IA

None of the military folks I know are happy.  

Normally, these are people who greet life with ebullience neatly camouflaged behind a façade of darkly twisted humor.  

I’ll give you an example.  One morning at sea some years ago, I stood with two of my shipmates on the fo’c’sle (all the way up on the bow) of our ship, USS COWPENS (CG 63), as one of them prepared to lob two concussion grenades over the side as sound effects for our battle-readiness training.  I had another role to fulfill that morning, but wouldn’t be needed until later, so I hoped to have an opportunity to toss one of the grenades.  No particular reason, I just wanted to be able to say I’d once thrown a grenade.  As leading chief of the division we three were in, I could occasionally do things like that.

Our conversation may have been jovial, but none of us was anything less than serious about the task at hand.  A single mistake could kill all three of us.  Basically, it was a regular day in the U.S. Navy.

The sound of a rapidly clanging bell cut our conversation short, followed by an announcement on the 1MC*: Fire, fire, fire!  Class Charlie fire in After Steering.  Away the Flying Squad, Away!

We exchanged glances.

There was a moment of reflective silence, as we all shifted a little nervously from foot to foot.  A fire aboard ship can always lead to a long dip in the Deep Blue.

“Well,” I said, “if there’s got to be a fire in After Steering, I can’t think of any place I’d rather be than up here on the fo’c’sle.”

“You’re glad to be here!” said my buddy Matt.  He pointed a thumb at Dan, and chuckled, “He’s the one holding the grenades!”

In short, sailors are fun-loving and fatalistic about the dangers they’ve chosen to face.

There’s a key word in that last sentence: chosen.

Two weeks ago, our command got a message announcing its obligation to support a program called “Individual Augmentation”, which is an attempt to help the Army and Marine Corps meet their personnel rotation requirements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Horn of Africa, and Guantanimo Bay by sending sailors to work in supporting roles such as communications specialists and prison guards.  Each “Individual Augmentee” serves in his or her role for a minimum of one year.

There was a list of names accompanying the message.  One of my office mates has been slated to go, and as of this morning, the rest have been put on notice that they, too, may be expected to go at any time.  At the school next door, seven people are going.

Before they are assigned to a new and exciting location, they’ll undergo three days of medical screening and be offered time to take care of any legal matters (such as the writing of a will), followed by seven days of physical fitness, weapons, and tactics training.  They’ll spend an hour or two learning about “Improvised Explosive Devices” (IEDs…booby traps), another hour or two on land navigation, a couple hours on convoy operations, and a couple on urban combat operations.  The last of the seven days will be a practical exercise offering them an opportunity to put the things they’ve learned in the classroom to good use.

This is a Bad Idea.  

First, these are people who bring a skill set that is entirely alien to the ground-pounder’s battlefield, and virtually none of what they know now will stand them in good stead when they climb aboard that first convoy.  

Second, this lack of knowledge will make them a danger to themselves and to the units they are sent to augment.

Third, the danger that these individual augmentees bring with them will undermine the esprit de corps that is essential for a unit’s ability to perform its combat function.

Finally, no one volunteered for this shit.

In the short term, more American military members will die, and the war will last longer.  In the longer term, our all-volunteer military will collapse from the inevitable wholesale departure of smart, well-trained professionals who won’t put up with such an egregious misapplication of their talents.

By now, you may be questioning the intelligence and sanity of our current leadership.  Even if you hadn’t been already.

Actually, gentle reader, this is the cost of, “Oppose the war, support the troops.”

I turned it around on you, didn’t I?  

The simple truth is that those who did choose to serve in the military are now being asked to accept the unthinkable because the average citizen couldn’t be bothered to pitch in.  If you look back at past generations…your parents and grandparents…you’ll see that they rallied to their cause in ways our generation has dismissed as quaint, ignorant, and misguided.  The members of Easy Company, 506th Battalion, 101st Airborne Division didn’t start asking about going home until the Germans capitulated.  The men who commissioned the first USS COWPENS (CVL 25) deployed to the Pacific Theater in 1943 and didn’t come home for twenty-three months.  No one told them they’d be able to go home in six months, or eight, or ten, or a year; they were shown a job, and they simply did it the best they could until they led the procession of American warships into Tokyo Bay in August 1945.  They were prepared to go longer, if necessary, and nothing short of Unconditional Surrender could have convinced them that their task was done.

For the average citizen in this country today, guts are quaint and tenacity is misguided.  Relationships are not the only things we can’t commit to.

There is a principle of strategy that was taught by the great samurai Miyamoto Musashi that went like this: Do not commit to combat until it is certain that you must.  When you do, turn neither to the left nor to the right; drive directly toward the center of your enemy, and do not stop until one of you is defeated.

Perhaps it was never truly certain that we should commit to war in Iraq.  But once committed, we should…as a nation of citizens…have pressed forward until we achieved unconditional surrender, instead of settling for what we have -- the hellishly slow descent through stalemate into self-induced defeat.  Anyone who thinks we’d simply have installed a puppet government and left it to its own efforts to rebuild needs to visit Japan or Germany…both of which are leaders on the world stage, and neither feels any particular obligation to support the US at the expense of its own interests.

Opposed to the war?  Fine.  Noted.  Like it nor not, we are there now, and if we were to leave now, we’d cause more harm than if we stayed to get the job done.  So we might as well roll up our sleeves and get it done.

Support the troops?  I have a suggestion for you, then: Become one.



* PA system aboard ship