A Short Guide to Iraq (1943)
history.navy.mil
history.navy.mil
112 Gripes About the French - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27852034 - July 2021 (238 comments)
I wonder if Leo Rosten also wrote it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865731). One thing's for sure, they had good writers working on these.
Normally we'd downweight the follow-up post (see [1], [2] for why), but this case is such an outlier that I think two isn't too many the way it usually would be.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I remember him telling me about hunting Warthogs in the desert. Bullets were in short supply so hunters were given one bullet and knife. You had one shot, and then you had to go slit the animals throat with the knife.
They gave the gun to my grampa a lot, he was an country boy who grew up target practicing on the range. He was always a solid shot.
Thanks for the memory!
What did they do? Run them over with 4x4s? How do you sneak up on a deer with a Jeep?
(By the way, their eyes are more like a cats, with pupils that can dilate far wider than a humans, so imagine a cop suddenly aiming a spotlight at you when it's pitch black - and then make it several times worse...)
Freezing in front of the lights is a big issue, but a bigger one is that they flip out and do weird stuff based on the sight and sound of the car at twilight. I had one jump into and break the driver side window of my car on one occasion.
The land is under shared management and one side decided to change the rules with insufficient consultation.
I am far from an authority on the subject and there may be more than one situation in play.
Not the case in this example at least, some of the judges saw it as a natural evolution from hunting by torchlight.
All day I noticed a deer checking out my yard. I had no idea she was looking for a safe spot to give birth.
I took a nap, and woke up to a wet fawn looking into the house.
It looked like she had the other one behind the fence.
My first instinct was she abandoned them, but I was completely wrong. She had her babies, cleaned them up, and she dissapears for a few hours. She does not want to bring any attention to her babies. Fawn don't have much of an odor when born, so it is to there benefit she isn't around except for feeding.
Every night she would return to her young. It was pretty amazing.
They slowly grew. The one by the window would only get up when mom came by--roughly 2x day. The babies are helpless to any predators. That is supposedly why the mom keeps them in different spots.
Anyways, they now just visit. It's a good feeling they are healthy, and seem happy.
Wise words, not heeded.
Even when Fallujah happened, they had more good popular disposition than not.
It took US repeated, conscious, and really best to say concerted mistakes to make Iraqis hate them.
1. Fallujah
2. Fallujah repeated
3. Fallujah fiasco repeated in other cities
4. Relinquishing of control of civil administration
5. Botched ellections
6. Propping the unpopular government elected under dubious circumstances
7. Tolerance to massive levels of corruption
8. Tolerating Iranian interference early on
9. Staging, and intentional exploitation of Sunni vs. Shia confrontation. This truly was the "Genie out of the bottle" moment
Genius moves all around, the guy was obviously playing 0.3D chess.
What was wrong was them failing to deal with Baathists themselves, not the party. Without Baathists question being ever given a final solution, it came to bit them back.
While USA was struggling with rebranded Baathist remnants, actual Saudi backed extremists, and Iranian militias sneaked in, some times even with US own backing, ensuring far bigger troubles to come.
Lastly, what I forgot to mention was US finally look every bit of face, and any rapport it had left with Iraqi population.
US wasn't able to talk to people of Iraq with a straight face at a after around 2007-2008. Then, they resorted to pitting Shia vs. Sunni. It was not a bright idea, and I have no idea why they even came up with it.
If the US had been conducting military operations in post ww2 France for that long the French wouldn’t look kindly on the US either.
The fundamental mistake was believing that occupation could be indefinite, and that there wasn’t an urgently ticking clock until civil unrest.
Even then, the occupations were limited to specific military bases that both sides would view as positive for defense against external threats.
That is changing. Slowly. The U.S. government has a program to train its people to speak and write clearly and in ways that ordinary people can understand. But it's a big government, and it's going to take a while to spread everywhere.
A similar thing is happening in healthcare, which is where I work. It's called "health literacy," and everyone in a customer-facing role at my company gets lots and lots of training in it.
I can't speak about the government's motivation, but for us in healthcare, it's because people who understand the state of their health get sick less and cost less money to heal. Sad that it took a bunch of studies to come to that conclusion, but bean counters gotta count beans.
1. It’s a quick read.
2. It has a clear list of dos and donts.
3. It explains what the soldier’s mission there is in a broad sense (defeat Hitler).
4. It has quite a bit of quick-and-dirty info like language basics and a map (I’m guessing more than a few folks stationed there would not be able to find Iraq on a world map before they went — that’s true today for sure).
Not a bad effort.
The one thing I can't tell if that's just how it was written naturally, or if that tone is on purpose like in the propaganda films and posters of the time. Obviously they wanted soldiers to read and follow the instructions, not get bored and toss it aside so I think the style is intentional.
Can you imagine if it was written today, what would they use to make it approachable for young soldiers, emojis and memes?
Take a look for yourself:
https://fieldsupport.dliflc.edu/
Spoiler alert… no emojis or memes.
That is a byproduct of having networked computers. It is easy and cheap to distribute first draft of a .DOC text to 10 000 officers for comments. It wasn't as easy with a real paper copy.
It's not all bad; survival manuals are dense but concise and well-structured, for example. On the other hand, the Advanced Combat Helmet comes with a 200+ page manual whose useful content could fill maybe 30 or 40 pages. More abstract topics like leadership, tactics, strategy, and logistics are in many respects manuals about navigating the very large and complex institution of the DoD. The smaller branches produce better output, unofficially or quasi-officially, eg the Marines have some excellent writers as do SOF - not least because soldiers in those branches are expected to exercise greater autonomy and decision-making at all ranks, whereas the army in particular is more of an organizational machine for delivery of combat power, not unlike Amazon for explosions.
