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Overview
Self-described war nerd Gary Brecher knows he’s not alone, that there’s a legion of fat, lonely Americans, stuck in stupid, paper-pushing desk jobs, who get off on reading about war because they hate their lives. But Brecher writes about war, too. War Nerd collects his most opinionated, enraging, enlightening, and entertaining pieces. Part war commentator, part angry humorist à la Bill Hicks, Brecher inveighs against pieties of all stripes—Liberian generals, Dick Cheney, U.N. peacekeepers, the neo-cons—and the massive incompetence of military powers. A provocative free thinker, he finds much to admire in the most unlikely places, and not always for the most pacifistic reasons: the Tamil Tigers, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Danes of 1,000 years ago, and so on, across the globe and through the centuries. Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed, Brecher provides a radically different, completely unvarnished perspective on the nature of warfare.
“Military columnist Gary Brecher’s look at contemporary war is both offensive and illuminating. His book, War Nerd . . . aims to explain why the best-equipped armies in the world continue to lose battles to peasants armed with rocks . . . Brecher’s unrefined voice adds something essential to the conversation.” —Mother Jones
“It’s international news coverage with a soul and acne, not to mention a deeply contrarian point of view.” —The Millions
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781593763022 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 935 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
COLOMBIA:A HUNDRED YEARS OF SLAUGHTERTUDE
* AMERICA KEEPS GETTING deeper into the shit in Colombia. We're airlifting planeloads of cash on the Colombian army — $1.5 billion is what the Defense Department admits, so you gotta assume it's more like $10 billion, with the rest squeezed through the usual CIA laundries. Colombia's gung ho president, Alvaro Uribe, says whatever Washington likes to hear; he's going to ratchet up the war against the rebels. Washington will give Colombia anything it wants, if only to annoy Hugo Chavez, who's right next door in Venezuela.
The big rebel group, FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia), has the same bring-it-on attitude. The rebels are always on the lookout for new ways to kill people. They even hired three ex-IRA guys to show 'em how to make remote-launched mortars, and learned so fast they damn near blasted el presidente right off the platform at his own inauguration.
So with everybody ready to party, seemed like a good time to give you a little briefing on Colombia, our new pal. But I have to warn you: Colombian history is as messy as a slaughterhouse floor in a blackout. So I'll give you a choice: the short version (for MTV victims with thirty-second attention spans) or the long version for serious military buffs.
First, the short version:
Colombian History and Culture in Three Easy Steps
• Step 1: Rent Scarface.
• Step 2: Fast-forward to that scene where Al Pacino and his friends try a coke deal with some Colombians. The Colombians want to take the money and keep the coke. They try to persuade Pacino to tell them where the money is by handcuffing him and his buddy to the wall, revvin' up a chainsaw and sawing off his friend's arms and legs till the whole room is so splattered with blood you can't see who's killing who anymore.
• Step 3: Replay this scene over and over for four hundred years.
And that, kids, is the history and culture of Colombia.
OK, now a more detailed version.
Say Latin America's a psych ward (which it pretty much is, anyway). Panama would be the sociopath con man. Argentina'd be this suicidally depressed old bag. Brazil would be a classic nympho whore ... and Colombia would be the guy all the other psychos are scared of, the guy in the triple-locked cage at the end of the high-security corridor, who used to barbecue his victims and make "Kiss the Cook" aprons out of their skin.
Colombians have been killing each other since the Spanish came ashore and got to work hacking the local Indians into extinction. Between 1819 and 1900, Colombia had fifty rebellions and eight full-scale civil wars. Some of the rebellions were quick little coups with only double-digit casualties, but some were serious bloodbaths. In the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1901), those hardworking Colombian killers managed to knock off 100,000 of their fellow citizens. They kept at it and hit some kind of peak in the 1940s with la Violencia, a free-for-all that notched up at least 300,000 dead.
