Lifetime deployment limits for soldiers?

By Adam Wojack

We all follow the news of the Army staff sergeant who is accused of murdering 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar province this week and we ask each other, What made him do this and why?

We hear those with access to details state that this soldier acted alone, that he suffered a traumatic brain injury during one of his three previous deployments to Iraq and that he is rumored to have marital problems. We hear he is stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Washington, which we also hear called “the most troubled post in the Army” in major U.S. media.

Wait. Three deployments to Iraq? And now months into a combat tour in Afghanistan?

Soldiers in my unit, preparing for deployment to Afghanistan in the next few months, process this information and cycle through responses one expects from any group of rational people: disbelief and shock at the event, empathy for the victims, and disappointment at the alleged actions of the individual, who wears our uniform.

Then we hear things come out of our mouths that undermine our own understanding of tragedy and that highlight our occupational bias. We express empathy for the alleged shooter and his family. Somebody did a horrible thing, for sure, but our organization deployed this husband and father of two to combat for a fourth time in ten years or less.

Deployments are not just numbers. Army deployments to Iraq lasted no less than 12 months, 15 months during the “surge.” Current tours to Afghanistan were reduced from 12 to 9 months only last year. No other service keeps it warriors on combat duty for so long.

“If he’s on his fourth tour, he’s broke,” one soldier in my office said, shaking his head. Nobody disagreed.

He wasn’t talking about the soldier’s finances. “Broke” in soldier-speak is a mental, physical or emotional limitation. It means the soldier is not standing in formation, or conducting physical training, or deploying with the larger group who are, for lack of a better term, “fully mission capable.”

This is not a better term because it is supposed to apply to the maintenance status of machinery and equipment, not people. To be “fully mission capable” is to be in good working order: a weapon that properly fires, a vehicle with all of its working parts or a radio that transmits and receives. We use technical manuals with long checklists to determine whether or not a given piece of equipment is ready for use or is in need of repair – or in other words, “broke.”

These same manuals also tell us how often or when a piece of equipment must be refurbished or completely replaced. This is called the “life cycle” of the equipment and puts a limitation on how long the item can be effectively used.

We use different checklists to determine whether or not a given soldier is capable of doing his job, and in the same way, these are comprehensive and useful. They include checks of medical and dental readiness, mental health, individual and unit training, and family care planning. The Army invests great amounts of energy into preparing soldiers and their families for combat and long separations. It is admirable. It is hard to imagine another organization doing more, or trying to do more, for its people.

Even so, a soldier who is “broke” in unseen ways can still meet criteria for combat duty and deploy with the others. This is not a knock on mental health screening practices. They may be as good as they need to be.

What is unseen by these checklists is the mental or emotional state that any smart individual can hide if he so chooses.

But why would somebody hide this?

We all have our answers: Because he is a soldier and this is what he does. Because he’s used to deploying and it feels more normal than being home. Because he doesn’t want people to think or say he’s “broke.” Because he trusts the Army and his leaders, and if they say he must go, then he feels this is his duty.

Do not underestimate the power of this last reason. We have a volunteer force, and for many reasons we are able to retain experience in our ranks and recruit new soldiers every year, many of whom remain to become this mid-grade experience.

It could be that the success of our volunteer organization is also the cause of ruin for many of its members who do not or cannot say, on their own behalf, when enough is enough.

Unlike a piece of equipment, there is no “life cycle” limitation on the use of a human soldier, nor is there a limitation to the number of times he or she is deployed, to combat or otherwise. To retire, a soldier needs 20 years of active service. Between the time he becomes a soldier and the time he retires, the soldier is utilized as long as he is not “broke.”

This brings up the question: do repeated deployments shorten the “life cycle” of a soldier? If so, how long before he is at risk of becoming “broke?”

British World War I army physician Lord Moran, observing combat fatigue on the frontlines in France, famously wrote, “Men wear out in war like clothes.” His theory was that each soldier has a reservoir of mental or emotional stamina that is consumed in use.

We soldiers are not scientists of the mind. We cannot say with authority how much time a person needs away from or between deployments in order to refill this reservoir as suggested by Moran. But as soldiers, we know how we feel. For most of us, the third deployment is a hard pill to swallow, and we talk about the times lost with our families, especially the time lost with our children, which is time we know we will never get back. Those of us who remain through the end of a 20-year career often find that once we have the freedom to finally stay home, our children are grown.

Based on this, it may be time to impose lifetime deployment limits on our service members. The accused Kandahar shooter survived three combat tours in Iraq before allegedly committing this inexplicable act. With a history of traumatic brain injury and family problems, he could have been excluded from this latest trip to Afghanistan. But it is likely that he was a willing participant in this deployment.

It is for the experts to calculate how much is too much, but three seems like a magic number. Three year-long combat deployments might be enough for any one soldier’s life, or at least before an extended period of mental and emotional “refurbishment.”

Imposing such a limit on our troops is necessary because these same warriors cannot or will not impose this on themselves.

The views in this article are the thoughts and opinions of the author, and do not represent the official views or policies of the United States Army or Department of Defense.

The impact of another soldier's death

(Note: Due to some traveling in the short-term, I'll be reaching deep into the "duffel bag" for my next few posts. This one is a re-print of an article I wrote for the "At War" blog of the New York Times. It ran May 24, 2010.)

