195: War Stories
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WBC Chicago and Public Radio International, it's this American life, I'm out of a glass. And I don't know if you've had this experience. You know we've all heard all these speeches about how we're going to war. How the war is going to take years and it is just hard to understand what we're in for. Is it going to be attacks and counter-attacks and American cities poisoned with chemical weapons? Are we talking about a war that doesn't touch most of our lives very often at all? Occasional commando raid and some faraway place to flash headlines, not much more. Those are very different scenarios. What does it mean if we get into a war? You know I say if, but of course the president and everybody in a suit in Washington DC is saying there is no if at this point. We're going to war. What does it mean? Our program today tries to address that question in four acts. We have a story sorting out exactly what we know right now today about what the coming war will be like. Plus stories about the psychology and life during war time and how it is different from life during peace time. And Scott Carrier talks to Americans who are ready to go and die and send their children to go and die in this coming war. Stay with us. Act one, the situation in the field. So it's been kind of confusing right? For a few days after the attacks on September 11th, it seemed like we were just on the verge of bombing and retaliation and we were issuing ultimatums to the Taliban, we were sending aircraft overseas. Now two weeks have gone by and as our weekend began nothing had happened. A couple days ago there were stories on the front page of the New York Times saying essentially that the US still does not have a plan. Still it's not clear about what might be effective. So it helps sort out what exactly we know at this point about the coming war we are thrilled to welcome Tom Johnson, an actual NPR correspondent to our program. He's been covering the story from the Pentagon for National Public Radio. In the past he's covered wars in Bosnia, Sarajevo, Nicaragua and El Salvador. He says we know the truth has been moved overseas. We don't know the number but it's nowhere near what was sent to the Persian Gulf War. And I think we also know that more specialized units, even commando units, special forces are on the ground in Pakistan now. And there are probably American ground forces and air crews in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. 14,000 reservists have been called to service? So far. It's like stories, we used to be, we bombed, we did a story every time we bombed Iraq and now we don't do that anymore because we're bombing Iraq like two or three times a week. I used to do a story here just in the last couple weeks every time we had a big mobilization. Now we're getting mobilizations every day. I don't even bother to keep town anymore. We're above 14,000. Now there were 600 or so yesterday. I didn't even pay any attention to it. And based on what we know so far, what's our best guess as to what kind of war we're going to be facing over the next few months and years? I think one of the things about this is that it's going to be a drama of several acts. It's going to go on and each act is going to be completely different from the one that preceded it. We are now in the first act. And the first act is about chasing the bad guys. It's about going after Osama bin Laden and it's going to be dramatic because they're going to be these special forces, these American commandos and there's going to be British commandos and they're going to be going through the mountains and they're going to be going into caves and trying to find the terrorists hiding in caves. So that's going to be the first round.
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