One interesting thing about Colombian killing is they do it both ways: solo and in groups. There are some nationalities that turn into psycho killers once they put on a uniform, but wouldn't even run a yellow light once they're back in civvies, two classic examples being the Japanese and Germans. The Japanese did things in China that'd make Jeffrey Dahmer puke. Beheading contests, sword practice on pregnant Chinese, hacky sack with babies and bayonets. But those Japs went home and instantly morphed into salary-men who wouldn't even jaywalk. Same with the Germans: let 'em loose in a gray helmet and they go crazy, but back home in Dusseldorf, they'd die before they'd drop an ice cream stick on the sidewalk.
Then there are the countries that kill real well in private life, but won't fight in uniform — Italians, say. Mean fuckers on the street, in the alley, but put one in a uniform, and he can't wait to throw away his rifle and find a nice, cozy cellar to hide out in.
But Colombians are multi-event killers. They're like the Bo Jackson of killing: They can do it all. In uniform or out, home games or away, on the street or the battlefield. Men, women, children, dogs — if it moves, Colombians'll kill it. For any reason. Or no reason. For money, fun, the revolution, the counterrevolution, or just for practice.
Killing is like the only way you can make a point in Colombia. Take soccer. We all know foreigners get weird about soccer — hooligans, riots, all that. But Colombians do it their way — none of that noise and drunken chair-throwing crap you get with English hooligans. Colombians say it with bullets. In the 1994 World Cup, Colombia lost out because a player named AndrÃ(c)s Escobar scored an "own goal." Escobar flew back to Colombia expecting to get a hard time. But nobody yelled at him. That wouldn't be the Colombian way. All that happened was that as soon as Escobar stepped out of his house, a man walked up and emptied a whole 9-mm clip into him. I mean, that's what you call fan feedback.
Before they got guns, Colombians settled life's little problems with machetes. I read about this pretty damn cool custom they had in Colombian villages: If two men have a disagreement, they don't shout, they don't sue, they don't bore everybody with long arguments. Nope. Two guys just take up their machetes, and then each grabs one end of a serape. When the ref blows his whistle, they start chopping each other up. The first guy to let go of the serape loses. Usually because he's dead.
The winner, who's probably bleeding to death himself, walks away covered with glory — and a few quarts of arterial blood. The goat or chicken or whatever it was the fight was about belongs to him, and he staggers off just as happy as a Colombian can be, down to the coffin shop to see if he can trade the goat for an upgrade to the deluxe mahogany model.
The historians I've been reading — typical bleeding-heart college professors — all try to say Colombians aren't really violent. Oh no! It's America's fault, or it's the United Fruit Company's fault, or it's the cocaine trade, or whatever.
Yeah. Reminds me of this "cultural education" visitor we had when I was in ninth grade in Long Beach — this huge Samoan lady who stomped in and told us she was going to "break the stereotype" that Samoans were violent. She sang some Samoan poem and showed us a flower arrangement, which was supposed to prove to us Samoans were the gentlest people ever to walk the earth. Our mullet-hair dyke teacher stood next to her, all nodding and clapping and going, "Oh, how true!" — and when big Samoan lady finally shut the Hell up, the dyke reached out to try to hug her. Except she couldn't get her little arms around far enough. It was funny, and about half the class sort of laughed. Samoan lady didn't like that. She put out one big nonviolent Samoan hand about the size of a catcher's mitt on the dyke's chest and shoved her halfway across the room. Then the bell rang and the rest of us squeezed around Samoan lady to see if we could make it to the vending machines before Sammy Faumina. Sammy was this peaceful, gentle Samoan guy who weighed about five hundred pounds, liked bouncing white kids' heads off their lockers, and could shake us down for our lunch money.
So how about a little truth for once? As in: Colombians kill. They've done it nonstop for four hundred years. They'll do it for another four hundred. That's part of the reason it's hard to explain the current wars in Colombia, because they're just a little episode in one long war that will never end.
