Sermon: The High Price of our Soldiers

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The High Price of our Soldiers

By Charles Rush

May 28, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 3Mb) ]

young boy asked the Minister of his church what Memorial Day was all about, so the Minister took him to the back of the church and showed him a plaque just like the one we have at the back of our sanctuary with a list of Veterans from World War 2. The Minister said, "you see this list. All of these men died in the service." With that the little boy grew wide-eyed and asked "Was it the 9:30 or the 11:15?"

This weekend, our country stops for a moment to remember our soldiers and the enormous sacrifice that they make on our behalf.[i] Since I've had my son in the Army, this national exercise has had more existential import. This year my son found out that he was going to be drafted by the Army for a 5th year. At the present time, you enlist for a 4 year term and agree to join the Army reserves for two more years. Since our forces are overstretched in Iraq and the military is having a difficult time recruiting people that want to serve in what has become a quagmire, they are exercising their option of drafting the Army reservists to serve.

My Son recently found out that he will not be deployed to Iraq which was cause for great relief by his wife, who is about to give birth to their first child, and to his mother who worries all the time when he is in active combat.

It is a great relief but not unequivocally so because I know that someone else's son will now have to deploy and go through that year of anxious concern.

It is not a morbid thing, but you when you have a child in active deployment, you find yourself beginning each day, turning in the paper to read such as you can about the latest bombings and counter-insurgency attacks. You find yourself reading about the young men and women that have been killed or injured that week, following up looking at Web sites that give some more information about their lives. As is so often the case, these young men and women are so enormously talented and full of promise.

Like Captain Ian Weikel, who was killed by a road side bomb on April 18th of this year. Ian grew up in Colorado Springs on Fort Carson where his father was stationed. He was an honor roll student, made straight A's in high school. He was a leader in his church youth group. He was the president of his Senior Class in High School and the quarterback on the football team. He went to West Point.

At his funeral, his little brother told a story about Ian in High School. During a football game, the other team broke loose on a running play and were about to score. Ian threw himself in front of the runner, knocked him down, saved the game, and suffered a concussion as a result. The local paper covering the game, wrote it up the next day and the two brothers were reading it together. Ian blew up with anger when he read that the reporter attributed the tackle to his little brother instead of himself. The two of them had a little laughter and wrestling about it.

His little brother said, 'I'll always remember Ian throwing his body in front of that guy to save the game, because I'll never forget that he laid down his life for my family and all of us that we might be here today in freedom.' Ian left behind a wife and an 18 month old child. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery.[ii]

I think about his wife, his family. Such talent, leadership…

There is something pernicious and cowardly about terrorism, made clearest when it cuts down the brightest and the best. I remember reading a eulogy written about one of the world's best Rugby players ever, a guy from Zimbabwe that was killed by a cheap, stupidly made road side bomb. His friend talked about how tough he was and courageous too. On his farm one evening, he was attacked by a full grown lion at very close range. He had the presence of mind to do the one thing that might work and he plunged his arm down the Lion's throat and while the Lion was trying to bite his arm off, he gauged the Lion's throat so that it choked on it's blood and died. What Lion's could not bring down bare handed, terrorists could kill by their cowardice.

Admiral Crowe, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked at Rutgers University last month that ironically we our very success has created this new pernicious terrorist tactic. After these last two military campaigns, the one thing that is clear is that there is not another army in the world that could even begin to fight ours, that in point of fact, we could probably defeat all other armies combined at this point. As a result, our enemies have wisely chosen to fight the only way that they can, through terror. That is the only way they can actually get at us.

At the moment, Admiral Crowe and a number of other Senior Military leaders are beginning to do a "Postmortem" on our invasion of Iraq, an important and timely discussion to be had, precisely because the human cost of Military service is so high.

I was a little surprised to see the public and the media reaction to the public criticisms that were made by some Senior Generals in the Pentagon. They seemed to think that somehow military leaders move in lock step and that they are deferential to the wishes of the Commander in Chief. Sometimes they seemed to suggest that perhaps Senior Generals were all Republicans to begin with. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In point of fact, our top leadership in the Military fosters a culture of wide ranging discussion and the broadest spectrum of opinion. In execution of existing plans, there is a tight chain of command, but at the point of policy making and strategy planning, it functions more like a collegial seminar. These leaders are not the least bit afraid of expressing an informed opinion, especially not a dissenting one.

They think through the broadest range of solutions to a problem: social, economic, political, and religious short of the use of force. And they think through every conceivable implication of the use of force. They can be counted on to cogently argue for the limitation of the use of the military because, more than anyone else, they know how expensive it is.

