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(The interior of the al Firdos District Command and Control (C3) Bunker in Baghdad on the second anniversary of the strike. The big hole in the roof was opened up by one of the two Guided Bomb Units (GBU-27 PAVEWAY III laser-guided munitions) on Feb 13, 1991. The impeccably executed strike we learned the next morning was on a C3 target that also served as a local air raid shelter).
There has been a growing fondness between legal counsel Amanda and the Old Salts and venerable Ladies at the Fire Ring at Refuge Farm. Amanda was charged with keeping the group out of trouble after the government announced it was going to prosecute retired military personnel for being critical of members of the establishment they had served.
The Chairman had decided that assigning Amanda to keep an eye on us would be enough to keep his organization out of trouble. That may have reflected a part of the Lawfare that infests all sorts of things in our nation. This morning there was news about nuisance suits being funded by private parties to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to sue Government to get pre-determined results determined by shopping for the judge with the correct orientation to deliver the desired ruling.
Splash laughed from his comfortable rock \u201cI am a disabled veteran with injuries suffered by ejecting out of defective airplanes. Maybe I should sue McDonald-Douglas and not have to live in the Bunk House.\u201d
Loma frowned, still serious about the original topic. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work that way. Mickie-Dee has a battalion of attorneys ready to claim it was your improper operation of a wonderful and reliable wartime tool that made you reach down for the lower handle of the Martin-Baker ejection seat instead of reaching upward for the preferred initiation of the rocket located directly under your butt to punch you through the elegantly crafted canopy.\u201d
\u201cSo, you ae saying that trying to sue someone with more resources would just bankrupt me and not them?\u201d
\u201cIf one of them happens to have an inexhaustible reservoir of lawyers.\u201d Rocket shook his head and rose slowly to get more coffee. \u201cYou have heard that the fighter community of aviators has been reporting cancer in dramatically higher levels than ordinary people who don\u2019t strap themselves within a couple feet of an extremely high-power radar system endlessly sweeping the skies ahead of them?\u201d
\u201cUnintended consequences, we are told. Plus, you had the same rocket under your butt that Splash had to use, correct procedure or not.\u201d
\u201cSee the confusion? PTSD.\u201d
There was general laughter to that, since the original term for the mental and spiritual impact of surviving a traumatic event was more accurate.
\u201cYou mean \u2018Shell Shock?\u2019 Or \u201cCombat Fatigue?\u201d I had a buddy I worked with in the last Balkans fight. He got a chance to visit Kosovo after the air campaign and see some of the results of his planning handiwork and target analysis close up. You know, dropped bridges, smashed barracks. He said it gave him an idea of how many people got killed as a result of his expertise. It made him think about what he had been part of. He said it was a sort of PTSD. Mild, since it hadn\u2019t been close up. But real.\u201d
\u201cYeah, I felt the same way after we took the planning results for a great target in Iraq all the way up to the Chairman and the SECDEF. We had great intelligence on the place, the construction blueprint, all the elements to plan the right weapons to use and all that stuff. Both of those senior officials and their horse-holders had been pleased with the precision of the effort. Then, the next day we had to explain the part we missed.\u201d
\u201cWhat was that?\u201d
\u201cIt was filled up with family members of the regime who thought it was a safe place.\u201d
\u201cJeeze.\u201d
Melissa sat back, knowing a little more about the complexities of some of the ordinary experience of being female in this world than the grizzled old guys. \u201cI read one of the Washington Post reporters said she had PTSD from some of the mean tweets she got after revealing the home address of someone she didn\u2019t like in the newspaper.\u201d
\u201cI think maybe we ought to stop using that term and restrict it to people who have actually had to walk up to the line of death and work there for a while.\u201d
\u201cRemember our pal who wound up being like the second-to-last Yank on the ground in South Vietnam and trying to figure out how the hell to get out of there before the North Vietnamese tank column arrived?\u201d
\u201cThat would be enough for me,\u201d said Melissa. Everyone else who had been in the business of administering lethal force looked thoughtful for a minute.
Loma suggested we go back to using \u201cShell Shock,\u201d since being encompassed by the blast of high explosive didn\u2019t require a lot of qualification to it. \u201cBesides,\u201d he said. \u201cWe ought to have another term for the results of bad decision-making that don\u2019t involve direct kinetic-induced concussion.\u201d
DeMille was eager to get on with building the open-source information Weather Report for the week, so we got on with all the other stuff that has people pretty worked up already. \u201cThe first Ukrainian corn export made it to a port in Romania,\u201d said Buck hopefully. \u201cThey had to ship it by train, so it was a good news story. Some corn made it out of the country.\u201d
\u201cThat doesn\u2019t sound like a bunch of good news, considering it is only one ship-load and you can take a train out in all sorts of ways.\u201d That was Loma, whose specialty had once been a thing called \u2018Targets That Count.\u2019 He sometimes joked that it was better than the ones that didn\u2019t, but sometimes it didn\u2019t work out that way.
\u201cIt is a complex business. It gets even more complicated when one of the factors is to ensure that it makes a simple blunt kinetic statement with minimal collateral damage.\u201d
\u201cMaybe that is what we ought to call \u2018mean tweets.\u2019 There is plenty of shock to go around. Does anyone see how we can get to some kind of peace? I\u2019d like to go back to ordinary trauma rather than be part of someone else\u2019s collateral.\u201d
There was general agreement on that point, but a growing sense that we might be seeing something emerging from the violence that was going to shock us all. Even the ones who had done some shocking things on their own.
Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
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