Not always, but sometimes, grunts can live in perfect harmony with war. The command environment, the caliber of soldiers, and the nature of the mission all play a role. Under good leaders, with good comrades, grunts will take extreme risks because they trust one another and their commanders. Along the way, they will also speak their minds with no sense of self-censorship. As the Army saying goes, it’s a good day when grunts complain: it means they care.
In August 2007, at the tail end of back-to-back deployments to Iraq, a bunch of us in the 82nd Airborne Division were in just that frame of mind. It was the height of what came to be known as “the surge” in Iraq, a last-ditch attempt by US military officers to turn the tide of war and make the country into something resembling a functional state. Back in America, the already divisive political discourse was reaching new heights of acrimony. But it mostly focused on the superficial and the banal, with little attention to the realities on the ground that soldiers witnessed and Iraqis lived through. So as enlisted airborne infantrymen, we deemed it only appropriate to offer our assessment of the ongoing conflict to the august pages of the New York Times. After all, who had a better sense of how the war was really going in the streets of Iraq?
Paratroopers say, only partly in jest, that nicotine, caffeine, and unmitigated rage add up to a pretty effective formula. It was this formula, plus irreverent confidence, that motivated us to take aim at the commentariat and the pundits at home. We were not thinking in grand terms, nor were we driven by specific political predilections. But we were dead serious about highlighting some of the gritty realities soldiers face when fighting other people’s wars.
Our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, we wrote, but it also robbed them of their self-respect. The best way to regain that dignity would be for them to call us what we were—an army of occupation—and force our withdrawal. Until then, the best approach required increasingly letting them take center stage, assisting them from the margins while allowing them to resolve their differences as they saw fit. Ultimately, winning had to be their business.
The sentiment we expressed was by no means original, and eventually in the war against ISIS, something similar would be formalized into a strategy: “By, With, and Through.” The notion of letting Iraqis take center stage in their own country seems self-evident in retrospect. Retrospect, though, always confers a false sense of clarity. Events leading up to our decision to share our irreverent confidence with the New York Times were a bit more complicated.
WHEN I WATCHED the Twin Towers come down on 9/11, I was a father, a husband, a bank employee, a graduate student in international affairs, and a permanent resident of the United States in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen. Like most Americans, I obsessively followed America’s entry into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of all the details of the time, what I remember most is how the more I watched and read about the wars, the more I worked myself into a soul-crushing depression. When I joined the Army, I met many others who shared that experience.
There are moments in life when the smart thing to do and the right thing to do don’t necessarily align. By 2004, that defined my dilemma. The country was politically polarized, the wars were going badly, but none of that mattered to me. What mattered was my overwhelming conviction that if I did not do my small part in this broader fight, I would regret it for the rest of my days. Yet what if going to war cost me my life, leaving my daughter to grow up fatherless and my wife a single mother? There was no good answer.
There was, however, an imperative, felt by so many other Americans as well. Irrespective of their sentiments toward the wars, they were saying: here I am, send me. Why? Because they thought it was their duty as citizens. And so it was with me. On October 14, 2004, I became a naturalized US citizen. On October 15, I went to the Army recruiter’s office and asked to enlist in the airborne infantry. I requested assignment to the 82nd Airborne Division, known by the nickname All American.
The Army has a way of bringing people together from all over America and giving them a home. The Army gave me a home too.
The 82nd Airborne lived up to its nickname. There were people of many different races, ethnicities, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds—as well as, most surprising to me, immigrants from many different countries. The institution and its leaders created an environment where soldiers single-mindedly focused on the mission regardless of their differences, yet without compromising their individuality. Only two things mattered: whether you could perform and whether you gave your all. If you could and did, you were in. If you could not or did not, you were worthless, and there were plenty of superiors at hand to point it out.
