Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: A Medical Odyssey From Vietnam to Afghanistan

by Ronald Glasser M. D.

  Yet, even after a decade of fighting, with the volunteer army stretched to the limit and more and more reserve forces being deployed multiple times, no one is complaining, or even talking, of sharing the burden by instituting or considering a draft.

  In 2006, Donald Rumsfeld, was asked by a relative of a deployed National Guard member why there were so many multiple deployments of Guard units, and why the National Guard troops were on operational duty, including foot patrols and setting up road blocks in the most dangerous districts and regions of Iraq. Unrepentant, unremorseful, and definitely annoyed, Rumsfeld answered dismissively, “The National Guard members knew what they were signing up for.”

  Well, not quite. Those Minnesota National Guard troops that I knew, many in their late thirties and early forties, some even in their fifties, had signed up for crowd control at celebrations, snow removal during blizzards, saving their neighbors during floods, and two weeks each summer at Camp Ripley swapping new stories with old friends. They had not signed up to kick in doors in the roughest neighborhoods in the world or drive down roads waiting to be blown up. Some 38 percent of all our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been and still are National Guard and Reservists. General Abrams would be surprised, maybe even astonished, but certainly disappointed that ten years into a war, the burden is on the military and not a generally involved and committed civilian population.

  Colonel Harry G. Summers, in his book On Strategy, an analysis of the Vietnam War, wrote about the failures of the military in Vietnam that ring as true and as applicable today as when he wrote these sentences about a military some forty years ago:

  Throughout the 1960s the military were torn between the commitment to civilian supremacy inculcated through generations of service and their premonition of disaster, between trying to make a new system work and rebelling against it. They were demoralized by the order to procure weapons in which they did not believe and by the necessity of fighting a war whose purpose proved to be increasingly elusive. A new breed of military officer emerged: men who learned the new jargon, who could present the systems analysis arguments so much in vogue, more articulate than the older generations and more skilled in bureaucratic maneuvering. On some levels it eased civilian-military relationships; on a deeper level, it deprived the policy process of the simpler, cruder, but perhaps more relevant assessments which in the final analysis are needed when issues are reduced to a test of arms...

  General Abrams died in 1974, having been given half his wish. We do have a small but powerful volunteer force, but the National Guard and Reserves are not supplementing the volunteer regular forces, they have been integrated into the force structure itself.

  The air wing of the Minnesota Air National Guard flying C-130 has had multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to fill in the gaps that an understaffed regular Air Force cannot supply. It is clear that our national amnesia has allowed a country of almost 300 million to allow fewer than 0.5 percent of the population, along with more than 300,000 women, to take on the whole burdens of what should be our fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  For the last few decades economists have talked about the growing disparities between the rich and the poor in this country, the gentrification of American cities into the “haves” and “have-nots,” along with the crumbling of the middle class and the growing gap between those with wealth and power and those without either. It is just this issue of class that Josiah Bunting III, a Vietnam veteran, novelist, and current president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, addressed in his article “Class Warfare” published in The American Scholar. Bunting laments and warns about the loss of any sense of national duty and national service that has been swept aside by privilege and indifference. Bunting is unabashedly direct in his criticism of the nation’s elite:

  The business of war has become increasingly remote from a particular segment (the wealthy and the privileged) of the American people.

  Bunting takes the issue of class further up the social ladder than most have been willing to go:

  The war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) … like Korea and Vietnam… has splintered away from the conscious concern of most of those in whose behalf it is said to be prosecuted.

  He points out that those killed and wounded are no longer the children of those who lead this country, or, as Bunting writes:

  Those who control its resources and institutions, dictate its tastes and opinions, and are blessed most abundantly with the country’s bounty, or feed most lavishly upon its expensive entertainments and its treasures.”

  Bunting presents the record of one of this country’s most prestigious but unnamed boarding schools. During World War I, 40 of its 400 students served in the military. During World War II, the number was 60. There were 10 during the Korean conflict, 5 for the ten years of the Vietnam War, and so far, none in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  The 1956 Princeton graduating class sent a little less than half of its 900 graduates into the military, some as volunteers, some drafted within two years of graduation. In 2004, that same university sent 9 out of a class of 1,100. Today’s Marines, patrolling the streets of Fallujah and the villages in Helmand Province, have the same attitudes, abilities, courage, and esprit de corps as the Marines of World War I and II, but today those prep school boys and Princeton graduates who had made up a significant part of those earlier units are missing. In 2007, the school sent almost 80 percent of its graduation class, not to Baghdad or Kandahar Province, but to Wall Street.

  Bunting makes clear that the abandonment of a Citizen Army is the main cause for the national anesthesia concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He points out that none of this is good for the country, the military, or our democracy. He ends his article with a statement written by George Washington at the end of his presidency:

  It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal service, to the defense of it.

