Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

ENDNOTES

1

The Department of Utah included parts of present-day Colorado and Nevada; the Department of California included Arizona; Oregon included Washington and Idaho; and the West most of the central and northern Great Plains.

2

The term “quiet professionals” was coined by Army Special Forces commander Maj. Gen. Leroy Suddath in the 1980s.

3

For a nostalgic firsthand account of Indian operations on the Great Plains between the Mexican and Civil wars, see Percival G. Lowe’s Five Years a Dragoon (’49 to ’54) (1906; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).

4

“The White Man’s Burden” was a poem written by Kipling to urge the United States to intervene in the Philippines in 1899. It is essentially an idealistic poem, though it has often been quoted out of context.

5

See N. Scott Momaday’s terse description of the warrior ideal, in Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 10. Momaday was referring not to Remington’s work, but to that of the photographer Curtis. It is a small but interesting fact that members of the 101st Airborne Division, in preparation for their parachute drop on D-Day, shaved themselves in Mohawk style and applied war paint on their faces (Airborne Special Operations Museum, Fayetteville, North Carolina).

6

British historian Niall Ferguson, in a reference to the American position in the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century, puts it another way: “The technology of overseas rule may have changed—the Dreadnoughts may have given way to F-15s. But like it or not, and deny it who will, empire is as much a reality today as it was throughout the three hundred years when Britain ruled, and made, the modern world.” Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 370.

7

World Bank estimates.

8

For a blow-by-blow account of United Nations military incompetence in Sierra Leone see Damien Lewis’s Operation Certain Death (London: Century, 2004).

9

Women did not serve in the Special Operations community.

10

See Richard H. Shultz Jr.’s The Secret War Against Hanoi: The Untold Story of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) (footnote 6) for a lucid analysis of the problems of unconventional war in Vietnam, and of Kennedy’s attraction to it.

11

Mexico is covered by Northern Command.

12

SOUTHCOM provided a fifteen-man Special Forces Mobile Training Team to train a Bolivian Ranger battalion, which killed Guevara. Guevara had hoped that the U.S. would respond with a massive gringo intervention; in fact, Washington’s response was measured. Guevara’s company made the additional mistake of trying to recruit native Bolivian Indians whose Quechua and Aymara languages they didn’t speak. See John D. Waghelstein, “Ruminations of a Pachyderm or What I Learned in the Counter-insurgency Business,” Small Wars and Insurgencies (London: Cass, Winter 1994), p. 362.

13

The Special Forces operation in El Salvador was certainly not a complete success; nor were many aspects of the Vietnam War a failure. Moreover, the congressionally imposed limit of 55 SF trainers at any one time—a reflection of the Vietnam syndrome—was not always adhered to; in fact, the real number on the ground was often higher. Still, it was an exceedingly small number. The U.S. approach to El Salvador showed that as much help as the U.S. gives a besieged ally in a small war, ultimately, military and humanitarian assistance must operate under a reasonably strict ceiling, so that the war remains the ally’s to win or lose.

14

For diplomatic reasons, it was politically unacceptable for SOUTHCOM to have a forward operating base inside Colombia. Thus, it was technically a battalion headquarters and not an FOB, though that’s what everyone called it.

15

Douglas Porch, professor of strategy at the Naval War College, in his 1996 introduction to Col. C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), notes that a key feature of imperialism is the use of host country or “client” armies in place of one’s own.

16

According to The Economist, “The harder-jawed a region, the likelier it is to put its young into the army. The generally Republican, pro-gun south contributes a lot more soldiers than the Democratic north-east, both in absolute numbers and percentages of the regional population. A Texan is eight times more likely to be in uniform than a New Yorker.” Mar. 22, 2003, p. 28.

17

A. J. Simons, The Company They Keep: Life Inside the U.S. Army Special Forces (New York: Free Press, 1997), pp. 189–90. The author writes that some noncom families live in trailers and turn on the heat only at night in the winter. “Others heated with wood they chopped themselves.”

18

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19

See David Brooks’s insightful commentary about the reduced sense of self in the part of America that voted for George Bush in the 2000 election: “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 2001, p. 63.

20

“Humvee” is, in fact, another acronym: high mobility multi-wheeled vehicle.

21

This is one of the themes in Shultz’s The Secret War Against Hanoi.

22

This included my colleague at The Atlantic Monthly, Michael Kelly, who gave his life for the enterprise. Embedded with the 3rd Infantry, he was killed April 3, 2003, on the outskirts of Baghdad.

