THE RECKONING
One of the pleasures of writing an oral history is listening to something said better than you could ever have said it, offered by someone who speaks from personal experience. Let me draw together a few of those comments that resonate from war to war, a handing off of the torch, from one generation of soldiers to the next.
From the World War II veterans:
Ever since World War II, they’ve kept some kind of war going, all the time. (Jones)
I believe in my country, they say right or wrong. I believe in my country, right. If it is wrong, I want to make it right! (Cohen)
If everyone has the bomb, good-bye earth. (Kells)
We thought that World War II was going to end all wars and it hasn’t. It seems worse now than World War II. (Kostanski)
From Korea veterans:
Unless it is political, why are we sticking our nose into other people’s business? It’s terrible. (Hart)
From Vietnam veterans:
My conviction is that the reality of war is so obscene, so shockingly terrible, that it’s one of the worst things in the world. (Munroe)
I just had a lot of sadness for the little people who are the ones that suffer most from wars. (Rogers)
There is, in my experience, not clear “good guys” or “bad guys.” (Rankin)
Americans died in the conflict, you cannot let that go. You spill the blood, now you have to atone for it. (Basye)
They’ve been to Iraq, they’ve been to Afghanistan, they’ve had their houses foreclosed on…their businesses are shut down… These guys have had it tougher than I ever did. (Hartman)
More than anything else, I like to think that all the people that were sacrificed there didn’t do nothing out there, because they showed what America is willing to do. (Gregg)
From veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan:
You cannot bring in a Western-style democracy and expect it to work. The proverbial you can’t put a square peg in a round hole. I don’t know if it’s self-delusion or just not caring. (McGurk)
We’ve gotten off track and we need to worry about our country and where it’s going. (Woehlke)
My awards: Combat Action badge, Bronze Star with Valor, Good Conduct medals, graduating top of my class. It makes you want to go back over. But you’ll never heal, you’ll never heal. It pours more cement on an already existing issue that you’d have to chip through eventually. (Kenney)
In World War II there was a clear road to war and the world watched as it got closer and closer. In Europe, the line was drawn at Poland, and the starter went off on September 1, 1939. The road through war was also clear; it ended in the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers to the Allies, first Germany and then Japan. The goalposts were marked and observed. In Korea, the invasion by North Korea on June 25, 1950 marked the beginning, and a final armistice (not yet a peace treaty) was signed on July 27, 1953. Those goalposts, too, were visible to all. When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was being constructed in Washington, DC, however, it led to a debate about what years actually bracketed that war. It was decided to list deaths from 1959 to 1975, although those dates stretch the war before its beginning and after its end.
Even more, the current wars are indistinct in duration, purpose, and outcome. Their costs in financial treasure are stupendous and match any previous war, but the cost in fatalities is far lower than in previous and conventional wars. For on-site destruction they match earlier wars, but it is the nature of combatting nontraditional foes that so distinguishes our current endeavors.
We have heard from 55 veterans of foreign wars fought by the United States in the last 70 years. This collection of their personal stories and views on their own and other wars, and on war itself, ends with this question: Of what value to our country are our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and can we even achieve our aims by war? Vietnam raised similar questions earlier. Many, but not all, of the narrators wonder whether America has entered into too many and too poorly selected (and managed) wars since World War II. They say we should consider, before launching into new engagements, what this country can and cannot do and should and should not do. They also weigh whether we can win a given war, and whether it is a just or necessary war.
As civilians and citizens, we also should address these questions. Does US world leadership with its moral, military, and political force, truly depend on a “win” in either or both Afghanistan and Iraq? If it does, then our leadership is very challenged after a decade of sending troops overseas without winning results. Let us consider those two wars, for the sake of argument, lost. Would US global achievements and its democratic traditions be shaken by a “loss” in those countries? Or could these wars be considered major missteps that we recognized and remedied as best we could?
The fear of tarnishing our national and international reputation is rational, and was a major block to resolving the Vietnam War; it is today a barrier to resolving our current wars. We must not operate out of the fear of losing, because losing an improbable or impossible war for hearts and minds in distant and different lands is more than likely, and should be accepted, now that it has happened. We will survive the debacle of retreat, however staged. The pride in being an American, and in being an American soldier, is durable even when war and its conduct—and sometimes its outcome—is self-defeating.
While we are looking to war as a solution, we too often lose track of its measurable cost. We have spent our, and foreign, treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan: both sides have lost men, women, and children, killed, damaged, and bereft. Both sides have siphoned off money that could have been much better spent. The multifaceted cost of what we have done must be acknowledged. There is the constant leakage of the lives of US soldiers from explosives, firepower, and suicide. There is devastation in the lives of local civilians from suicide bombings and explosions in marketplaces, in the lines of police recruits, and among pilgrims of a different sect. These constitute the true cost to be weighed against any benefit from staying on. The tragedy is not only in the persistent killing, but in the cumulative sense of the uselessness of death without lasting gains.
