Michael Yon reports on “Death or Glory,” his journies with The Queen’s Royal Lancers in Iraq; the first installment of four. Good reportage on what is otherwise grossly underreported in the MSM.:

The Queen’s Royal Lancers have been living out in the desert for about six months, like nomads moving from place to place, sleeping under the stars, getting much of their resupply of food and water by nighttime parachute drop as they patrol the Iran-Iraq border. They were living out there, as some officers had told me, in true Lawrence of Arabia style, wearing shamals, sometimes taking camel rides when Bedouins would wonder through their camps with great herds of camels. Some soldiers would go for weeks without bathing, while others would wash-down with a bottle or two of water. Water is strictly rationed.

LTC Nixon-Eckersall would say that their job was to melt away into the desert, providing the eyes and ears that monitor the border. They’d apparently done their job well. I had been on many patrols with American forces along the Iranian border, but had no idea that Brits were out on desert safari. Although there had been some fighting, the Queen’s Royal Lancers had not lost a single soldier to combat during this tour. ….

Just some days ago (I was in Baghdad and Anbar while writing this dispatch), while visiting a hospital with CSM Jeff Mellinger, I met a wounded American soldier who told us how he tried to pull his buddy from a burning Bradley after it had been hit by a car bomb. While trying to rescue his buddy, they came under heavy direct attack. The young soldier thought the enemy had used chlorine in the bomb. He was still not able breathe well, but he kept telling CSM Mellinger that they used all the fire extinguishers trying to put their buddy out, but he was caught in the wreckage and they couldn’t pull him out fast enough. [This is something I have personally witnessed: all the fire extinguishers are used up, but someone is still trapped.] The soldier asked several times what happened to his buddy—who burned to death—and then he kept saying to CSM Mellinger that “They didn’t win nothin’. They didn’t win nothin’.” His breathing was labored, “We got fire superiority on ’em. We got fire superiority on ’em.”

To follow up, Victor Davis Hanson explains just why reporting from the front is so scewed:

The globalized media is an American epiphenomenon, but the narrative of the war is still the IED, not the purple finger. We apparently have no way of convincing the world that the primordial enemy commits daily something far worse than the sexual humiliation of the entire Abu Ghraib fiasco. Somehow “thousands have been killed” is never qualified as those mostly butchered and blown up by insurgents — since the loose use of the passive voice lends a general sense that somehow Americans are directly involved in, or responsible for, the killing.

Our soldiers are fighting brilliantly, and history will record they are defeating the enemy while suffering historically low casualties. But if the sacrifice of American youth is not tied — daily, hourly — to larger strategic and humanitarian goals by eloquent statesmen who believe in the mission, then cynicism follows and, with it, despair. …

We can quibble and fight about tactics on the ground, manpower numbers, strategic postures toward Iran and Syria, the need to prod the Iraqis, but our problem is more existential. Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t. If the Left is right that it isn’t, then we should flee; if they are wrong, and I think they are, then we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake — in a strategic and humanitarian sense — and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it, and how we have adjusted to counter our enemies who in the last four years have not won in Iraq or anywhere else either.

What is at stake in the war on terror needs regular and robust explaination in popular culture. I agree.

But in the entertainment culture that absorbs so many of us with one escapist fancy or another, where there are few virtues worthy of human pursuit beyond “good” sex and lots of money, in a culture where religious faith is constantly hedged as “therapeutic” and “socially conscious” rather than morally instructive and demandingly self-forgetting, we need not only simply better explain the war on terror. While doing so we need to be ever critical of the dogmatic blinders that excuse people from living in the real world, a world of real consquences where understanding what it means to be human, to know one’s limits as a human being, becomes our salvation.

There is a PR war and it needs to be hard fought, but as Hanson so eloquently puts it, at the end of the day, the war is either existentially critical or it is not. And if it is taken as not, when it really is critical, the West losing big for years because of defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the vacuum of Middle East chaos radical Islam will flourish by leaps compared to what we see now.

It’s time to challenge cynics on the very grounds of their cynicism, the deception and deformations of reality they are quick to get righteously indignant about.

The War on Terror is existentially critical. With brilliant soldiering and greater resource the West can win it. The real challenge is living in the real world, a world in which the West has a rich heritage to its current position of strength.