By Adam Wojack

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 always believed the wounds of war, whether physical or emotional, belonged only to those who suffered serious injury or unforgettable trauma. I had always been lucky. It seemed I was always just far enough ahead of or behind the bad stuff, and too heavy a sleeper to remember my own dreams. I never thought someone else’s wounds could impact my life, or that of my family, until it happened.

After coming home from the longest of three consecutive deployments from 2002 to 2007, the last two to Iraq, I was told by my wife that she no longer wished to live with me, and that she and the kids would not accompany me to my next assignment, an hour and a half away to another post in Germany. Needless to say, this was not the homecoming I wanted or even expected. Sure, we had problems, but they weren’t anything I thought required a separation as a fix—if that was a fix at all.

I had just completed a 15-month tour in Baghdad, which had begun before the “surge” and had ended after the reconciliation movement had taken root. It was an especially hard deployment, and even though I spent it in a staff job within the expansive sprawl of Baghdad Airport, I lost many friends at other locations to large explosions or well-aimed small arms fire.

My wife and I began having problems at the beginning of the deployment, and in moments of clarity, I knew they weren’t because of Iraq or because of the Army. They had been building for years. We pushed and pulled at each other by phone for those long months, sometimes yelling, sometimes ignoring, sometimes threatening, but always trying to connect and somehow get better. As fate would have it, the effects of the war would touch her before I could. Her best friend’s husband, a soldier in my brigade, was killed in a brief but violent skirmish in Anbar province in the summer of 2007, mere months before we were scheduled to redeploy. When I heard the news, instinctively, I knew my life was about to change.

It did, almost immediately. Communication with my wife became more distant. The passion, angry or not, disappeared from our phone conversations. This soldier’s widow now became her focus, the center of her world. Days would pass without emails. Sometimes I would call home on evening nights and my teenage daughter would answer, embarrassed to tell me she wasn’t sure where her mom had gone or with whom.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when, three days after dropping my bags for good inside my home, she informed me of her decision. But it was. I seethed and raged when she closed doors behind herself to have private phone conversations with this soldier’s widow. Roughly two months after arriving home, I left again, alone, not understanding how another soldier’s death could have such an impact upon my family and upon my life.

The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.

What war is like: one version

By Adam Wojack

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rowing up, I always wanted to know what it was like to be in a war, as did many of my friends. For starters, we idolized anyone who had served in the military and even more, anyone who had been to war, because this seemed to us the most exclusive club: there seemed so many who were curious but so few who really knew, or who had the credibility to tell.

To satisfy our curiosity, we’d turn to what was available: movies and books. Movies about war were constantly on TV. They were mostly about World War II, because Vietnam had just ended and the long hangover only just begun. On cold mornings before class we’d huddle in the school library and turn the pages of Life Magazine photo books, oohing at the coolest or grittiest images of soldiers at war. For lack of any tactile experience of war – or life – we formed our own opinions based on pictures we saw or stories we heard.

For one, I thought the Army in Europe had it the toughest, because not only did it seem like constant fighting – when do you sleep? – but it seemed like they were always outdoors in the cold. Images of the Battle of the Bulge, with soldiers walking knee-deep through snow made me wonder how anyone could function in such an environment, especially when someone else out there was hunting you.

When I got older, I realized that no matter how many war movies I watched or stories I read or heard, I would never understand war as intimately as the storytelling veterans, nor would I be able to verify what was hooey and what was legitimate and useful. I knew I wanted my own answer, and this youthful curiosity drove me to enlist, as much as anything else.

Of course, I remained a soldier because I found I loved the culture of the military: the lifestyle, travel, adventure and benefits, and because after twenty years, recognized that I had joined the ranks of those veterans I had once looked up to for information about what war is “really like.” One could say that after participating in three separate combat deployments that covered two wars, I have my own answer to this question.

So, I’ll attempt to share that. It’s not easy to approach because all wars are different. Even so, they all share a basic similarity: they consist of men, mostly, aiming to kill other men for god or country while bystanders are hurt and property is destroyed. This much hasn’t changed for a few thousand years, if you start with The Iliad, the Greek classic about the Trojan War.

But that’s too general for most people. What I think people want to know – what I wanted to know – are the details: quirky tales and personal recollections from the men (and women) who stood in storm’s center of battlegrounds and have things to tell us which confirm or deny what we already believe to be true about this strange, exclusive adventure. Because most of us never will, for reasons as varied as inclination or timing, experience it for ourselves.

So, after some thought, here’s what I learned that war is not: it is not a state of existence, like being under the influence of a drug, although in some peculiar and temporary ways it can be. It isn’t a haze, or a dream, or an alternate reality where time-honored rules, laws of physics or ethics no longer apply.

What war is, I learned, was a series of days. Some good, some bad, some tedious. All of them occurring in an area where the potential for each existed, but on a more heightened scale than a typical day in, say, modern Kansas City. All of this due, of course, to the proximity of opposing forces and their willful use of destructive means upon each other.

Local day to day life, however, still goes on. During my first tour in Iraq in 2004-5, I watched Iraqis drive down the same highways and roads as the U.S. Army, in the same categories as you’d find on American highways – commuters, trucks, buses, taxis, families. Their lives were delayed whenever an IED was detonated or discovered on the road they were traveling, or interrupted whenever the Army conducted a clearance operation in their neighborhood, street or home. But they returned to their business immediately afterwards, and went on their way, driving down the road or walking along the city sidewalks, shopping for tomatoes or freshly-slaughtered chicken or lamb meat or tanks of propane for cooking.

