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READING BETWEEN THE STARS AND STRIPES
This entry was posted on 8/22/2007 4:57 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
My husband's brother entered the Army right after he graduated college, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, in 1975. Like his brothers before him, he was tough and strong and smart, and over a career that spanned more than 30 years, he rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the Army Special Forces. (He retired last year.)
However, unlike his brothers, he spent his time in the Army without ever seeing combat.
Don't get me wrong; as an SF soldier, he found himself more than once in hairy situations, but as far as combat deployments, he seemed to miss just about every war.
For one thing, he was too young for Vietnam; by the time he got out of R.O.T.C. as a young second lieutenant, the war was pretty much over. During the Persian Gulf War, he was stationed in the Pacific. During the Balkans conflict, he was a full-bird colonel, and he did fly into Kosovo more than once to negotiate with warlords, serving under Gen. Wesley Clark. They gave him his star when the war in Afghanistan was launched, and used his skills, again, to negotiate with mountain warlords.
These assignments were dangerous, there is no doubt about that, but all the same, my brother-in-law never did command a combat platoon, as his brother, my husband, did with the 101st Airborne in 'Nam, and as his other brother did with the SF during two combat tours to Vietnam. In fact, that brother spent the last few months of his second deployment on board a hospital ship, after he was badly shot up and left for dead.
(When my daughter asked her uncle why he had two Purple Hearts, he joked, "Because I kept gettin' up, and he kept shootin'!")
My brother-in-law (the Brig. Gen.) has two sons, both of whom have followed in their father's footsteps to career paths. One is currently deployed to Iraq as part of Bush's Escalation, and I've chosen not to discuss his situation in any great detail for opsec reasons and to protect his privacy. Suffice it to say, he is in a very bad area, and his mom tells me that his voice over the phone "aged ten years" when he'd been in-country for two months.
War news of any kind upsets her, so when my nephew calls home, he mostly talks to his dad.
And Kent, my husband, and I were discussing how, as much love and support and comfort as my brother-in-law can offer his son--the harsh truth is that he has never experienced what his boy is going through right now, at least, not the war part.
Now, I love my brother in law like he was my own brother. We've been good friends since we were both eight years old. I am very proud of him, and I cry when I see him in full-dress uniform. I love my nephews, and whenever either of them is deployed, I write them every week, sending funny cards and jokes, so they will know they are not forgotten. In our family, we all have a great deal of respect for all the men, of both generations.
But this family situation where older generation senior officer has not experienced what his younger generation family member soldiers have in terms of war, hits at the very crux of the problem with this war, how it was managed from the beginning, and how it is being sold to the American public right now.
Because make no mistake about it, there is a growing generation gap in the American military, between those senior officers who came of age during an entire generation where this nation was at peace. (Granada? C'mon! Somalia? Horrible, but not an endless ongoing full-scale war. The Gulf War? Gimme a break. It lasted all of a hundred hours.)
I do not wish to take away from those who fought bravely in those conflicts, and I know that good men died in all of them.
But no one who participated even in those operations can have the slightest IDEA what the modern young men and women of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have faced, are facing every day, and fear facing for many years to come. The awful grind of extended deployments--month after month after month--the compressed training schedules, and the REDEPLOYMENTS back into the same war, over and over again.
Senior officers who do tours of duty in Iraq often have postings in places that are, for Iraq anyway, relatively quiet. They do not go out each and every day, driving up and down the same stretch of desert road, waiting to get blown up. They do not go out every day in 120-degree heat through labyrinthine urban streets and back alleys, wondering which second-floor window will hold a sniper, which residential home a grenade launcher, which dead-end a deadly ambush.
Once, during his first deployment to the Anbar province, my son walked into a residential home--only to find himself in a building that was packed--floor to ceiling--with explosives. Backing slowly out, he could do nothing but thank God that they did not detonate. If they had, we would not have had a body to bury.
High-ranking colonels and generals do not live with this grinding fear, sweat, anxiety, and turmoil each and every day, month after month after month.
Back in May, a very brave young Lt. Col. by the name of Paul Yingling wrote a scathing piece for the Armed Forces Journal, called, "A Failure in Generalship," in which he called to task those yes-men generals who allowed themselves--and the men and women serving under them--to be hurled into a war they knew to be poorly planned and even more poorly executed.
(I posted a "Blue Inkblots" on it at the time, called, "The Generals Failed Us in Iraq, Says Lt. Col.," in which I gave a thorough analysis of the article: http://deaniemills.com/2007/04/27/the-generals-failed-us-in-iraq-says-lt-colonel.aspx )
Yingling's piece set off a firestorm, partly because anyone in the military knew that going public against superior officers as he did--regardless of how general and respectful in tone the piece was--could very likely have halted a brilliant career in its tracks and endangered future promotions.
But it set off a firestorm, as well, because the vast majority of junior officers--captains and lieutenants, (not to mentioned non-commissioned officers like the seven sergents who wrote a recent op-ed in the New York Timesk, "The War as We Saw It," that was a scathing criticism of armchair politician-warriors who made quick photo-op touristy visits to Iraq, where they were squired around by generals and came home to pronounce the surge a success--as opposed to men and women such as themselves, who were finishing up a fifteen-month combat tour with the 82nd Airborne), felt exactly the same way.
Life on the ground for grunts and the platoon leaders and company commanders who send them out on daily or nightly missions is a far cry different from that of smooth-shaven generals in air-conditioned Green Zone quarters.
According to a new article in the New York Times magazine, "Challenging the Generals," by Fred Kaplan, (subscription required)(http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2007/08/26/magazine/slash/1154687152669.html?8tpw=&emc=tpw&pagewanted=print ),
this generation gap is becoming increasingly acute, because the vast majority of lieutenants and captains and NCO's have spent a great deal of time in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the generals commanding them and fashioning "the mission" not only have not been in combat in either of these wars, but have not been in combat in ANY wars.
