Excerpt du Jour on the Iraq War

The ninth of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks:

Each war produces its own artifacts -- its distinctive phrases, garments, or technological innovations. The memorable piece of clothing from World War I was the trench coat, which captures a key aspect of that mired conflict. The classic abbreviation of World War II was "sanfu" -- situation normal, all fucked up.

More than anything else, war is about destruction, and so it is weaponry that most often captures the feel of a given conflict. The cold soul of the limited 1991 Gulf War was the precision-guided "smart bomb," which distilled to one lethal device the technological leap the U.S. military had taken since the end of the Vietnam War just sixteen years earlier.

The emblematic weapon of the new Iraq war was quite the opposite: the inexpensive, low tech roadside bomb. The U.S. military called it the IED, for improvised explosive device. In unhappy contrast to the earlier U.S. war with Iraq, this weapon was not used by but against U.S. forces. It quickly became the single greatest threat to them. . . .

As they treated bomb injuries Army doctors began to notice a new pattern of problems in soldiers that resulted from brains being rattled around in the skull by the blasts. In 2003 and 2004, hundreds of soldiers were diagnosed as suffering some form of damage from such incidents. Even seasoned surgeons were surprised by the extent of it. Army Reserve Maj. Donald Robinson was a trauma specialist in inner-city Camden, New Jersey, before deploying to Iraq, but he was surprised by what he found in the war. "When I got there I was taken aback," he said. "This was penetrating trauma to the nth degree. It was massive. The tissue destruction was like nothing I'd ever seen before . . . Imagine shards of metal going everywhere . . . Add the percusion from the blast. Then put someone inside a Bradley fighting vehicle and add fire to it and burning flesh. A person inhales and [suffers] inhalation injury."

© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.