Editor’s Note: This is a much longer essay than we usually publish at PJ Lifestyle but by the time you finish the first page it should be more than clear that you’re going to want to take the time to read the whole thing. Tom Weiss is an extraordinary emerging writer you should start following. Here he delivers an inspiring rebuttal in defense of America’s military heroes.
Coming Home
Early on a Sunday morning in late January, 2008, the last members of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division arrived back in the United States after spending almost sixteen months in Iraq. We landed in Bangor, ME just as the sun was coming up and groggily prepared to disembark for a couple hours while the aircraft was re-fueled and serviced.
I was one of the first people off the plane that morning and as I walked down the jet-way I didn’t expect much of anything. I assumed the terminal would be deserted and hoped, at such an early hour, that something would be open so I could grab a cup of coffee and maybe a little breakfast.
I was completely unprepared for what was about to occur.
At first, I saw just a couple people on either side of the corridor some fifty meters ahead of me. My tired mind paid them little attention until their numbers began to swell. A couple turned into a dozen. Then two dozen. Then four. By the time I reached them well over a hundred people were lined up – half on one side of me, half on the other – and every single one of them wanted to shake my hand, and the hand of every other soldier on the plane, as we walked past. Even now I get emotional just thinking about this moment.
I had landed that Sunday morning in the midst of the Maine Troop Greeters, a group devoted to greeting service members upon their return from overseas. “As long as there are U.S. armed forces serving overseas,” their web site declares, “we will be here to greet them.”
My second return from combat in Iraq wasn’t as pleasant. I flew in on a stretcher and spent the next month in the hospital at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas enduring one surgery after another. Once I was released from the hospital, I spent a few months living at the Fisher House on the hospital grounds and working with the physical therapy team at the Center for the Intrepid. One afternoon, sitting out on the patio following a grueling therapy session, I was approached by a Fisher House volunteer. She asked whether I had, on my way to Iraq, flown through Bangor.
When I told her we did stop in Bangor she told me to stay put, she’d be right back. I joked that I wasn’t going anywhere quickly in my wheelchair and when she returned she handed me a t-shirt, which I thought strange until she explained its meaning.
She was from Bangor and also volunteered with the Maine Greeters. She told me that since I didn’t get the opportunity to return with the rest of my unit, I owed Bangor, ME a visit. She then showed me that the shirt had exactly that phrase embroidered on the front, “I owe Bangor, ME a visit.”
I was born in 1971 and have no memory of the Vietnam War itself, only its aftermath. I learned of the anti-war protests in school and read news stories about how Vietnam vets were greeted upon their return. I’ve returned from overseas combat tours three times, but never had to endure treatment like this.
Gary Rodd, describing the reaction to his Marine Corps unit marching in a parade to honor the Apollo astronauts, said “As soon as you marched out, all you could hear from the crowd was, ‘Baby killers!'”
And here is the experience of Edward Kenney:
Demonstrators were marching outside Travis Air Force Base in California “in the wee hours of the morning” when the plane bringing him back to the states landed, said Edward Kenney, who served with the Marine Corps in Vietnam.
“And they put us in a reception hall and said, ‘If you don’t have civilian clothes, buy them. You will not leave this facility in your uniform,'” he recalled.
Back in Glens Falls, Kenney agreed to speak to a class at St. Mary’s Academy.
“What I was surprised about, I thought I was going to go there just to maybe relay what kind of life I had lived and how it was,” he said. “They didn’t want to know that. They wanted to know how it was that I would support the politics of the current administration and the previous administration that would send us over there to kill us. I almost backed out of that place.”
Chickenhawk
James Fallows, in his cover piece for The Atlantic this month, isn’t satisfied with how Americans today, people like the Maine Troop Greeters, support our servicemen and women. He is convinced that these “empty” gestures “do more for the civilian public’s self-esteem than for the troops’.”
At length Fallows decries what he describes as a culture in which “everyone ‘supports’ the troops but few know very much about them.” He writes wistfully about the World War II era and immediate aftermath where “the standing force remained so large, and the Depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most Americans had a direct military connection.”
Fallows also has an affinity for the word “chickenhawk.” It appears no less than eight times in the original essay and is featured in the title of eight of the nine responses to the piece he posts on The Atlantic’s blog. For those unfamiliar with the progressive Left’s use of the term during the last decade, Fallows helpfully defines it as a “derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going.”