After periods of somewhat prolonged quiet, we’d watch children suited up in uniforms that made them look like Catholic school students in America, wearing little book backpacks on their shoulders, and walking down these same occasionally deadly streets every early morning and afternoon. Women continued to get pregnant and have babies, and people still got sick, and they all needed access to the city hospital, which continued to operate.

Good days were when something unexpectedly pleasant happened, usually in conjunction with something that would be considered bad, like the late afternoon I found myself stopped on Route Tampa, the main highway that paralleled the Tigris and connected Iraqi cities from Baghdad to Mosul. I was stopped, as was my entire patrol of six vehicles along with several dozen Iraqi civilian vehicles, by a U.S. Army engineer unit that had discovered an IED a few hundred meters down the road, and who were working to reduce the risk and detonate the device in place.

It’s always a happy moment when a responsible party finds something dangerous before you stumble upon it, but there was more. It had been a long, hot day of running around, finding parts, loading them on vehicles and worrying about this or that. All of a sudden, I forgot about all of this. I watched the Army engineer pulling security on the road, manning a Mark-19 grenade launcher from a makeshift steel box sitting on the bed of a cargo Humvee. His morale seemed high and he was alert and focused on the singular task of keeping us all safe. Clearly, he was proud of the fact that his unit had discovered an IED and that he was protecting the rest of us. But it got better.

The day, like I said, had been hot, but as we waited, it cooled and the sun began to set. Blue sky gave way to pinks and reds and everything grew quiet. I relaxed and wondered if the sunset looked like this every night, and wondered again why I didn’t try to watch it more often. The soldiers in my patrol relaxed and stood around outside their vehicles, sharing smokes and stories.

I walked the line of vehicles to check on them all, and behind us, among the few dozen civilian cars also waiting, was a young Iraqi couple holding a baby. I don’t know if they smiled first, but when I saw their baby, I realized it had been months since I’d seen my kids, and I couldn’t help but quietly rejoice at the sight. With another soldier, I walked up to them, smiled and said hello, and asked them, in English, what their baby’s name was. The man said, “Abbas,” and after some basic chit-chat in English and Arabic, he offered to let me hold little Abbas. I did.

We stood there, admiring the sunset and their baby and agreeing that this war was a huge inconvenience for all of us, until the BOOM several hundred meters down the road indicated that the engineers had completed their task and we were now free to continue. I knew I wouldn’t trade phone numbers or make plans to meet this couple for dinner later, but for a short time, we were able to relax and share things that all people have in common: a love for our children, and for calm and beautiful surroundings.

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ad days were days when someone was hurt or killed. Nothing could be done to change the circumstances, but sometimes a misunderstanding or the mistrust that resulted from these sorts of days were as harmful as the specific act itself, as if an enemy attack could plant a cancer inside a unit’s confidence and metastasize.

A bad day could result in changes to procedure, relief of leadership, a breakdown in alliances between U.S. forces and the local Iraqi government, or feuding between a unit and its higher headquarters, or between soldiers nearest the event.

These days didn’t happen as often as many believe, but when they did, they lingered, usually until the next bad day forced a change in the unit’s focus. Bad feelings could go away quickly if the incentive was there, such as when the grieving or feuding party realized they still needed the other. This sort of conditional bad feeling was as much a product of human nature as the war itself: people tend to form alliances and draw lines, even on the friendly side of the wire.

But most days were in between. Some bad days were really other people’s bad days, and some good days didn’t feel as good as they should. On one particularly successful day in Samarra, the Iraqi commandos I worked with found a house basement full of mortar and artillery rounds and other weaponry that filled an entire courtyard for an after-action photograph.

It was a huge find, and it surely made a dent in some group’s ability to ambush U.S. and Iraqi forces in and around Samarra. But I knew, and the commandos knew, that we were far from calling this a win, and that tomorrow, the same people we took from were going to try to take from us, by following our movements and waiting for us to drive by a planned ambush. Almost needless to say, enemy attacks did increase in the weeks following.

Some days were just tedious. These might have been bad days because they seemed wasted, but they were good because they were safe. They were days spent doing routine, administrative or logistical tasks on forward operating bases that had to be done but weren’t the kind of things that generate war stories: ordering parts, fixing vehicles, planning operations or coordinating resources for this or that.

Soldiers found ways of coping with the tedium. Regular breaks were one – getting on the internet to email or call home, smoking, snacking or making mealtimes last a bit longer. Hobbies were another, such as working out or playing Halo on Xbox or watching movies or playing cards. But all of these things would remind you of home, and since you had the time to do these things, it made you wonder why you were sitting on a FOB in a combat environment doing the same things you did back at your peacetime duty station.

In many cases, this tedium could lead soldiers to seek excitement, in the form of a combat mission on the road or in a city, if this was not the sort of thing they ordinarily performed. For those who had no choice but to conduct daily combat missions, there was a certain tedium to this as well: not every day on patrol in a dangerous city is a good or bad day, either.

Tedium led me to volunteer the Iraqi commandos and my three-vehicle, ten-man element to conduct security patrols around the city whenever a shortage of human intelligence meant no targeted raids on a given day. This wasn’t required, but it could be useful and it felt more proactive than sitting around behind a barrier while other folks took care of daily security tasks.