23

SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused panic in Asia in the spring of 2003. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that the masks were of only minimal help, yet the Mongolian authorities insisted that everyone wear them.

24

The black berets were introduced by the then–Army Chief of Staff, Eric Shinseki.

25

As it happened, that prediction proved correct for Operation Iraqi Freedom, but not for the insurgency that followed.

26

The Siberian city of Chita, northeast of Mongolia, was reportedly 40 percent ethnic Chinese by 2003.

27

When Zinni’s term ended, he was succeeded by Army Gen. Tommy Franks.

28

But it must be said that Fleming was no slouch at hunting. Much of what he ate in his journey across China he had shot himself. He would die tragically in a hunting accident in Scotland at the age of sixty-four.

29

Marine Maj. Gen. Holland McTyeire (“Howling Mad”) Smith is the father of amphibious training of the U.S. armed forces. Before the outbreak of World War II, the Alabama-born general foresaw the need for U.S. soldiers and marines to land on enemy beaches in the face of hostile fire. See Robert Sherrod’s Tarawa: The Story of a Battle (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), pp. 133–34.

30

The Northeast certainly has military facilities—the Hanscom Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts; the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York; the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island; and so on. Nevertheless, no military facility in the Northeast serves as the home of thousands of uniformed troops and their families, and none has generated a retirement community of former military men and women, as bases in the heartland and in the South have.

31

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld considered this imbalance irrelevant, arguing that troops everywhere belonged to him and the President, to be moved around as they saw fit. But outside Washington, the proprietary attitude with which the various area commands referred to their troops was striking. Also, Rumsfeld’s argument presupposed a powerful defense secretary as well as a president focused constantly on military matters. As the 1990s showed, a less forceful defense secretary coupled with a distracted president allowed some area commanders to become barons in their own theaters.

32

Though the Korean Peninsula was technically under its own separate command from PACOM, it was the centerpiece of any regional strategy.

33

It was also testament to the fact that under Spanish rule, administration of the Philippines was often subcontracted out to Mexicans.

34

In fact, a Chinese shipping company held the contract for operating the ports at both ends of the Panama Canal.

35

Foreign Minister Ople died a few months after I met him.

36

SEALs: Sea, Air, and Land, the Navy’s equivalent of Delta Force. SAS: Special Air Service, an elite commando team.

37

Ramón Magsaysay was the Philippine minister of national defense and later the country’s president. In the early 1950s, helped by an American covert action program, he mounted a successful counterinsurgency campaign against the communist Huk guerrillas in Luzon.

38

The Philippine Armed Forces later tracked al-Ghozi down and killed him.

39

The comparison between extremist Islam and the granite-like ideology of Soviet communism was made by Bernard-Henri Levy in Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2003).

40

The Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force was specifically promoted by President Carter’s hawkish national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. See Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 43.

41

William Cohen later served as the secretary of defense in the second administration of President Bill Clinton.

42

In 2003 it was $5 billion out of a total defense budget of $364.7 billion, or 1.8 percent. About one third of that $5 billion was for salaries.

43

A burka is a loose-fitting, all-enveloping cloak with veiled eye slits that devout Muslim women wear in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

44

Close air support, during Operation Enduring Freedom in the fall of 2001, involved the much more high-tech AC-130 Spectre gunships, which were converted cargo planes.

45

Also killed in the incident were Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser of California and the team sergeant, Master Sgt. Jefferson Davis of Tennessee. Robin Moore’s book The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger (New York: Random House, 2003) fills a significant gap in war coverage by detailing this and much else.

46

The sector of Bagram where the JSOTF was located was called “Camp Vance,” after Sgt. First Class Gene Arden Vance, a West Virginia National Guardsman killed in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area in May 2002.

47

See the Prologue, p. 10.

48

The Economist, Mar. 22, 2003, p. 28. (Also footnoted in Chapter 2, p. 56.) In fact, that statistic was inflated because tax laws encouraged many troops to declare their residence in those two states. The real truth is that many more came from other states of the Old South, and fewer from Texas and Florida.

49

In the history of modern imperialism this was not unusual. At the turn of the twentieth century in the Sahara Desert, the French military found it necessary to shift from “sedentary infantry to mobile, camel-mounted troops.” Douglas Porch, The Conquest of the Sahara (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 251.

