Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

^PROLOGUE INJUN COUNTRY

He was a lieutenant colonel in the First Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF as it is written, and One MEF as it is spoken) stationed at Camp Pendleton, California. I met him before he left for the Persian Gulf in the autumn of 2002. He had just been injected with anthrax vaccine, and had been taking malaria pills for many months of his life, during missions to Africa to train local armies. He told me that in the markets of the Congo–Brazzaville condoms were used as sacks for “pencils, fruits, everything except what they’re supposed to be used for”; that tribal patronage, not merit, often decided promotion in the Kenyan army; that North Korean diplomats in Africa received little financial support from their government, and in order to be self-sufficient dealt in drugs and prostitution. His skin was the color of clay under his high-and-tight crew cut, with taut cheeks and a get-it-done expression: an ancient sculpture in digital camouflage, except for the point of light in his eyes. The Romans, by their rites of purification, accepted and justified the world as it was, with all its cruelty. The Americans, heir to the Christian tradition, seek what is not yet manifest: the higher ideal. Thus, he was without cynicism. Rather, his honesty made self-delusion impossible.

“The century is only two years old,” he told me, “and look at what’s happened. That al-Qaeda incident on September 11 was somewhat significant. But we may have nuclear attacks and disease outbreaks that will take many more lives, and which will get us deeply involved on the ground in countries still obscure to us, the way September 11 got us involved in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is those involvements-to-come that will shape the course of the new century.”

Indeed, by the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice.

The Pentagon divided the planet into five area commands—similar to the way that the Indian Country of the American West had been divided in the mid-nineteenth century by the U.S. Army. Instead of the military departments of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, California, Oregon, and the West, now there was Northern Command, or NORTHCOM; Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM; European Command, or EUCOM; Central Command, or CENTCOM; and Pacific Command, or PACOM.¹[1] For example, at the corner of 5 degrees latitude and 68 degrees longitude, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, CENTCOM gave way to PACOM, just as EUCOM gave way to CENTCOM at the Turkish-Iranian border.

This map bore uncanny resemblance to one drawn in 1931 for the German military by Professor Karl Haushofer, a leading father of Geopolitik. The United States, having vanquished Germany’s budding world empire in World War II, now had operational requirements for maintaining its own.

But according to the soldiers and marines I met on the ground in the far-flung corners of the earth, the comparison with the nineteenth century was more apt. “Welcome to Injun Country” was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. To be sure, the problem for the American military was less fundamentalism than anarchy. The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier. But the fascination with Indian Country was never meant as a slight against Native North Americans. Rather, the reverse. The fact that radio call signs often employed Indian names was but one indication of the troops’ reverence for them.

This map left no point of the earth’s surface unaccounted for. Were I standing at the North Pole, where all the lines of longitude meet, I might have had one foot in NORTHCOM and the other in PACOM; or in EUCOM if I shifted a leg. After I first saw this map in the Pentagon, I stared at it for days on and off, transfixed. How could the U.S. not constitute a global military empire? I thought.

The only way to explore such a map—to know it intimately—was on foot, or in a Humvee, with the troops themselves, for even as elites in New York and Washington debated imperialism in grand, historical terms, individual marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors—all the cultural repositories of America’s unique experience with freedom—were interpreting policy on their own, on the ground, in dozens upon dozens of countries every week, oblivious to such faraway discussions.

This was true of both officers and enlisted men, for while generals were involved at the tactical level as never before, the actions of the lowliest corporals and privates could be of great strategic impact under the spotlight of the global media.² It was their stories I wanted to tell: from the ground up, at the point of contact.

Truly, the increasingly decentralized nature of command—necessary in a complex world where, for instance, each region of Afghanistan required a different approach to the local militia—was giving enlisted men unprecedented decision-making powers. Such responsibility required a firm, moral belief system, of which secular patriotism could form but a part. Thus I was interested in religion, and once on base went to as many religious services as I could.

