game, it is real-life brutal combat.

When Miniter, writing about the rescue of the bodies, says, "the cavalry had come," it's time to tune out. The question remains: Where was the 80-man assault element previously mentioned as a component of this operation?

If the plan called for an 80-man reaction force, then artillery or aerial rocket artillery should have been pre-planned to support the assault and recon teams' efforts. In addition, aviation assets should have been on-station and ready to launch. Yeah, sure, the cavalry had come, but they were riding dead horses.

The Taliban were controlling the pace of battle. We gave up the principle of initiative when the first shot was fired. It is safe to assume that anti-coalition forces were pushing the SEALs down into a pre-planned kill zone.

The Taliban displayed a level of proficiency one would expect of U.S. SOF ground assets. They fought good, solid, well-planned small unit Infantry action. Murphy's team was totally reactive and defensive, therefore, they were the designated losers.

This entire operation seems based on a hope and a prayer, and not a chaplain anywhere in sight. The author calls it a "rescue", but it was a salvage operation and a body recovery mission. Nobody were rescued except Marcus Luttrell, who survived with a broken back by the good graces of goatherd who took him into his stone hut.

This failure of colossal proportions, like the Pat Tillman incident, proves the Army maxim: when a big screw up occurs, promote, or award medals. The Army's answer to an eraser.

Addendum: Author Richard Miniter is the best-selling author of two books which Borders does not stock. Each explains how Bill Clinton is to blame for Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. You can guess the audience which drove these books into best-seller status. That's right -- your fellow Americans.

Miniter's non-credentials as a "terrorism expert" include a terminal degree of a B.A. in philosophy from a liberal arts college. He has never worked in the military or government. He would make a fine writer of YA adventure stories.