Some of my experiences in training were memorable because they exceeded my expectations, and some were memorable for their endearing absurdities. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, most of us were housed in dilapidated barracks built in the sixties, with ceilings falling apart and condemned rooms infested with mold. It was obvious, as our senior NCOs often pointed out, that the armed forces had been an afterthought in the minds of policymakers in the previous decade. And to say the IT system was antiquated would be an understatement. We joked that this was by design: no enemy can hack a system that does not work. Everyone turned their complaints into humor and had an attitude of “figure shit out and make it happen.”
On the first day, another new guy and I walked into the dilapidated barracks bathroom. (At the time the unit was all male.) A senior noncommissioned officer with multiple combat deployments was sitting in a doorless stall with his pants around his ankles. One hand held a magazine on firearms, the other a spit-bottle for his mouthful of chewing tobacco. He casually looked up, spat into his spitter, and introduced himself as one of the NCOs who would be training the new guys to get them up to speed. “Let me pinch this turd off and link up with you boys in five mikes,” he said. We had arrived.
An atmosphere of immediacy animated our unit. A sense of intensity and purpose made for a relentlessly unforgiving setting. We would deploy soon, and we had to be ready. The only way to be ready was to train. Train the way we fight and fight the way we train: that was the mantra.
All the senior NCOs and even most of the buck sergeants had combat experience, while most of the young officers and all the enlisted privates and specialists—the majority of the unit—had none. A long series of intensive training cycles and multiple organizational reforms eventually whittled our unit down to half its original size. This was by design. When our turn to deploy came, we were fewer in number, but we were ready.
When we arrived in Iraq, our job was to kill or capture high-value individuals. We had volunteered to be in the fight, had trained to kick down doors, and now were finally getting the opportunity to do the job. It was a dream come true. This was what we had signed up for.
Dreams in war have their costs. Our unit would go on to receive the Presidential Unit Citation, awarded for extraordinary heroism in action against an armed enemy. Along the way, we incurred a 21 percent casualty rate. That was considered high for this war—though as we kept reminding ourselves, it paled in comparison with earlier wars, where many dared far more and fared far worse. This kept us inspired. And while continuous combat was wearing us down, it was also making us better at our job. Experience sharpens intuition and increases one’s confidence in making decisions of consequence.
Some members of the unit, after completing a six-month deployment, went home for less than two weeks and immediately returned as some of the first boots on the ground for the surge. By August 2007, some of us were approaching fourteen months of nearly uninterrupted combat. We had spent more time with one another in those months than with anyone else, and the shared experiences of combat create bonds that last a lifetime. We unequivocally trusted our leaders and one another.
SOLDIERS AND OFFICERS read, some more than others, and our unit was no different. We read about our trade, about tactics, and about politics at home. As the war polarized discussion back in America, we increasingly saw politicians and pundits trying to appropriate what was happening in Iraq in behalf of their own agendas. Iraq per se was irrelevant; how Iraq would affect domestic politics was all that mattered.
We took all this in with humor. In Iraq, we had become familiar with numerous insurgent groups, and many of these had what was referred to as a “spiritual leader,” usually a high-ranking cleric. An Iraqi friend of ours explained the underlying dynamics. He saw these spiritual leaders as the worst of the bunch—peddlers of self-serving delusions in the guise of faith who gave real clerics a bad name. Fascinated by power, these leaders could never actually wield it directly. Instead, they used their spiritual authority to influence the action by leveraging their followers. And the best part of being a spiritual leader was that one was never held accountable for the consequences of one’s thoughts and words. Ah, we thought: We know how this goes. We have the same thing in America, where commentators, columnists, and public intellectuals play out a profane version of spiritual leadership for their devoted following.
Soon, soldiers in my unit started speaking of the most prominent American public intellectuals and TV commentators as mirror images of Iraqi spiritual leaders. The TVs in our recreation tent were tuned to the Armed Forces Network, and the news broadcasts were mostly Fox News. But some genius or jokester at the network had decided to supplement these with the ribald commentary of Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. The parodies, we thought, captured the reality of our experience much more accurately than the straight news programs.
