"i congratulate you for cutting the king's head off"

And here it is: Blood & Treasure's long awaited interview with the War Nerd:

UPDATE: Thanks to g in comments, you can hear the nerd interviewed on the This is Hell radio show, straight out of Chicago.

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge". Is this the basic motivation of the War Nerd?

Well I said in my first column happy dumb jocks don't spend their time in the library researching war. So I'd say it probably starts out as some kind of revenge. But it's a lot of fun too. War is what I know. It's what I bring to the party.

Just to get this out of the way, there's a persistent rumour that Gary Brecher is in fact either Mark Ames or John Dolan. Can you confirm this or put it to rest in some way?

I've started doing interviews to promote my book, so if you'd been listening to Chuck Wertzman in Chicago a couple of weeks ago live, in all my glory, such as it is. I don't know why everybody believes those two made me up. Anybody ever see them around? Why doesn't someone get a DNA sample from them? I'm here, seriously.I've never even met those guys. They supposedly live in Moscow but that's a pretty lame excuse for not existing.

The War Nerd collection is the most war loving book I've read since Storm of Steel. What martial epics are on your bookshelves?

Like a lot of American kids I started out with Vietnam and the Civil War. That's the US Civil War aka the real Civil War, not those pitiful skirmishes you Brits had in the seventeenth century. I salute you for chopping the king's head off. That was pretty fun but militarily the war was strictly from nowhere.

So I started out reading everything Bruce Katton wrote about the Civil War, then US Grant's memoirs. Then I started doing my homework --- going to the library to read JANE's Armored Vehicles, Infantry Weapons, Missiles, Aircraft. To keep up with the defense budgets I read every issue of Armed Forces Journal, Aviation Week and Proceedings of the Naval Institute. Then I went to Vietnam oral histories like Al Santoli's Everything We Had, Robert Mason's Chickenhawk, which is still the best book ever on Vietnam, FNG and that one all the English majors talk about, Dispatches by Michael Herr though in my opinion that hippie tries way too hard to be cool. Then I went on to Korean war memoirs. And lately I bit the bullet and started reading the Greeks and the weird thing is, they're not that bad. This Herodotus guy? He tells a story really well, like I try to in my columns. And Thucydides – that fucker is a genius. What I like best about him is that he's not just one of these hardware geeks; he understands that war is about propaganda, morale, food distribution – all the stuff the video war gamers don't know about it. And of course every week I'm reading some weird shit off the net for my column like I just finished researching medieval Tibetan military history. As my grandma used to say, "Death can hold no terrors for us now."

How did you start War Nerding anyway? And how did you hook up with the eXile?

I've been war nerding since…actually I can't remember a time when I wasn't. I started out as a bully – you know practical experience – but when they bussed me to a Mexican school I got the shit kicked out of me so many times I decided to go for the theory.

Exile did a couple of half-assed articles on the Russian military and I wrote to Ames trying to set him straight. The good thing about those exile guys is they not sensitive types. Ames asked me if I wanted to do my own column. Sometimes they even pay me a little money. You might wanna underline 'sometimes' there.

Your feud with Victor Davis Hanson has been most amusing. How's it going? Planning any more ambushes?

I do my part but the miserable coward won't play along. I burned the old fool too bad. The whole web was laughing at him. Here's a plan: A duel at High Noon in downtown Fresno. Proceeds go to a charity of the winner's choice. I'll donate all the money to a big statue of Hanson getting his head sawed off by an Al-Quaea recruit.

Amusing tales of violence aside, your predictions and summaries of ongoing conflicts have been remarkably accurate, at least when compared to mainstream commentaries. Yet official war pundit status goes to people like, well, Victor Davis Hanson. Why can't a War Nerd get a break?

Damn good question. I have to quote the Good Book:, "The race goeth not to the swift nor victory to the strong." Not in Fresno anyway.

OK, so you're the Great Khan of Washington with all the military and economic power of the United States at your disposal. Struggling from under a heap of concubines one morning you find that the pyramid of skulls in the courtyard is looking a little dilapidated. With the world your oyster, what do you do to replenish it?

I don't think you'd like my answer. See, what I'm thinking about lately is why do there need to be seven billion people in the world? You got two global problems here: exploding population and global warming. I can think of a way to solve both those problems in about five seconds…

Moving on to actual scenes of mayhem, how do you see the endgame in Iraq developing? Berezina? Permanent US bases? Something in between?

