Mike Tharp: Ten lessons to learn from war

Forty years ago this week I landed in Vietnam as a soldier.

When you read this, I'll be on a plane leaving Iraq after covering the war for the last six weeks as a correspondent.

Bookends.

Mike Tharp

Several volumes between them -- a dustup in Belize with Guatemala; South Korea's street fights for democracy; the Persian Gulf War; the L.A. riots; Somalia; Bosnia; Kosovo; Iraq last year.

Not a large library. Some of them more CliffsNotes than books. But they've all left their mark on me, the way some songs, novels, photographs, paintings and poems haunt you.

The U.S. military leaves formal footprints behind in a war. They're called "lessons learned" and "after-action reports."

This is a personal after-action report.

In the Editor's Note to our 2007 Special Report, "The War Comes to Merced," we quoted Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." That's Lesson No. 1. As I've found over four decades, from carrying a rifle to carrying a pen, war will always be with us.

Young reporters, like our Corinne Reilly, who twice has covered the war in Iraq in sterling fashion, can count on a war coming along sometime during their careers. Fewer, it seems, want to bear battlefield witness today than my generation and earlier ones did. But if some Twitter dude or lady blogger wants to don the battle-rattle, good on 'em. It'll make them better journalists. And Americans need someone on the ground, watching and listening for them in the most important decision any human society ever makes.

Lesson No. 2 is that we Americans don't learn from our mistakes. Vietnam was a mistake. This war in Iraq was a mistake. We'll get out of it with fewer than the 58,257 dead from Nam. And the Iraqis probably won't lose 2-3 million, as the Vietnamese did. But we won't leave behind a functioning democracy or even, over time, a U.S. ally. As with Vietnam, the so-called leaders who sent our young people across the seas to fight failed to understand both the enemy and the nature of the war.

Lesson No. 3 is that few of those leaders will ever have to pay the price of their folly. The 4,300-plus American dead, 31,000-plus American wounded, hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqis have paid the cost. But not the McNamaras or the Bundys or the Cheneys or the Wolfowitzes or the Johnsons or Nixons or Bushes. They get medals and money. The ones who made the ultimate sacrifice get lost in the pages of history. Five of their names are carved in granite at Courthouse Park.

A learning curve leads to Lesson No. 4. By the time I got to Vietnam, America knew it was losing. The late Walter Cronkite had called it "a stalemate" the year before I stepped onto the tropical tarmac at Tan Son Nhut Airbase. Americans don't do stalemates. Before Tet in '68, American soldiers and Marines -- like those in Gen. Hal Moore's and Joe Galloway's book, "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young" -- believed in their mission. By the time the guys in my company landed there, all we wanted was to get home alive.

Lesson No. 4 is that from the Persian Gulf War onward, the quality of soldiers -- and that includes all branches of the service -- has gotten better each year. The volunteer army has produced smart and brave studs, male and female. Each trooper I met over the last 18 years impressed me more each time. From technology to leadership to commitment, the modern American soldier is somebody we can all be proud of.

My dad taught me the next lesson. It may seem to contradict No. 4, but they're opposite sides of the same coin of our realm. National service should be mandatory. My dad said people shouldn't get to vote unless they'd performed two years of national service. Like him, I don't think it has to be only military service. But every able-bodied, able-minded youngster over 18 should be made to serve the country in a way that helps our society. Lesson No. 5 is that the same virtues and values I've found in young soldiers can be applied to peacetime problems right here at home. Sign 'em up and watch what happens -- to our crumbling bridges; to our weak grade schools; to our understaffed hospices; to our trashed national parks.