50

Pro-Soviet Afghan rulers Nur Mohammed Taraki, Hafizullah Amin, and Najibullah, and anti-Soviet radical mujahedin leaders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Rasul Sayyaf were all Ghilzais, prompting one expert to note that in the latter part of the twentieth century power in Afghanistan had passed from the Durrani Pushtuns to the Ghilzai Pushtuns. See Ludwig W. Adamec’s Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan (London: Scarecrow, 1997), pp. 123–24.

51

Johnston was one of a handful of 19th Group National Guardsmen at Gardez. Because 19th Group is Utah-based, its ranks are filled with westerners.

52

Maulvi is a Pushtun honorific to denote a respected imam or religious personage.

53

The Hazaras are a people of Mongolian origin who live in the mountains of central Afghanistan, and were converted to Shiism several hundred years ago by the Safavid rulers of Iran.

54

Some weeks later, Special Forces finally got permission for a direct hit on Jalani’s compound. Because it was part of a larger, more conventional offensive, Jalani might have been tipped off in advance and was not found at the compound. The intelligence provided to Special Forces indicated that there were no noncombatants inside, but there was a heavy machine gun which could have destroyed the U.S. helicopters taking part in the mission. Tragically, the intelligence was wrong—there was a group of children in the compound who were killed in the attack. Special Forces captured large amounts of explosives in the attack. Because of the attack, many people in the area began turning in their arms caches for destruction. Among the items recovered were five complete, functional SA-7 portable surface-to-air missiles.

55

The more familiar, Arabic term is qanat.

56

At the time of his death, Sweeney was promotable to sergeant first class.

57

Sgt. Sadler, an 18 Delta medic in Vietnam, also wrote a song, “Spit and Polish,” making fun of REMFs who cared only about what a soldier looked like.

58

Obviously, military correspondents—a small part of the media—were an exception to this rule.

59

Greater New England means New England proper and regions of the country like the northern Midwest and parts of the Pacific Northwest that had been settled by New En-glanders. See Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999). Chapter 4 presents a penetrating, statistically backed exegesis on the religious, ethnic, and regional divisions over Vietnam and other American wars. For a more general but equally profound observation on the differences between the South and the North regarding military affairs, see Samuel P. Huntington’s mid-twentieth-century classic The Soldier and theState: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 211–21.

60

Nearly a year later, an Annenberg Public Policy Center study concluded that 51 percent of the military thought it proper to show flag-draped coffins of troops: a much lower percentage, I suspect, than civilians in New England. Also note that the Special Forces and marine infantry communities tend to be more conservative than other branches of the armed services.

61

This idea was not exclusively mine, but originated in comments made by Gen. Geoff Lambert, former commander of all Green Berets before becoming commandant of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center.

62

The Coast Guard fell under the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

63

“Rack” is the naval term for bunk. The Marines, being part of the fleet, use Navy lingo.

64

This was a useful simplification. For example, while a company had three “line” platoons, there was often a fourth “weapons” platoon. Moreover, fire teams had four men almost as often as three.

65

Platoons in the Marine Corps, like Special Forces A-teams, varied in size. With only twenty-nine marines, this was a small platoon.

66

MOPP: mission-oriented protective posture—gear for chemical and biological attacks.

67

At retirement gatherings, marines who had known each other all their lives still addressed each other by rank.

68

The gunnery sergeant was also the last rank in the Marine Corps before the noncom command structure branched off: toward the leadership-oriented sergeant major and the technical-oriented master sergeant.

69

The Ranger Handbook was the smart sheet for individual tasks; its equivalent was the Guidebook for Marines. The FMFM 6-5 concentrated on squad-level operations.

70

Indeed, a religious map of the region put out by the Pentagon showed Eritrea as a separate category all its own, with a single national identity rather than separate religious identities.

71

The reputation for crime was somewhat undeserved because crime was limited mainly to Nairobi.

72

Whereas Maj. Gen. Mattis, a two-star general, commanded the ground combat ele-ment of I MEF, the MEF itself was commanded by Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, a three-star general.

73

The Marines were a naval force; the medics in each Marine platoon were not marines but “Navy corpsmen,” hence the reference to sailors.

74

Lt. Gen. Griffith also earned the Navy Cross on Guadalcanal in September 1942 for “extreme heroism.”

75

Michael Gordon, New York Times, Dec. 12, 2003. Gordon adds: In the Al-Fallujah area, the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division had been replaced by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was replaced in turn by the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry, which handed it back to the 3rd Armored Cavalry and then back to the 82nd Airborne again.