I was less concerned with war and conquest than with imperial maintenance on the ground, and seeking a rule book for its application. The project would take years. I had the earth to roam. It could not be the work of one book but of several.

Here is the first.

But before I recount my odyssey through the barracks and outposts of the American Empire, I must address the issue of imperialism itself, a word with which most are uncomfortable, and about which there has been much recent debate.

Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world, and in the process to become subject to all the world’s anxieties.³ That is why empires arise at the fringes of consciousness, half in denial. By the time an imperial reality becomes truly manifest, it is a sign that the apex of empire is at hand, with a gradual retreat more likely than fresh conquests.

It is the revealed fact of empire itself that spurs those outside it to join forces in opposition. Rome never consciously thought that it was building an empire until it already had one, and had already reached the limits of its expansion in the Near East, under Trajan in the early second century.⁴ British imperialism in India reached its highest level of self-consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century, just as the British Empire was becoming impractical.⁵

Empires are works in progress, with necessity rather than glory the instigator of each outward push. The Venetian conquest of Dalmatia in 1000 began as an expedition against pirates, just as Venice’s later conquest of the Morea, the Cyclades, and the Dodecanese in Greece was a defensive measure against a Turkish advance from the west. The British acquired Bermuda in 1684 to guard a stretch of the Atlantic. They took Trincomalee in Ceylon in 1795 to help guard India, and the Yemeni port of Aden in 1839 to have a coaling station for their ships en route to India through the Suez Canal.

The American Empire progressed likewise. “As both a dream and a fact the American Empire was born before the United States,” writes Bernard De Voto, the lyrical historian of westward expansion.⁶ Following their initial settlement, and before their incorporation as states in the Union, the western territories were nothing less than imperial possessions of Washington, D.C.

The embryonic nation that hugged the eastern seaboard of North America had found it intolerable that the guns of European powers should be at its rear: the French in the Mississippi Valley, the Spanish in the Southwest, the British in Canada and the Northwest. But it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire in the western part of the continent. That destiny was brought by small groups of frontiersmen, separated from each other by great distances, making alliances with some Indian tribes and buying the neutrality of others. It was they who “provided just enough weight to turn and keep the balance American,” writes De Voto. The result, he goes on, was an imperialist drama in “delicate equipoises, constantly oscillating.”⁷ He might have been describing the American military deployments of the early twenty-first century as I experienced them, for while the entire planet was a battle space for the American military, I would learn that the fewer troops that policed it the better. Small light and lethal units of soldiers and marines, skilled in guerrilla warfare and attuned to the local environment in the way of the nineteenth-century Apaches, could accomplish more than dinosauric, industrial age infantry divisions.⁸

Despite the building of the Panama Canal—one of those rare, conscious feats of empire building, accomplished by President Theodore Roosevelt—it was also not inevitable that America should have become a preeminent global power. What would the United States have become without Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo? It was those dictators, and the men around them, who forced the U.S. out of its self-imposed isolation in order to meet the security threat posed by Nazism and Japanese militarism. The unintended consequences of successfully meeting those challenges included the encampment of the Soviet Red Army in the heart of Europe and a civil war in China that brought a communist regime to power: new threats which led to further American imperial expansion.

Four decades later, the victory over communism, like the victories over the Nazis and Japanese, led to more unintended consequences. Breaking the will of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s meant the arming of radical Islamic guerrillas, who subsequently turned against the great power that had helped sustain them: the United States. Henceforth, Islamic terrorism became the sharp edge of a seeping anarchy that followed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eurasia, and of the decomposition of states created by European empires on other continents.

