Odysseus in America (40 page)

Many of the derailed lives of veterans and their families would have been preserved, I believe, if every service member going into harm's way
and his or her family
had enjoyed the social support and resources of a good military unit association. At every step—adjustment to military life, the family's experience of the service member's deployment, the service member's own and the family's experience of return from deployment (especially if it's been a dangerous one), recognizing and coping with psychological and physical injury, making the transition to civilian life, networking in civilian life and educating employers, again, recognizing and coping with psychological and physical injuries, practical assistance in obtaining health and governmental services—every one of these would benefit from a vibrant military unit association.

Unit associations could enter into seamless partnership with the family support programs on our military bases, thus taking advantage of the added wisdom from the families of former members of the unit who still live nearby. Members of the unit association could receive training as peer counselors. This would both help destigmatize psychological injury and provide a confidential and knowledgeable source for treatment referrals, if needed. It would also reduce the sense of isolation that psychologically injured service members and recently separated veterans often suffer.

While the mass membership veterans' service organizations have many advantages that come from their size alone, I believe that they have not been as effective as unit associations can be in providing continuity of support during the transition from active duty to veteran status. For combat veterans, generalized fellowship does not easily substitute for the shared experience and shared narrative of the unit association—common
identity. But there is no need for unit associations and mass membership veterans service organizations to be adversarial. They can and should be synergistic and mutually supporting.

Thus, sound unit associations can be an effective and efficient means of delivering
both prevention and restoration.

In the wake of any war, these unit associations will be noisy, demanding, and make themselves a thorn in the side of bureaucrats and politicians. Many civilian bureaucrats nervously view these groups as nearly criminal gangs because of their lack of docile gratitude. But the peer acknowledgment, social recognition, and practical support that unit associations provide should be treasured, not feared.

Historically minded readers may remember with a shudder the proto-Nazi Freikorps death squads, which destabilized the Weimar Republic in Germany after World War I, and may wonder how I could be advocating the encouragement of military unit associations. Historical research indicates that it was precisely those German World War I veterans who were demobilized
as individuals,
not as units, who gravitated to the Freikorps.
⁴⁴
Their alienation, bitterness, and boredom crystallized into street violence, extortion, murder, and political terrorism.

Unit associations are no single magic bullet. The reception of returning veterans by the local community, abundant and combat-trauma-aware vocational and educational programs, employer education and support, and community-based, veteran-based treatment programs with early, assertive, and persistent outreach to psychologically injured veterans, all form part of the complete picture. What I am saying is hardly more than a restatement of what World War I veteran Waller said near the close of World War II.
⁴⁵
Will we never put into practice what we learn from our own experience?

There is relatively little public awareness of the extent to which the U.S. armed services reformed themselves in the wake of the Vietnam War. Journalist James Kitfield devoted his 1995 book to this story:
Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War.
⁴⁶
The Army's COHORT program was a direct product of this self-reform process—now undone. But something that so far has largely
not
been undone is the revolution in training made by the generation of officers who stayed in after the Vietnam War.
⁴⁷
The most visible legacy of these reforms is the combat training centers with resident
opposing force (OPFOR) units. If I concentrate on the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, it is because of my greater familiarity with it. But I believe that what I have to say is true of all the combat training centers, as well as the air combat equivalents at Nellis Air Force Base and Fallon Naval Air Station.

The visiting units are typically thoroughly whipped by the highly skilled—
but low-tech-equipped—
opposing forces (OPFORs).

Colonel John Rosenberger, recent commander of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the OPFOR at the National Training Center, rhetorically asks:

How does OPFOR develop and sustain its ability to fight and defeat its opponents in almost every battle at the National Training Center? How does the regiment, fighting with 1960s-1970s technology, routinely defeat brigade task forces equipped with the most modern weapon systems and technology our Army can provide?
⁴⁸

His answer is mainly in terms of the training that the 11th ACR troopers receive at all levels, from private to colonel.

