The medic had wrestled the gunner quiet. While the rest of them set up a perimeter defense, he took out his knife and, grabbing the protruding piece of jaw bone, forced back the soldier’s head and calmly cut open his throat, then punched a hole into the windpipe. A sputtering of blood and foam came out through the incision, and as his breathing eased, the marine quickly quieted. There was another explosion up ahead and the rattling of small-arms fire. Jake watched while the medic took an endotracheal tube out of his kit, slipped it in through the incision, and threaded it down into the soldier’s lungs, listening for the normal inward and outward hiss of air, then reached for the morphine.
They managed to carry both of the wounded down to a Humvee, jury-rigged to carry the stretchers. They would try to make it back to their base camp. It had gotten to the point in their area of operation that if you could hear the boom, it was good. It meant that you were still alive after the bomb went off. A number of those who were near an IED when it went off would be confused and rattled after the explosion even if there were no obvious wounds. But they would tell everyone that they were fine and just walk away to go back to what they were doing.
Jake’s war soon had nothing to do with winning hearts and minds, protecting the civilian population, and not shooting up wedding parties, but simply making it back to base camp with the job done, the supplies delivered, and all the equipment intact, with nobody killed or severely wounded. That was called a good day.
There had been a U.S. Aid project during the 1950s in some of the areas they were patrolling. Engineers had dug canals through the valley to bring water to the crops of wheat and corn. Now, the crops were opium poppies and marijuana, with some of the plants five and six feet high. In some places the crops were so dense that is was almost impossible to walk through the fields. When the crops were planted to the edge of the roads, the fields were perfect places for ambushes, which the Taliban could not resist. In Helmand Province that could be a big mistake. Every now and then, the Taliban would do something that foolish.
One early morning, the marines took some fire from the edge of a poppy field. Jake was on top of his APC, manning the 50-cal. He used the machine gun to mow down the plants as surely as if he were using a scythe. They killed ten Taliban that morning and had no more trouble on that part of the road for weeks. The marines always preferred a straight-up firefight to what they called the “death at every corner” crawl that they had used in Iraq and in the larger towns and villages of Afghanistan.
During his months at Geronimo, Jake spared his parents the worst of it. He didn’t mention the time that his 50-caliber and two others on accompanying Humvees, along with their Mark 19 automatic grenade launchers, stopped a column of supply trucks and oil tankers from being blown up and all the drivers killed or taken prisoner.
Jake stayed on the top of his Humvee out in the open, bullets ricocheting off the armored plates surrounding him, his own machine gun chewing up the surrounding hillsides, keeping the Taliban from moving closer. After gunships were called in, the Taliban, hearing the sounds of the approaching helicopters, had no choice but to leave or be killed.
While at Geronimo Jake had heard about a shift in strategy to counter-insurgency, whatever that was. When someone asked a sergeant what that meant, the sergeant, clearly annoyed, shrugged it off, muttering that counter-insurgency only came in two sizes—long and very long.
Moving around as much as they did, Jake saw that things weren’t going as well as the official pronouncements. There was a lot that wasn’t going right. But it was the kids that troubled him the most.
When the 1/5 had first gotten to Helmand Province, the kids would be cheerful and jabbered whenever they stopped or pulled over to wait or rest for a while. They passed out candy and kids would take it. But as the weeks past, the villagers seemed to be keeping their kids away from them. Those who did come up weren’t smiling as they did previously, some of the older kids had actually taken to throwing rocks at them when they passed through the villages.
The Taliban might have become more cautious in trying to stick them in the eye, but they were obviously warning the villagers not to help. And Jake couldn’t blame villagers for listening. Over the years, the plains had been swept by U.S. and NATO troops countless numbers of times. After a couple of weeks, the troops would just get up and leave and the Afghans who’d helped, or been given work, were worse off. There were stories that Jake believed were true about the Taliban coming back into a village after the American or NATO troops had left and killing all the men who had worked for them, even killing the kids who had acted as lookouts for the American or NATO troops.
Jake understood that if things didn’t change, really change, that they’d probably have to leave like everyone else. The Afghan Government knew it. The Afghan people knew it, and the Taliban knew it. And that didn’t make much sense to him as they crawled slowly along another dirt road, always looking for signs of recent digging—places where the Marines weren’t quite liked anymore, and definitely were not trusted.
There were rumors about new orders coming down from Central Command changing the Rules of Engagement. Apparently, the higher ups were growing more concerned about the increasing numbers of civilian casualties, and to cut down on the collateral damage they were changing the rules to shoot only at people who were shooting at you. But Jake had no idea how to tell the good guys from the bad guys before they actually started shooting. It would be like walking down one of the streets at home, trying to decide whether the person coming towards you was Catholic or Lutheran. If you had to wait for someone to be shooting at you before you could fire back, you’d probably be dead even before you could pull the trigger. To do something like this was lunacy.