Fallows expands the definition of the term to include the entire country. You – yes, you – are part of the chickenhawk nation if you treat the military,
“both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings.”
If you’re having trouble following Fallows’ line of argument, you’re not alone. I don’t have a detailed log of his whereabouts during the Bush administration, but I think I’m safe in assuming he wasn’t living underneath a rock. The Iraq War was perhaps the single most publicly and privately debated topic in the first decade of this century.
I was in Baghdad the day Senator Harry Reid said “this war is lost.” The Democratic Party primary the following year would hinge, in part, on Hillary Clinton’s vote in favor of the war. Every Friday during the time I worked at the Pentagon a small, polite, and determined group of protesters picketed the Metro entrance. On my way home from work one day in 2008 I stopped outside one of the gates to Fort Hood, TX to speak with some people I came across who were protesting the war there. And how can anyone forget Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war protests outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford?
It is possible – desirable, actually – to look reverently at the troops while disagreeing with the decision to send them to Iraq. I fell into this category before I deployed to Iraq. From my orderly room I watched Colin Powell’s testimony to the United Nations live and found it hard to believe that, if what he outlined was the best evidence we had, we would make the decision to invade.
But once that decision was made, for me the only option was victory. Fallows calls the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan “unending” and “unwinnable” but neither characterization is true and in fact the latter contradicts his thesis that Americans should be more critical of our military. How fair is that criticism if our politicians gave the military an “unwinnable” mission?
For Fallows it’s simply not enough that the military was handed an “unwinnable” mission, they also had to prosecute it poorly. His assessment of today’s military is that it is “better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.”
Yet this better trained, motivated and disciplined force performed, in Fallows retelling, incredibly poorly:
“In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.”
Note how Fallows’ left-wing ideology poisons his analysis. After successfully dodging the draft (more on this below) during Vietnam he worked as a journalist before becoming a speechwriter for President Carter. An objective observer he is not. His progressive worldview blinds him to the many strategic successes of the Bush administration (Fallows calls these tactical successes, reversing the meaning of the two words): the successful invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power, the successful elections and the seating of democratically-elected governments in each country, the decimation of Al Qaeda leadership, among other successes.
He has to minimize these events so he can claim that the only strategic success of the last 13 years was a small-unit raid ordered by President Obama.
Just Chicken
This “disconnectedness” Fallows sees between the American people and the troops has led, by some mechanism he doesn’t quantify, to the military “losing” its wars. How are we as a nation supposed to restore this lost connection?
A careful reading of Fallows’ argument leads you to the unmistakable conclusion that, while he doesn’t come right out and say it, he wants to re-instate the draft.
Indeed, his first follow-up blog post confirms this thought: “I agree in principle that a broadly based draft might rebuild a connection between the citizenry and its military, as well as creating additional drag against launching ‘wars of choice.'” Similar arguments have been made sporadically since 9/11, from politicians as well as journalists, but the argument seems curious coming from a man who intentionally failed his Vietnam War draft physical.
Fallows was just entering his senior year at Harvard during the fall of 1969 when his draft number came up. Here the story in his words:
Like many of my friends whose numbers had come up wrong in the lottery, I set about securing my salvation. When I was not participating in antiwar rallies, I was poring over the Army’s code of physical regulations. During the winter and early spring, seminars were held in the college common rooms. There, sympathetic medical students helped us search for disqualifying conditions that we, in our many years of good health, might have overlooked. Although, on the doctors’ advice, I made a halfhearted try at fainting spells, my only real possibility was beating the height and weight regulations. My normal weight was close to the cutoff point for an “underweight” disqualification, and, with a diligence born of panic, I made sure I would have a margin. I was six feet one inch tall at the time. On the morning of the draft physical I weighed 120 pounds.
I sent Mr. Fallows an email asking him to explain why, in 2015, he would like to see the draft return when in 1969 he did everything he could to avoid it. In response, I received this cryptic email (reprinted in its entirety):
If you read the two articles you will see the obvious connection.
In a subsequent email, representing something of a non-sequitur, Mr. Fallows assured me that he does not “advocate a restoration of the draft. It is not going to happen.” Were it politically feasible, one is left to conclude, then James Fallows would be an advocate for the draft.