76

Just as this book was going to press, Gunner Bednarcik—back in Iraq for the third time in the spring of 2005—was badly wounded and recovering at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

77

The size of the state indicated the size of the various cement barricades, Jersey being the smallest and Alaska the largest.

78

Senator Barry Goldwater, Republican, of Arizona; Representative Bill Nichols, Democrat, of Alabama.

79

The situation was more complicated than that, however. Saddam, by drafting significant numbers of people into the military and hiring many on public works projects, weakened the traditional sheikhs even as he co-opted them. See Patrick Graham’s “Beyond Fallujah: A Year with the Iraqi Resistance,” Harpers, June 2004.

80

Apparently, the term “Ali Baba” was coined by American soldiers who preceded the Marines here, and was picked up on by local kids. See Graham’s “Beyond Fallujah.”

81

Several weeks later, after assaulting parts of Al-Fallujah, Bravo Company and other elements of 1/5 returned to Al-Karmah. They lived in the community, patrolled regularly, talked to people, collected information, and made some progress toward reclaiming the town.

82

Army Special Forces called night vision goggles “NODs” (night optical devices).

83

The One Shop was Administration, the Two Shop Intelligence, the Four Shop Logistics, and so forth. All were headed by first lieutenants, except for the Three, which was headed by a major, reflecting the preeminence of Operations.

84

Pronounced New-ark, to distinguish it from Newark, New Jersey.

85

Actually, one of the finest expositions of the chieftain phenomenon can be found in Bing West’s 1972 classic about Vietnam, The Village (New York: Pocket Books), pp. 328–29: “In Dai Loc district… one night in early November the VC had laid waste several villages with the thoroughness and savagery of Apache raiders, despite the nearby presence of a Marine battalion. As a consequence of the fear thus instilled, the people afterward refused even American medcaps for their wounds. One general thought that the disruption proved his point that the people went with the winner—the incident at Dai Loc had happened because the people had not been provided security. ‘Give them security,’ he said, ‘and they’ll give you information and cooperation.’”

86

Preliminary intelligence given the Marines at the time indicated that there may have been a few individuals inside Al-Fallujah who had fought in the places Byrne mentioned.

87

Belleau Wood was where the Germans gave the Marines their notorious nickname, Teufel-Hunden (devil dogs).

88

This was in addition to the dozens of soldiers killed and more than 500 wounded.

89

The coverage of My Lai did not appear until revelations began to surface in late 1969.

90

The AC-130 in particular is a magnificent asset, an attack cargo plane designed to fly for hours at a time above the battlefield, carrying tens of thousands of pounds of ammunition for its 25mm and 40mm guns. Because it can hover for hours, its crew gets to understand the battle space, talk to the ground-based forward air controllers, and be intimately involved in the fight. The Big Air Force is no fan of this rather antiquated plane. But old-fashioned counterinsurgency is part of the U.S. military’s future. Thus, the AC-130 could continue to prove more useful than some of the high-tech jets and other gizmos in the Air Force’s arsenal.

91

C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 52–54. The fact that the U.S. military needed to adapt to such frustrations of counterinsurgency was somewhat ironic, given that unconventional guerrilla warfare had been part of the American military tradition since the French and Indian War of the mid-eighteenth century. On the western slopes of the Appalachians, English settlers mustered light infantry, ranger, and reconnaisance units, often small and nimble, working with Indian auxiliaries against the French and their Indian allies. And that tradition did not die, for the American Revolution itself, not to mention the many small wars that followed, saw the U.S. military fight both as insurgents and as counterinsurgents. It was only the two world wars, with their emphasis on mass infantry movements, that finally obscured this vitally useful legacy, forcing it to be painfully relearned in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. See Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 411.

92

See James Fallows’s 1975 essay in The Washington Monthly “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” He describes a busload of Harvard draftees at the Boston Navy Yard armed with carefully manipulated medical records to show their lack of fitness for duty, while another busload of working-class kids from Chelsea went smoothly through the induction process. See, too, Peter Beinart’s “Two Countries,” The New Republic Online, May 5, 2004. There is also Swarthmore professor James Kurth’s “The Late American Nation” (The National Interest, Fall 2004). He explains that the global economy began producing business and cultural elites in the early twentieth century, but was stopped in its tracks by World War I, a worldwide economic depression, and World War II. By the 1960s, however, this globalization process resumed, with the rebirth of transnational identities. The sixties’ youth revolt was a partial consequence of that.