At War Blog: In Common

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Lance Cpl. Benjamin Whetstone Schmidt was killed in Afghanistan on Oct. 6. He was a 24-year-old native of San Antonio, a Marine scout sniper and a son of proud parents. Like many others, Corporal Schmidt volunteered for the combat tour that cost him his life because, as he explained to his friends and family, he wanted to go back to protect his fellow Marines.

Even before it emerged that he had been killed by friendly fire, his explanation had struck me because my son Ricky had given the same reason for extending his commitment in order to make his last deployment, though luckily for us it ended well. At the time, I had told him that he had done quite enough and that maybe it was time to leave the Marines and to go back to college. But he said he? had to go talk to the “Afghanistan dude:” the gunnery sergeant who would explain his options.

A few days later, as that discussion was related to me, Ricky, who had already served four years, was told he was free to leave the Marines — if he was comfortable with letting the younger guys he had helped train go into battle without having him there to guide and protect them. And, of course, that sealed it. I had warned him that the “dude” would be better skilled in the art of persuasive guilt than any grandmother or Catholic school nun ever could be, but I knew my words would have no more weight than the breath that conveyed them.

My son never met Corporal Schmidt, but they were not exactly strangers. The corporal’s father, Dr. David Schmidt, is well known in San Antonio as the team physician for the Spurs of the National Basketball Association. But, in a much less publicized role, he is also the team physician for the Trinity University Tigers, the Division III football team that my son joined when he returned home safely from Afghanistan and went to college.

In early September, Ricky had injured his shoulder in practice and was being treated by Dr. Schmidt. During office visits, they talked about football, the Marines, Afghanistan and, of course, Dr. Schmidt’s son. Corporal Schmidt had spent three semesters at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth before enlisting, just as Ricky had spent a year at the University of Connecticut. Benjamin Schmidt felt he was not ready for school and needed to distinguish himself in some other way before finishing his education; Ricky had felt the same way two years before.

Corporal Schmidt had also been a football player at Alamo Heights High School, a school that my daughter had attended before she also went to T.C.U. Dr. Schmidt described his son as handsome, complex and thoughtful, and very funny. But the words that would come to haunt Ricky were his own, when he told Dr. Schmidt just weeks before the scheduled end of his son’s deployment that he should not worry, adding that “Lance Corporal Schmidt will be O.K.”

On Oct. 7, Ricky called me, distraught on hearing the news of Corporal Schmidt’s death, and asked, “What can I ever say to Dr. Schmidt now that he’s not O.K.?” I told him that his reassurance was not a promise broken but a comfort, and that he was not accountable for Dr. Schmidt’s loss. But Ricky could not let it go, Nor, I suppose, could Corporal Schmidt have done so had their fates been reversed, an almost imponderable situation that I have now considered too many times to count. These Marines, all of them, are forever part of an organization that instills an ingrained responsibility to protect one other as both its principal weapon and its shield. And so for this one Marine, now a college sophomore, even being at home a half a world away did not soften the sting of this tragedy.

He wrote to Dr. Schmidt that night:

I do not know what to tell you, Dr. Schmidt, I have no idea, the only thing I can think to say is what I would hope somebody tell my father if my time was up: You see, over there, life doesn’t seem the same, not for us, the wins and the losses are too surreal to really hit home. We talk about “home” we talk about everything that that word means, or we think it means to us, “Ah man when I get back…,” but they are just fantasies. They are distant, and they are strictly when you have literally nothing better to do. The only thing that matters out there is the present, the guys you are with, and the idea of something greater. I believe that your son is not much different than me in this regard, not even a little. Your son is a hero, a true hero. Many people, such as me, have the burden of coming back, and fading away, forgotten. Your son will never be lost this way, he will live forever. There are many good men alive today because of a great man; and their stories, legacies and lives are a gift from him. My deepest condolences sir.

This year, with the end of the Iraq war, coming home is a common thought among us all. Still, skeptics see it as a ploy, strategically set to occur at the beginning of a national election year. Others see it as a victory and a promise kept. But to the troops and the families, from Iraq and Afghanistan, coming home is all that is on their minds. Dr. and Mrs. Schmidt, I want you to know that your son Benjamin is also on mine.