Many of us felt that the extreme hubris of American politicians and the commentariat was responsible for the mess in Iraq. Our military leaders in Iraq were fighting tooth and nail to craft a winning strategy to salvage what was turning out to be an ignominious military and political failure. We found it enraging that the same folks who had breathlessly cheered the nation into war were now imparting half-baked wisdom from their safe confines about what our military leaders were getting wrong. The tragedy is that when American opinion makers mislead the public and misinform them about the realities of warfighting, it has a direct impact on how the war is waged. That’s because the legitimacy of our combat power ultimately comes from the people in whose name we fight. As soldiers of an all-volunteer force in a democracy, we know our personal predilections regarding the mission we’ve been asked to execute are irrelevant. As long as it is legal and ethical, we’ve always believed that it is our duty to carry it out.
What was really going on in Iraq, meanwhile, had little to do with American military superiority. Our combat primacy was never in doubt. But we doubted the willingness of people back home to commit to what the realities on the ground required: the widespread use of lethal force. And we also recognized the struggles of our Iraqi counterparts. This was not because of any personal failings: committed Iraqi soldiers were as good as any of us. But they could not be the best versions of themselves, because the institutional structure was not there. The contrast in this respect between us and them was striking and disheartening. As American soldiers, we were kept immune from the political vicissitudes of the wider American society. Iraqi soldiers, on the other hand, had to worry about their ethnic, linguistic, sectarian, and political affiliations, because the Iraqi military was also a contested political space. That meant they always had to watch their backs, they could barely trust their comrades, and they could not trust their leaders.
American counterinsurgency strategy had two facets. One was the feel-good approach of winning hearts and minds. The other involved killing off the most extreme and getting the fence-sitters to choose: as we used to say, violence has a way of working on the heart by way of the mind. In this way, relying on our combat primacy, we had managed to create a tapestry of control in Iraq. But that tapestry held together only because myriad Iraqi groups recognized that we had a preponderance of resources and power. We may have set the stage, but the decisions of those Iraqi groups mattered as much as our own efforts. And what would come in our absence?
So at the tactical level—our particular interest, politics be damned—enabling our Iraqi colleagues to do their jobs meant that they had to take ownership of the war. They needed to claim a larger share of the killing, even if the outcome was going to be bloodier. Bloodier not because they sought gratuitous violence but because the Iraqi military hardly had the capacity to apply violence with a sense of surgical precision. They would have to overcome their shortcomings with a preponderance of indiscriminate violence. Though unpleasant, if applied with clear strategic goals in mind, it is a military tactic that goes a long way toward generating desired outcomes.
SOLDIERS IN WAR take their jobs seriously but rarely themselves. Maybe not taking themselves seriously is necessary for taking the job seriously. And it was no different with us. Between missions one day, we were once again kicking around those ideas about counterinsurgency tactics while making fun of the misguided pronouncements of some prominent American “spiritual leaders.” Perhaps, we thought, “the troops” that the politicians and spiritual leaders kept reverently referring to should actually have a say, if only for a moment. “You knuckleheads should write something up,” an NCO in the unit suggested. Sure, we said. We’ll do it in the New York Times.
It was a joke, but also not. We knew Americans were not getting the straight scoop about why the Iraq War hadn’t turned out as planned, and we wanted to provide a glimpse of the little corner of the war that we had become intimately familiar with. Now suddenly there was a dare and a wager. At stake were sublime libations—for soldiers are resourceful, and we knew where to find the right stuff. Nightcaps at dawn it was. Game on.
Irreverent as we were, we were responsible soldiers committed to the mission, and loyal to our leaders and the Army. We knew that we were operating around the limits of our freedom of expression, because when we’d raised that right hand, we chose to forgo some of our individual rights. We also knew that as enlisted soldiers and NCOs, we had a bit more maneuvering space in our ability to express ourselves than commissioned officers did.
That brought us to another dilemma. Should we ask our commissioned officers for permission? If we did, that would put them in a difficult position—and us, too, for if our leaders said no, we wouldn’t disobey them. On the other hand, not telling them would inevitably put them in the hot seat when the piece came out. We decided to go with the latter alternative and just hope that the hot seat wouldn’t be too hot. When all was said and done, the officers could comfort themselves by calling us the knuckleheads that we were.