Most everyone had mixed feelings about this activity, since it involved leaving an area we controlled and driving around quite visibly in an area we did not. But we were all soldiers, and this is why we had signed up: action. Leaving the safe area for the dangerous area was where things got interesting, and everyone maintained a certain optimism or hope for either finding something or drawing fire so it could be returned with greater force and emphasis.

In many ways, this was gambling, and the longer we did it, the better we got. Our odds were clearly better than average, since having a good day or a tedious day were both wins. Only a bad day was a loss, and we learned how to hedge our bets through observation and historical analysis, or just by remembering where the worst places were and avoiding them at vulnerable times, such as hours of darkness or when the streets were free of civilians.

As crazy as this might sound, sometimes when it had been quiet for days, we would go to the worst area we knew and just park in the open, trusting that our eyes, our armor and the poor aim of our enemy would neutralize their advantage of surprise if gunshots or rocket propelled grenades were fired our way. This also, we hoped, would send a message to both the bad guys lurking in the area and the non-combatants caught between us that we were still here, and we were not afraid.

The best day? I still remember the day we were finally relieved by our follow-on unit – an armor battalion from Fort Stewart, Georgia – of the responsibility for control of Samarra. It was February 10, 2005. It felt like the last day of a very long freshman year. Summer – and home – was just around the corner. And I think everyone can understand that.

The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.

The unavoidable rookie mistake

By Adam Wojack

The “cherry” story is prized in military folklore because we like to believe that no matter how awkward a “first time” mishap, the person’s reaction tells us what we need to know about their character and potential usefulness to a group. Do you have a story you’d like to share?

H ere’s my “cherry” story. I’m the cherry, or rookie, and the mistakes in this recollection are mine, but as you’ll see, I get a little help. I’m the motor officer for my battalion at Forward Operating Base, or FOB, Brassfield-Mora near Samarra, Iraq in March, 2004. It’s my first combat patrol as a leader.

I’m an infantryman, but I’ve been asked to think like a maintainer and get our battalion’s fleet of wheeled and tracked vehicles fixed and to keep them running. This requires a large section of working Army mechanics – which we have – and a continuous supply of replacement parts for the vehicles: tires, tracks, engines, transmissions, fuel pumps, igniters, generators, window glass, and anything else you can name – which we don’t. This is simply the nature of the maintenance business: Replacement parts flow into theater to a central location, and it’s your job to drive to that place two or three times a week to pick up the parts you’ve ordered.

I have been in this job for a month, and already I am frustrated. I have elected to lead a separate patrol to our parts warehouse, located at FOB Speicher, which is 45 minutes to our north and passes through some areas notorious for IED ambush. Ordinarily, I send our parts team – which is two soldiers and a 10-ton truck – with the battalion’s twice-weekly food, fuel and ammunition convoy to get our needed parts. But for whatever reason, my team hasn’t been bringing the right parts back, if many at all, and my battalion commander, who has no patience for unserviceable vehicles when parts are available, has hinted publicly that I need to be more aggressive in getting our “down” vehicles back “up.”

As a root cause, I suspect that my main parts guy, a young sergeant not known for assertiveness, is not asking the right people at Speicher for parts, or maybe not even asking at all. Thinking that “leadership by example” might cure what ails, I organize a patrol around the parts team and their big, 10-ton cargo truck, adding three armored Humvees crewed by mechanics and an assorted group of soldiers from other sections in the battalion headquarters, all of whom have business on Speicher that day. My mission: get the critical parts I need and “show” my parts guy how this business – at which I am also very new – is done.

The patrol starts on time, which is promising, and as we roll down the main north-south highway in Iraq, the one we call Route Tampa, I’m thinking this is simpler than we make it seem. We’ve planned, rehearsed and inspected, but all we’re doing is driving down the road to another secured FOB to load parts into the back of a truck. How complex is that?

I soon get my answer. We aren’t ten minutes down the road when I’m contacted on the FM radio by my trail vehicle – mechanics – who say they’re having a problem with their Humvee and want to stop and check it out.

I have no choice but to stop, so we roll to a halt on the northbound shoulder of the four-lane highway. I depart my vehicle with weapon at the ready and walk back to the trail Humvee, which already has its engine hood raised and two mechanics in full gear peering into its dark jumble of metal, belts and hoses. Before they tell me what the problem is, they say the vehicle is down and that we can’t drive it any further.

The senior mechanic, Sergeant Chase I’ll call him, tells me this vehicle needs a new throttle position sensor, and that it can’t be driven any further unless we want to damage the engine. These words stick in my ears because a TPS is one of the critical parts on my list and it’s one that my parts team has failed to pick up for the past week. I start giving an earful of frustration to Sergeant Chase – maybe because he’s the bearer of bad news – until he informs me that we can stand here in the open and bitch about it or we can hook up this Humvee to the 10-ton truck and tow it to FOB Remagen, which is on our way and closer to us than Speicher, and then try to fix it there.