This is the fourth post that Tom Cassone has contributed to At War. Read his other posts here. If you have a loved one serving overseas and would like to contribute an essay about your experience, please write to us at AtWar@nytimes.com

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At War Blog: In Libya, Modified Weapon Becomes Less of a Threat

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An article in The New York Times last week discussed an American proposal to buy heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from the many armed groups and people in Libya who are holding them. Even the older variants of these missiles, known in nonproliferation circles as Manpads, are a threat to civilian aviation; the American proposal is intended to take as many of the weapons as possible out of circulation, with hopes of trimming the number available on black markets.

All of the Manpads identified to date in Libya have been variants of the SA-7, an early Soviet-designed variant of a class of weapon that would eventually evolve to the American-made Stinger and other similarly frightening but lesser known models made in several nations. The story noted that the West’s working estimate for the number of missiles imported by the Libyan military during Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s long rule runs to 20,000. But that is a rough guess at the quantity imported — not the quantity on the loose after the war.

…the number now missing is a fraction of that. Precise estimates are impossible, officials say, because no one is sure how many the military still possessed at the outset of the uprising or later after months of fighting.

Some of the missiles were fired in training and in war. Others were disassembled by rebels, who used their tubes as makeshift launchers for other looted ordnance. Many of the missing missiles were looted, either by rebels or would-be profiteers. Many more were destroyed in bunkers that were hit in airstrikes.

One line in there — about rebels using tubes as makeshift launchers — provides the background you will need to interpret the short video below. In it, Kevin Dawes, an unusual battlefield wanderer from the United States, has made a record of the phenomenon of Manpads being repurposed for ground-to-ground war.

As an aside, it is worth noting that Mr. Dawes is a controversial figure and his behavior in Libya and elsewhere has been the subject of considerable online critique. Some of his wanderings with Manpads were the subject of a separate post on my own blog, here. This post will steer wide of the larger discussion about who Mr. Dawes is, and what he was doing in Libya, to examine some of the video record he has been posting from his travels. If nothing else, his video record provides a useful window on Libyan rebel behaviors, and in places is valuable for that alone.

The video is short. Watch it.

Note the start. By the tenth second, what you see, notwithstanding Mr. Dawes’ description of an Igla, is an anti-Qaddafi fighter heading toward a firefight with an SA-7 tube. But at a glance you might notice that this is not an ordinary SA-7 tube, at least not an ordinary SA-7 tube that is ready to fire an SA-7. It is missing its battery unit, and it has no gripstock.

Moreover, someone has outfitted the tube with a wooden dowel as a foregrip, and what looks to be a wooden shoulder rest, too. If you look more closely, you’ll also see something — but not an SA-7 missile — protruding from its aft end. The activities of the many other rebels in the video should provide a hint at what is happening in the video. This fighter is obviously not preparing to fire at an aircraft. He is heading toward a group of cornered Qaddafi fighters — not a tactical situation that demands heat-seeking, ground-to-air fire.

What you are seeing is yet another improvised launcher for the 57-millimeter air-to-ground rockets. Libya’s rebels proved adept at working with what they could scrounge to carry on their war. In this case, by removing the heat-seeking missile from the SA-7 tube and replacing it with a captured 57-millimeter rocket, the rebel had become equipped with a lightweight launcher for firing a single high-explosive rocket at a ground target.

We’ve covered at some length the early Mad Max-style 57-millimeter rocket launchers that rebels put together by taking rocket pods designed for aircraft and fitting them to pickup trucks. The weapons were dangerous, and often used badly. Libya’s rebels may have seen in them a sign of their uprising’s resolve and grit. But they had little means of employing their truck-mounted systems discriminately or accurately. Rather, the way the rebels often fired them served to undermine their standing, showing that their battlefield conduct could resemble that of the Qaddafi forces they loathed.

