A Short History of the Long War

from the Preface I often hear the din of war drifting off the Pacific Ocean. It has swept in not from the Middle East on the trade winds but from up the road at the Los Alamitos Joint Training Center where the military trains to fight America’s enemies. This is the global war made local as Army National Guard Blackhawk helicopters routinely practice take offs and landings; their flight path taking them over my southern California beachfront neighborhood. This was part of the background noise as I wrote A Short History of the Long War. The terrorist attacks perpetrated on September 11, 2001 had a serious effect on my life. I did not lose any loved ones and I was not serving in the military at the time, but the war on terror became a major focus in my life. In 2002 I enlisted in the Army National Guard and chose to be assigned to a light infantry unit (air assault.) A knee injury, reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation resulted in a medical discharge from the Army. Although I did not serve America in the way I had planned, I decided I could perhaps serve it in another way. This book is an attempt to answer some of the questions about this complex and sometimes opaque war on terror by giving the reader a broad overview of the most relevant topics. The government’s official designation for the war used to be the Global War on Terror (GWOT.) Seven years in however, it has been appropriately changed to the Long War. This name was always problematic because it implied that the enemy was a generic force of terrorists when the truth is the terrorists cling to militant Islamism, a specific ideology, not a generic set of grievances.