  But Washington was not the only Commander-in-Chief who believed in Universal Service. The French General, Maurice De Saxe, who over a two-week period of illness in 1732 wrote down his views on war and a Citizen Army that was eventually published in his book, Thoughts on the Art of War. The book became to the military officers of the Eighteenth Century what Clausewitiz’s On War was to become to the colonels and generals of the Nineteenth and Twentieth. Saxe’s view on conscription, or the draft, in the chapter titled “On the Manner of Raising Troops” had clearly caught Washington’s attention.

  Would it not be better to establish by law that everyman, of whatever condition, was obliged to serve his prince and his country for five years? This law could not be objected to, because it is natural and because it is just that citizens exert themselves for the defense of the State. Choosing those between 20 and 30 years of age would result in no inconvenience—these are the years of license, where the young search for fortune, wander the country and are of no benefit to their parents. There would be no public desolation, as one would be sure that after the five years having passed, the young would be returned to their families. This method of raising troops would supply an inexhaustible fund of good recruits, not subject to desertion and by extension, cause it to be seen a duty and an honor to do one’s part. But for success, it must be that no one of any condition be exempted, to be severe on this point, to be unmoving on its application to the rich and noble will ensure that none will complain. Those who have served their time will look with contempt on the Law’s detractors and insensibly, it will become an honor to serve. The poor working man will be consoled by the example of the rich, the rich will dare not complain upon seeing the noble serve. Arms is an honorable profession. How many princes have borne arms. And how many officers have I seen serve in the ranks rather than live in indolence. It is only their weaknesses that make some view such a law as harsh.

  Washington wrote his farewell speech 250 years a
go, but the warning, if not the concern, is as real today as it was in 1793. Not to have some kind of personal involvement and even risk in issues of war and peace is to allow a kind of recklessness to enter those discussions that does not serve any real national purpose and is sure to end in both public confusion and personal tragedy.

  These are the kinds of decisions that lead to what have been called “political wars,” wars that are not fought for national security, but wars that are put into place for political or policy reasons rather than out of any real necessity. These political wars, usually trumpeted by policy hacks, offer only vague reasons for committing our armed forces, where any kind of winning is always hard to define and ultimate victory presented as some kind of distant far-off illusion. Because there is ultimately nothing important at risk, these are the wars that the politicians can offer up as wars that can be fought on the cheap. While real wars of necessity end in military victory or military failure, political wars usually end by everyone simply losing interest. Eventually, the tedium and casualties and the loss of treasure become too great to ignore, and the wars are simply abandoned and closed down while everyone pretends it wasn’t that important. Or that none of it ever really mattered much anyway.

  All of this simply walking away with nothing in hand makes the sacrifice of our troops and their families even harder to understand and much harder to accept.

  It may be that in war or peace, the best way to focus the mind is to expose everyone’s brain to real dangers. In the final analysis that may be the only way to make sure that wishful thinking is not replacing reality.

  What is sure is that if there were a draft, all of America would know what John Witmer, author of Sisters in Arms: A Father Remembers, didn’t know, and unfortunately, had to learn through a very steep and very tragic learning curve.

  Mr. Witmer had no idea of the real dangers his daughters would face when they joined his state’s National Guard. Like so many other Americans, he had no idea that hundreds of thousands of U.S. women had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2001. Like so many Americans, Witmer understood little about the military, less about our wars, and even less about who was doing the actual fighting. Witmer was certain that he, his wife, and their three daughters had nothing to fear when the girls joined the Guard. He assumed that the daughters, even when deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, would not be put at risk. He was sure that as women, particularly women in the National Guard, they would be assigned to clerical work, doing typing and filing or to process, in and out, different pieces of equipment. It proved to be a fateful and fatal misunderstanding, one that he and his wife would have to live with forever. It never occurred to the Witmers that the girls were not clerk-typists sitting in an office but combat soldiers going out on combat raids and convoy protection missions.

  One of John’s daughters, the youngest, was manning a 50-caliber machine gun in the turret of an armored personnel carrier when she was hit by a sniper’s round. The autopsy report that Mr. Witmer obtained some eleven months after her death stated that the bullet had entered her chest, passing directly through her heart, killing her instantly. What surprised him as he researched the facts surrounding his daughter’s death was that the three other armored vehicles in the convoy all had women in the turrets manning the machine guns. Every automatic weapon in the three armored vehicles protecting the trucks in the convoy were manned by female soldiers. The inconvenient truth about Iraq and Afghanistan is that, without a draft, we have an army that cannot survive, much less fight, without women on the battlefield.

  Women currently make up 20 percent of the 1.9 million troops that have been deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan and that percentage increases every month. That is our army now. And these are the soldiers our political leaders, and the country, have put in harm’s way. But, as Bunting points out, these warriors are not their own daughters any more then they are their own sons.

  If there were a draft, America, as well as the John Witmers, would have known that we have already deployed over a quarter of a million women to run the most dangerous roads in the world. They would know that more women have been killed and wounded in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan, then in all our other wars combined.

