SteynonRPG

Mark Steyn knocks one out of the park about Brian Williams.

It helps that unlike you, me, and most of the people you see on TV and in print, Steyn was in Iraq at almost the same time as Williams was. While the NBC superstar got an aerial tour courtesy the United States Army, Steyn went a little more low-key:

Back in 2003, I was in Iraq just a few weeks after Brian Williams. As I mention in The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, I rented a car at Amman airport, drove through Jordan's eastern desert, crossed the border and kept going. A little bit of it was scary, a lot of it was funny, relaxing, dull... As the years go by and I tell someone about the goofy guy I met gassing up in Ramadi, I have to stop myself and think, "No, wait. Was it Ramadi? Or Fallujah?" I'm sure, if you combed through a decade's worth of radio interviews, you could find inconsistencies.

When a soldier pointed me toward the road to Tikrit, he added, "Or, as we call it, RPG Alley."

"Oh, yes?" I said. "Why's that?"

I was certainly alert on the road, and I saw the occasional burnt out tank and other vehicles, but I've never been in any danger over the ensuing dozen years of "misremembering" an RPG hitting my car - because the difference between being in a motor vehicle or flying machine that's not hit by an RPG and the same contraption that is hit by an RPG is so vast I don't see how one wanders innocently across that line. I was around RPGs, I was in the vicinity of RPGs, I was in the Greater RPG Area zip code ...but I didn't see one and I didn't get hit by one. And I've no idea what that would feel like.

In the Canadian Armed Forces, especially in the years since Bosnia, there have been a lot of conflicts between the "tourists" (the ones who went to Bosnia in the early 2000s, when there were great pizza parlours and movie theatres across the road from the base), and the "soldiers" (the ones in the early 90s, the ones who it turns out were in deadly top-secret firefights).

A soldier once told me the best way to tell who falls in which category, (and he says World War II vets are the absolute best demonstration) is this quick guide:

Soldiers who have been in massive battles won't ever talk about it.

 

Soldiers who haven't been in massive battles won't ever shut up about it.

(Related: Ronald Reagan apparently never talked much about this.