This, of course, makes good sense, so Chase and his guys hook up the Humvee to the 10-ton. In minutes, the Humvee is attached to the rear of the big cargo truck, but the crew is still sitting inside the small vehicle. We have exactly two empty seats in the other three vehicles in the patrol to seat these four soldiers. Chase and I and the crew stand there for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to get everyone seated. We debate having them ride in the 10-ton’s cargo bed (bad idea), double them up in the other Humvees (not enough room) or leave them where they are. Since this Humvee is attached by a V-shaped steel tow-bar to the 10-ton – which stabilizes the towing situation more than would, say, a chain – and because we aren’t going that far, I make the final decision to move two and have the other two stay put. Everyone takes their place, and off we go, Humvee in the lead, Humvee in trail, and truck-Humvee combo in the middle.

The drive toward Remagen is short and routine, and things are looking up. I’m sitting in the passenger seat marking our progress on a paper map by counting terrain features and overpasses, and I ask my driver, a big, easygoing kid I’ll call Williams, who ordinarily drives for the company first sergeant, if we are near the entrance. Williams has been to Remagen before and tells me he knows where to turn. But maybe his mind is wandering, because only a few seconds after he responds with, “No worries, sir, we’re good,” he turns his head and gives me the You May Never Trust Me Again look and says, “I think we just passed it.”

Okay, I tell him, let’s turn around. I pick up the FM radio handset and transmit this news to the rest of the patrol. Williams starts braking in preparation for our u-turn across the highway.

And this is where things get memorable. Out of habit, I look into my side-view mirror to check on the position of my trailing vehicles, but instead of seeing anything owned by the U.S. Army behind me on the road, I see something bright and small and silent – a civilian automobile – sliding forward quickly and upside down, its tires and dark underbelly oriented upward. This inspires one of those feelings of disbelief into my mind, like, I didn’t really see what I thought I did, did I? And I tell Williams to stop.

I step out of our stopped Humvee and all traffic behind me has also stopped. Behind us in the next lane, a small white car is resting on its roof – bent, twisted and leaking fluids onto the road. Our 10-ton truck is on the shoulder a short distance behind us as well, but it’s facing the opposite direction. A long semi-circular skid mark on the road ends where the 10-ton sits. And the Humvee it has been towing is still attached to its rear, but is now resting on its side, with its bottom facing us.

I’m still looking around, trying to figure out how things suddenly came to look this way when people start emerging from their vehicles. The turret gunner from the capsized Humvee helps himself out of the top – now side – of his vehicle, spilling MREs and water bottles onto the road shoulder, which merge with the automotive fluids that are also draining from this vehicle.

My parts guy, the driver of the 10-ton truck, has dismounted and walks over to me with a half-smile on his face that might be embarrassment but doesn’t seem to convey to me that he understands the gravity of this situation. Maybe I misread his expression, but I’m already so frustrated with him that I walk the other way. From the smashed civilian car, two Iraqi men are pulling themselves out from inside the upside-down hull. A mere minute earlier, they’d been thoughtlessly driving along the highway in their little white Opel. They are wearing white dishdashas, and these long shirt-dresses are spotted with their own blood.

All of us except drivers and turret gunners have dismounted by now, and several soldiers in my patrol rush over to the wrecked Opel and assist the injured Iraqi men. Our signal officer, a young captain named Jaison, plops down in the middle of the road with the more wounded of the two Iraqi men and applies a pressure dressing to a cut on the man’s head. I radio the situation to my battalion and ask for whatever help or advice they can provide. I’m clueless. I have a 12,000 pound Humvee that is off its wheels and leaking fluids but is still attached by tow-bar to a 10-ton truck. Plus, we have a destroyed civilian car and two injured local men.

On the radio, I’m told that it’ll take 45 minutes for someone from Remagen – a FOB we can see from the highway – to respond to us.

While we wait, I gather leaders from my patrol to re-create the accident. I reach this tentative finding: my 10-ton truck driver, towing a 12,000 pound Humvee, was not able to slow his vehicle in time to make our unplanned u-turn, maybe because he was following us too closely or going too fast. To avoid rear-ending us, he slammed his brakes hard enough to put his truck into a 180-degree spin with a 12,000-pound “tail” which swung around behind the truck with such force to schwack the little Opel that was attempting to pass. The 10-ton truck/Humvee combo batted the Opel forward with such force during that it flipped the little car onto its roof and caused it to continue its slide in the direction of travel. Finally, as the 10-ton truck came to a rest from its 180-degree tailspin, the Humvee’s lateral inertia caused it to tip over just as the big truck reached a stop.

Eventually, a wrecker from FOB Remagen arrives to pull the Humvee back onto its four wheels. We watch as the same wrecker easily moves the Opel off the road, and we watch as an Iraqi ambulance picks up the two injured Iraqi men and takes them away. Jaison, the signal officer, has been applying the field dressing to the injured man’s head the entire time. I also watch a U.S. Army field ambulance take away two of my mechanics – the crew of the capsized Humvee. They hadn’t appeared injured, but since they had been in a vehicle rollover, the medics insisted they be x-rayed.

We spend hours at Remagen, waiting and wondering when we’ll see these two again (they are now at FOB Speicher, fifteen minutes up the road) and discussing backup plans to return to our FOB, such as splitting up the group or staying overnight at Remagen. We discuss how unlucky those Iraqi men were, but agree that they shouldn’t have gotten so close or attempted to pass when they did. We know that the Army has a procedure for property damage or injury claims made by local nationals, and we know that these men, if they file, will probably get a few thousand bucks for their trouble.

