Now that the Washington Post has given blogspace to non-journalist redstater Ben Domenech, his background in opinioning is being investigated by various folks (for good times, a great clearinghouse for hilarity at
firedoglake), and the charge has been leveled that Red Dawn Ben is a big-talking, pro-military war-monger with NO military service! In other words, the classic chickenhawk yellow elephant!
I thought so, until I saw this:
I would normally be tempted to respond to [a] very stupid column by a college student at UConn about how he believes everything changes the moment an American soldier dies. This aversion to any sort of bodybag in the context of war is something my brother Ellis and I have mocked before, at length: we like to call it the "Contra 3 Syndrome." In Contra, one of the most popular arcade games ever (unrelated to the South American resistance), you play a soldier blasting away at baddies (in the 3rd installment, for the SNES, it's alien baddies) with oversized weaponry in a side-scrolling firefight. It's an entertaining game, but extremely short--Contra 3 is only 6 levels long. Besides, you really need all three of your lives to deal with the last boss--so a lot of people who play the game will restart the minute they lose their first life. Ellis and I are more likely to make it to the end with only one life left, but hey, that's the point of the game, not erasing/restarting every time anyone dies. Modern War isn't exactly like Contra, and it's a good deal longer than any 6-level game. For many of my peers who've avoided history books, this is a surprising fact.
Well, I was just blown away. It turns out that Ben completely understands military sacrifice through his hard-fought days as a veteran of the Contra 3 Wars!
He understands that you just can't "restart" every time one of your men dies --- you need to have the courage, the strength, the moral clarity to continue the fight, even as your first life is left for dead on the battlefield of Level 2!
What a hero! He clearly doesn't need any more military service to opine on questions of military sacrifice and strategery.
Now I know what some of you are thinking --- but Slim, why didn't Red Dawn Ben (twice decorated with the Silver Star for his bravery in the original Contra for Nintendo) simply call in support troops with the secret military code UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT B A SELECT START? I'll tell you why! Because General Ben subscribes to fellow military genius Don Rumsfeld's theory of military force --- a small, undersized strike force of 3 is far better used than a large, uncoordinated force of 30.
So I think we owe Ben an apology, and I hope that no one accuses him of being a chickenhawk. After all, he learned about military sacrifice and strategy way back when the SNES was in circulation --- imagine his military experience now that it's been supplemented through the years thanks to the Sega Genesis, N64, PS, XBOX, PS2 and XBOX 360!