And so it was that the New York Times wound up running “The War as We Saw It,” coauthored by half a dozen NCOs from the 82nd Airborne and me. “We are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day,” we wrote. “The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere.… A vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.”
Part of the problem, we explained, lay in the bewildering tangle of the groups involved in the fighting: Sunni extremists, Shiite militiamen, al-Qaeda terrorists, armed tribes, unaffiliated criminals. The situation was made even more complex by the questionable loyalties of the Iraqi police and the Iraqi Army, which had been trained and armed at American expense. Even if their battalion commanders were well-meaning, they had little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men loyal only to their militias.
After an armor-piercing explosive was detonated between two Iraqi-controlled checkpoints, for example, killing one American soldier and critically wounding two others, local Iraqis readily told us that that Iraqi police and Army officers had escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. But these civilians couldn’t alert us beforehand: the Iraqi Army, the police, or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families. And such incidents were virtually routine. Our enemies were determined; our allies, questionable at best.
Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation was also unhelpful. Political reconciliation couldn’t happen at our command. It would occur only on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield became congruent with that in the political sphere. There were no magnanimous solutions that would please every party. There would be winners and losers, and our only choice was to decide which side to take. Trying to please every party in the conflict, as we were doing, would only ensure hatred from all involved in the long run.
Meanwhile, we noted, “the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably.” There were two million Iraqis in refugee camps in neighboring countries and almost two million more internally displaced, while cities lacked regular electricity, phone service, and sanitation. As for security, the fact that American observers could now safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns was not the relevant measure. What the locals saw was a lawless environment where men with guns ruled the streets and simply engaging in the banalities of life was a death-defying act. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis was when and how they were likely to be killed, handing out care packages didn’t do much good. It all added up to a situation where the best thing for American forces to do was to pull back to the margins and develop a nuanced strategy to assist Iraqis so they would take ownership of the fight. We simply pointed out “the war as we saw it,” so that others could think of the broader implications.
NOT BY COINCIDENCE, our essay appeared just as our commanding general was attending highly publicized hearings on Capitol Hill. Having published the piece and won the in-house wager, we deliberately chose not to follow how it was received at home, though, for entertainment value, some of our colleagues would bring up from time to time bits of the more egregious commentary we provoked. Nor did we engage in any follow-up discussions on the topic. We had said all there was to say. Now it was back to continuing the mission.
Given the loud political cacophony at home, it was inevitable that the officers in our unit would have to address the piece. When one of them received complaints from prominent folks back in America about his soldiers talking to the press, his response to them was: “What appears to be the problem? I see no problem.”
As for our senior commanding officers, when questioned about our essay, they first mentioned that almost all their staff agreed with our depiction of the multifaceted challenges on the ground. They commended us on work nicely done. Then they told us: “Given the adversaries we are facing, outfighting them means outthinking them. You are fighting soldiers but also thinking soldiers. Keep fighting, keep thinking, and as for writing, that is a right that we fight to keep. Keep writing!”
It is perhaps no accident that our senior officers were the only ones to see what we wrote through an objective lens. They were dealing with the same realities we were and, like us, could see the issues close up. Therefore, they saw our essay for what it was and knew us to be committed soldiers. For our part, we had always trusted our leaders, but this experience distinctly deepened our loyalty to the Army as a whole. While various spiritual leaders back at home were ranting their heads off, our leaders could be magnanimous and give us top cover, precisely because the institution allowed for it. In this case, the smart thing to do and the right thing to do went together. One could not say the same of many other institutions.
That was our experience with military dissent. The time, the place, the nature of the unit, and the leadership all play a role in how such events transpire. Perhaps we were naïve, but in truth we never really expected to get in trouble for our piece. We did expect at least someone in the military hierarchy to lose their wits over it, which would give us fodder for more humor. But that barely happened, we suspect because more astute heads prevailed.
At the end of the day, we had the confidence to do what we did because we trusted our colleagues and hoped that our leaders would cut us some slack even though we’d put them on a hot seat. Our leaders did not disappoint. They proved to take the job seriously but not themselves.