The system on the video, documented by Mr. Dawes, was the man-portable version of the same rocket, and it summons a somewhat different reaction. The nature of shoulder-fired arms stands to make them potentially more discriminate. And in this case, though the weapon may be dangerous to the man who fires it and to his colleagues standing nearby, this particular makeshift weapon contains, in its own odd way, a good sign.

Libyans and the officials and contractors now trying to assess the risks of the former Qaddafi Manpad stocks have noted that some of the SA-7s were disassembled for this kind of use. Every SA-7 that has been dismantled for conversion to a makeshift 57-millimeter rocket launcher is an SA-7 that will never be fired at a Boeing, a Tupolev or an Airbus.

And so Mr. Dawes has given us a curious little record of the Libyan war. You won’t find many people who would endorse this kind of weapon. But you will find, here and there, a few nonproliferation heads nodding with grudging approval. Why? Because this is one heat-seeking missile that need not be tracked down, bought and destroyed. In the annals of makeshift arms, this is the law of unintended consequences, turned kind.

Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.

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At War Blog: Lens: From a Marine's Side of the Camera

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Over on the Lens blog, Sgt. Thomas James Brennan writes about the close bonds that form during battle, even between soldiers and the combat photographers documenting them. When Finbarr O’Reilly, a Reuters photographer, embedded with Sgt. Brennan’s squad of Marines in Afghanistan last October, he was a little guarded around the man with the camera. But the war didn’t give him time or space to hold onto those feelings. And conversations with Mr. O’Reilly, coupled with the closeness of battle, forged a bond between the men that continues to today. A bond was cemented with the commonalities the men shared, as Sgt. Brennan notes:

We mesh because we are so different, yet in so many ways alike, because we are not the status quo. We aren’t normal 9-to-5rs. Our 9 a.m. would start at 0600 hours and when our 5 p.m. would come, at 2100, we would tell stories of home or debate current events. Whether we shared the same ideals at that moment didn’t matter. The conversation was simply an escape from the harrowing reality we were in; a reality that few people share, a reality that brought Finbarr and me together.

Read the blog post here.

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Opinionator | Borderlines: Fighting over Parsley

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Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time.

On July 11, 2002, six Moroccan gendarmes occupied Isla de Perejil [1], or Parsley Island, an uninhabited, Spanish-administered rock of about 37 acres, just 220 yards off the Moroccan coast. If the standoff had lasted longer than a few days, and if blood had actually been spilled, we might now know it as the Parsley War. But on July 18, they were overwhelmed and forcibly ejected by Equipo 31, a crack team of Spanish special forces soldiers. No shots were fired.

And that was that. Morocco and Spain agreed to return to the status quo ante [2]: Spain’s claim to the island would remain disputed, but not actively challenged, by Morocco. The island itself would remain unoccupied by either side. Isla de Perejil’s non-occupation is now closely monitored by both the Moroccans and the Spanish (though it’s unclear whether the Moroccan goatherd who occasionally used to graze his flock on the island now has to show his passport).

Apart from that, the case seems closed. But in this part of the world, few things are merely what they seem [3]. Known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules, the strategically important gateway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is laced with mirroring versions of history — a commodity in no short supply here. Those versions of history have even left mirroring border phenomena on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Perejil is one of seven Spanish territories on and off the Moroccan coast, once known collectively as “plazas de soberanía.” The two main ones are Ceuta and Melilla, two cities on the African mainland. Formerly called the “Major Plazas,” they are now each enjoying a separate, autonomous status within Spain. The remaining “Minor Plazas,” apart from Perejil, are all garrisoned with Spanish soldiers: the Islas Chafarinas, a three-island archipelago near the Algerian border; Alboran, a flat and empty fleck of land flanked by tiny Isla de las Nubes; and finally Pe?ón [4] de Alhucemas (which includes the two minuscule islets called Isla de Tierra and Isla de Mar) and Pe?ón de Vélez de la Gomera, both on Morocco’s central Mediterranean coast, not far from the city of El Hoceima. Morocco claims both autonomous cities and all of the plazas, except Alboran, 30 miles out to sea, the only bit of Spanish North Africa not hugging the Moroccan coastline.

