Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^PROLOGUE THE BETTER THEY FOUGHT, THE BETTER RELIEF WORKERS THEY BECAME

Stage by stage, the USS Benfold, a guided missile destroyer, closed the distance with the USNS Rainier, a fast combat support ship: 9,000 yards, 8,000 yards, until, after fifteen minutes, the $1 billion steel behemoth came alongside a ship of even greater proportions, loaded with fuel and provisions. Only 160 feet of water now separated these two gray armored spirits of the industrial age. There was a deafening holler of wind as a churning funnel of rapids formed between us and the Rainier, the explosions of foam concentrating, it seemed, all the energy of the ocean. One by one, lines were shot across the Benfold’s deck from the Rainier and hauled in by “deck apes” and “deck monkeys,” the lowest-ranking enlisted sailors, who latched them onto fairleads, pelican hooks, and pulleys. It had begun with a single red string fired by an M-14 rifle, to which a rope was then attached, followed by a cable. Soon gigantic fuel hoses and pallets were sliding from the Rainier across to the Benfold, as deck apes with blue construction helmets and orange vests began a snake dance with the cables that controlled the line tension, so as to carefully “bring in the groceries.” A chief petty officer boomed orders over a loudspeaker while another communicated with the Rainier in whole sentences through signal flags. The world was a roaring black abyss sprinkled with a flurry of glowing yellow lights from the two vessels. It was like a docking in space.

Few navies in the world could perform an Un-Rep (underway replenishment), which depends less on technology than on sheer seamanship.

Bosun’s Mate Chief Andrew Rader of Newark, Ohio, orchestrated the snake dance. “Reconnect the fucking messenger [cable], and stop acting like a fucking girl,” he hollered over to a member of his crew, immediately giving a fatherly pat and apology to the female sailor beside him. “I didn’t mean that,” he told her. He paused for a second only. “Flake the line down, fuckstick. Remove the hook from the ass. Heave!”

I was in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sumatra. It was January 2005 and the Benfold had just completed its part in the tsunami relief effort. It was now heading for the Strait of Malacca, to help patrol the world’s busiest shipping lane—a choke point crucial to international trade, and hence to globalization itself.

For these sailors, places like Iraq and Afghanistan were at the edge, rather than at the forefront, of their consciousnesses. They and so many others in the U.S. military were busy with the additional responsibilities of a great power—disaster relief, protecting the sea-lanes, training indigenous troops, fighting terrorists on several continents, adapting to the rise of new hegemons, and so on. The two wars in the Middle East might not have been going well, but you would have barely noticed it aboard America’s surface warships and submarines, scattered over the world’s oceans; or among pilots on deployment from Alaska to Antarctica and many places in between; or among soldiers and marines on small missions across Africa, Asia, and South America. To go from several weeks aboard a submarine in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy to several weeks in the center of the Sahara Desert with the U.S. Army, as I did one time, was normal, given the scope of so many simultaneous operations.

I did not ignore Iraq. But neither was I limited by it.

My travels began in 2002. At first, I had observed counterinsurgency and unconventional war on several continents with Army Special Forces and marines, experiences that formed the basis of an earlier book, Imperial Grunts.¹ Back then, I had observed platoon-sized units in South American and Asian jungles, and in Near Eastern deserts. Iraq found me briefly in the thick of urban combat. But for the most part between 2002 and 2004, I observed the bread and butter of imperial maintenance on the ground: the training of indigenous troops, whom U.S. military trainers called “indigs.”

Nobody liked the word “imperial.” But in terms of the challenges and the frustrations that so many junior officers and enlisted men of the American military faced worldwide, they were in an imperial-like situation, comparable to that of troops of other great powers in centuries past.

My traveling companions mocked and complained, something that soldiers and marines have done since time immemorial. It was unrelated to bad morale: bad morale is only about losing the spirit to fight. They belonged to the combat arms community, a self-selecting elite within the military who fell into two categories: those who were (or had been) deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, and those who were doing what they could to get there. Rather than fanatics, they were like foreign correspondents whose nightmare was to be left behind at a bureau while a colleague got the nod to cover the latest war or overseas crisis.

When you got to know the world of these infantrymen; got to know, say, the vast differences between an Army major who was a general’s aide at a big, rear Burger King–type base and an Army major who was the executive officer (the second-in-command) for an entire battalion at an advanced operating base—a real fighting base, that is; or got to know the differences between a Marine infantry sergeant who commanded twelve men within a platoon and a gunnery sergeant who was the exalted go-to guy (the iron grunt) in a company of 150 men, then from the point of view of any civilian in an age without conscription you were inside a culture as mysterious as any encountered in the far-flung reaches of the globe.