In no time we forgot our moment of passing notoriety, for we still had to continue our mission. In the end, of the seven of us that penned the piece, one passed away in an accident, one was severely wounded but lived, and two were killed in action. One of those two was a permanent resident in the process of becoming a US citizen. From a legal standpoint, a petition to become a citizen usually dies with the person. But during times of war, the military is allowed an exception. And just as our colleague lived up to his enlistment oath by making the ultimate sacrifice, the institution lived up to its own promise. The Army flew in some of his immediate family from his country of origin to attend the funeral. And a federal clerk showed up to the ceremony to make him an American citizen before the burial.
THE ARMY PROVIDED me with a home, a purpose, and a tribe. Whether armies and wars bring out the best or worst in people will forever be debated. But what I do know from my experience is that the armed forces attract a self-selected group with some consistent characteristics. It seems that for those of us who join, something distinctive resonates in the deep recesses of our hearts. For the call to service is ultimately an affair of the heart.
Most of those who volunteer find a sense of meaning and purpose in life by belonging to something larger than themselves. And from day one of training, it seems everything is designed to inculcate a sense of mission and service. As some career NCOs would tell us: “If you are in the Army because you took a wrong turn somewhere—and you are—then it is our job to make sure it was the last wrong turn. We will make sure you end up at the right place. And if you take one more wrong turn, we will skull-drag you down the street out of love.”
Senior officers, with a better vocabulary and better training in the art of eloquence, would say much the same thing in different words. “By raising your right hand, you have proved that you are committed. Now we will make sure you turn into the leaders that your soldiers deserve. And along the way, we will make great citizens out of you.”
That animating intensity of purpose is what most soldiers miss when they leave the armed forces. And for the enlisted, that void is coupled with the painful realization that the skill set they acquired has little applicability to civilian life, at least if they were at the sharp end of the spear kicking in doors.
So it was for me when I left the Army. I needed to retool and acquire a new skill set. In addition to making good soldiers and great citizens, the military also teaches recruits about themselves. The Army taught me that I am innately goal-oriented, that I need to have clear objectives to live and not self-destruct. Warfighting taught me that I can think critically. And working with my commanders taught me that I can write and that I want to speak my mind. So, armed with multiple recommendation letters written in my behalf by the very officers whom we put on a hot seat, I walked into a fully funded PhD program in political science at a top university.
Academia showed me what true privilege looks like, and how absurd it is when people unaware of their privilege sustain a narrative of victimhood by indulging in a contrived siege mentality. Having been trained in the Army to speak my mind, I also realized that, contrary to all the highbrow claims, not all corners of academia allow a person to do that. In fact, outspokenness could be quite detrimental. I realized that academia would not be my natural home. I completed my PhD, but in my moment of success I once again felt a deep depression.
I had too many choices, and every choice seemed hollow. I had survived the war relatively unscathed, thankful to my colleagues, leaders, and God for saving my dumb ass. I carried in my heart the memories of all my comrades I’d carried to the medevac birds, injured or dead. The best way to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice, I knew, was not to quit when things got tough, to keep going, to try to do better with every step. But what would be the most meaningful way to spend the rest of my life? How could I be of service again?
Once more, my colleagues and some mentors we’d put on a hot seat came through for me. They eloquently pointed out, as only dear friends can, that I am dumb as a box of rocks, that I have a bad attitude, that I run my mouth and I speak my mind. In other words, I am fundamentally unemployable—except in the military! Once again armed with their recommendations, cheerleading, and inspiration, I set out to get a job but ended up finding my calling. Now I teach at the US Air Force Academy, where I get to dissent to my heart’s content while playing my part in improving our armed forces as we prepare for the next fight. And the true privilege is that I also get to play a role in the personal, intellectual, and professional growth of the next generation of our military leaders. Leaders with critical minds; leaders who, when necessary, will speak truth to power by providing constructive criticism while remaining unwaveringly committed to the mission, the armed forces, and the nation.