A Test of Will
"Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution."
Drain the swamp. Some people, of course, take a colder--they would call it a more practical--view. "If the politicians had been willing to risk lives in the war against terrorism in past years, we wouldn't have 5,000 civilian casualties today," says retired Lt. Gen. James Terry Scott, commander of the Army Special Operations Command from 1993 to 1996. Scott believes that the organizing principle of American military engagement over the past decade has been not strategic victory but casualty aversion. This philosophy, he says, has handicapped past efforts to fight terrorism, such as when the Clinton administration chose not to use Special Forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that in this new war on terrorism, Special Forces--including units like the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, whose motto is "Death Waits in the Dark"--will "drain the swamp [terrorists] live in."
Public-opinion polls show solid support for retaliation against terrorists, but nobody knows how the public will react if the September 11 attacks turn out to be only the first phase of a multiphase war on the United States. "I am very worried about that," historian Fussell says. "Let's say we introduce U.S. marines into Afghanistan, and then they set off an atomic bomb in the United States in retaliation. The other thing that troubles me is if we go into Afghanistan, when do we get out? It seems to me that this will be another South Korea: We will keep troops there forever."
General Scott says: "We have to understand that wars are long and bloody. There will be successes and failures," and as for politicians, "I'm not sure there are any new true believers when it comes to riding out all the difficulties." In this war, some military experts point out, the frontline casualties may not be American soldiers but American civilians.
Hurt and embarrassed. To ensure that doesn't happen, President Bush sent scores of B-1 bombers, F-15 and F-16 fighters, and support aircraft from their home bases to American bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia last week. From Norfolk, the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier battle group, with 14 ships, 75 warplanes, and 15,000 sailors and marines, sailed for the Mediterranean against a backdrop of muffled sobs from loved ones and the jauntily defiant strains of "New York, New York" blasting from dockside loudspeakers.
Just before the USS Shreveport, a troop transport, shipped off last week from Morehead Beach, N.C., Marcus Mason, a 21-year-old lance corporal from Carrollton, Ga., said: "I've been in the Marines for 31/2 years [and] I'm ready to get some action." The terrorist attack, he said, "hit hard. I felt hurt." He watched it on the news, then called his family to get their reaction. "They felt embarrassed," he said. "They thought we had more protection as a country."
At Camp Lejeune, N.C., some 40 miles from Morehead Beach, another group of marines was preparing to ship off on the Shreveport's sister ship, the Bataan. Families came down to an expanse of soccer fields, where helicopters were waiting to take their loved ones away. Danyelle Crum leaned on a stroller carrying her 11-month-old daughter. Her son, Jacob, 6, played with the dog tags that his dad, Nathan Crum, a 22-year-old sergeant, gave him. "Yesterday was worse," Danyelle said. "We were running last-minute errands, and I was crying." She's planning to do plenty of E-mailing--the ship has a computer room for the crew--and scan pictures of their children to her husband. "My daughter will be a toddler when he gets back," she said.
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