by Larry Minear
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One female sergeant with the New Hampshire National Guard was intimately involved in civic action work. Serving as a truck driver and convoy gunner in Iraq for fifteen months beginning in late 2003, she observed “huge” changes. “We did a ton of humanitarian aid. Before we left, there were seventeen schools built. Thousands of school books given out, thousands of school bags. More people were thanking us for being there than were trying to shoot us.”9
In April 2007, a well-publicized distribution, of school equipment and supplies as well as cookies by a U.S. Cavalry regiment, accompanied by Iraqi troops, won praise from those involved. In a U.S. Armed Forces news release, the first lieutenant in the U.S. contingent commented on the win-win situation: “It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, helping the children,” he said. At the same time, by giving them “the ability to learn and get an education, they’re less vulnerable to other influences—like extremist views.” A platoon leader involved in the operation was also impressed. “Seeing the kids respond to us handing out toys and book bags is always great—they are so happy. It’s like we’re Santa Claus.” Doing such missions jointly with Iraqi soldiers in his view strengthened the Iraqis’ hand as their government began to assume greater responsibility for social welfare programs.10
At the individual level, too, hearts-and-minds work was viewed as overwhelmingly positive. “Combat is only one facet of the military,” remarked Warrant Officer Jared S. Jones, a twenty-three-year-old who served in Afghanistan with the Aviation Attack Helicopter Battalion of the Utah Army National Guard, “a necessary evil we must sometimes wage against evil people.” The highlight of his year-long deployment was a series of civic action activities in the village of Jegdalek. In Operation Shoe Fly, Chinook helicopters dropped shoes, blankets, clothing, and toys on selected villages.11 Army Sgt. Shawn Molloy recalled throwing stuffed animals out of Black-hawk helicopters to children waiting excitedly below.12
Schools were a particular priority. Since “Saddam Hussein had done away with a lot of the schools in southern Iraq,” explained James Machen, a major in an Army chemical battalion, the reopening after twenty years of the school in the village of Atsu Schuwaih was great cause for rejoicing.13 A U.S. engineering battalion and civil affairs unit from the nearby Tallil Air Base had helped with the construction. Navy Lt. Daniel Neville also found the military’s role in reopening a village school “uplifting,” given the grinding poverty of the area. Operating a clinic that was open during regular hours also offered the troops “a way to invite Iraqi women to bring children for medical treatment.”14
For many soldiers, civic action activities provided an all-important link with people in their areas. “I dealt a lot with the Iraqi people,” recalled one medic from the New Hampshire Guard. “They got dehydrated quite a bit, and we had to do a lot of IVs.” While treating locals was not part of his unit’s original mission, it became so over time. For Afghans who depended for their livelihoods on agriculture, services provided to their livestock by military veterinarians were much appreciated. Sometimes health and immunization activities were linked with voter registration efforts. “They would get people there to get medicine and then they would register them there for the vote so they could get a census for the country’s population.” The broader national reconstruction agenda was thus advanced.15
“Like most folks,” says Army veterinarian, Maj. Jessica McCoy, “I never even knew the Army hired veterinarians.” But since arriving in Iraq in May 2007—she had been similarly involved in Egypt and Afghanistan—she has been working with a State Department-led team of bilingual, bicultural advisers to help rebuild the Iraqi poultry industry, severely disrupted by the fall of Saddam Hussein and the war. In an area south of Baghdad, Operation Chicken Run has helped 300 poultry farms form a cooperative association across tribal and religious lines. The business model employed, in her judgment, will not only spur rural development but also serve as “a good tool for reconciliation.”16
Civic action activities also connected American soldiers to communities in the United States. Army Sgt. August C. Hohl from Wisconsin distributed school supplies received from home to rural schools he visited regularly. “The kids sit there and learn with old bullet holes and bomb-scarred walls around them. They are usually lucky if they even have wooden benches to sit on. Most of the time there’s just the bare floor or a plastic tarp. But the children there are so proud to open up their book bags and show you their math, writing, or art books and what they can do.”17 In 2004, a nongovernmental organization, Operation Iraqi Children, was founded, which seeks to keep U.S. troops well supplied with the ingredients for such programs.18
In a world of carnage, providing assistance gave soldiers something to feel good about. The experience of two medics who served in 2005 with an Alabama National Guard unit in Afghanistan offers a case in point. In civilian life a salesman and a volunteer fire fighter/emergency medical technician, the pair were responsible for what they called a “hugs and drugs” program in Paktia Province. “The medics traveled to villages to treat ill Afghans and opened their clinic for several days to treat sick villagers who came to the base.” They insisted on treating women at a time when only men sought help. Over time they gained the trust of villagers, who were enormously grateful for their services, even though a clinic that was constructed did not outlive their departure.19
“We’d be riding through the streets” of towns in Iraq, recalled Spec. Eric James March of a similar initiative by the California National Guard, and “hundreds of kids would just flood our vehicles. Every person in our unit had families and friends just send tons of candies and toys and books and literature for the kids to read … we’d always stop in the community…. We’d show them that we care about you guys. We’re not just here to occupy you guys’ land. We’re here to help you, we want to help you, so we would always take time out of our days to help the kids and give them toys and candy and put smiles on their faces.”20
