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Apocalypse Redux

By blueness

The war in Afghanistan is being waged long-distance, by remote control:

From their cockpit at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the pilot and co-pilot are flying a pilotless Predator on a bombing mission over Afghanistan, 8,000 miles away. A forward air controller in another unmanned drone spots the target and the Predator bomber takes off under local control from Kandahar in Afghanistan. Minutes later, control of the bomber is handed over to satellite control in the cockpit at Creech.

Two hours later, the crew sees on the cockpit screen two suburban vehicles stop in front of the targeted mud-baked house. Half a dozen bearded men hurry into the dwelling that intelligence had spotted as a Taliban command post. Seconds later, the bombardier in Nevada squeezed the trigger and a 500-pound bomb flattened the Taliban dwelling with a direct hit.

Watching the action on identical screens are CIA operators at Langley, Va., who can call in last-minute course corrections

Their eight-hour mission over, pilot and co-pilot climb into their vehicles and drive home. Thirty minutes later, they are playing with their children.

       

This is how the US lost Vietnam.
Novelist and former British intelligence agent John le Carre survived Southeast Asia in the months when the dominoes finally fell in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Near the end of the book he fashioned of that experience, The Honourable Schoolboy, occasional British spy Jerry Westerby is ensconced in a CIA compound, hollowed out of a US military base in northern Thailand. As Westerby waits while a defeated and half-drunk American spook transmits his signal to London, and waits for one in return, Westerby observes:

The windows overlooking the airfield were smoked and double glazed. On the runway aircraft landed and took off without making a sound. This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm's length. This is how they lost.

Introducing an uncompleted version of his film Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival, director Francis Coppola said:

My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment. And, little by little, we went insane.

In the film itself, reflecting on the surreal spectacle of a Playboy-themed USO show helicoptered in to rouse American cannon-fodder, the errand boy Captain Willard notes:

Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep, or moving too fast. His idea of great R and R was cold rice, and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home--death, or victory.

Don't play it again, Barack. Once, more than enough.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on February 21, 2009 (boomark / email).