I say "wars" because there are at least three rebel armies and God knows how many death squad paramilitary groups fighting right now in Colombia. The three rebel armies have some things in common: They all talk more or less like Commies. They all say they're for the peasants, and they talk about cooperating — but they'd kill each other in a second if they weren't too busy fighting the government.
The three groups go by initials, natch: FARC, M19, and ELN. The biggest, by far, is the FARC, with around eighteen thousand combat troops. That may not seem like a lot by U.S. or Russian army standards, but you have to remember, most guerrilla groups are real small. They have to be. They need to be mobile, keep their logistics simple, and be able to disappear fast. For that kind of fighting, you don't really need too many combat troops.
There are guerrilla groups with only a couple of dozen troops that work damn well. In fact, one of the weirdest war stories I ever heard was about a guerrilla army consisting of three guys. They were survivors of a Japanese platoon stranded in the Philippines, and their leader, this hard-ass sergeant, refused to surrender. He decided that it was his duty to the emperor to kill anyone who entered his territory. For thirty years, these three guys controlled a huge chunk of jungle, killing any of the locals who entered their domain. The Philippine army couldn't find them; the villagers got the message and left them alone. In other words, the little group was an effective military force — with three men.
So eighteen thousand men makes the FARC a huge army, by guerrilla standards. They're by far the most aggressive of the three groups. Like most Latin American guerrilla armies, they have an elite command group who are almost all middle- or upper-class boys 'n' girls, commanding troops who are almost all campesinos. (That's the way Colombia's army looks, too: rich elite command, poor peasant troopers. It's the way Colombians split the money down there, too: Four hundred families own half the crummy country, and everybody else lives on beans and rice. )
The two other rebel armies, ELN and M19 (the oldest group) haven't been run as well as FARC; they're seen as less powerful and clever and are just holding on. But the FARC really believes it's gonna defeat the Colombian National Army. This is unique, if you think about it, because it's been a long time since a Maoist peasant army won anything. The Khmer Rouge were the last to do it, and that was over a quarter-century ago. In 1950, the world was jammed with groups like the FARC, but now, only in a few weird, fucked-up corners like Nepal and Colombia do they count for anything.
The FARC's last big push was supposed to take the big cities — the old Maoist battle plan, where you strangle the cities and then march in. It failed. FARC lost a lot of soldiers and retreated to its backwoods power bases. The only city in Colombia where FARC has any control is Medellin, Pablo Escobar's ol' stomping ground. The slums of Medellin are FARC territory. But when the offensive failed, most of the eighteen thousand FARC men dispersed again back to the big tracts of jungle and scrub FARC run.
The army and its paramilitary allies are even harder to sort out than the rebel groups. For starters, you've got the official Colombian National Army, which is estimated at 55,000 to 90,000 combat troops — not nearly enough for the ten-to-one ratio you usually need for counterinsurgency warfare. They're not world-class soldiers, but there's an old military rule that mediocre troops are adequate for defense, not attack, and that's what the Colombian army realized. It holds the cities and leaves the search-and-destroy mission to the paramilitary gangs.
The paramilitary groups — and there are at least a half-dozen operating in Colombia now — are rightwing militias. Their job is killing anybody who even smells like a rebel, with a little torture thrown in for fun. They're set up and paid by the army or the rich families that really run the country. The paramilitary are recruited mostly from the army, so the whole army-paramilitary divide isn't so clear. A guy can be a government soldier all day, doing the nice-nice stuff like guarding a bridge, waving to the tourist buses that go by — then go home, change into civilian clothes, hop on a pickup, and go off to kill villagers as a paramilitary.
You can respect the army and the FARC, but the paramilitaries — the more I read about them, the more I wanted to see them all dead. They don't settle for killing; they play with people, popping out eyeballs, cutting off tits, real sick stuff.
