Is it Combat? Is it War? It Certainly Feels Like War If You're There

At War talks about the semantics of describing the mission in Iraq, and how it's not as safe as our vocabulary implies.

But the missions [in Iraq] will hardly change. Instead the military will call them stability operations. And they will inevitably involve – in addition to advising and training Iraqi forces and providing security for Provincial Reconstruction Teams – fighting insurgents, and probably more American troop deaths.

(A brief aside: in late-April I spent a night with a young sergeant, Staff Sgt. Amilcar H. Gonzalez, in Ash Shura, a restive village south of Mosul, on an overlook position watching a roadway. He was 26 and on his fourth tour in Iraq, and spoke about how he liked the structure of the Army and planned to make it a career. About three weeks later, Sergeant Gonzalez was killed by small arms fire in the same village. The soldiers there called it a combat operation, but it will be called a stability operation after August, a mission justified by the provision that allows for self-defense, or force protection, in the security agreement that binds Iraq and the United States.)

By: Brant