No, not a disaster on the Berezina scale in terms of casualties. US Airpower makes that sort of defeat pretty nearly impossible. But you can kill a country by bleeding its finances too. That's what happened to the Russians – collapsed without firing a shot. Stiglitz says the war's cost us three trillion dollars already. There just won't be any money to keep it going. I don't see Iraq dissolving as a country. One thing you can see from Africa is that even though the national borders were total nonsense carved up at the Berlin Conference, they take on a life of their own and they last, even though both the Commies and the Tribalists keep saying they can't last. So all this talk about Iraq splitting into three or four small states – I doubt it.

When it comes to attacking Iran, many people think it won't happen because it's a mad idea. Then they think: 'Hang on, these people in Washington are actually crazy'. Do you think that there will be an attack on Iran? If so, what do you think will be the consequences?

I used to be sure there'd be an attack. I said there would and that's one prediction of mine that hasn't come true. What seems to've happened is that the US Military was so angry about the way they'd been misused in Iraq and hated the Bush Administration foreign policy team so much that they started pulling every bureaucratic trick in the book to harass and interdict plans for the Iran attack. In the meantime Iraq went so bad so fast that it actually hurt their morale. Not the real crazies, nothing could affect people like Cheney or Fieth, but they're not getting a lot of cooperation these days.

They are crazy though. They really are. The military keeps telling them there are no good targets, there's nothing to hit, it's all spread out and disguised. But Cheney might do it to show that he could, to prove that the executive branch can do whatever the hell it wants.

Conflicts seem to be melting into basic resource wars: I'm going to kill you so I get to eat. Will anyone ever fight over great causes again?

I think eating's a great cause.

…and are we ever going to see proper wars again, wars with huge tank battles and aerial dogfights?

I'd have to break that question down. There will be great wars again, yes, definitely. There will be a great war on the Asian mainland within 50 years. Whether it will involve tank battles, I don't know. I suspect not. Aerial dogfights, yes – some kind – but I suspect the "planes" will be RPV's and the "pilots" will be fat guys at a keyboard just like me. And when the RPV they're "piloting" gets blown up they'll belch up some Diet Coke and say, "Aw shit!" And go get a Snickers from the vending machine to drown their sorrows.

My kind of war, actually.

I suppose the best chance of that would be China versus the United States. So who wins that one?

An all-out war? If it's in the next ten years, it's the United States. Any time after that, China. If Bush were a really smart ruthless fascist like some lefties think he is, he'd be thinking about that but he's not. He's too stupid.

Reading through the book, I occasionally got the bizarre sense that the whole world is dissolving into one great war with different fronts and forces in different places. Is 'peace' just a pretentious term for 'ceasefire?'

Well, take your own country, Britain. You had peace at home because you exported war all over the world. If you hadn't, where would you be now? Living on herrings and potatoes? The periods of peace in the history books like the big Victorian peace were violent as hell if you were in Africa or Asia. That's where you guys exported your violence. There's never been peace and there never will be peace.

It's easy to get a kind of sick pleasure from reading about wars outside or on the fringes of the rich world. Do you see the day when war will come 'home' again, to the United States or Europe?

Shit, drive through Fresno on a Saturday night and you'll volunteer for Iraq just to get a little peace and quiet. I don't think war will come to Europe because I don't think you guys have it in you anymore. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude but it's young and healthy countries that make war. You don't have the birthrate. And I don't see anybody invading you by force either. The people who wanna get in are getting in now, a few at a time, and it's working for them. Who's going to change it?

As for the US, there's talk about another Civil War but who's going to fight for the North? The South'd kick ass to be honest. And American's are kinda crazy. You'd have to disable the whole nuclear arsenal if you planned to invade the US and live because I guarantee we wouldn't hesitate to erase the planet. If my sister thought she was going to lose at checkers, she'd just whack the board up with an open hand, pieces flying everywhere. That's us, and proud of it.

And there you have it, straight from the Fresno Bunker. The war Nerd book will be available from May. You can pre-order a copy here.

Comments

[g]

In the interview, this line:

>listening to Chuck Wertzman in Chicago

I think it's supposed to be Chuck Mertz, and the show was This Is Hell. The interview he did on that show was good -- the show itself is very good. A regular podcast is available.