The barracks bellyache is an art of war

Donald Rumsfeld is trying to teach the ladies and gents of the press in Iraq a few things about the military life, but he has a way to go.

A few of the correspondents, who only recently learned to recognize a proper salute and the business end of a gun, have discovered that the dog soldier’s lot, like a policeman’s lot, is not always a happy one.

Our boys in Iraq are “facing extended danger, heat, and uncertainty of an Iraq occupation,” reports the breathless correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, “and are suffering from low morale that has in some cases hit rock bottom.”

Their wives back home are impatient; the husbands want to come home. Sleeping alone between sand and grit instead of between clean sheets is no fun. A few GIs have written to their congressmen. One or two have even asked the Red Cross for more than doughnuts.

Correspondents for The Washington Post, having failed earlier to get traction with complaining dispatches about strategy, tactics, quagmires and stalemates, are serving up a daily diet of gripes, beef and lamentation. “Rock bottom” seems to be the popular destination.

“Make no mistake,” an officer of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division tells the Monitor, “the level of morale for most soldiers that I’ve seen has hit rock bottom.” The reassuring thing about rock bottom, of course, is that we’ve been there before. There’s another bottom just beneath rock bottom, and it’s rocky, too. It’s in the nature of a bellyache.

GIs of every war, as every top sarge knows, are fond of bitching. It’s what makes barracks life tolerable. A wise company commander begins to worry only when his troops quit their bellyaching. It’s written in the stars. Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy Atkins,” a barracks favorite of Britain’s colonial constabulary, got it about right:

“We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes,

nor we aren’t no blackguards too,

but single men in barracks,

most remarkable like you;

And if sometimes our conduck

isn’t all your fancy paints,

Story Continues →