Jake heard an officer comment one evening that this fight was not about the Taliban, nationalism, or terrorism, but what he called “valleyism.” Jake didn’t say anything. He just listened, but reluctantly had to agree. These people only care about what is happening in their own valley. These Afghans have never known any central government and they’d never liked or tolerated any occupying force, whoever they were. He just couldn’t see how what they were doing would work. Whatever else was going on or whatever else people were being told, Afghanistan was not going to be easy.
There were comments from the British troops who were still in Afghanistan as part of the shrinking NATO coalition that, whatever they did or however successful the American offensive might appear to be, the fighting would be dropping off during the fall months no matter what happened. “As soon as the leaves start falling off the trees,” the Brits offered, “the Afghans fighters give up and go home, since they can be seen more easily maneuvering with the leaves gone. During winter nobody can fight, so the only way you’ll be able to tell if you are actually winning is to wait for the spring and see if the fighting starts up again at the same level that it ended. That’s the way it’s been here for the last 3,000 years. Nothing is going to change just because you guys are here with your gunships and armored personnel carriers. After all,” they would add with British understatement, “this is Afghanistan.”
Jake did guard duty when one of the captains went out to speak with a group of elders in one of the valleys. It was crazy. The captain talked about putting a paved road through the valley. It would allow the locals to make more money, to make them richer. But what the captain wanted was to have them help the Marines with security. If they did that, then the captain would bring all kinds of money and projects to the valley. Jake doubted that would ever happen and was put off that bringing lots of money to the valley was the reason they were there and getting killed.
Like all nineteen-year-olds, Jake was into music and an avid listener of tapes and disks from rap to country and western, including the oldies but goodies. There were days coming back from patrols that he couldn’t help but wonder if the new Twenty-first Century Creedence Clearwater version of “Waist Deep in the Muddy” that ended with “It will be a long dark night before this thing is d
one” didn’t say it better, and maybe more sadly, for his war than Pete Seeger had said it for Vietnam.
A week after the meeting with the elders, Jake heard that six U.S. advisors had been killed at an Afghan National Police Training Center near Kandahar. Apparently, a trainee had turned around at one of the rifle ranges and shot the six instructors dead. It baffled Jake, as it did the other marines who heard of the shootings, that anyone would be foolish enough to give an Afghan, trainee or not, a full clip of ammunition. Thirty rounds was just so stupid. Anyone in the 1/5 would have handed out one or two rounds at most. That way if they turned on you they’d only be able to kill one or two before they’d run out of bullets. What had happened at that rifle range was Alice in Wonderland stuff. Those guys who had been killed hadn’t even noticed that they had fallen down the rabbit hole.
The week Jake was promoted to corporal, he sent home a package of pictures that had been taken during his promotion while his unit was taking a rest and refit back at Camp Leatherneck. When his mother opened the envelope, the gritty dirt and dust of Afghanistan fell through her fingers onto the kitchen table. She stared at the small mound of grayish sand and started to cry.
17.
THAT DEADLY SENSE OF PRIVILEGE
Americans notice foreign policy only in the depths of a disaster too colossal to ignore … [there is] an evisceration of civic culture that results when a small praetorian guard shoulders the burden of waging perpetual war; while the majority of citizens purport to revere its members even as they ignore or profit from their service …
—Andrew J. Baceviche, Vietnam Veteran, Professor Internal Relations, Boston College
Edward Gibbon said much the same thing in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon makes it clear that Rome succumbed to the barbarians due to a gradual decay of civic virtues among its citizens. He makes a special point of focusing on the outsourcing of the inherent duties to defend the empire as the beginning of the decline, ending with the fall of Rome as that abrogation of responsibility became institutionalized. What Gibbons documents was that within a period of sixty years not one general of the Roman Army and not one ground commander of any legion was from a family of wealth, privilege, or influence, even though these were the citizens who most benefitted from Roman power.
The military officers and, in growing numbers, the soldiers themselves were from the nations that Rome had subdued decades before. The Visigoths, the Gauls, the Germans, and the Huns gradually became the Romans who eventually did the fighting and eventually offered up Roman security out at the borders of the Roman Empire. Neither the nation detached from its army, nor the army detached from the nation, would survive.
As a people and as a nation, we have never endorsed the idea of a large freestanding army. It was Richard Nixon, angered with the growing resistance to our war in Vietnam, who supported and then promoted the idea of just such a volunteer army.
In a democracy, that old adage that “war is too important to be left to the generals” can become a two-edged sword. Politicians can be as foolish as any general, and faced with a population that is not involved or doesn’t care that much about what is happening, can cause as much damage to a nation as any jingoistic military commander or field marshal.
Add to that mix of potential political or military hubris a volunteer army, removed from an unconcerned or uninformed electorate, pushed on by an imperial government or military establishment, and you have the ingredients for a national disaster; specifically, the implementing of narrow, self-serving decisions leading to ever-more widening unexpected and terrible consequences.
Indeed, it was to by-pass public scrutiny and possible opposition that the French Government, along with its military in 1831, formed the Foreign Legion so that they could send troops around the world, including Spain, Mexico, the African Colonies, Indochina, and Algeria, without having the French population become involved or even begin to think about their wars.