Joe Burgess/The New York Times

Opposite Ceuta, across the STROG [5], is Gibraltar (“Gib” in British parlance), captured by the British in 1704 and granted to them “in perpetuity” by the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713. The Spanish have never accepted the loss of Gibraltar, besieging it on three occasions and most recently blockading it from 1969 to 1985.

It seems illogical, not to mention a bit petty, of the Spanish to demand the return of Gibraltar while they cling to their toeholds on the Moroccan side. But Spain’s position is cherry-picked from two opposing principles: Either occupying strategic bits of another country’s coast is an affront to its territorial integrity, in which case Spain can rightly claim Gibraltar but has to renounce its plazas and autonomous cities in North Africa, or Spain’s historic rights to those places can be maintained forever, in which case the same applies for British sovereignty over Gibraltar.

Naturally, Spain has an internally consistent way out of this conundrum: Ceuta and Melilla were Spanish cities long before present-day Morocco existed [6], so it can’t claim them. But Gibraltar was ripped from the bosom of the Spanish state and has been a British colony ever since — in fact, the last colony on European soil [7]. And what should happen to colonies? Right, they should be decolonized.

Another solution, examined first by the British in 1917 and then proposed independently by Spain’s King Alfonso in 1926, was an exchange between Spain and Britain, with Gibraltar reverting to Spain and Ceuta (and possibly also Melilla) becoming British. The swap would have been an interesting new chapter in the long association of Ceuta and Gibraltar. Both exclaves, barely 14 miles apart, poke into the strait, guarding this chokepoint of naval traffic between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Seen from above, they look like the hinges of a door that can be opened and shut by whomever controls them. Seen from the sea, Gibraltar’s Rock and Ceuta’s Monte Hacho [8] could be mistaken for the northern and southern pillars of a gigantic gate.

Google Earth

In fact, both rocks are the actual Pillars of Hercules known to the ancients, named after the legendary hero because they marked the westernmost extent of his 12 Labors. To the Greeks and Romans, the Pillars of Hercules were the proverbial end of the world. Tradition has it that the inscription on them warned “Nec Plus Ultra,” or “Beyond this, there’s nothing.”

That changed when Columbus brought back news of lands beyond the ocean, and riches beyond compare. The personal badge of Emperor Charles V, who ruled Spain soon after the discovery of the Americas, showed both pillars interwoven with the slogan: “Plus Ultra” — “There is more out there,” the perfect motto for a nascent transatlantic empire. Charles’s badge is at the origin of Spain’s coat of arms (which still shows both pillars), and possibly also of the dollar sign [9] — the two vertical bars being abstract renderings of Gibraltar and Ceuta, and the curling motto reduced to the S-shape that connects them.

(Nec) Plus Ultra: the pillars as endpoint or gateway. Again, two competing versions of history. And Ceuta and Gibraltar are connected by yet another history with two wildly differing versions. Early in the Eighth Century, Julian [10], a count tasked with “holding Ceuta for Christendom,” switched sides, exhorting and aiding the Muslim invaders of North Africa to cross the strait to Spain. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula began when their general Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Mons Calpe in 711, henceforth renamed Jebel Tariq — i.e. Gibraltar.

Legend has it that Julian wanted revenge for the honor of his daughter Florinda, ravished by Roderic, the last Visigoth king of Spain. Muslim sources later described her as innocence incarnate, while Christian scribes depicted her as a loose woman — respectively maximizing and minimizing Julian’s casus belli. In Spanish history, Julian is the ultimate traitor, opening up the country to seven centuries of Moorish rule. But in his 1970 novel “Count Julian,” the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo takes the alleged traitor’s side, relishing in the destruction of Spain.

Examples of this mutability of allegiance persist across the strait. Spain’s claims to Gibraltar are supported by … Morocco — for surely, a return of Gib to Spain must mean a return of Ceuta to Morocco. Spain’s claims to Perejil are supported by Algeria, Morocco’s unfriendly neighbor, but not by Spain’s fellow European Union member France, Morocco’s former colonial overlord.