And as I would learn, the Navy and Air Force, owing to the unfamiliar worlds of seamanship and high technology, would turn out to be more exotic still.

You couldn’t begin to understand the U.S. military without focusing on noncommissioned officers (NCOs, or noncoms in service lingo)—that is, sergeants and corporals—or chief petty officers in the case of the Navy. It was they who were the repository of the military’s culture and traditions, as many a West Pointer or Annapolis graduate would admit. The Prussian baron Friedrich von Steuben, during the 1777–78 winter at Valley Forge, had laid the groundwork for this NCO corps. Thus he provided the bedrock for the American military: the radical decentralization of command, so that the general directive of every officer was broken down into practical steps by sergeants and corporals and petty officers at the farthest edges of the battlefield. Officers gave orders, NCOs got things done.

NCOs were emblematic of American social history. The ever-expanding frontier of western settlement in North America was about doing, not imagining: clearing land, building shelters, obtaining food supplies. Though the family farm was dying across the continent, almost half of the sergeants in a twelve-man Army Special Forces A-team with which I embedded in Algeria had grown up on family farms. That A-team was typical of others I knew.

NCOs were also a product of America’s middle-class society. Observing third world armies, I had seen how the gulf between officers and enlisted men was like that between aristocrats and peasants. But such class distinctions did not exist in the United States to nearly the same degree. The consequence was an NCO corps that dealt confidently with its superiors, so lieutenants revered and depended upon their sergeants. This bond was at the core of a military that got the greatest possible traction out of sometimes the worst possible policies.

The importance of noncoms was magnified by the increasing size and emptying out of the battlefield. Instead of large numbers of troops fighting in a confined space—the essence of mass infantry warfare—small clusters of combatants now lay scattered across vast deserts, jungles, and slum cities. It was a world of platoons, squads, and teams: a world of NCOs, who worked at the lowest tactical level, where operational success or failure is determined. In Iraq, noncoms had a 40 percent higher mortality rate than officers. And among officers, the highest mortality rate was among lieutenants who led platoons composed of noncoms and enlisted men.²

In an age when field troops were scrutinized under media klieg lights, the actions of individual NCOs carried untold political consequences, for better or for worse. Marine Gen. Charles C. Krulak writes, “The individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy.”³ By “individual Marine,” read NCO. Two-thirds of all marines were noncommissioned and in their first four-year enlistment. Nearly 90 percent of Army Special Forces soldiers (Green Berets) were sergeants of one grade or another.

These NCOs had their national identities as Americans engraved in sharp bas-relief. Off duty, they were often tight-lipped, except when I asked them about the technical task at hand. Then they couldn’t stop talking. Ask them what they do, not how they feel, I had to constantly remind myself. Only after I got to know them would they tell me how they felt—how deeply they felt—and only if I didn’t ask.

“Men of action are the unwitting slaves of men of intellect,” observes the early-twentieth-century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.⁴ Pessoa’s categories may be too grand and too neat, but there is a core of truth in his observation. It’s certainly true that in regard to Iraq, these soldiers and marines had to deal with the consequences of ideas about liberation, occupation, and democracy that were the product mainly of civilians in Washington with or (usually) without experience on the ground. As someone with experience living with and writing about the military, and who privately and publicly supported the invasion of Iraq from the beginning, I was not innocent in this regard. It has been said that the occupation of Iraq was so grotesquely mismanaged that the war was never given a chance to succeed. But it may also be possible that the occupation would have been cursed with even the best of plans. I backed the invasion, despite my published concerns about anarchy in the event of a flawed strategy, in the expectation that a more liberal regime of some stable sort (not necessarily democratic) would ultimately emerge in Iraq. Given current facts, it was the wrong decision. Though, by increasing the leverage of downtrodden Shiites, and thus disturbing the complacency of calcifying Sunni police states in Egypt and Saudi Arabia—as well as turning al-Qaeda against fellow Arabs—the war has created strategic opportunities still to be exploited.

