Wednesday, March 28, 2007
2 senators' paths from Vietnam to Iraq - International Herald Tribune
Chuck Hagel spent 13 months as a grunt in the Mekong Delta in the deadliest period of the Vietnam War. He saw the horror of war from the bottom up — men sheared in half by explosives, half-decapitated by sniper fire, bleeding to death in the gloomy swelter of the jungle. Thirty years later, he came to believe he had been used.
John McCain was shot down 3,500 feet, or 1,065 meters, above Hanoi on a bombing run one month into his tour. He spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war; he was held in solitary confinement, tortured, beaten until he could not stand. An admiral's son, he came to believe, like many pilots, that the war could have been won if only it had been fought right.
...
Infantrymen patrolling populated areas came in regular contact with civilians, sometimes indistinguishable from enemy combatants. Hagel and his brother, Tom, who served with him, saw children with explosives taped inside their shirts, a woman in a rice field with a tripwire tied to her toe. Under the rules of engagement, U.S. soldiers who were fired on from a village could open fire or even call in an airstrike to obliterate it.
Hagel has described seeing a sniper take off the top of the head of a young captain crouching near him in a cemetery. A mine sheared off a fellow soldier at the hips. ...
Chuck Hagel spent 13 months as a grunt in the Mekong Delta in the deadliest period of the Vietnam War. He saw the horror of war from the bottom up — men sheared in half by explosives, half-decapitated by sniper fire, bleeding to death in the gloomy swelter of the jungle. Thirty years later, he came to believe he had been used.
John McCain was shot down 3,500 feet, or 1,065 meters, above Hanoi on a bombing run one month into his tour. He spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war; he was held in solitary confinement, tortured, beaten until he could not stand. An admiral's son, he came to believe, like many pilots, that the war could have been won if only it had been fought right.
...
Infantrymen patrolling populated areas came in regular contact with civilians, sometimes indistinguishable from enemy combatants. Hagel and his brother, Tom, who served with him, saw children with explosives taped inside their shirts, a woman in a rice field with a tripwire tied to her toe. Under the rules of engagement, U.S. soldiers who were fired on from a village could open fire or even call in an airstrike to obliterate it.
Hagel has described seeing a sniper take off the top of the head of a young captain crouching near him in a cemetery. A mine sheared off a fellow soldier at the hips. ...
Labels: war
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