  It would be known too, that those women who become amputees by losing an upper extremity are forced to choose hooks because most women in the military are less then 120 pounds and cannot carry the twenty-pound weight of the newest servomagnetically-operated upper extremity prosthetic mechanical arms.

  If there were a draft, Americans would know about women like Dawn Halfaker, a West Point graduate, who was severely wounded when an RPG came through the windshield of her Humvee, taking off the right arm of the platoon leader in the front seat and then continuing on through the vehicle, taking off her right arm at the shoulder. If that RPG had exploded, Dawn and everyone else in that Humvee would have been killed. Dawn spent a year at Walter Reed and today manages to deal with the ongoing phantom pain of her absent arm by exercising twice a day, using her own endogenous endorphin release to replace those doses of Percocet and Vicoden that had left her so groggy and at times so incoherent that she couldn’t function. Years after her injury, she has basically made it on her own with the grit, determination, and toughness of a West Point graduate and a born athlete, along with the help of a few good friends.

  If there were a draft, the country would surely know about Leigh Ann Hester, she would be a national hero. Sergeant Hester is the only woman to receive the Silver Star for valor since the Second World War. Sgt. Hester, at the age of twenty-three, and a handful of other Kentucky National Guardsmen fought off thirty insurgents armed with assault rifles, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades after the insurgents had attacked a supply column they were guarding. Hester, with one other Guardsman, killed twenty-seven of the insurgents, saving the column from destruction.

  Sgt. Hester was a member of the 617 Military Police Company of the Kentucky National Guard. Before the Kentucky National Guard had been sent to Iraq, the unit’s most dangerous duty had been crowd control at the Kentucky Derby.

  It is not only that the last Administration never allowed photographs of caskets coming home, and ordered the planes flying the wounded into Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to land only at night, or that the President never went to funerals of military personnel, or that the number of medals handed out for bravery are decidedly fewer in these wars than in any of our other wars. It is as if giving out medals for bravery might indicate that these wars are as ferocious and deadly as any of our other wars.

  And that the real dangers of those we put in harm’s way are decidedly greater than politically acknowledged or militarily reported. And all the sleight-of-hand appears to be going on as our newest President calls the escalating war in Afghanistan a War of Necessity. Well, if it is a necessity then we should all be involved and all begin to pay.

  A surgeon stationed at the 24th Surgical Hospital in Balad in 2005 made a clearer statement about our latest War of Necessity:

  There is no one with a lawn service who knows anyone in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  18.

  ALL THE CARRIES AND PRISCILLAS

  Suddenly, a loud crash jolted them from their tranquil positions. A rocket-propelled grenade had just smashed the window and wall where the male marines were sleeping. Marine Lance Corporals Carrie Blais and Priscilla Kispetik dropped to the floor. “You okay?” they yelled to each other. Before they could grab their flak vests, Kevlars, and rifles, they heard the whistle of another incoming RPG and crash.

  —Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq,

  Stackpole Books, 2007

  Ask any ground commander in Iraq or Afghanistan and they will tell you, even as they remain professionally and publically silent, that our military could not function without its female soldiers and marines and not simply in support roles, but in actual combat. It is a fact that in wars with no front lines and even fewer secure areas, the differences between support and actual com
bat is at best illusionary and at worse uncompromisingly deadly. As a female soldier commented during the run up from Nasiriyah to Baghdad at the very beginning of Desert Storm II, “ A missile doesn’t target a specific gender.”

  Yet somehow as a nation and as individuals we seem not to understand the wars we are fighting and whom we are sending to make the fight. The idea that the Dawn Halfakers, Leigh Ann Hesters, and the Witmer daughters are not the exception but the rule is part of the indifference of a country that is totally separated from those who decided to go to war and those we continue to send in ever-increasing numbers to get blown up on highways and mountain roads, go out nightly on dangerous raids, and daily have to fight their way out of ambushes.

  The Marines have never experienced that confusion. They understand exactly the kind of fight we are in and who is doing the fighting and in their usual realistic uncompromising view of the world and of war understand what has to be done and more importantly how to do it. Of all the services, Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, the Marines alone have refused to bend to feminist anger and, ignoring the accusations of political incorrectness, have done what they have always done and separated the sexes during basic training. A crusty old drill instructor gave the reason almost offhandedly in a conversation about women in the Marines. “The sexes differ in the need for their own types of endurance training as well as muscle building. The one-sizefits-all during basic training doesn’t work any more. Hell, the V.C. and North Vietnamese troops probably weighed the same as our women do now and they beat us. It ain’t the size that matters, it’s the training. Besides, we know that sexual harassment is a problem and that there are long hours out on deployments in war zones or at permanent duty stations around the world right after basic. What we want is for one of our female marines to be able to say ‘stop it or I’ll kill you’ and to have whoever is harassing her realize not only that she means it but that she can do it.”