How do we vindicate this cost of treasure and human life? Our role in holding off the “forces of evil” everywhere is not only a very risky adventure but brings further risks when we fail. When the US looks around for rationales in a foreign conflict (both those inflicted on us, as in 9/11, and those we initiate), we are looking inward, because we conceive of war as a solution to our problems. It is interesting that right after we failed to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq because there were none, we immediately spotted the same threat in Iran, although not for the first time. A WMD threat justifies our operations. We will now shift our sights back to nuclear arms in hostile lands or hands (non-state terrorists) just as surely as we did after World War II when first the USSR and then China “got” the bomb.
We need to look outward to where we are going, investigate, and understand local conditions and constraints before resorting to arms. We conceive a war and then busy ourselves with its planning and conduct, its “surges” and draw-downs, even its nomenclature. Most Americans have not noticed that Secretary of Defense Gates wrote a memo to General Petraeus, dated February 17, 2010, changing the name of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) to Operation New Dawn, to reflect an “evolving relationship with the Government of Iraq.” As of September 1, 2010, the DOD restarted its casualty statistics on deaths and injuries to our troops in Iraq under a new name. And now we worry about the safety of our soldiers as they leave. But the real point is that we conceive wars that we cannot win.
On Afghanistan, ex-Secretary of Defense Gates concluded that, “Far too much has been accomplished, at far too great a cost, to let the momentum slip away just as the enemy is on his back foot.” [June 10, 2011, NATO meeting in Brussels.] While conceding that Afghanistan and Iraq were wars “of choice” just before he retired, Gates has also reversed the concept of removing combat troops first and support and training troops last, as planned in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the still-lasting war, he wanted to leave combat troops for the last, and have them leave facing backwards, having the last shot—or the last say. That’s like maintaining that we didn’t lose the war in Vietnam because we had already pulled out when the North Vietnamese invaded South Vietnam and unified the country under communist control. We can lose a war even when we resolve it by being the first to leave the battlefield.
In his speech to the nation after ordering Osama bin Laden killed, President Obama reiterated the American mantra, speaking of our “commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place… because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” We are still married to the tradition of American exceptionalism and the natural supremacy of American and Western values. This has been translated into the belief that there is a democratic (meaning American) solution to civil war and insurgency elsewhere. The soldiers in this volume do not necessarily think so. This, then, is the current American quagmire, the paradox in which we, a great power, again find ourselves.
The reader might review the entire text of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, proceeding from the first two famous paragraphs to the next and much longer section that excoriates George III as an evil king forcing Americans (this is mainly Thomas Jefferson’s formulation as moderated for overstatement by Benjamin Franklin) to fight for freedom. America has always had an enemy; there has always been a “bad guy.” The period from 1945– 89 of the Cold War was a metaphor for our righteousness. We have always as a nation, espoused the “right,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence: “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES… We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
Such rectitude means that when things go wrong, it has to be someone else’s fault, from the Nazis and the Japs to the “Red Menace,” to Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, and now Ahmadinejad. Or Osama bin Laden, who was (like Hussein) “taken out.” I don’t believe that most Americans want to follow a God-given destiny to always be right (how then can we correct ourselves and live up to our highest expectations?) or always have to be fighting the bad guys. Yes, we will pull back from these fights, reluctantly, but realistically, as we did in Vietnam, knowing that after war we must strive for peace.
As we are now seeing, misconceived war is harder to end than to start. Our next task—because we must take responsibility for our actions and the devastation in Iraq and Afghanistan—should be to pay for humanitarian aid and rebuilding, using international agencies such as the UN’s World Food Program and UNICEF, as well as all available non-government organizations. The challenge is that reconstruction requires peace and security and both are lacking in the wake of our invasions and occupations and local turmoil. We can’t blast away these problems with American dollars, using expatriate contractors who are in it for the money. We should be developing a Marshall Plan, headed by the best of Arab and Muslim leadership in and from that area, that has the finite goal of restoring some services and hope to their people in, say, five years. Something can be accomplished in that time. It occurs to me that some veterans who are understanding and empathetic to people in the countries where they fought, might want to help rebuild those countries, not as soldiers, but as graduates of soldiering.