Since antiquity the collapse of empires has been a messy business, and the most benign antidote to the chaos unleashed has been the birth of new imperial domains. Consequently, the turn of the twenty-first century found the United States with bases and base rights in fifty-nine countries and overseas territories, with troops on deployments from Greenland to Nigeria, and from Norway to Singapore, all this while defense appropriations amounted to only 3.3 percent of America’s gross domestic product—compared to 9.4 percent during the Vietnam War and 14.1 percent during the Korean War.⁹

Even before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command was conducting operations in 170 countries per year, with an average of nine “quiet professionals” on each mission.[2] America’s reach was long; its involvement in the obscurest states protean. Rather than the mass conscript army of citizen soldiers that fought World War II, there was now a professional military that, true to other imperial forces throughout history, enjoyed the soldiering life for its own sake.¹⁰

For many of those professional troops the twenty-first century looked strikingly similar to the middle and latter half of the nineteenth, when volunteer cavalry and dragoons subdued a panoply of mobile guerrilla forces, composed of different North American Indian tribes, operating throughout the new American empire west of the Mississippi River.[3] Whereas the average American at the dawn of the new millennium found patriotic inspiration in the legacies of the Civil War and World War II, when the evils of slavery and fascism were confronted and vanquished, for many commissioned and noncommissioned officers the U.S. Army’s defining moment was fighting the “Indians.”

The legacy of the Indian wars was palpable in the numerous military bases spread across the South, the Middle West, and particularly the Great Plains: that vast desert and steppe comprising the Army’s historical “heartland,” punctuated by such storied outposts as Forts Hays, Kearney, Leavenworth, Riley, and Sill.¹¹ Leavenworth, where the Oregon and Santa Fe trails separated, was now the home of the Army’s Command and General Staff College; Riley, the base of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry, now that of the 1st Infantry Division; and Sill, where Geronimo lived out the last years of his life, the headquarters of the U.S. Artillery.¹²

The range of Indian groups, numbering in the hundreds, that the cavalry and dragoons had to confront was no less varied than that of the warring ethnic and religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa, and South America in the early twenty-first century. It included Pawnees in Nebraska; Arapahos in eastern Colorado; Cheyennes and Aricaras in South Dakota; Crows, Blackfeet, Flatheads, Snakes, and Cayuses in the Northwest; Utes in Colorado and Utah; Comanches, Apaches, Hopis, and Navahos in the Southwest; Shoshones and Paiutes everywhere from southern California into Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming. The word “tribe” itself was an oversimplification: the Teton Dakota, or Sioux, as they were

known, who roamed from the Minnesota River to the Bighorn Mountains, were not a tribe at all but a nation composed of seven distinct groups, such as the Hunkpapas and Oglalas.

The North American Indians were a throwback to the nomadic horse peoples of the Eurasian steppe—Scythians, Turks, and Mongols—who pierced the defenses of Rome, Byzantium, and Han China.¹³ Too, they invite comparison with another imperial nemesis: the nineteenth-century Pushtuns and Afridis of the Northwest Frontier of British India, who were subdivided into various khels, and about whom a young Winston Churchill, a subaltern and newspaper correspondent, wrote, “Tribe wars with tribe. The people of one valley fight with those of the next. To the quarrels of communities are added the combats of individuals…. Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.”¹⁴

Pawnees fought Sioux and Cheyennes. Crows fought Blackfeet. Arapahos fought Shoshones and Utes. Cheyennes and Arapahos fought Comanches and Apaches. Navahos were in constant conflict with Hopis. Sioux, in their westering trek from the Great Plains to the northern Rocky Mountains, subdued a gamut of rival Indians. Yet, like the Pushtuns and Afridis, the Native Peoples of North America were also capable of uniting against the stranger. Witness the coalition of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos that defeated Custer’s 7th Cavalry on June 25, 1876, at the Little Bighorn River in Montana, marring the centennial celebration of America’s birth the following week.

Beyond the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the American military found a Hobbesian world in which internecine ethnic warfare, motivated by the competition for territory and resources, was the primary fact of life. “War is the breath of their nostrils,” observed Francis Parkman, the nineteenth-century historian, writing firsthand about the Sioux. “Against most of the neighboring tribes they cherish a rancorous hatred, transmitted from father to son, and inflamed by constant aggression and retaliation.”¹⁵

Just as the stirring poetry and novels of Rudyard Kipling celebrated the work of British imperialism in subduing the Pushtuns and Afridis of India’s Northwest Frontier, a Kipling contemporary, the American artist Frederic Remington, in his bronze sculptures and oil paintings, would do likewise for the conquest of the Wild West.