Career officers, past a certain rank, become astute politicians. They know that the promotion boards who make decisions to promote or not to promote are made up entirely of their superior officers. Not only does a bland sort of "groupthink" set in among that general officer corps, but because getting their approval means more pay and better quarters and assignment choices for them and their families...then it behooves those lietenant colonels and colonels to PLEASE.
NOT to rock the boat.
By the time those officers reach Pentagon-grade, then it becomes their jobs to please their civilian commanders, because to do so, again, means even better promotions--and by then--choice post-Army careers. With lots and lots of money and prestige.
So you've got these career politicians in uniform, many of whom have never seen combat, or, if they did command, say, a battalion in Iraq or Afghanistan--again, they were not in the so-called "front lines" getting shot at and blown up on a daily basis. Some, in fact, consider many of the troops under them to be expendable and will send hundreds into areas known to be deadly, to fight it out until they win, no matter what the cost.
When my son fought in the Battle of Fallujah, he was part of a company whose company commander valued the lives of his men. (There are no women in combat capacities in the Marine Corps.) Consequently, when going into an area that had been well-cleared of civilians but was known to house die-hard insurgents willing to fight to the death--this commander saw to it that every resource available was put to good use to protect his men. Air strikes. Artillery. Tanks.
Only THEN would they send in the infantry troops.
Just one company over was a commander who was old-school, knife-in-your-teeth Marine. He sent waves of infantry troops into areas infested with insurgents to fight it out house by house, sometimes, floor by floor, as insurgents moved upstairs. Marines would head up those stairs and grenades would rain down on them. The losses in that company were horrific.
And unnecessary.
What I'm saying is common knowledge in the American military today. Junior officers feel an intense sense of frustration because the general corps seems oblivious to what they are facing in their multiple deployments. They resent like hell that many of these same generals sent them into combat in the first place knowing full well that they did not have enough men, and yet lacked the balls to face down the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and tell him to his face.
No one wanted to wind up like Gen. Shinseki--shut up, slapped down, shunted aside, and retired early with absolutely no fanfare.
And why?
Because he told the truth.
His was not an isolated case, and the generals who valued their careers over maybe the men and women who served under them and were tasked with carrying out their orders did as they were told without question.
(I do not include my brother-in-law in that number. He was too far down the food chain to have made any difference in speaking out, and at the time the war began, he was not in command of troops, having turned over his command before a posting at the Pentagon.)
The dog-and-pony shows we are seeing now in the lead-up to the White House report, in which select journalists and congresspeople are sent to Iraq for one-week visits, where they spend no more than a few hours at a time in carefully screened tourist-friendly areas and are shuttled out before speaking to junior officers or enlisted--is all part of the public relations photo-op political campaign being waged by the White House to get their way on this war.
Embedded journalists who spend day in and day out with the troops, who travel routinely to the deadliest areas, who interview men and women from enlisted ranks on up, remain appalled at this spectacle.
Men and women grunts on the ground see the TV news (when they get a chance) and marvel at this wonderful war they are not fighting.
Junior officers, and up-and-comers like Yingling, are starting to speak out. It remains to be seen whether they will be heeded or punished come promotion time.
One telling sign is worrisome, and that is that, for the first time in more than 30 years, West Point officers are bailing out of the Army just as soon as their mandatory five years of service is up.
HALF OF THEM ARE LEAVING THE ARMY.
Half.
West Pointers are routinely the officers who make it past one star and move up to two, three, and four stars. Most West Pointers love the military and are happy to make it their life.
But the class of 2003 was the first one to prove that, after two or three years spent in this godforsaken war, watching the generals preen and the politicians pose, while being forced to train the soldiers under them in conventional warfare tactics that long since ceased working, sent back to fight an unconventional war where the enemy lives, breathes, and moves in and out and among civilians as well as police and Iraqi army, freely blowing up the very Americans who are arming and training them...
As the brave sergeants said in their op-ed piece, which had to be submitted by only six, because the seventh was shot in the head by a sniper before the article was finished and sent home in who knows what condition--as they said, they are soldiers. Whatever the mission is, they will perform it, with bravery and resourcefulness.
But they are exhausted. NCOs and junior officers are bleeding out of the Army so fast that nobody knows how to stop the hemorraging. Enlisted men stay only when huge amounts of cash are waved in their faces, or when they are tricked by being told they will not have to return to Iraq--only to be sent back as soon as they sign, among other travesties. Or being stop-lossed.
This gap between the generations in the American military is more than just a disagreement. If this war is allowed to continue full-bore as it has been maintained for the past four and a half years, our military will, literally crack in the middle and break in half.
By that I mean that there will be fewer and fewer combat-experienced junior officers AVAILABLE for promotions, because they will have all gotten out altogether. There will, literally, be a gap in that place that was once filled by majors and lieutenant colonels.
Divorce rates among junior officers has shot up to EIGHTY PERCENT. In the Army overall, alcoholism, desertion, and suicide rates are all at a statistical all-time high. PTSD symptoms among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are so high that they cannot even be measured right now. More and more Iraq vets are winding up homeless.
This war is destroying the American military. And as long as the populace continues to allow themselves to be bamboozled by a general corps who does not know what their own troops are going through on a daily basis...as long as we permit the politicians to manipulate our emotions with star-spangled serenades and stirring speeches and purple prose that threatens our own patriotism...
Then our effectiveness as a fighting force will gradually grind to a halt, and the greatest military fighting machine on the face of the earth will find itself top-heavy with virgin generals, looking for somebody, anybody, to go fight their wars for them.
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