Word: soldierly
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When you've been camped in the Kuwait desert for weeks, even dodging incoming SCUD missiles can become routine. Late Thursday morning air raid sirens blasted the 101st Airborne's Camp Pennsylvania. Seconds later every soldier in camp was wearing a chemical protective mask and scurrying to one of the concrete bunkers scattered around the camp. There they rested, many of them panting after the exertion of a full out sprint in chemical gear, until the all clear siren sounded some fifteen minutes later...
...last SCUD alert of the day came while hundreds of soldiers were eating in the mess tent. About half of the soldiers left on their own, but the rest had to be ushered away from their chicken dinners by the non-commissioned officers. Eventually, most of the soldier left for the nearest bunker, except for one who resisted all entreaties to leave and continued to eat his meal. "Dinner is the one meal of the day that should be eaten in a dignified way," he said, "And I refuse to be rushed...
...mops up one war in Afghanistan and prepares to launch a second in Iraq, it is increasingly clear that if Franks is not Rumsfeld's better half, he is surely his other half, his alter ego, the soldier's soldier who can rein in the supercivilian and gently remind him that battles are won not with dash but usually with numbers. If Afghanistan had been fought Rumsfeld's way, we might still have commandos mounting up on horseback to hunt down the Taliban. If the war had been fought Franks' way, we might have nabbed Osama bin Laden a long...
...like any good soldier, the general knows when to keep his head down. Rumsfeld loves the spotlight; Franks is only too happy to stay out of it. "Franks thought that Schwarzkopf cut way too high a profile during the Gulf War," says a military subordinate who has worked on Franks' Centcom staff. "He thinks it's tawdry." Ultimately, Franks is really more comfortable behind the scenes. A Marine officer puts it another way: "He's been a low-profile guy all the way up. That's been the secret to his success...
...Buruma, nothing in modern Japan is completely Japanese. Even the myth of a divine Emperor, he contends, was assembled using imported parts. The old samurai who wrote Japan's first constitution in 1889 borrowed the nation-building blueprint of Europe's wiliest soldier, Otto von Bismarck, transforming Shintoism from a nature cult into a unifying national faith by grafting on German dogmas of military discipline and national essence...