Beyond Glory

Last night, my wife Pamela and I went to see Stephen Lang portray eight extraordinary men – all winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor from three wars: World War II, Korea and Vietnam. “Beyond Glory,” a one-man show at New York’s Roundabout Theater had only one omission in an otherwise pitch-perfect account of courage, indeed extraordinary courage, under fire.

There was not a single hero, a single holder of the nation’s highest military honor for heroism, from the Iraq War. That could be because there’s been only a single such winner in this war. Of all the 3,684 American soldiers who have lost their lives, let alone the 26,558 who’ve been wounded (certainly enough Purple Hearts have been handed out), the only American soldier, sailor or marine to be awarded this singular award for bravery is Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, B Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, United States Army, who entered the war on April 3, 2003, two weeks after it began.

I thought back about some of the other wars America has fought. World War I, from June 28, 1914, the date of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Garvrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student, until the final armistice on November 11, 1918, lasted just four years, four months and fourteen days. The United States was officially a declared belligerent, however, for only one year, seven months and five days. Yet 125 Americans were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in that conflict.

Stephen Lang doesn’t even mention Iraq in his riveting 80-minute monologue. Yet this war lasted March 20, 2003 to the present – four years, four months and 23 days, or nine days longer than all of World War I for which the United States provided only a short, sharp and as it turned out winning coda. Lang’s portrayal of heroism is by no means an anti-war screed – far from it. Rather it is a tribute to bravery. Does that mean there are no brave men or women serving in contemporary Mesopotamia? Far from it. Certainly, some may be designated years later, as happened occasionally in previous conflicts. But perhaps there’s simply some question as to one defines heroism in this sort of war that has basically superimposed 21st century military technology and tactics on bloody and bitter tribal disputes that have been a fixture of conflicts in Arabia and the Persian Gulf as far back as recorded time.

One of America’s most perceptive commanders in Iraq today, Brig. General John Allen, an astute battle-hardened Marine commander in al Anbar Province, observed to Wall Street Journal correspondent Greg Jaffe that it was the Anbari sheikhs who continue to call the tune in this, and most other regions of contemporary Iraq, as they have back to the time of Versailles, and even before.

“When the tribes are at their best they live in a condition of splendid equilibrium,” General Allen quotes Gertrude Bell as writing in her diaries in 1920. Readers of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today will recall her as a colleague of T.E. Lawrence in his efforts to prevent Mesopotamia from being carved up to the advantage of the western powers at the Paris Peace Conference. Bell, Lawrence and their Arab clientele, failed in their efforts of course. General Allen and a handful of others recognize the consequences. “The tribes are constantly shifting alliances to suit economic and security needs,” he says, pointing out that the vast majority of Iraq’s population – Sunni and Shiite alike, are members of one of the 150 or so tribes that comprise the present day kaleidoscope that is the ultimately artificial nation of Iraq.

Can there ever be heros in a conflict like this? In World War I, even in Vietnam, the enemy was quite clear. You could them apart – by their uniforms, if not by the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes. Today, one day’s hero, one day’s ally is the next day’s bitter enemy. The British and French discovered this, very much to their chagrin, in the decades that followed the disaster that took place in Paris in1919. Today, the United States seems to be learning a similar, if even more costly lesson in the same region.