To say that the U.S. military adapted well to this challenge would be an understatement. The crucible of combat, month after month, in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq, in which American troops sometimes went from urban street fighting on one day to trying to get water and electricity hooked up the next, invigorated further the character and quality of the armed services, particularly the Army, despite the damage done to it in other ways by the manpower strain that Iraq imposed. And the better the Americans fought, the better relief workers they became, as the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 would demonstrate. For the logistics of humanitarian assistance were similar to the logistics of war: both demanded fast infiltration and the movement of men and equipment to a zone of activity. It was all about access. The official Marine motto might be “Semper Fidelis,” but the unofficial one was “Semper Gumby,” always flexible.

By igniting a long and bloody struggle that no one in the military wanted to repeat, the overreach in Iraq by civilians in Washington spurred men in uniform to want to increasingly manage the world through quiet alliances on one hand and the use of host-country proxies on the other. That, in turn, required greater emphasis on stealth and small units composed of extraordinary individuals, and on austere dirt outposts rather than on big legacy bases that themselves had become the cause of political friction.

The smaller the American military footprint and the less notice it drew from the outside world, the more effective would be the operation. Get in before a problem began to fester, when you had the leeway to experiment and make mistakes without suffering a loss of prestige. It was the military side of crisis prevention. The way to avoid future quagmires was to be engaged in more places, not fewer. Whereas a few hundred Special Forces troops as in Colombia and the Philippines could be effective force multipliers, and 20,000 as in Afghanistan could tread water, 150,000 as in Iraq constituted a mess.

Obviously, Iraq could have used many more troops. Once a decision was made to invade and occupy a country, well, then an overwhelming force was preferable. But small, well-chosen numbers remained a practical approach for train-and-equip and stabilization deployments almost everywhere else, in order to minimize the need for large conventional invasions in the first place.

As one general officer in the Pentagon told me, “After Iraq, we hope not to be invading a big country for a long time, so we’ll be reduced to low-profile raiding, which the U.S. military has a very long and venerable tradition of from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” It was no accident that throughout my travels, officers and NCOs, who inhabited a tactical universe rather than a strategic one, told me that they found more benefit in studying the nineteenth-century Indian Wars in North America than the two world wars combined, for the former had featured mobile attack sequences, quick strikes, and ambushes and skirmishes where combat was a matter of surprise more than of large-scale maneuver.⁵ Small-unit combat, again, a world of junior officers and NCOs.

A military was only as good as the courses taught at its staff schools, and a whole generation of officers and enlistees, again especially from the Army, was returning from combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq with lessons learned to revitalize curriculums. Through it all, through the course of natural disasters like the tsunami and a badly planned occupation, as well as Special Operations deployments in dozens upon dozens of countries, the all-volunteer U.S. military was producing a caste of long-serving veterans who could govern as well as fight, accustomed to both civilian-style management and urban combat. Before 9/11, this military had enjoyed a relatively comfortable, peacetime lifestyle with only certain units sent to dangerous hellholes.[1] That period in American military history seemed over.

Leon Uris, a former Marine drill instructor, as well as a radio operator during the World War II landings at Guadalcanal and Tarawa, begins his first novel, Battle Cry, with a soliloquy by a salty veteran that, in fact, reveals the mindset of America’s expeditionary military a half century after he wrote these lines:

America’s global military footprint, as I’ve indicated, was made up of not only soldiers and marines, but of sailors and airmen, too. Whereas from 2002 through the middle of 2004, the time frame of Imperial Grunts, I concentrated mainly on unconventional land forces, this book includes long interludes with the Navy and the Air Force, as well as with the conventional Army. It wasn’t just Humvees that I needed to travel inside of, but also destroyers, nuclear submarines, bomber planes, and Stryker combat vehicles.

And whereas the first two years of my travels with the military were usually clustered around the Greater Middle East and its shadow zones (from the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan), the scene in the course of this volume shifts to the Pacific, over which loomed the challenge of a rising China, as well as of a still-divided Korea. Indeed, it seemed that the ultimate strategic effect of the Iraq war might be to speed up the arrival of the Asian Century not just in economic terms, but in military terms, too. While the American government was distracted by Iraq, and Europe’s defense establishments continued to be budget-starved, Asian militaries—China’s, Japan’s, India’s, and so forth—were quietly enlarging and modernizing, even as their economic leaders became more and more integrated among themselves and with the rest of the world. If the development of Asian militaries was anything to go by, the Middle East was now, the Pacific the future.

But I begin the second part of my travels, from 2004 to 2006, with marines in West Africa. Traveling back and forth between Africa and the Pacific quickly would become a pattern for me.