We have too much time on our hands and while we wait, cannot imagine our situation easily correcting itself. Plus, we will obtain no needed parts here at Remagen. We are, for precious hours that day, a unit with broken vehicles, missing soldiers and an unfulfilled mission, stranded on an unfamiliar FOB. We are military homeless, and this sucks.

By sunset, a minor miracle happens: another patrol from our battalion shows up at Remagen on its way back from Speicher with the two soldiers who had been taken there for x-rays. We are able to assemble our original patrol and attach it to this other element – which is part of the miracle because they have the extra seats we need so nobody has to ride in the towed Humvee – and the big bunch of us drive back to FOB Brassfield-Mora by sundown.

Back at our FOB, I head to our tactical operations center to report completion of my patrol. My battalion commander has already heard all about my day, and searches me out to get my side of the story. I can see in his eyes that he is angry: for the accident, the vehicle damage, the injured soldiers, and the embarrassment this will surely cause him in the eyes of his boss, our brigade commander. He angrily asks me which soldiers and vehicles I have left at other FOBs, but changes his tone when I tell him that everything we’d brought with us – soldiers, vehicles and equipment – have all returned with us to base.

“Good job,” he says, and walks away.

I learn that even though we have acquired no repair parts, bringing everyone and everything home by dinner is something that a commander – like any parent – can appreciate.

I stand there and hope that every patrol will not be like this first one. Our next one is not: two days later we try this again, but this time we make it to Speicher, pick up the critical parts we need (including a TPS), miss no turns, injure no people and damage no property. When I tell my battalion commander that several vehicles are now mission-capable or will be shortly, all is forgotten.

The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.

Why we haven’t yet called Iraq a “win”

By Adam Wojack

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few weekends ago I found myself at an apartment party in downtown Washington, D.C. It was a small gathering of twenty- and thirty-somethings, all of whom shared a common religious background. One person there, a young patent attorney, became enthusiastic when he learned that I was not only in the Army on active duty, but a veteran of the Iraq War as well.

After telling me that he and his father were both big supporters of the military and of American servicemembers, he asked me, perhaps in the spirit of generating amiable small-talk, when or if we were ever going to say we won the war in Iraq.

This was an unfortunate question to ask me, since I saw this as the opposite of small talk and excused myself in advance if my answer became long-winded or indecisive.

Well, I said, we should not and I hope we don’t call it a victory anytime soon. My words were still hovering in the air when I saw the upturned corners of his smile go flat. This was not what he expected to hear, I gathered, and knew that my response now required a detailed explanation. I understood where he was coming from, and if I’d been in his shoes – no military experience, but proud of his nation’s might, prowess and servicemembers – I’m sure I would have felt the same way. But I’d gone down a different road, and years later, my perspective was compromised: I knew no easy answer.

The truth is, soldiers don’t go around high-fiving each other after a combat deployment, even after a successful one. We may trade our wildest stories, but when it comes to scorekeeping, most of us remain silent. This is for a few key reasons: 1) as long as we keep getting deployed, it’s too early to celebrate; 2) losing fellow soldiers, friends and family members during wartime is a loss any way you look at it; and 3) doing so would feel disrespectful toward those who have sacrificed more – and there’s always someone who gave more than you.

Instead, soldiers usually get quiet and introspective and stare at the foam in their beer. Or, they go on at length and give you the answer you probably weren’t looking for.

No, I told him, calling it a win would be arrogant because even though things are better over there, the critical fact is that we didn’t do it all by ourselves. I added that we couldn’t have done it all by ourselves, either. Realizing that this also required proof, I chose to tell him the story of how the so-called Sons of Iraq turned the tide in Baghdad in 2007, several months into the famed Gen. Petraeus-led surge.

I told him how Petraeus, our new top boss, had issued a change in operational guidance early that year, directing that population centers were to be saturated with permanent U.S. and Iraqi Security Forces soldier presence. The idea was to crowd neighborhoods with soldiers in order to create a feeling of improved security for the locals which would eventually – in theory – lead to improved confidence in the ability of the combined U.S.-Iraq team to bring the peace.

All of this would result, we hoped, in our team winning the popular support of the people and convincing them that U.S. forces were their friends and partners rather than occupiers. The irony of the situation is that we were trying to accomplish all of this by “occupying” neighborhoods with fortified combat outposts.

What happened immediately afterward, I related, was a spike in U.S. casualties and an increase in catastrophic kills of U.S. combat vehicles and crews. Our heaviest vehicles – tracked Bradley fighting vehicles and even tanks – had suddenly become vulnerable to new makeshift anti-armor devices and improvised, buried bombs. To many, the casualty rate seemed unsustainable. It started feeling like we were losing, and many of us started wondering, for how much longer can we bleed like this?

None of that part of the story was news or unknown. My next point, though, may have been a bit more surprising. Then, I told him, things suddenly and irreversibly changed. Multiple factors were at play, but in my version of this story, there was one clear driving force: a group of Iraqi citizens who had acted on their own.

In late May, 2007, we received word that local citizens from one of the most violent and dangerous neighborhoods of Baghdad – the Sunni enclave Ameriyah – had decided to switch sides and battle al Qaeda rather than the U.S. Army. They phoned the American commander responsible for that sector to request that he stand by and not interfere as local men fought with and attempted to rid Ameriyah of its al Qaeda operators.