Remington, more than Francis Parkman, was the Kipling of early American imperialism, turning it from fact into heroic myth. Though lesser known than his British counterpart, Remington was a figure of enduring cultural importance to Army officers I met in the course of my travels. Like Kipling, Remington was to be uprooted from his time, judged relentlessly by modern standards, and found guilty of racism and jingoism.¹⁶ And that would be something of an irony since for both men, “the white man’s burden” meant only the righteous responsibility to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos, a mission not unlike that of the post–Cold War humanitarian interventionists.[4]

Remington rode with the troops on scouting forays. His snapshots-in-oil idealize solitary men, the essence of hardihood and endurance, caught on the naked plain. Stern-faced cavalry officers confront Indians depicted in hot red and yellow colors, their horses in full gallop. It is a world of mixed-blood scouts clad in buckskin; of mountain men and pathfinders whose “spirit of adventure… is the maker of commonwealths,” to quote that great Remington admirer Theodore Roosevelt.¹⁷ In Remington’s mythic universe, those early imperialists, the cavalry officers and pathfinders, appropriated the warrior ideal of their Indian enemy, which was marked by bravery and steadfastness.[5]

While microscopic in size, it was the fast and irregular military actions against the Indians, memorialized in bronze and oil by Remington, that shaped the nature of American nationalism.¹⁸ America’s oft-noted “optimistic ecumenicism,” the basis for peace and disarmament movements, “was largely limited to the north-east of the United States,” writes the British war historian Sir Michael Howard.¹⁹ “Further west and south,” Howard goes on in a mightily perceptive passage, quite another spirit began to predominate:

A few good men: a cliché, yet a telling fact throughout the history of American expansion. As I traveled from continent to continent with the American military in the first years of the twenty-first century, my most recurring image would be one that Remington himself might have painted: singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes.

It is also the case that as America’s pioneer spirit led it across oceans and continents, in the course of the twentieth century and into the next, American power became harder to exercise.

Despite its military might the American Empire emerged finally as more implicit than explicit, akin to Achaemenid Persia’s near the close of the fifth century B.C., when the victory of a weakened Sparta over Athens in the Peloponnesian War gave Persia nominal control of the Greek archipelago in the west, even as Persia’s eastern borderlands were insecure, partisan struggles ensued, and local alliances of convenience were necessary for military operations.

Indeed, America’s imperium was without colonies, suited to a jet-and-information age in which mass movements of people and capital diluted the meaning of sovereignty. The Americans did not establish themselves permanently on the ground in many locations as the British had, but reliance on their military equipment and the training and maintenance that went along with it (for which the international arms bazaar was often no substitute) did help bind regimes to them in another way.[6] As one historian puts it, empires can be ambiguous processes rather than formal structures in which the very opposition to imperial influence constitutes proof of its existence.²¹

To be an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century was to be present at a grand and fleeting moment, a moment that even if it lasted for several more decades would constitute but a flicker among the long march of hegemons that had calmed broad swaths of the globe. The Persian empires of the Achaemenids and the Sassanids each lasted several hundred years, as did each of five conquering Chinese dynasties, to say nothing of Rome. Byzantium lasted a millennium, as did Venice. Portuguese, Habsburg, Ottoman, and British dominance must be measured in centuries, not decades. Even the Vandal empire of Genseric dominated the Western world’s Mediterranean core for the better part of a hundred years while Rome was collapsing. Because it was a fomenter of dynamic change, a liberal empire like the United States was likely to create the conditions for its own demise, and thus to be particularly short lived.

