Two Decades of War Have Eroded the Morale of Americas Troops: Now Trump owns Syria.........

[riversedge]

It has to wear on the troops and their families.--never ending wars!

Link to tweet

Two Decades of War Have Eroded the Morale of America’s Troops
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/left-behind/556844/

After nearly 17 years of war, service members have seen plenty of patriotic displays but little public debate about why they’re fighting.


South of Fallujah’s Route Fran were hundreds of insurgents who’d spent months digging trench lines, emplacing roadside bombs, barricading streets, training with their weapons, reading the Koran, and watching videos of suicide bombers to inspire them for the fight to come. North of Route Fran were the roughly 1,000 men of 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, preparing themselves for the assault. Route Fran itself was a wide, four-lane highway. On November 9, 2004, the highway was wet—it’d rained the previous day—and the sky was gray and foreboding.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

“You just know that this whole company crossing this road,” marine Justin Best later told a reporter, “someone’s gonna get hit.”

When crossing an open space like Fran, it’s important to have units in overwatch, shooting at locations from which the enemy might fire at you and your buddies. Most of the bullets expended in war aren’t intended to kill the enemy so much as to keep his head down while you maneuver your way to a place where you can kill him. It doesn’t always work. There were enough large buildings on either side of Fran that the marines could never hope to cover every window.

The marines started to cross—one platoon running at full speed, the others firing away, filling the sky above with bullets. Insurgents on the other side opened up as well, one of them hitting Sergeant Lonny Wells, a 29-year-old father of four children. The round tore through his leg and he pitched forward, falling to the ground. Wells, his mother later recalled, had wanted to join the military since he was young. She’d tell him, “Why don’t you try to be a model? You’ve got the looks.” And he’d reply, “Oh, Mom, I’m gonna be a marine.” Now he was facedown in the middle of an open highway in Fallujah, blood pooling around his body.

Gunnery Sergeant Ryan Shane, whose platoon had been providing covering fire, put down his rifle. As a senior leader, he wasn’t expected to be the one to recover Wells. Nevertheless, he ran out to the fallen marine, grabbed him by the drag strap on his body armor, and, along with one other marine, began tugging him to safety. After Shane took few steps, a bullet slammed into his lower back, and he fell to the ground. Now there were two injured men facedown in the middle of the open highway, bleeding onto the wet pavement.

Everyone in overwatch had seen Wells fall, and they’d seen what had happened to Shane when he’d tried to help. They all must have known that the two injured men were now bait, that insurgents were waiting to fire on anyone else foolish enough to try to save their brothers. Naturally, marines being marines, two more of them ran out. Thanks to them, Shane would live, but they were too late for Wells. He bled to death..................






?1523390470
Illustration: Attila Futaki; Coloring: Gregory Guilhaumond

[bearsfootball516]

1. Syria will only end up being a big deal if we send in ground troops, which won't happen.

Sending ground troops in would be an unmitigated disaster. But if the action is ultimately limited to Friday night's airstrikes, the news cycles will take over and by Monday morning, nobody will be talking about it anymore.