The “obvious connection” between the two articles was anything but obvious for me at first. I had assumed, naively, that any reasonable American would prefer the twenty-first century version of greeting the troops when they return home that I described compared to the late-1960s version of Gary Rodd and Edward Kenney.
James Fallows does not. He wants that conflict. He wants the civil unrest. He wants college-aged men and women to be forced by their government to choose between being a “noble hero” by dodging the draft and being one of the “many cattle off to slaughter.”
The great irony of Fallows’ argument lies in his description of his feelings following his successful deception of the physicians who gave him his draft physical: “We returned to Cambridge that afternoon, not in government buses but as free individuals, liberated and victorious.”
Today, Harvard seniors don’t need to lie to a doctor to be free individuals, they already are. Should they decide to enter into a term of military service during a time of war it is their choice. Millions of American sons and daughters have, over the course of the last 13 years, contemplated joining the military. Some, like the Wall Street banker who enlisted in the months following 9/11 and came to my unit shortly afterward, did so out of a deeply held love for, and commitment to, their country. No doubt others, like Fallow, were “desperately afraid of being killed” and decided against serving.
Every Institution Has Its Problems
Fallows is on somewhat firmer ground when discussing the acquisition and procurement policies of our military services. Having worked for a time in the J8 Directorate of the Joint Staff (Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment) I’m not going to spill a lot of ink defending those policies. But James Fallows has been writing about military procurement for decades. In 1981 he published a book called National Defense which explores many of the same themes as this article.
Today Fallows is worried about the skyrocketing cost of the F-35. In the early ’80s he was worried about the F-15 and the M1A1 Abrams tank. The F-15 has proven in the years since to be “among the most successful modern fighters, with over 100 aerial combat victories.” The M1’s “performance in Desert Storm instantly made Fallows’ (and his fellow critics’) carping about its cost, weight, and complexity look foolish. Iraqi main-gun rounds simply bounced off the Abrams’ expensive Chobham armor, saving countless American lives.”
Fallows also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post on the eve of the Gulf War in 1991 once again decrying the “Pentagon procurement system” and advising that,
“the question we should consider, once we know enough about the gulf war [sic] to draw sensible conclusions, is whether our weapons proved effective enough – enough to forestall a grisly land warfare, enough to justify their great cost.”
In the days and weeks before this question was definitively answered “yes,” Fallows seems to be anticipating that the answer will be “no.” His reservations about the F-35 may very well turn out to be correct, but his track record on these matters is less than stellar.
The Strength of the American Military
At the conclusion of the 1981 article on the F-15, Fallows offers the following observation:
For months I had heard pilots and aircraft designers emphasize that, even in this most technically sophisticated of the military services, the machines themselves are often less important than the spirit, skill, and training of the people who fly and maintain the planes. Having seen the thousand opportunities for disaster that a sloppy maintenance crew might create, having glimpsed the physical and mental stress that pilots must endure, I understood more fully what I had been told.
Having worked alongside officers and soldiers from a variety of countries allied with the United States and having trained military forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the thing I would change about this paragraph is to remove the word “often.” People are always more important than machines and the American military trains and develops its soldiers, non-commissioned officers and officers far better than any other fighting force on the planet.
In the intervening 30 years Fallows seems to have forgotten this basic lesson:
We know that technology is our military’s main advantage. Yet the story of the post-9/11 ‘long wars’ is of America’s higher-tech advantages yielding transitory victories that melt away before the older, messier realities of improvised weapons, sectarian resentments, and mounting hostility to occupiers from afar, however well-intentioned.
Of course technology is a hugely important component of our military strength, but it is not and will never be decisive. Nowhere is this principle more evident than in counterinsurgency warfare of the kind the US has been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US military reluctantly embraced a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, implementing it in conjunction with the surge in early 2007. I was a maneuver planner for the 1st Cavalry Division at the time and designed the small outpost Joint Security Station (JSS) component of that plan for Baghdad. Our initial planning assumptions included the prediction that enemy insurgent attacks on these low-tech, people-intensive stations would be constant and would increase our casualty rate.
But then a funny thing happened. Except for the JSS near Sadr City – in 2007 still a hotbed of Shia militia activity – almost every other JSS was established and operated without a major attack. Our soldiers’ proximity to the Iraqi people helped protect them. There was no “mounting hostility to occupiers from afar” as Fallows describes. To the contrary, following my stint as a maneuver planner I led the American contingent at a JSS in central Baghdad. While there dozens of Iraqi citizens walked into our base and asked to see me. When I asked why they chose to see me instead of the Iraqi commander, they each told me a variation of this theme: they didn’t know who to trust in the Iraqi military, but they knew they could trust the Americans.
