I respond to a dear friend...

...who has concerns about stories she's been sent in her email:

     The headline on the article you sent says that the US is now using napalm in Iraq but the story doesn't mention napalm, only wp. Nonetheless...

     I saw both in use, at a distance of just over a mile, in Vietnam. Napalm does not resemble wp in use. 

     Napalm is a sticky jelly-like substance, that is essentially soap powder and kerosene and was developed by DuPont.  In Vietnam it was dropped from jets in containers that split and spread the material, igniting it on the way down.  It was used often as an anti-personnel weapon but mostly to burn out enemy supply points and hiding places, just as flamethrowers were used against the Japanese in the Pacfic Island campaigns in WW2.  What napalm hits it sticks to and what it sticks to it burns.

     Napalm has a very distinctive in-use signature and if it had been used in Iraq there is no way that that sight would have been missed by the embedded film crews, no matter what side of the political base they represent. Believe me, Judy, we would have seen pictures that, as evidence, would be undeniable. Additionally, napalm has been banned from use internationally for years.

     The US has NOT used napalm in Iraq. I vividly remember, one morning in February of 1969, after a very long night of enemy attack, watching F-4's do napalm run after run, dropping cannisters of napalm against a batallion-sized force of NVA who were attempting to overtake Long Binh.  We cheered as the long trails of fire erupted. There is no missing the image, smell and heat of a napalm run.

     Yeah, someone would have seen it, photographed it and reported it accurately had such a thing occurred in Iraq.

     White phosphorous, on the other hand, has a number of uses:  illumination, smokescreen, fireworks (you see it in the air over the Mississippi at Fair St. Louis every July).  It bursts into intensely hot flame upon exposure to air and can only be extinguished by lack of air.  Nothing puts it out. 

     Maybe you remember a classic MASH episode where the surgeons had to operate on a patient submerged in a tank of water to remove the glowing embers of wp that had hit him from a North Korean artillery shell.

     As I told you on the phone, wp is fired from artillery or mortars, and sometimes airdropped, to serve as illuminating flares over a battlefield.  The load is exposed and falls slowly under a parachute.  It emits huge amounts of smoke, so it also serves a purpose as a smokecreen in other applications.  But because of that, the smoke, it serves almost no purpose as a targeted weapon.  Why would a military force shoot a round at an enemy position that obscures the enemy position?

     None of the photos I've seen (in the Italian newspaper that originated the story) show anything but slowly descending wp flares that extinguish long before they hit the ground.

     Yes, anything wp hits when it's burning will also burn.  The gruesome photos of the Iraqi dead, allegedly killed by wp bombardment, are images of decomposing corpses, not people killed by burning.  Clothing is not wp-resistant.  And one other problem:  the white panels with the "case numbers" on each of the photos seem to have been "photoshopped" onto the original corpse images, and not very skilfully, for what purpose I do not know.  Maybe to make them seem official?

     My experience says that these accusations are poodle-poop.  Have there been excesses of force in Iraq?  Probably.  But not with napalm and not with wp.

     Frankly, I'm more worried about what Iran has been saying about Israel and the potential of Muslim nucs.  Where are the world's priorities as it engages a global war with Islam?

Comments

[Steel]

WP is a poor anti-personel weapon. A round will go off and light up the whole world, but it doesn't blow stuff up or do any real damage.

Yeah, white phosphorus burns like hell, smells like nothing you have ever smelled in your life and makes for some real bad dreams for the enemy.

It doesn't KILL efficiently enough to use aside from its intended purpose, lighting things up.

Ask yourself this, we are discussing the vagueries of different incediaries here, what do you suppose openning up a container of glow-in-the-dark, radioactive material would result in?

In say ... downtown Manhattan?

Or L.A.?

Let's say we wrap that container with 3 pounds of plastique. BOOM.

Is it preferable to die a slow, cancerous death and know your children will suffer the fate ... or be burnt to a crisp instantaneously?

I thought so.