{"id":10808,"date":"2011-08-08T17:58:12","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T21:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=10808"},"modified":"2011-08-08T17:58:12","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T21:58:12","slug":"rudyard-kipling%e2%80%99s-ode-to-seal-team-six","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/10808\/rudyard-kipling%e2%80%99s-ode-to-seal-team-six\/","title":{"rendered":"Rudyard Kipling\u2019s Ode to SEAL Team Six"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424053111904480904576494672078478148.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> summarizes the costly human waste that even worthy wars can bring:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As their Chinook was about to land, Afghan and U.S. officials said, a lone insurgent shot it out of the sky with a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, in the deadliest attack endured by the American military in a decade of war in Afghanistan. Thirty American troops, including 22 SEALs, died in the crash, as did a civilian interpreter and seven Afghan commandos.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Each of the dead was the son or daughter of a family who raised a child willing and able to defend freedom at the most demanding level possible.\u00a0 And while we say a prayer for each of these brave souls, it\u2019s hard not to feel an extra tinge of anger that none of the 39 highly trained professionals killed had a fighting chance against a lone shooter with perhaps no more skill than is sufficient to operate a video game controller.<\/p>\n<p>Whether it\u2019s an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) killing and maiming members of a military convoy or an RPG ambush on SEAL Team Six (the outfit who <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/US\/osama-bin-laden-dead-navy-seal-team-responsible\/story?id=13509739\" target=\"_blank\">killed Osama bin Laden<\/a>), these kinds of deaths defy one\u2019s sense of proportionality.\u00a0 Rudyard Kipling saw his own share of disproportionate death as a writer in India during Britain\u2019s Imperial rule, with similar misgivings (from the poem <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kipling.org.uk\/poems_arith.htm\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Arithmetic on the Frontier&#8221;<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A scrimmage in a Border Station-<br \/>\nA canter down some dark defile<br \/>\nTwo thousand pounds of education<br \/>\nDrops to a ten-rupee <em>jezail<\/em>.<br \/>\nThe Crammer&#8217;s boast, the Squadron&#8217;s pride,<br \/>\nShot like a rabbit in a ride!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Wall Street Journal summarizes the costly human waste that even worthy wars can bring: As their Chinook was about to land, Afghan and U.S. officials said, a lone insurgent shot it out of the sky with a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, in the deadliest attack endured by the American military in a decade of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[138,2943,2940,2941,2942,682,494],"class_list":["post-10808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-afghanistan","tag-ied","tag-rudyard-kipling","tag-seal-team-six","tag-special-forces","tag-terrorist","tag-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10808"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10811,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10808\/revisions\/10811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}