We have ample evidence of the toll that it takes on families. At the moment, the divorce rate among our officer corps on active deployment is unacceptably high. These are people that have make fidelity a much more substantive value than the rest of our society. The fact that the divorce rate is as high as it is suggests that undue and unrealistic pressures are being put on our military families that have to be reviewed.

We now have a richer understanding of the indirect, but profound impact that warfare has on the souls of our soldiers. We have observed for years, anecdotally, that a high percentage of the permanently homeless men that we serve in our Bridges outreach program on the streets of New York are veterans of Viet Nam. The trauma of war fare etches our soldier psyches in ways that they are not even entirely aware of and the impact of that trauma is sometimes not manifest in a materially measurable way for many years. But it is there and it is very real.

You are probably aware that upwards of 50% of the soldiers that have been deployed in Iraq over the past three years have not been regular Army but were National Guard and Army reservists. These are people with families, with jobs, with mortgages to pay. They are more than willing to serve their country in a national emergency but friends, this is not a national emergency. We are having trouble getting people to go to Iraq because the mission that we are asking them to undertake is problematic. Ordinary soldiers are voting with their feet. And to solve that weak recruitment, we are drafting Mom's and Dad's for an extra year or two. Now these soldiers are not going to complain in public. But what we are doing is not just and it is not moral. And we have to put an end to it. Our military families deserve more respect and more support than we are giving them right now.

Scott Anderson's article in the New York Times magazine covers just a couple of guys from the Alpha company of the 112th iinfantry Regiment of the Pennsylvania National guard in Butler county. Chuck Norris, aged 37, father of teenagers was one of them. Alpha company was called up and stationed in, of all places, Tikrit, one of the densest areas of former Baath party members in Iraq, full of active violence.

Alpha company's first day there featured film clips of I.E.D. devices wounding and killing people. One of them said, "The way tis war is, everyone is free game and there's no back-base…You have to be very aggressive, very vigilance, and you have to live that way day in and day out for a year, and when you come back here you can't just turn that off. On top of that, the National Guard guys never really signed up for this. They'll all tell you they were proud to serve, that it was their duty, but the fact is, when they joined up, they thought they'd be dealing with floods and local disasters. They never thought they'd be part of the regular Army and put in the middle of a war zone."[iii]

The National Guard faces a double difficulty in that they have to return to civilian life right away. Regular Army return to base, to the support of their comrades, all of whom have been through the trauma and violence of the war zone and can understand what each other are talking about. Chuck Norris reported that one of the hardest things about returning instantly to small town Pennsylavannia was his "inability to describe Iraq" or "its effect on him to anyone who hadn't been there."[iv] Said he, "Sure you can tell them stories or whatever, but inless they were there, they're not really going to get it."

Chuck Norris, who was a Humvee driver in the Sunni Triangle came home and "had a reluctance to be in crowded places, a heightened startle reflex, a tendency to watch the side o the road for anything unusual, as if even in rural Pennsylvania a roadside bomb were still a possibility."[v]

Eventually, he became depressed, more or less stopped working, found he couldn't leave the house, then just started sleeping on the couch to the point that his father came over to get up for a walk every day. He not only had images and tape that he found difficult to live with, to make sense of, he had also lost a very good friend and neighbor, and was simply having a hard time coming to grips with it.

These guys wanted to serve their country. They won't complain about what they went through. But they did not sign up to kill people and we made them do it. It is not right.

I was interested to read Maureen Dowd's article in the Saturday paper raising a similar question about the recent incident in Hadith, in which some of our soldiers, apparently had a break down of discipline and began shooting wildly in Hadith, killing innocent people. Without condoning the tragedy of the incident, she pointed out the enormous strain that we place on our soldiers that we ask to engage in this work as a matter of routine.[vi] Implicitly, she was asking us to consider the complexity of the way that we have created the conditions for these tragedies to happen. It is a form of reflection that is getting wider vetting at the moment with good reason.

I was very interested to hear Admiral Crowe analysis of lessons learned from everything that has gone wrong in Iraq. What is not wrong, in his estimation, are our soldiers. They are simply outstanding leaders on every front. If you read any of the articles that Robert Kaplan has written as an embedded reporter with the Marines in Falujah, you know what I'm talking about.[vii] They not only invented a whole new chapter in urban military warfare and have succeeded on every challenge given to them, it is simply impressive to listen to the way that they are making the local political process work, and most of these leaders are in their twenties, effectively managing towns of tens of thousands of people, very well, never reported by the media.