Lt. Jr. Grade Susan Diekman, deployed with a Coast Guard unit offshore Kuwait from February to June 2003, had a similar experience. The group’s mission was to ensure that the Iraqi government did not detonate gas and oil platforms in the waterway leading to the port of Um Kasar, a primary destination for Iraq-bound ships carrying troops and cargo. During the latter part of her stay, she functioned as a project officer for a program to distribute school and sports supplies to a girls’ school in the area. Materials were available through a Navy-wide “clasped hands” program. Enormously well received by the youngsters, aged seven to twelve, the undertaking offered “a sliver of hope” for their future. Diekman’s involvement, she says looking back, represented “one of the most profound moments in her life.”21
Such efforts seemed unquestionably constructive, given the extent of unmet basic human needs. “I get goose-bumps every time I think of it,” recalled Metz Duites, an Army sergeant who arranged for the distribution of toys, school supplies, and snacks near Camp Bucha, the world’s largest detainee camp.22 A photograph of Duites unit can be found in this chapter. For Air Force Col. Linda McHale, who helped the Ministry of Health rebuild the health sector, her enduring impression of Operation Iraqi Freedom was of a young Marine, M-16 slung over his back, carrying an Iraqi child with cerebral palsy to a military facility for treatment.23
The Global War on Terror section of the Pentagon’s website frames the military’s civic action activities worldwide as “a force for good…. Every day the men and women of the U.S. military help others in humanitarian missions across the globe.” Full-page advertisements in major newspapers encouraging enlistment in the National Guard emphasize the benefits of such activities to civilians under duress. “Whether it’s rescuing local families from floodwaters, securing our borders, rushing humanitarian aid to the other side of the world or defending our homeland, that’s where you will find the National Guard.” Photos intersperse human-interest scenes (such as medics treating young children) with defense and security activi
ties (helicopters and ground patrols). The Guard is presented as “the nation’s greatest counterterrorism asset.”24
As a video produced by the New Hampshire National Guard puts it, “In the wars, it is not enough to be a warrior. In the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqi and Afghan citizens, kindness and generosity can be a Guardsman’s most powerful weapon.”25 The state Guard’s publications are replete with references to civic action activities. In 2007, C Company of the 172nd Infantry Regiment reported, “Our operations supporting the local children are in full swing. We regularly distribute shoes, clothing and school supplies to the kids in our area. It is truly a double benefit, as they receive much-needed items, and we receive the smiles, waves and hugs of grateful kids.” The items distributed “were sent by our soldiers’ families, friends, as well as organizations and schools in southern New Hampshire.”26 Hearts-and-minds activities by active-duty forces are also given top billing by military publicists and recruiters.
CROSS-CURRENTS
Most soldiers interviewed were enormously positive about civic action work on behalf of local populations. In settings characterized by deprivation and carnage, such work represented an affirmation of the humanity of Afghan and Iraqi civilians, of the troops themselves, and of Americans back home. A few soldiers, however, raised questions about the strategy and tactics underlying such efforts, their durability and sustainability, and the extent to which their positive potential is undercut by the violence with which the troops are also associated.
With respect to the underlying strategy and tactics of hearts-and-minds work, some boots on the ground sensed an implicit contradiction in having an offensive fighting force also provide succor. Spec. Gregory James Schulte saw a Catch-22. “You want to look scary on the roads so that you don’t get attacked,” he said. “At the same time you want to have a friendly face so that people understand that you’re there to help them.”27 Some wondered if it is possible for an army of occupation to play both roles. However broadly compatible the roles may seem, will they at some point prove contradictory?
Aware of the problem that his dual roles might create, New Hampshire’s SSgt. Brian Shelton made it a practice to take off his gloves when walking through local villages. His point was to show Iraqis “that he wasn’t a monster or a machine; they might trust soldiers more if they recognized that they’re human.” Shelton’s work, which combined civic action activities with combat duties, was, in the words of one observer, “part open hand, part closed fist.”28 Another New Hampshire Guardsman believed that in conducting work with local populations, a show of force would serve as a necessary deterrent, giving pause to “anybody that was driving by that wanted to do something.”29 While no incidents were reported, the fact that civic action work required armed military protection underscored the tensions involved and the politicized nature of the assistance.
Army Sgt. Gregory Mayfield described as “surreal” the twin agendas of “fighting a war and rebuilding simultaneously. We would rebuild a school or a road or something and it would get blown up the next day. I never did understand that aspect of it.” On one occasion, a U.S. civil affairs group challenged local leaders for having countenanced an ambush of the reconstruction work. If “you don’t want to play,” the U.S. soldiers said, “we won’t spend our funds fixing up your neighborhood. We’ll go somewhere else.” But suddenly the troops were surrounded by children and began passing out chocolate. “We just went through this God-awful ambush,” a baffled Mayfield said, and “now we’re being nice to people!”30 Shelton himself observed, “You could be in a town all day long handing out food and blankets and water and pens and pencils and notebooks. And you’d leave the town and head back to the camp and they’d ambush you. Why are we doing all this stuff if they’re not appreciative of it?” he asked.