Our Revolutionary War has been our model. It has been the Citizen’s Army we turn to in times of danger. Common sense has led us to believe that in times of real and actual danger, everyone must be involved, and a standing army simply would never offer up enough “boots on the ground” to win our battles, much less go on to win our wars.
Yet over these last decades we have become content to let such an army fight our battles, both out of sight and out of mind, under the foolish assumption that their will be no real individual or collective price to pay for it. We may not be Rome yet, but it is beginning to seem that way to the units that we keep deploying again and again, as well as their families and loved ones, while all the rest of us go shopping.
But it wasn’t only two savvy Presidents, beat up by an anti-war movement energized by an unpopular draft, who clearly understood (from the most recently released White House tapes) that Vietnam was not going well and that we had to get out. A few of those generals who had served as company grade officers in World War II and Korea understood that a large part of that discontent and eventual antagonism to the war was that the country had grown disenchanted with the reasons we were fighting, coupled to a draft that was viewed as undemocratic and blatantly unfair.
The issue was never whether we should have a professional military. The country had decided that much in the 1850s with the establishment of West Point and Annapolis as training grounds for our officers. The question was who would pull the triggers and how the country would become committed to our future wars.
Among those generals trying to get it right was Creighton Abrams, who replaced General William Westmoreland as Commander of Military Forces Vietnam in late 1968. Abrams rethought the whole issue of public war and private commitment. Tough, crusty, and gruff, Abrams’ concerns were quite different from both Johnson’s and Nixon’s, who wanted to get rid of a problem. Abrams simply wanted to get it right.
Abrams eventually came to view Vietnam as a war being fought by an army cut off from the population it served. What Abrams saw was that by 1969 the majority of combat units in Vietnam were made up mostly of minorities. He understood the inequality in all this and realized that this kind of smoldering demographic, barely working in a country at peace, could not work in a country involved in a deadly war that was going badly.
He became convinced that it was the separation of those who serve from those being served that had opened up the country to divisiveness, and the military to a conflict that had not been well thought out and, without public support, was ultimately doomed to failure. Abrams understood that the Vietnam draft had skewed conscription to the poor and disenfranchised, and away from those in positions of power, prestige, wealth, and privilege. He was aware of the long history of inequities in conscription, going back to the Civil War and Congress’s 1863 legislation that allowed draftees to hire substitutes, paying a $300 fee to the government in order to avoid the whole conscription process. There was nothing so egregious or as flagrant as a $300 exception going on during the Vietnam War, but by the time Abrams took command of our troops there were no end to those same kinds of exemptions. There were undergraduate deferments and graduate school deferments. There were deferments for enlistment in the National Guard and Reserve units. There were medical deferments if you were connected enough to have a medical specialist document that you did have a certain degree of scoliosis or flat feet, whether you did indeed have asthma as a child rather than a chronic cough, or were so severely nearsighted that it was barely correctable by eyeglasses.
The three most famous cases of deferment during the Vietnam War years were those of two future presidents and a vice-president. George W. Bush spent his time during the war within the continental United States as a member of the Texas Air National Guard and Bill Clinton spent the war years with his own educational deferments at Georgetown and then at Oxford under the auspices of a Rhodes scholarship. Vice President Dick Cheney received five deferments during the Vietnam years, famously remarking that he had “other, more important things to do” at the time.
Abrams saw all this privilege as operationally hopeless and both politically dangerous and philosophically unsound. In response to this “privilege gap” and to make sure that it never happened again, Abrams’ idea was for the country to maintain a small but competent volunteer army that would act as a powerful rapid deployment force to handle any fairly large-scale emergency. The plan was that for any prolonged conflict you could throw in the National Guard and Reserve units, giving America an immediate, quick, and abiding interest in any administration’s continued pursuit of enlarging the military conflict. The idea was simple enough—calling up the Guard was sure to ensure a vigorous and lively national debate that would either end the conflict or legitimize and democratize the military effort by leading to the next obvious step, the establishment of a draft in order to continue the war.
Conceptually Abrams’ plan was simple enough and there were many in the military, battered by the multiple failures of Vietnam, who went along with the idea. For anything more than a police action, the citizens of the country would become engaged through the activation and overseas deployment of their own state’s National Guard and Reserve units, with a national discussion on reinstituting a draft sure to follow.
But it didn’t turn out that way. By 9/11, we had a different kind of government, a different kind of army and apparently a different kind of country. There had been the success of Desert Storm I, and the Bush administration, with the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, was quite willing to let a small volunteer army, along with the addition of National Guard units to fill in the gaps, do the fighting. It would take Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” for the country to look the other way when the caskets and wounded started to come home, and when more and more of those same units started being redeployed back into the war zones again and again. All the while believing that people who had been at each other’s throats for centuries would suddenly embrace American-style democracy and welcome American troops as liberators. But it is the blindness or indifference of letting so few try to do so much while the rest of us went shopping that is the real tragedy.
Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: A Medical Odyssey From Vietnam to Afghanistan Page 19