One of Ours

Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching human shields. I'm starting to think that even Command and Conquer: Generals, a game so "realistic" it took a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.

Well, below is my open letter to the Real Time Strategy gaming cartel. I want a War Simulation. A real one...I want an RTS game that will give me a stress headache after an hour and an ulcer after a week. I want to identify experienced players on the street by their Thousand-Yard Stares.

I want a War Sim...

1. ...where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a "nuclear missile silo," only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage...

2. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another "orphanage" turned out to be [an enemy] ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn't level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier's daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan.

3. Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over.

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5. I want that "Public Support" meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my [soliders] happened to be caught on video accidentally [committing an atrocity]. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime.

6. Speaking of innocents, I want a War Sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks...I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all, with [aircraft] carriers. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to Hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

7. I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know. I want little talking heads to pop up on my screen - commanders, politicians, allies, military intelligence - each giving me different sets of victory parameters, all of them conflicting and many of them written in bullshit ass-covering doublespeak.

8. I want CIA Field Agents that operate completely on their own agenda...


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13. I want factions...I want to share the map with powerful forces who are not friend or foe or anything else, a News Media, Private Corporations, asshole allies and friendly enemies, everyone jockeying for their own interests and me unable to bend over at any moment without turning my codpiece around first. I want a France.

14. I want fat, left-wing documentarians carefully editing the only the most incriminating footage, countered only by low-IQ country music singers crooning my praises while in American Flag-colored cowboy hats.

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16. I want a fourth of my casualties to come from friendly fire and non-combat or training accidents...

17. In my Public Support display let me find out that the news media has run, in the same magazine, one story blasting us for going to war for minerals and another story blasting us for not acting on the continuing mineral shortage back home. There should also be simultaneous stories about the outrageous expense of the war effort, and another about how the troops are under-funded and under-equipped. Set it so that I somehow lose Public Support points with each story.

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19. [At my court-martial] I'll tell them that we live in a world that has walls and that those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. I will tell them that I have a greater responsibility than they can possibly fathom. They weep for mistreated prisoners and curse the military. They have that luxury. They have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that the naked human pyramid and homoerotic torture, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to them, saves lives. I'll tell them that they don't want the truth, because deep down, in places they don't talk about at parties, they want me on that wall. They need me on that wall. I'll tell them that I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to men who rise and sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it. I'd rather they just said "thank you" and went on their way. Otherwise, I'd suggest they pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what they think they're entitled to.

...the presumed Democratic presidential nominee also had a message for terrorists the government says may attack to try to influence this fall's presidential election.

"We may have an election here in America. But let there be no doubt: This country is united in its determination to defeat terrorism," Kerry said. "As commander in chief, I will bring the full force of our nation's power to bear on finding and crushing your networks."...

...The lead-up to the war was contentious and, knowing what we know now, quite of few of the advocates of the war would have come down the other way. I suspect I would have, as I’ve always been skeptical of using the military for nation building. Indeed, I was very much a Realist on the war, rejecting the Administration’s arguments for it until roughly the time that North Korea announced that it had nuclear weapons. Ultimately, the prospect of a nuclear-armed and thus uncontainable Saddam pushed me into the pro-war camp.

On the other hand, I wonder how many wars that we now view as just would have met with popular approval in their midst. The U.S. Civil War, for example, would almost certainly not have been fought if Lincoln—let alone the public—had known ahead of time that over half a million would be killed and many times that maimed for life. The initial northern war aim of preserving the Union would certainly not have been deemed worth that price. The abolition of slavery, which became the war aim well into the conflict, has made it seem worthwhile in the hindsight of history, but that goal had much less popular support in the North than did Union.

Would we have fought World War I if we had known the cost ahead of time? Or that we’d have to fight it again thirty years later? How about Korea? Certainly, we’d have avoided Vietnam; a good thing in hindsight.

Indeed, World War II is the lone high cost war since the War for Independence that would likely have commanded popular support had the costs been known up front. And, indeed, I’m not sure WWII would survive this test had we not been attacked at Pearl Harbor. We were quite content to let Hitler have his way in Europe—participating only with materiel support—for quite a few years until Pearl Harbor gave Roosevelt the excuse he needed to send us to war.

Gunmen opened fire on a U.S. Army vehicle Friday in Najaf's twin city, wounding two American soldiers and raising fears over the agreement struck the day before to end the bloody standoff around this Shiite holy city. Mortars fell on the main U.S. garrison but caused no injuries.

Five Iraqis were killed and 14 wounded in clashes between U.S. troops and Shi'ite militiamen in the holy city of Najaf and in nearby Kufa Friday, hospital sources said.

Three people died in gunfire and mortar shelling in the town of Kufa, while eight were wounded, said an official at the hospital there. In Najaf, three miles southwest of Kufa, two people were killed and six hurt...

Armed members of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia -- some of them masked and brandishing rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Kalashnikov rifles -- roamed the streets of Kufa on Friday. Most of the shops were closed and the streets were largely deserted. Three people were killed and eight injured in armed clashes...

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Despite the agreement, nine mortar shells hit the main U.S. camp in the Najaf area on Friday morning, according to CNN, which has a correspondent embedded there. U.S. soldiers detained four suspected militia members who said they were unaware of the truce...

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During the seven-week standoff with the coalition, al-Sadr had appeared every Friday in a mosque in Kufa to deliver the traditional sermon. He did not show up Friday, however, and it was unclear why.

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The deal also allows for discussions of al-Sadr's future, talks that will certainly stretch past the June 30 handover. The arrest warrant for al-Sadr, however, has not officially been suspended...