Usually our military wreaks havoc on other countries, but this week we did damage to our own. The "Shock and Awe" campaign on South Jersey unleashed an enormous forest fire, a result of flares dropped by F-16s onto a gunnery range. The fire has consumed 22 square miles of between Ocean and Burlington Counties. Some towns and developments have had to evacuate as firefighters struggled to get a handle on the blaze. Thankfully the rain from last night helped to turn the tide, creating hopes for the fire to be contained by today.
Attytood notes that there is something similar about all of this and what we do in other countries that we bomb.
From Attytood:
The kicker, which isn't in the article but I just heard reported by Alan Chernoff on CNN, is that the Air Force is now knocking on doors in the endangered neighborhood, giving people money. In fact, he reported, they'll likely pay to replace people's homes if and when any are destroyed. Does that sounds familiar? Yup -- it's the exact same thing that we now do in Iraq and Afghanistan when we accidentially target civilians.
Over there, we've paid out $32 million for bombings and raids that in many cases unintentionally killed civilians; here, we could pay a lot more, even though hopefully there won't be any loss of life. I guess for South Jersey, it is a small and highly regrettable taste of what life is like in a war zone.
It would be hypocritical of me to criticize the Air Force for training in New Jersey -- not after writing articles questioning the laggard response to 9/11. But there's got to be a better way than testing flares over a parched forest, isn't there? Maybe one of my military readers can make sense of this.
South Jersey may not be a warzone, but this is certainly a taste of life thrown out of whack by our military jets. Apparently there are some nasty terrorists hiding out in the dry woods of the Garden State. I thought Bush said we would be fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here. Oh well!
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