Riding to the Rescue

It is the eleventh hour. Somewhere deep in the untamed West, the hard-pressed Forces of Good, their ammunition exhausted, their water running out, their enemies encircling them, await their doom. Night falls, and with it their hope. From their stronghold, they can see hundreds of campfires in the gathering darkness: the enemy will attack at dawn.

The sun rises. The final assault begins. The tumult-gunfire, the screams of terrified horses, the cries of the wounded and the attackers-is indescribable. The defenders fire off their last rounds. Defeat and death await.

Suddenly, above the pandemonium of battle, one clear bugle note rises. Out of the east, the sun at its back, flags flying and heads held high, comes a host of men on horseback. Down, down they ride, into the Valley of Death. But now they bring death to the attackers and succor to the defenders.

The U.S. Cavalry has come.

In the gallery of American images, few are more powerful than this one. In darkened theaters in hundreds of cities on thousands of Saturday afternoons in the heyday of the Western, audiences would cheer the shadows on the screen when the cavalry rode over the horizon. No one who sat in one of those theaters will easily forget the thrill of the moment when the rescuers arrived. Everyone knew that the cavalry would come through, yet so skillful were the writers and directors of that era that everyone also feared it would not.

It was, as we now realize, not merely a powerful but a misleading image. The real cavalry did not ride to the rescue; it mounted extermination campaigns against those unfortunate Native Americans who happened to occupy land that the government wanted. Its members were not the squeaky-clean heroes portrayed on film. Many cavalry units were made up riffraff who would have turned and fled had they not feared their officers more than death in battle. Their commanders were often little better. Some, like George Armstrong Custer, were plainly demented.

Even more deceptive was the sight of the cavalry's onslaught driving all before it. One seldom or never thought in these terms when watching a Western, of course. The plot, the thrill, and the ride to the rescue were all that mattered. But in the sober light of day, the mystique of the cavalry turns out to have been mainly smoke and mirrors. Far from driving all before them, cavalry charges were usually ineffective, even suicidal, against well-prepared infantry. The deadly-accurate marksman on horseback, so beloved of Western filmmakers, did not exist. One cannot aim a gun from horseback. Against an opposing army of horsemen, cavalry was almost equally useless unless the troops on each side dismounted and fought on foot. Cavalry could intimidate and kill civilians, ride down and destroy fleeing soldiers, and cause enormous damage when set loose against an unprepared village or campsite; but it seldom rode to the rescue, and when it did, it was as likely to be forced into retreat as to rout the opposition.

This brief excursion into history and military tactics would have been unnecessary twenty years ago, when memories of the Vietnam War were fresh and the image of the-military-as-rescuer was in disfavor. We knew then, or suspected, that the cavalry came not to liberate but to oppress. We knew that military force had its limits and that the images of its cleansing power were false. We had lived through a war in which we rode to the rescue in shiny new helicopters and ended by burning villages, killing peasants, and retreating in disarray.

The Vietnam War has passed into history. The image of the U.S. cavalry charging out of the morning sun has not. It remains with us, so deeply entrenched that even some in the peace movement who should know better are calling for yet another rescue mission in Bosnia. Those who call for intervention have thought long and deeply about the alternatives and concluded that there are none. What they fail to see is that intervention, too, is not the alternative they may suppose. It would not be a gallant charge into the valley.

There is another cavalry charge in Western literature. Nothing about it was good save the courage of the soldiers who executed it. It was a military blunder, ill-conceived and quite possibly the result of misunderstanding of orders. It is, of course, the Charge of the Light Brigade, in which 600 British cavalry attacked Russian artillery, with frightful results. It is an example of what not to do-and of the failure of mere courage and good intentions when guided by a bad idea. It, not an image out of the movies, is the likely paradigm for a Bosnian intervention.

There are, of course, good reasons to seek peace in Bosnia. What is happening there offends any decent human sensibility and threatens future hopes for peace. Whether we should seek peace in Bosnia is not in question. The issue is whether the Western military powers (more particularly the United States) can ride to the rescue.

At first glance, images out of old Western movies, however powerful, seem to have little relevance to this question. No one is proposing that we send mounted cavalry down the Bosnian mountain passes. Mounted cavalry is for parades and crowd control, not for serious warfare or (the latest buzzword) peacekeeping. A few proposals include ground troops and armored units. Most, however, seek a low-cost military solution by the use of air power.

The military objections to such proposals are many and should be conclusive. Bombing Serbian artillery might have had some effect in World War I conditions, when fronts were stable and artillery difficult to move; but this is not World War I. Artillery does not stay put, and destroying artillery would not stop "ethnic cleansing." Declaring a "no-fly" zone would be effective only if the combatants were themselves using air power-but none are. Bombing Belgrade, which has been seriously proposed, would cause great suffering with little effect and might renew the Serbs' will to fight.

Everyone, including the Air Force (which stands firmly against intervention), knows all of this. Why, then, do such proposals persist? In part, of course, they retain their power because no one really knows what to do. But there is more at work here than desperation. Air power is the new U.S. Cavalry. It is an elite, mobile force with a mystique grounded in the romance of flight. In the trenches of World War I, the poor bloody infantry did the fighting and dying, while the air aces became celebrities. In the Persian Gulf War, air power prevailed, or so it seemed, over the Evil Invader.

Our faith in air power-and, to a lesser extent, in military intervention-is the faith of the audience at an old Western, waiting for the magical rescuers to arrive at the last moment. Never mind that the military cannot perform as advertised. Neither, in real life, did the cavalry.

If we have begun to think of the military's mission as rescuing the oppressed, what of those who cannot take part in it? What will happen to conscientious objectors? The more we view the military as a rescue force, a kind of international 911, the more uncomfortable will be the position of COs.

The reasoning here is simple. When the military enters a country, its supporters will argue, it is only trying to help. Those who object to being part of it are refusing to help. They have therefore lost the high moral ground that might once have been theirs. Their courage is no longer in question; their willingness to be part of the solution is. What, after all, is so bad about riding to the rescue?

One might answer, A great deal. As a practical and military matter, riding to the rescue is never as simple as it first appears, it always involves violence, and its chances of success are small or nonexistent. On the moral level, one must balance the certainty of violence against the small probability of success. The plain fact is that one cannot readily transform the tools of destruction into the tools of rebuilding. The high moral ground still belongs to those who seek another way.

Such arguments, convincing though they may be, must overcome the power of the U.S. Cavalry-not the real cavalry, but the cavalry of the Western movie. To do so, we must rely on a new set of images. Yet we must also acknowledge the power and even the partial truth of the old image. The U.S. Cavalry supported an oppressive system; its military effect was not as portrayed in the movies; its personnel were not the gallant elite of legend. Yet the aspiration it represented-a hope beyond hope for the triumph of good over evil-remains a powerful and valid force in the human imagination.

We all like happy endings. What we need is endings that are genuinely happy, endings in which good really does triumph. The U.S. Cavalry will not provide that. We must seek images and approaches that do.

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