Other soldiers identified a related difficulty. In selecting villages for assistance by asking, “Where do they stand on the insurgency?” the troops were in essence drawing local populations more deeply into the conflict. In the case of the clinic set up by the two medics in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province, relations between the troops and village elders deteriorated after their base came under fire in circumstances that ostensibly implicated the elders. Rather than leaving medical and other supplies behind for use by the community as planned, the departing troops “blew up the remnants of their camp before leaving Afghanistan.”31
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Counterinsurgency operations can be characterized as armed social work. It includes attempts to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at. This makes civil-military operations a central counterinsurgency operations activity, not an afterthought. Civil-military operations are one means of restructuring the environment to displace the enemy from it.
—U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual*
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The tensions identified lie at the core of the conduct of hearts-and-minds activities. The Army’s counterinsurgency field manual situates assistance of the kind provided by the troops to civilians in both Afghanistan and Iraq as an element in U.S. counterinsurgency operations. Civilian aid agencies seek to conduct humanitarian activities without political objectives, assisting people because they are in need, rather than as part of a political agenda. With respect to the activities of the troops, however, the Army Field Manual specifies that there is no such thing as neutral humanitarian assistance. “Whenever someone is helped, someone else is hurt, not least the insurgents. So civil and humanitarian assistance personnel often become targets. Protecting them is a matter not only of providing a close-in defense, but also of creating a secure environment by co-opting local beneficiaries of aid and their leaders.”32
Soldiers in both theaters also raised questions about the balance between offensive military operations directed at the enemy and assistance programs to address civilian needs. They sensed a contradiction between their counterterrorist strategies and local priorities. Several articulated the view with respect to Afghanistan in particular that the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which provided the rationale for international military presence there, seemed remote from the experience of most Afghans. “It didn’t affect them, it didn’t bother them, and it wasn’t an issue with them,” noted one soldier. “They just live their lives day to day, just plant their seeds, dig their crops, and eat and support the family. They don’t have a preference for what type of government is in effect. They just want to know that things are good for them and their kids. They don’t believe in the cause of the Taliban or the Al Qaeda.”33
Sergeant Dougherty commented on the extent to which hearts-and-minds work in Iraq was dwarfed by “the destruction and unnecessary violence” of the war itself. She recalled an incident in which a water tanker for which she was providing convoy support lost a pallet of plastic water bottles. The soldiers ran over the bottles to destroy them rather than letting them fall into the hands of Iraqis, whose water is often contaminated but who “can’t afford bottled water.” She noted, “The same guys who ran over the water were the same ones you’d see go into an orphanage and give out care packages. Then they’d feel really good because they were helping. One day they do something great; the next day it’s totally different. The most I can say is we gave candy to their kids. ‘Sorry we blew up your neighborhood and killed your father, but here is some candy.’”34
But some soldiers felt that there should have been more hearts-and-minds projects. In this view, addressing the human needs targeted by “hug-and-drugs” activities was more essential to the future of Afghanistan and Iraq than were U.S.-led military efforts to defeat insurgents. What local people really needed, in their view, was a sense of visible progress in meeting immediate and longer-term needs. U.S. objectives would be advanced more decisively by employing the instruments of “soft power” rather than the sharp-edged sword.
Interviews with soldiers in the Veterans History Project collections and elsewhere are noteworthy for their relative absence of mention of the work of humani
tarian and human rights organizations, international or local. This is to a certain extent understandable in Iraq, where UN agencies and other aid groups maintained a low profile in the years following the bombing of the UN’s Baghdad headquarters in 2003. The soldiers’ lack of comment on assistance efforts is more telling in Afghanistan, however, where countless agencies engaged in emergency and reconstruction activities during the time when U.S. and other coalition forces were present.35 In both countries, the troops are more familiar with private DOD contractors such as Kellogg, Brown, and Root than with UN or private aid groups.
In Iraq and Afghanistan alike, the work of humanitarian and human rights agencies is critically important, despite their difficulties functioning in situations of great insecurity. Indeed, their work is often complicated by the presence of U.S. and other international military forces. In Afghanistan, such groups initially fiercely opposed aid work conducted under military aegis by Provincial Reconstruction Teams, although some later softened their opposition. In Iraq, some UN agencies and nongovernmental aid organizations found that the U.S.-imposed political-military framework compromised their independence and security and questioned the competence and the longer-term effectiveness of military activities in the human needs sphere.36 Some groups challenge the military’s description of its work as “humanitarian,” as it lacks the essential elements in classical humanitarian action of neutrality and impartiality.
Striking the right balance in community development activities between military and civilian actors is an issue that vexes officials in Washington and other capitals as well as those on the ground. As policymakers commit more troops in their effort to keep perilous situations from unraveling—whether the surge decision in Iraq in 2007–2008 or the commitment of an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2009—the fears expressed by some veterans that more inputs of a nonmilitary nature may be needed may be confirmed.37