Our counterinsurgency strategy had started to work and in conjunction with the Sunni Awakening in Anbar province, the direction of the Iraq war changed dramatically. When Senator Reid proclaimed the war to be lost in April of that year, I knew he was either woefully uninformed or lying. We weren’t even close to losing, we were winning.
Elsewhere in the piece Fallows laments the fact that the Iraqi military – which received a substantial amount of American military training and gear – folded at the prospect of engaging ISIS earlier this year but fails to explore the reasons behind that failure. They failed for the same reason that counterinsurgency warfare takes an extended amount of time – to be successful we needed to change their culture.
I used to speak to college classes about Iraq and when I did I would throw up a slide outlining the history and culture of that country compared to the United States. What’s striking about the comparison is that although the Iraqi culture is millennia older than US culture, our system of government has been far more stable. We can’t imagine a violent coup overthrowing our government, but that event was commonplace for Iraq in the late 20th century. Establishing a stable, secure, representative democratic government in a country which has known no such entity is an incredibly difficult and time consuming task.
It is also a task President Obama had no desire to finish. In 2008 he campaigned to end the US involvement in Iraq, period. Prior to his nomination, he outlined his plan for Iraq on the pages of The New York Times. He didn’t use the word “win.” He instead states, in his final sentence, what he intends to do: “It’s time to end this war.”
Fallows, in attempting to detail the many perceived failures of the American military in Iraq, is strangely silent on this. Dexter Filkins, writing in The New Yorker this past June, documents the legacy of this strategic decision and the rise of ISIS:
The negotiations between Obama and Maliki fell apart, in no small measure because of a lack of engagement by the White House. Today, many Iraqis, including some close to Maliki, say that a small force of American soldiers—working in non-combat roles—would have provided a crucial stabilizing factor that is now missing from Iraq. Sami al-Askari, a Maliki confidant, told me for my article this spring, “If you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be cooperating with you, and they would become your partners.” President Obama wanted the Americans to come home, and Maliki didn’t particularly want them to stay.
Fallows looks at Obama and sees a man responsible for America’s only strategic success of the last 13 years. He looks at the American military and finds it responsible for Iraq’s failures. I see precisely the opposite.
Too Easy to Go Home
Toward the end of the piece Fallows quotes retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen:
“The next time we go to war,” he said, “the American people should have to say yes. And that would mean that half a million people who weren’t planning to do this would have to be involved in some way. They would have to be inconvenienced. That would bring America in. America hasn’t been in these previous wars. And we are paying dearly for that.”
For Fallows, this is another in a long line of arguments which support reinstating the draft, or some form of national service, in order to better connect the American people with the American military. I see it slightly different.
While it may be too easy, as Fallows contends, to go to war, it is certainly far too easy to bring the troops home before we as a nation have completed the mission. Insurgents and students of 4th Generation Warfare fully understand that they cannot compete with the United States militarily. Their only hope is to fight a long war lasting years or decades and perhaps eventually cause enough damage or kill enough civilians to break our nation’s will to sustain combat operations.
We certainly must “bring America in” at the beginning of a war, but if it devolves into counterinsurgency warfare we also must keep America in. By 2008 the press and a majority of the American people were out. We elected Obama knowing his intent was not to pursue victory in Iraq but to bring the troops home. And while Obama promised as a candidate to focus more resources on Afghanistan following the re-deployment of troops from Iraq, he detailed a plan early last year to pull all the troops out by the end of 2016 at which point, it appears likely, Afghanistan’s fate will mirror that of Iraq. Afghanistan can already see it coming.
When those last troops do finally leave Kabul and touch down on American soil, I have no doubt the Maine Troop Greeters will be out in force to welcome them home. When they do there won’t be any talk of politics, of whether we won or lost the war, of whether or not they are sufficiently connected to the troops. They will simply want to shake the troops’ hands and show them their support. It may mean something to the greeters, but for the troops, that will mean everything.
And in case you’re wondering, I still owe Bangor, ME that visit. I haven’t forgotten them.
*****
image illustrations via shutterstock / Chris Parypa Photography / Glynnis Jones
Join the conversation as a VIP Member