Of course, we were shocked, surprised – even awed. Within a few days, maybe a week, the fighting in Ameriyah was over. With some coalition help, the local Iraqis had pushed al Qaeda out and then offered to work with U.S. troops to maintain safety and security in Ameriyah in return for U.S. sponsorship.

It happened like that. By mid-summer, this sudden trend in Sunni parts of Baghdad – local neighborhood groups of Iraqi men taking charge of security in their neighborhoods in exchange for U.S. support – had spread to every neighborhood in the capital. And as Baghdad went, so went the rest of Iraq.

As I finished this story, the expression on this young lawyer’s face hadn’t changed. He respected my opinion but wasn’t satisfied with my answer. Part of me understood why: It sure looked like a victory, and the U.S. was clearly on the side that found a way to control violence in that country. But a bigger part of me refused to celebrate this fact.

Later, I wondered what the official answer might be, and found quotes from both President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In a September, 2010 Reuters story on the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq, the president said we would “earn” victory through “the success of our partners.” In the same piece, Secretary Gates said that declaring victory in Iraq “requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run.”

Still later, as I tried to understand my own reluctance at participating in end-zone celebration over this, another kernel of memory came back. This was from 2004, my first tour there and my formative combat experience, which bore a link to the 2007 Iraqi-sparked turnaround in Baghdad.

In 2004, I was in Samarra. My infantry battalion had assigned me to work as a liaison of sorts with a brand-new unit of Iraqi soldiers: the Ministry of Interior Police Commandos. They were one of the first security products created by the new Iraqi government, only months old, and had been raised and trained in Baghdad. Outside of funding assistance, they bore no stamp of U.S. influence. This gave them credibility in the eyes of many Iraqis, but made them somewhat suspect in the eyes of U.S. soldiers. The first commando battalion had been sent from Baghdad to Samarra in October of that year to assist in stabilizing the security situation there by targeting and capturing known insurgent leaders who had so far been able to blend into the cityscape.

Over the next four months in the city, my small team worked together with the MoI Commandos, conducting countless raids and patrols, capturing bad guys and seizing weapons and bomb-making caches and occasionally getting ambushed, blown up or shot at and along the way. Overall, we suffered our share of casualties – and most of them were Iraqi commandos. The reason for this was because their government provided them with big, unarmored Dodge pickup trucks to drive, while we rolled in armored Humvees. While an IED or land mine might blow a tire or crack the armored glass of one of our Humvees – leaving passengers mostly unhurt – these same ambushes were almost always fatal for someone sitting behind the thin sheet metal of a commercial pickup truck.

But despite the increased danger, my Iraqi commando partners never backed down from a mission. In time, I couldn’t help but make friends with them. My favorite was a captain I called “Ibrahim” on missions in order to protect his identity. I worked with him for only six weeks of the total time I spent in Samarra with the commandos, but he and I were fast friends. He was a professional, a career MoI policeman who had worked for Saddam Hussein’s internal security force, but now worked with us. He was charismatic, smart, spoke good English and showed no fear on raids or patrols. He was very good at what he did, and he was fair and just. If the tables had been reversed, I would have willingly followed him into battle, the same as he did for me.

Our combined team’s best and most successful days in Samarra were always with Ibrahim at the lead of the commandos. Their information and intelligence led to the capture of men and material that interdicted or prevented attacks on U.S. forces in the city. The work done by Ibrahim and his commandos, while costing many of them dearly, saved U.S. lives in Samarra. It also helped set the conditions as early as the fall of 2004 for what would eventually take place in late spring, 2007. That much I say with confidence, because I was witness to both.

So when someone asks me if we won in Iraq, or if I think it’s safe to finally say we won, I think about the Sons of Iraq in Ameriyah, who ignited the big shift that pushed al Qaeda out of Baghdad, and which led to the sharp downturn in violence. I also think about what President Obama and Secretary Gates both said in September, 2010, that this question requires greater perspective and will ultimately be answered by the future success or actions of that nation.

But mostly, I think about Ibrahim and the commandos in Samarra, because this is as close as it ever was for me, personally. Sure, we were Americans fighting Iraqi insurgents. But there were more Iraqis fighting alongside us, and in many cases, fighting for us and dying for us. If it wasn’t for them – and for many others like those rugged individuals in Ameriyah – we’d probably still be fighting.

The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.

Getting to Know America, Again

By Adam Wojack

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ometimes I feel like Borat, the Sacha Baron Cohen character, experiencing this culture of America through the eyes of innocence or ignorance and making Old World value judgments about New World things and not fully understanding our peculiar but seductive ways.

 
I am American by birth, upbringing, education, majority residence and service in the United States military. But because of my job, as an officer in the U.S. Army, I have spent the majority of my active duty career outside of the country. I have served short or long tours in Panama, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Hawaii, Germany, Kosovo and Iraq. Most of my time overseas has been in Germany, at which I first arrived in 2002. Ever since, subtracting a year for schooling in Leavenworth, Kansas, I have lived on the other side of the Atlantic.

Life in Europe is different than life in the United States, as many well know. What is surprising is what happens to an American’s perspective when European or Old World ways start feeling normal and American ways feel strange. After almost eight years in Germany, with two combat deployments to Iraq during this time, I returned to the states for a year of professional schooling – the Army’s way of preparing me for the next ten or so years of my career. After experiencing in Germany a life of quiet Sundays, uniform prosperity and a gentility of interaction amongst people, I returned to an America that seemed to me the opposite: round-the-clock commerce and activity, a conspicuous division of wealth, and a constant buzz of provocation between people over all things – which I thought was saying it kindly.

