Understanding

I mentioned in an earlier post that there are concepts, such as bestiality, that I just don't get. I admit, things like that, I don't try very hard to get. I'm not sure I want to understand them, or the people who are taken by them. On the other hand, there are areas that I also don't understand at more than the most superficial of levels that I am trying to understand. That's why I read the Tell Me How This Ends book about the Iraq War, and why I'm waiting for Baghdad At Dawn. The general topic of war, how it's executed and managed, is interesting to me, though my knowledge is all second hand and more at the GI Joe than the Army War College level of knowledge. For that reason, I've started reading An Army At Dawn, about the North African campaign in World War II. Coincidentally, that lead to an interesting discussion this morning.

I was driving my daughter and another girl over to a color guard practice when my daughter looked down at the center console and saw the Army At Dawn book. She asked what it was about, and I told her, saying that I didn't understand much about how wars worked, or how they came about, and I was trying to learn more. She said that it was easy - get guns, shoot people - and I said well, sure, but how do you decide who to shoot? How do you get guns to them, and make sure they have training on how to use them? She thought about that a minute, and said that if the other guys shot back, you run away, so I said maybe; if you do decide to do that, how do you know that there will be a way to do that, that you'll know which way to go, that you're get your equipment out of there, too, so that the enemy doesn't capture it. Like in the Battle of the Bulge, I said; the Germans were trying furiously to break through an Allied line, and if they had, they might have won the war -- but they couldn't because, among other things, they ran out of gas for their tanks. What if they'd had enough, or if they'd been able to capture Allied fuel? Logistics isn't sexy, but its as important as knowing who to attack, and how to do it. The other girl said that she was studying that war, and knew that it started because Hitler was smart and a good manipulator of people. Yes, I said, but remember, he was lucky in his timing -- things in Germany were very, very bad, and the German people wanted someone to give them back the pride they'd lost, and the prosperity they'd lost. They would have done just about anything, supported anyone, to get that. Like us, after 9/11, when we said we didn't want that to ever happen again, and we would have done about anything to keep it from happening again. It took us years to say that while some of what we did was good, some was not. Like what, my daughter said, and I said Like warrantless wiretapping, and limiting habeas corpus. What's that, she asked.

It was fun.