But what if it is totally pointless? Do you tell them then? If it is totally pointless and you don't tell them, you are showing more disrespect then those that speak the truth. The people in Iraq are not children. They are men and women trained as warriors. They deserve our admiration and they deserve us to be honest with them. They can handle the truth... like many human beings, they may not like it, but they can handle it. Over the past 30 years, a bunch of wildland firefighters have died. In 1994, 14 died in CO fighting a fire that was of no immediate threat, but could be seen from a neighborhood, where the residents were freaking out and calling for action. The firefighters should not have been there. It was pointless for them to be there. There is nothing they could have done that would have made a difference and the neighborhood was defensible from the neighborhood... they didn't need to be on the mountain. Still, the deaths led to policy changes and organizational changes that empower firefighters to literally turn down assignments they feel are unsafe and have subsequently saved countless lives. Those that survived Storm King are supportive of those changes even though the changes were predicated on the assumption that the work done on the mountain was totally pointless. Look at this photo of a group of firefighters who were waiting to be helicoptered up to to the fire and had to watch hopelessly as they knew their friends were dying on the mountain Is there anything on the mountain worth a life? Why not fight the fire near the homes, where the terrain is more flat and the influence of wind not so great and the fuels not as dense? Why did we put so many people in danger with so little hope of accomplishing anything? We just lost five firefighters in Southern California who were protecting an unoccupied house with no defensible space that was sitting on a point between two steep drainages chock full of fuel in the middle of a Santa Ana wind storm on a one-way road. The home was not worth one life, much less 5 and it burned anyway. What were they doing up there? Their deaths were pointless, except in the sense that we will now have a firmer policy that allows us to easier sacrifice property to buy distance and time so we can take safer suppression actions on the fire... but it shouldn't have taken 5 deaths to see that. It shouldn't have taken 2,800 deaths and a Republican defeat to see that there need to be changes in Iraq and to see that the "strategy" we've been pursuing has been utterly meaningless in accomplishing our "mission." It shouldn't have taken all of that to see that maybe our efforts will pay greater dividends elsewhere.