At first, I found much to dislike and criticize. Some of it was silly and selfish, like complaining about not being able to find the same kind of fresh, crusty bread that had been so cheap and plentiful in Germany, or bemoaning the shortage of true Pilsner beer on tap, the way they make it back there.

Other things, though, made me wonder if we as a nation had made much progress toward the “Great Society” President Johnson had envisioned back in the 1960s. While I was in Leavenworth, I chose to rent an old house, built in the 19^th century, on one of the oldest streets in town. My street for a few blocks in either direction was loaded with what locals called “historic homes,” all of which were well maintained by proud homeowners. The neighborhood directly behind mine, however, was blighted and poor. In fact, most of the old city center of Leavenworth was like this – pockets of stately historic homes surrounded by poverty.

As a result, most of my classmates – fellow Army majors – opted to live in brand-new housing developments miles away from the city center. Essentially, they clustered themselves in socially homogenous enclaves, separated from other local areas by farm fields, four-lane roads and driving distance. Their only interaction with folks unlike themselves were at shopping centers, such as the local Super Wal-Mart. And, they seemed to like it like this. When one classmate told me that he and his wife had driven by my house and admired its historic charm, he added that he could never live “there.” Unless, he joked, he had his Glock with him whenever he went out into the backyard.

At a liquor store in town to pick up some beer, I stood at the glass door of the chiller straining to decide which from the dozens of strange but wonderful microbrews from all over America I would purchase. As I deliberated, an older man in overalls walked in the store to buy a pack of cigarettes. When he heard the price, he complained that the same smokes were cheaper in Missouri. The man behind the counter said he knew this, but that state tax in Kansas was higher. At that, the man blurted out loud, “Taxes. That’s why we’re supposed to kill all the politicians every seven years. I think it says that in the Constitution, don’t it?”

Hearing this made me stop searching for Pilsner amongst American pale ales, straighten my back and look over at this man. He was just frustrated, but now, so was I. I turned to face him and told him I couldn’t remember reading that in the Constitution, and asked him if he could tell me which part said this. He seemed only a little surprised by my remark, but didn’t bother replying. He ignored me, picked up his cigarettes and left the store.

At school, in a class of 16 field grade military officers almost all of whom were currently pursuing or had completed graduate school study in fields such as history, business, management or international relations, we carried on emotional arguments about whether President Obama’s healthcare initiative was in the nation’s best interest. As a recent returnee from a complex multinational continent with a nearly unified belief in social welfare, high tax rates and increased public services for citizens, I was mystified by any negative attitude toward providing the poorest Americans more access to a better life.

One classmate, whom I considered a good friend and with whom I would share many after hours beers at a local hangout, believed wholeheartedly that America could not afford such a benefit for those in need. He spoke in terms of dollars rather than investment in future health and increased productivity, but the terms mattered less than how intractable was his – or my – position. I felt as if we were replaying a news-entertainment debate between liberals and conservatives on Fox or MSNBC, and in many ways we were.

In these first few months back from Germany, I knew I had a problem. I complained so much about minor aspects of life in America – the condition of the roads, the food, the driving – that a woman I had just started dating told me to “go back to Germany” if I didn’t like it here. After we stopped dating, I experienced a string of quiet months where I became re-acquainted with concepts American: variety and variation of consumer product, creative enhancement of common items and an optimistic-democratic belief that like a vote, every opinion on every subject matters.

I hadn’t forgotten how commerce in America was geared toward consumption, and that a great way to perpetuate consumption was to design disposability into products, or to create “new and improved” versions of the same old thing. I knew but didn’t miss the American spin on classic Old World coffee products like cappuccino and caffe latte or on most foods and desserts, which seemed larger, sweeter, creamier and more caloric, as if the American stomach was empty and more sugar and fat were the fix. Most irritating was the background racket of opinion, which almost always began with, “Well I think…” Hearing this made me want to walk in the other direction and wonder if the First Amendment wasn’t our nation’s intellectual ball and chain.

But here is also where it started to change for the better. Rightly so, one or more people without the burden of my “superior” worldview called me out, like the woman I dated, for my snobbish criticisms. I found myself alone with my own haughty opinions, and realized that I cherished my views and forced them on others believing they were as valuable to all as they were to me. It clicked. I was being an American—really, a re-born American bringing his optimistic ideal of how this life can be better, if only we build a new, improved set of ideas (or houses or beers or coffee products) away from the old ones, and do away with the current politicians or policies and create new ones because this will rightly cure what ails. We can do this, I realized, because we have the room to do it.

I traveled from Kansas to San Diego in April during that school year for a family wedding. The flight took three hours and when I landed, I was still in America, but in a completely different type of America than I’d been in Kansas. That’s when I had my “What a country!” Borat moment: The sun, the ocean, the beautiful people, the prosperity and the idea of this sprawling nation of opinionated folks from all over the world disagreeing on how to make this nation and this world a better place but still believing it is possible. And all of this culminating, on the go, in something as desirable and attractive as this notion of potential realized or rebuilt. And looking as glorious as San Diego did that weekend.

Whether in Kansas or southern California, it was the same ideal: American optimism. I have found this nowhere else in the world, and it still amazes me. What a country.