In fact, the only really fun part of the Colombian wars is that when the urban offensive failed, FARC decided to go for the paramilitaries instead. The army was trying to run a kind of Vietnamization program, get the paramilitaries to do some actual fighting. The army thought it could turn these sick fucks into soldiers. Didn't happen. The FARC trapped big paramilitary forces in towns all over the country and wiped them out. Turned out the paramilitaries didn't like fighting people who had guns. They were great at beating unarmed peasants to death, but fled like sissies when they ran into FARC.
The rebels got a lot more popular when they whacked the paramilitaries, because nobody likes those fuckers, not even the army. Though the army uses the paramilitary, it still hates the sick little bastards. So FARC is riding pretty high right now.
It's also set on the money front. Guerrilla groups have to buy their weapons in the black market, and that's incredibly expensive. But don't think FARC has to worry about that. It's the richest guerrilla group this side of Fatah, thanks to its own coke-'n'-opium growing and shipping business in the areas it controls. In fact, the Bush press whores like to say FARC is responsible for all the coke killing our kids, blah-blah-blah. Bullshit. Every group in Colombia grows, processes, ships, and sells coke and opium: the army, the paramilitaries, the rebels, not to mention a whole lot of poor, scared peasants who just want to make a little money.
It might seem weird that a just semibig country like Colombia can have all these armies and dope-growers running around at once without running into each other. It's a matter of geography. The geography of Colombia is as fucked-up as everything else about the place. Basically, there's the Andean highlands, where the big families and most of the other people live. Then there's the hot, swampy coast, where the people are black and a little less blood-thirsty, by all accounts. And there's the llanos, big, flat swamps full of anacondas to the east, and the jungles south of the highlands and sometimes right in between mountain ranges. A few miles as the crow flies may mean going from sea level to ten thousand feet.
If that seems confusing, it is. In fact, confusion is maybe the best word to describe the whole military history of the place. One confusion-causing tactic that's very important in Colombia is the false-flag massacre. False flag means inventing a fake group that goes out and kills people so the real killers, the army or the rebels, don't get the blame. So soldiers dress up as rebels, go into a pro-rebel village shouting, "Viva la Revolucion! Viva Che!" and kill pro-rebel villagers. The idea is to break down the trust between the villagers and the guerrillas. Next time the real rebels come to the village asking for food and info, they're not going to get a friendly reception. (You see the same thing in Algeria, where a lot of those weird massacres by "Islamic militants" are done by soldiers dressed up like imams to discredit the Islamic parties.)
Of course, the false-flag deal works both ways, so sometimes the rebel groups put on government uniforms and kill a few people, just to keep the peasants from trusting the government.
Are you beginning to get the impression that the life of a Colombian villager is not that restful? They probably piss their pants with fear every time they hear a truck coming toward the village: Which anthem should they sing when it pulls up? "Madre de dios, do we put up the Che Guevara poster or the crucifix?"
Killing poor, dumb peasants, pulling out their teeth with pliers — that's what the war in Colombia comes down to. It's the kinda stuff that gives war a bad name. And we're supposed to send American GIs to wade into this stinking Manson Family of a country? It's not like the Colombians need our help to kill each other. They do it just fine on their own — always have, always will.
CHAPTER 2SHINING PATH: THE COMEBACK TOUR
* SOMETHING KIND OF surprising happened in Peru in July 2003. An army patrol was ambushed by Shining Path guerrillas in the Ayacucho Valley, a patch of nearly vertical jungle on the east side of the Andes. The ambush wasn't much in classic military terms, seven soldiers killed and another ten wounded out of a thirty-man patrol. It was over in a few minutes. The troops didn't see anybody and probably didn't hit a single guerrilla. Not the kind of battle war buffs like to reenact. But it could be the start of something big.
I'm not sure if anybody still remembers the Shining Path these days. It was always a weird bunch of people, even by guerrilla warfare standards, but it was big back in the late 1980s to early 1990s. For a while, Shining Path guerrillas were on the attack all over Peru.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "War Nerd"
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Copyright © 2008 Gary Brecher.
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