Extensions

Watching the news over breakfast, I see that part of President Bush's "new strategy" for Iraq is to extend by three months the tours of troops already there. A similar "surprise" happened in my outfit of Russian linguists stationed in Germany in 1961.

The Berlin Wall had just gone up, and we were on a war alert. Pres. Kennedy gave a speech and extended tours for everyone with less than a year of duty left. Fortunately I had over a year and didn't get extended. But a friend of mine, a colleague, learned of his extension in the middle of his going-home party.

We were celebrating at the E.M. Club. He left the next morning. Another linguist came in with the bad news. Short-timer boy went bonkers, got terribly drunk, and went looking for our commanding officer "to kill him." We managed to stop him but didn't hide his loud anger, so he ended up being arrested and later sent to a shrink, sent home and given a dishonorable discharge. Letters from him made it clear that he didn't mind this at all. He was a civilian again. He was back in grad school at Princeton working on his Ph.D. in psychology.

Extensions can be very bad for morale. You focus on your sent-home date -- you do this for weeks and months ahead of time -- and then it explodes in your face.

Troubling times are ahead, I think. I've never accepted the comparison of Iraq to Vietnam -- until now. I think this escalation may be unpopular enough to bring large, meaningful protests to the streets -- and if I'm right, it may be "here we go again." (If only the accompanying sound track, the music, was as good...).

But here's the worst case scenario: the war drags on, the protests increase and get violent, by the time of the Democratic Convention in 2008, it's 1968 all over again, huge protests congregate at the convention, and there's another police riot when trying to control them. And as a backlash, the Republicans get reelected, and the war escalates some more (ala Nixon bombing Cambodia).

History is so repetitive it gets dramatically boring, and we don't learn a damn thing from our mistakes. Each generation has to reinvent the wheel. Ain't life grand?