Many problems were entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan before we came, and we have created further problems by our interventions. Our soldiers have done enough, and should not be the peacemakers, or peacekeepers, even though in both those countries, civilians and in some cases, the government, realistically fear that the departure of US troops will invite chaos. We must stay out of the way as indigenous institutions and methods take over the task of restoring the dignity of the people and authority of domestic leadership. But we cannot let famine, despair, and genocide replace our troops; that would truly be un-American.
So, if US interventions abroad are to be carefully weighed, we should include not only our intentions, but the physical and political impact of our military incursions and the costs to all parties. At the same time, we have many other demands on us as peacemakers, and we need to shift our focus to honest diplomacy across the Middle East, from working with Arab uprisings, the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, and “regime change” in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, and other countries poised to alter the nature of Middle Eastern governance in the 21st century. We must seek a new peace for Israel (as we once did) and a new Palestine. We have a role to play, but we cannot determine the outcome. The Middle Eastern and South Asian countries in turmoil must set their own course and elect governments that are accountable in the wake of dictatorial regimes that siphoned off the energies and hopes of their people.
Meanwhile, I believe we should counter terrorism with local and international police action using smaller targeted military methods, not large-scale warfare. Terrorism will be most definitively defeated domestically, not by foreigners. We need intermediate aims, not general goals like spreading democracy and defeating terrorism, which extend too far into the future to be realistic. We can also anticipate that extremism will at some point burn itself out.
Unfortunately, too often we look first for military solutions. For example, the US Army and US Marine Corps keep updating a guide called Counterinsurgency: Field Manual, by General David H. Petraeus, USA and General James F. Amos, USMC, most recently in December 2006. General Petraeus is known to the public as the author of the surge and the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, and until recently, was the head of military operations in Afghanistan. As a manual for use by the military, it is informative about insurgencies past and present but it does not offer a political rationale for counterinsurgency; in other words, it cannot guide the US government, just its forces. It does not address the question of why the US fights insurgencies around the globe because counterinsurgency—or COIN—is a military method, the “what” and “how,” not the “why.” It is not easily combined with aid or diplomacy, and it is unlikely to succeed in any of its forms, as history has shown.
It is believable that we are fighting because of 9/11, the military-industrial complex, a defense system grown huge, or natural resources like oil. While all these reasons play a large role and certainly make the decision to engage in hostilities more politically palatable, I do not believe they are the historical, or even basic, cause of our current wars. I think that we fight insurgencies, intervene in wars between religious and political groups, social groups at odds, and in tribal wars despite the fact that the US has no natural ally in such internecine conflicts, because of what we think is our exceptional role in the world.
The US history of war and its foundation in our political exceptionalism make us eager to use combat against insurgencies. If no place is too remote, too alien, too intractable for our troops, we can always wage these wars. As global policemen, it is hard to remember that we are only outsiders in these conflicts. Legitimate local governments can be ineffective as well, so we lend a hand. If we fought in Vietnam against communism for ten years to prove that we were willing to do so, should we replicate that determination against insurgencies now? We can defeat and occupy a country, but how do we defeat terrorist tactics? One veteran of World War II said it’s like a war on mosquitos. Another, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, said it’s like the war on drugs, not meant to be won—a process, not a battle.
Well, what’s wrong with trying? Is it not a noble and worthwhile cause that befits our country’s identity? The problems and challenges of current wars, as well as the Vietnam War, have been identified in these pages by veterans who have faith in the US mission. They ask how we can avoid making as many enemies as friends as we seek to impose our vision of freedom on others. They wonder, as our (and their) military fights terrorism abroad, what will happen if we can’t succeed. Do those who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq think we can win? In fact, they ask what is meant by “winning.”
No veteran or civilian has to abandon the belief in the United States as a force for good if they are also willing to accept that our intervention may be fruitless. The current wars fought in the hope of removing a bad regime and installing a democratic government in a foreign country are quite simply beyond our own or any outside country’s capability. A number of veterans have concluded in these pages that we must learn to accept that while some wars vindicate the best of our purposes, some wars will defeat them.
Veterans are among the most patriotic of Americans, yet while wishing otherwise, they do acknowledge that there are wars that American forces cannot win. Even if we do some good, or try, the effort may fail. That is not the end of the world as we know it, nor our country as we know it. There must be other, better, ways than major military action to defeat terrorism. The United States of America can work on that.
POSTSCRIPT
What can the reader do to help veterans? There is much to do, and I hope the reader will find a way in his or her community to make things better for veterans of our foreign wars. Some may also want to support humanitarian efforts in those countries that have been devastated by our wars. I plan to do what was suggested to me by the final narrator, an Iraqi now becoming an American citizen. He asked that I provide support not to those who narrated the stories but to those who have been injured, or the families of those injured and killed. I will happily use any proceeds from this book to do so.