Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

My father's war: as a naval officer at Okinawa, my dad survived one of the most hellish battles of World War II. What he learned there tells us everything we need to know about Iraq.

Article Excerpt
Like almost all the civilian architects of our war in Iraq, including the president, vice president, and Secretary of Defense, everything I know about actual combat I learned secondhand. I once sat in a tiny Pentagon office with the late, legendary Colonel John Boyd, a fighter pilot who was considered the most brilliant military theorist of our time, and listened to him expound on arcane-sounding "OODAloops," a strategy for outmaneuvering our enemies that was instrumental in crushing Saddam Hussein's armies in both Iraq wars. But most of what I know about war I learned from a former Navy lieutenant named Charles L. Ennis. He was my father, and I really didn't understand some of his most important lessons until he died a few months ago. My father left behind a brief, typewritten autobiography, a familiar Greatest Generation tale of a kid who grows up during the Great Depression (at the worst of it, he and his family lived off the land in the Northern California wilderness) and then goes off to global war, in his case aboard an aging destroyer-mine-sweeper that island-hopped from Guadalcanal to Palau before it was finally blown in two. Rescued from the sea, my father was soon shipped out on another destroyer-minesweeper, the U.S.S. Butler. And here his tale begins to read a bit like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

The first ominous hint as to what waited at the end of the voyage was the anti-aircraft drills, repeated far beyond the proficiency necessary for a minesweeper's crew. Then there was the officer's club at Pearl Harbor, where an encounter with an old college chum introduced him to a word few Americans in or out of uniform had ever heard: "kamikaze." Rumors of the Japanese suicide planes haunted the Butlers crew as she steamed toward the island of Okinawa, several hundred miles south of the Japanese home islands, where the largest amphibious invasion force of the Pacific war had gathered for the greatest land, sea, and air battle in...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!