Perhaps Gibraltar is the northernmost part of Africa, for its Barbary Macaques are the only monkeys living in the wild in Europe [11]. And maybe Melilla is the southernmost city of Europe, because its Capilla de Santiago (St James’s Chapel) is the only gothic church in Africa.

All the while, the peculiar borders of these exclaves persist, and harden and soften according to circumstance. Spain and Britain’s co-membership of the European Union was instrumental in ending the blockade of Gibraltar, normalizing the border at La Linea — no longer a three-quarter mile strip of no man’s land garnished with barbed wire.

Read previous contributions to this series.

But the persistent disagreement between Spain and Morocco over the plazas, coupled with an increase in undocumented migration from Africa into Europe, has put Spain on the spot. For many thousands of poor Africans seeking a better life in Europe, Ceuta and Melilla are the entry points into the First World. The barbed-wire fence around both territories is hardly an impediment for those daring and hardy enough to trek across the Sahara.

Some in Spain suspect the periodic surges of migrants into its two African cities are co-orchestrated by Morocco, to underscore their untenability as Spanish, and EU, exclaves in Africa. But ironically, the surges more likely result from the improved Spanish surveillance of the strait, which many migrants try to cross. Like the flow of a river, the phenomenon of mass migration simply seeks the most convenient channel for its course. Hence the poor, huddled masses of boat people reaching Italy’s southernmost island Lampedusa, and likewise the Canary Islands, Spain’s archipelago off Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

For them too, the Strait of Gibraltar no longer is the Nec Plus Ultra of their dreams.

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.

[1] The official Moroccan nomenclature is “Tura,” which in Berber means “uninhabited,” but also used is “Leila,” which probably is a loan from the Spanish “la isla” (“the island”).

[2] In full: status quo ante bellum, “the state of things before the war.” This principle of international law holds that territorial conquest in battle should be nullified after the end of hostilities. The opposite principle, used to justify territorial gains, is uti possidetis — in full, uti possidetis, ita possideatis, “as you possessed [it], you shall possess [it] from now on.”

[3] For starters, how about the intriguing similarities between the Parsley Incident and the Falklands War, fought two decades earlier? Both involve failed attempts by former European colonies to reclaim islands off their coast held by former European superpowers. Kennedy-Lincoln assassination similarity buffs, start your engines!

[4] Literally a crag (a steep rocky outcrop), the Spanish word pe?ón has also come to mean a Spanish military outpost at such a location. Apart from the two mentioned here, other examples include the Pe?ón de Argel (i.e. Algiers), occupied by Spain from 1510 to 1529.

[5] Naval speak for the Strait of Gibraltar.

[6] 1640 and 1497, respectively. Morocco became independent from France in early 1956. Spanish Morocco — a protectorate since 1912 , not to be confused with the plazas — was allowed to join French Morocco in independence a few months later.

[7] Gibraltar had the status of Crown Colony from 1830 to 1981; in 2002, it was re-classified as a British Overseas Territory. Gibraltar has its own elected government, and thus claims no longer to be a colony, but Spain resists attempts to remove it from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization’s list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (16 at present, of which 10 are under British jurisdiction).

[8] Elevations 1,400 and 670 feet respectively; another candidate for the southern pillar is the Jebel Musa (2,800 feet), just beyond Ceuta’s border with Morocco.

[9] The pillars were pictured on the reverse of the Spanish dollar, legal tender in the United States until 1857.

[10] He might also have been called Urbano, or Ulban. He may have been a Berber, a Visigoth or a Byzantine. Perhaps he was the local ruler of Ceuta, or merely its governor. [11] According to tradition, the extinction of the Gibraltar macaques would signal the end of British rule over the Rock. A similar legend requires the Tower of London to house six raven, lest the monarchy should fail.

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World Briefing | Middle East: Saudi Arabia: Help Wanted

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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WORLD: A Date With the Censors

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Reality TV shows have become common on Chinese television but the sometimes racy and materialistic content has attracted the attention of China’s censors.

Produced by Jonah M. Kessel and Edward Wong

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World Briefing | Africa: South Sudan: Civilians Flee

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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