But Admiral Crowe, whose tenure spanned well into the Cold War, said that the most important lesson for us comes on the political level. I'm interested in what he has to say on matters like these because while he was an officer, he went back to school and got his Ph.d. in history at Princeton- in just 3 years I might add. The rest of us take about twice that long. He said that the biggest change in the world revolves around the fact that we are now the undisputed, unequivocal sole super power in the world. And that with that comes more responsibilities than we have ever had. And that chief among them has got to become the virtue of patience.

Without reviewing the particularities of our critical intelligence assessment in detail, the Admiral simply noted that by any sober estimate Iraq was never a threat to our national security. Even if they had 'Weapons of Mass Destruction', they were not a threat to our national security. They just didn't have a credible way of following through on their threats.

To be fair, all of us gathered in this room remember vividly that there was a quiet consensus following the strikes on our homeland to do something, to assert ourselves internationally. But it is also true that one of the consequences of being a sole superpower is living with the fact that there will always be little rogue nations, small tyrants that try to nip at your heels like those obnoxious little dogs that walk through Central Park. It is very tempting to just drop kick them into the pond. But prudence will help us to see the value in the very selective and infrequent use of direct force.

The Admiral's second point was that our military is trained to do military missions. They are not trained for peace-keeping. They are not trained for nation-building. They are not trained to rebuild infrastructure. They are not trained in foreign diplomacy. What are asking them to do at the moment, with 80% of their time and mission are things that they are not trained to do. Can they learn to do them? Yes, because these young women and men are adaptable and remarkable leaders. But at the moment, their primary mission is over, we need to begin bringing them home.

Someone asked the Admiral the question about whether if we bring our troops home now, chaos will descend on Iraq, and all our hard fought gains will be lost. He had two notes of realism about that question. On the one hand, insurgencies of the nature that we are witnessing in Iraq cannot be quelled, which is to say that the day we leave Iraq, whether that is next year or ten years from now, we are likely to see a bomb go off. On the other hand, the presumption that the sky will fall without our presence, just like the prediction that the sky would fall in South Viet Nam without our presence, is just not true. The Iraqi people will find a way to carry on and we do have the military ability to prevent an outright Civil War from taking place. As we read in the NYT this week, these forces that are fighting against each other in Iraq right now are sufficiently rooted in the society itself, that some of them are led by Government Ministers. It is going to be ambiguous and conflictual for the rest of this generation, which is what dysfunctional societies look like after 2 generations of tyrannical state terror. They don't just suddenly emerge into tolerant, debate driven democracies.

We owe it to our soldiers and their families to provide for them a clear military mission. Absent that, we are obliged to bring them home in a reasonable manner so that such force could be quickly deployed again should serious Civil War begin to break out. Representative Bertha of Pennsylvania has been most articulate in making this precise case.

A few years ago, I was at a Memorial Day service and a World War 2 Veteran came up to me after the service. He shook my hand, pulled me up, looked me deep in the eyes and said, "I want to thank your Son for"… and his voice started to crack with emotion. At this point, he very deliberately finished his sentence slowly …"for everything that he is doing on our behalf." I wasn't quite sure what to make of the encounter, so I tried to be gracious and exit.

6 months go by and I run into him at a holiday party event. I kind of wave. He comes over to me again, grabs my hand, looks me dead in the eye, and says "I want to thank your Son"… his eyes are starting to well up. But this time, I realized the obvious. That every time he started to say this, he was getting a visual. Those images of war fare that can not be repressed or erased, were flashing before his mind subliminally. He was seeing friends and comrades.

It has happened probably three four times since. But now I am honored by him that with me, he is willing to be genuine. And his pain, after all these years, is a reminder to me of just how much we ask these people to do so that we don't have to do it.

I think it is appropriate that one day a year, we stop and remember that before God, before our other nations, we have a lot to account for. Amen.

[i] Christopher Hitchens noted in Saturday's lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal (May 26, 2006), p. A6, the little village of Lower Slaughter in the Cottswald's in England possess the distinction of being the only village in all of England that does not possess a memorial to World War I which so widely shattered faith in civilization. The root of our tribute to the day as we know it was remembering the irony and tragedy of the 'War to end all Wars'.

[ii] To hear the story, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5396945

[iii] See Scott Anderson "When You Can't Quite Find Your Way Home" New York Times Magazine (May 28, 2006) p. 42.

[iv] Ibid. p. 43.

[v] Ibid. p. 42

[vi] see the Op-Ed page, far right column for Saturday, May 26, 2006.

[vii] Atlantic Monthly; April 2006, The Coming Normalcy?; Volume 297, No. 4; 72-81 ...