Some denied the very fact of American empire, claiming a contradiction between an imperial strategy and America’s democratic values. They forgot that Rome, Venice, and Britain were the most morally enlightened states of their age. Venice was defined by a separation of church and state. It had a working constitution which severely limited the authority of its doges, who were unable to act without the approval of their councilors. Its humanistic outlook made Venice the only state of Catholic Europe never to burn a heretic.²² Liberalism at home and a pragmatic, at times ruthless policy abroad have not been uncommon in the history of some empires.

As it happened, the early twenty-first century saw the U.S. in the Second Expeditionary Era regarding its global military-basing posture.²³ In the First Expeditionary Era, from the buildup to the Spanish-American War to the end of World War II, the U.S. had established bases in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the North Atlantic, in order to expand its continental defense perimeter and protect new economic interests. The Cold War years constituted the Garrison Era, in which large, permanent frontier garrisons surrounding the Soviet Union were built in places like West Germany, Turkey, and the Korean Peninsula. The Second Expeditionary Era featured an emphasis on rapid mobility worldwide to deal with peacekeeping interventions, anti-terrorist strikes, and the containment of Iran and Iraq. The post–September 11 global footprint was to put further emphasis on mobility and the dispersion of forces, to deal with the twin threats of radical Islam and the rising power of China.

These strategies were all legacies of Rome, which was constantly requesting territory on foreign soil to build bases. Rome established hardened bases in ungovernable areas for the sake of deterrence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Its superior road network and control of the seas enabled the rapid relocation of its forces in large concentrations at times of crisis. Rome, like Britain, followed a doctrine of “inevitable reversibility.”²⁴ Because it knew that it could not be strong everywhere, that there would be places where it might have to withdraw ignominiously, and other places where it would not be prudent to intervene, Rome emphasized the rapid strategic reaction of its forces rather than their continual presence in too many areas.

Just as empires expand by happenstance, impelled forward by a succession of security threats, real or imagined, my journeys also followed no discernible pattern. Friendships with captains and majors helped get me to the most remote locations as much as those with colonels and generals. The American military is a worldwide fraternity. Thus people in one part of the globe led me to another part through the oddest of coincidences. A Coast Guard officer I met in Yemen would stoke my interest in Colombia. An Army officer I met in Mongolia would inform me about Bosnia. An enlisted man in the Philippines told me all about the Singaporean army. The stories themselves were evidence of a global military.

Through it all, I was not truly a war correspondent. I concentrated more on local history and scenery, because the drama of exotic new landscapes has always been central to the imperial experience. A series of books about empire—at least to some degree—had to be about travel.

The number of countries I planned to visit, while considerable, would be less important than the amount of time I spent in the barracks with the troops, and the degree to which I could be accepted by them. I wanted to see the world and their deployments from their perspective, not to judge them from mine. I wanted to devote all of my professional time to this endeavor, for half a decade at least. I wanted to cut myself off from civilians as much as possible. It was the depth and quality of an experience that I was after, particularly with the grunts.

Grunts: cannon fodder. The word best applies to Marine combat infantrymen. But in a sense even Army Special Forces sergeants belonged in the category, because of their willingness to sublimate their own identity to that of the unit. Their concern was less with their own self-preservation than with the preservation of the function they performed. If the man beside you was able to do your job, your own death would matter less. The grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial.

The security threat that had caused the latest and, perhaps, final expansion of the American Empire was especially elusive. More so than infantry phalanxes, there were now clandestine guerrilla cells of young men and occasionally women working to wreak greater destruction than most of the armies of history ever had. Thus I began in Yemen, said at the time to have the largest al-Qaeda presence anywhere outside of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Yes, Yemen was relatively little known. That was the point. A world empire meant many different places.

But before I linked up with the military, I wanted to scout out America’s latest version of Indian Country by myself: to view at ground level what it was, exactly, that the U.S. was up against. Yemen would constitute merely the long overture to my experience with the troops, rather than the experience itself.

Even in Yemen, though, I would meet an American officer or two: sometimes retired, sometimes working for an international organization, who, in keeping with the implicit nature of American imperialism, like the mountain men and pathfinders of old, was clearing new trails of expansion and influence, in his own indirect and unconscious way.