1. Military field manuals are not that big, about the size of a paperback book because they have to fit in a pocket.
2. There's a bunch of stuff about measuring your head to pick the right size, which really matters...
3. and how the straps attack to the helmet, which also really matters and is not as obvious as you'd think. You need to know this in case your helmet straps get damaged and you need to re-attach them.
4. The ACH has a bunch of moveable padding inside that can be put into various different configurations for comfort. Bot all of these are equal, though. What's viable for walking around in hot weather is not safe if you're doing a parachute jump.
5. And while you can experiment with the padding you can't just move it around any old way because otherwise you'll have it too high or low on your head and you'll either be exposed or block out a lot of your visual field.
6. The thing is rated to take a direct hit from a bullet and and prevent it from getting through to your skull, though even if it succeeds in that you are probably gonna have lesser injuries. This is the sort of thing worth having some detailed information about.
7. It's designed to have stuff attached to it (drink holders, christmas lights) so you need additional information on how the furniture connects to the helmet.
The reason the manuals get sooo long is that when the army makes a decision about a very basic piece of equipment like this that every soldier has to have, it's committing to buying millions of the things (at about $250 a pop) and issuing them to hundreds of thousands of people, so they really, really do not want people to fuck it up.
Also 'I authorize the Tigerprimer - Guderian' is a shapr contrast with the tedious homilies that decorate contemporary manuals.
- M1026 manual
It's interesting to compare the British and US military leadership's view on their own soldiers and on the Germans. In general, the British seemed to be much more cautious towards the Germans, and the Americans seemed to have trusted their soldiers more to judge a situation.
1 Iraqi Dinar was 4.02 USD in 1945 and in 2021 1 Iraqi Dinar is 0.00069 USD
https://history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-roo...
https://google.com/search?q=1+dinar+to+usd&oq=1+&aqs=chrome....
I think this is still "normal" for guys to walk around hand in hand in arab countries, although it is a serious crime to be homosexual...
In fact, here in America, it's common to see friends (who are both women) holding hands. But you'd almost never see two male friends do it.
Truth is, as many other commenters have pointed out, this document's overall tone reflects better on the American spirit than a lot of what's in the global conversation today.
A reference in US military to Palestine before it was gifted to European settlers and rebranded as Israel. Guess it wasn’t a “land without a people” back then.
I feel like this advice alone could help everyone globally when they condemn some political or religious group specifically because someone considers them "backward." Nobody ever stops to think that they got successful within that system, so what would cause them to ditch their beliefs now because you "an enlightened" individual "know better."
I have found that the gaps in knowledge between your typical USAID worker in Afghanistan and some military members (even those who should know better, at E5 and E6 ranks and similar) can be quite vast.
Was there an equivalent US Army guide from the last few decades? Was there ones for Afghanistan?
Can we bring this America back?
And people in Cuba and Hong Kong raise American flags just because the US is an enemy of their State (enemy of my enemy is my friend) not because of "freedom and change".
The whole idea was to deny those resources to the enemy and safeguard them for Allied use.
I wish therenwere a class of travel books written in this style. This seems particularly helpful, which I didn't know before:
-3 teas/coffees is ok, 4th is a sign to leave. - quick language reference. The amount there can be learned in a few weeks prior the trip. I also like the suggested vocabulary. - a bit of history and context on why people live the way they live.
Thanks for sharing!
BTW, I was puzzled by EE-RAHN - surely it was called Persia in those days?
Correction: Each month could be either 29 or 30 days
I always laugh when Americans say eyeRaq or eyeRan.
But apparently this incorrect pronunciation goes all the way back to 1943. Wild.
I am sure there are also plenty of countries whose names are pronounced differently in Iraqi Arabic than in those countries’ native languages. That doesn’t make it “wrong”.
Is it “incorrect” that Germans call France “Frankreich” ?
It’s indeed surprising that the two are used inconsistently within the same book, but I suspect that’s just due to some uninteresting artifact of random chance. Perhaps the two sections were written by two different authors, or perhaps there was one author who happened to have an Iranian friend who exposed him or her to the native pronunciation. Who knows.
As mentioned elsewhere, Iran is “ee-raan”.
Iraq is more like “eh-raaq”.
They have different initial vowels which are obvious in Persian/Arabic script, but harder to translate into latin script with variable vowel pronunciations in English.
seems like an entirely different army mentality that today.
> The best way you can do this is by getting along with Iraqis and making them your friends
...
> And secondly, so that you as a human being will get the most out of an experience few Americans have been lucky enough to have.
That the general public has not been exposed to the equivalent current documentation doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The level of understanding that many leaders have going into these situations, and especially their earnestness to want to help in material ways ... is very high.
The US Army didn't 'build schools' in Germany and many atrocities were committed there, far more so than incidents today which are generally widely reported.
The US firebombed German and Japanese cities and burned them to the ground, with mass civilian casualties. It was a completely different story in Iraq for example.
If the US were to have 'had to invade' Iraq in WW2, the era of this 'friendly publication' - well, they wouldn't have had a problem levelling entire cities either if it were deemed necessary.
Large swaths of US activity in Iraq and Afghanistan focused directly on construction and support of civil services. More so than probably any intervention in history.
That's not to say there aren't gaping holes in understanding and that it frankly may not make much of a difference anyhow, but it's more true that one would expect reading the slightly cynical comments here.
I do appreciate the familiar tone of the publication, and I do agree that there's something there we ought to admire, however, we do live in different times.