As with cohesion, I do not make cheap hyperbole when I call training a combat strength
multiplier.
Excellent training engages the whole person: mind, body, emotions, character, and spirit. It prepares for the demands and stresses of war and other situations with mortal stakes. Therefore, at all levels it must be “tough” and realistic.
⁴⁹

The particular content of training experience to which “toughness” applies varies with the technical content and military role the trainees are being prepared for and with rank. All roles need training to perform effectively in the face of physical danger and to perform ethically in the face of moral danger. The relative proportions of physical and moral danger may tend to change according to rank, but in the interconnected modern world no enlisted man or woman is too low to be released from moral strain or the need for moral understanding. Former Marine Corps Commandant Charles C. Krulak spoke of the “strategic corporal,” whose “maturity, restraint, and judgment” can influence foreign policy outcomes at the strategic level.
⁵⁰
And no officer is too high to be sheltered from the dangers of attack.

It's not often that the words “ethics” and “training” show up in the same sentence, and similarly infrequent, the words “competence” and “ethics.”
Mention of ethics puts us in a Sunday-go-to-church frame of mind, and competence is something for the workplace and the professions. Put “ethics” with “workplace,” and the mind usually goes to sex, lies, and stealing money—still no thought of competence. I hope to persuade you that competence is an
ethical
imperative in military service.

The basic argument is simple: lives and devastating wounds are at stake in military performance, ranging from the private beside you who might not know how to handle a grenade safely, to millions of lives at risk from weapons of mass destruction. The mortal stakes of military service means that without competence there can be no trust—in peers, in subordinates, in seniors, in self. No more than a surgeon can be excused for failure to achieve and maintain skill and knowledge by simply meaning well, no service member of any rank can be excused from the responsibility to know his or her stuff.

Of course
there are moments in war, in dangerous emergencies, and in exercises simulating war, when instant obedience is required. For example, fire fighting in a burning ship cannot be suspended for a chief petty officer to answer “why” questions, but those providing training in these essential activities must know why, and convey enough of this rationality to permit their sailors to build habits of obedience on well-founded trust. Obedience based on well-founded trust in the competence and integrity of the senior is much more reliable than the reflex of blind obedience based on fear. Integrity also means that institutional powers to reward or punish are only employed for the good of the training or the good of the trainees, never for the private personal interests of the trainer. If a trainer uses power to coerce a private gain, be it sexual, financial, or careerist, the whole body of trainees—sometimes the whole service—is injured.
There are no private wrongs in the abuse of military authority.
In some instances the moral fabric of the whole service is damaged, and the trust and respect of the nation are impaired. In training no less than in military operations, all personnel watch the trustworthiness of those who wield power over them.

What service members need at every level is moral knowledge, as well as technical knowledge.

Every atrocity strengthens the enemy and potentially disables the service member who commits it. The distinction between lawful combatant (who may thus be legally and morally attacked) and protected person is the bright line between soldier and murderer. The overwhelming majority of people who volunteer for our armed services are not psychopaths; they are good people who will be seared by knowing themselves
to be murderers. You do not “support our service men” by mocking the law of land warfare and calling it a joke.

Francis Lieber's 1863 “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field” (the Lieber Code) expressed what I believe to be the continuing consensus of serious military professionals: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.” Even tough-guy gunslingers in the ground forces, and all those whose ideals includes “supporting our troops,” have good reason, based on national self-interest, to respect and support the rules of war. Everyone who thinks that repeating “there are no rules” demonstrates patriotic support for the troops should think again.

It's easy to make the case that excellence in military leadership is a combat strength multiplier. Proving that such excellence protects the troops from psychological injury is harder, especially since this is the least studied of the three protective components—cohesion, training, leadership. Because of the powerful correlation between the rates of psychiatric casualties with physical casualties, it's plausible to expect that data connecting leadership performance with physical casualties can be generalized to mind wounds:

Data from the Vietnam war covering 34 maneuver battalions in 5 Army divisions and separate brigades in the years 1965 and 1966 indicate that, “maneuver battalions under experienced commanders (6 months or more in command) suffered battle deaths in sizeable skirmishes at only ⅔ the rate of units under battalion commanders with less than 6 months in command.”
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The scarcity of empirical studies on the relationship between leadership and psychological injury is startling. Reuven Gal, former chief psychologist of the Israel Defense Forces, and his U.S. Army co-author, Colonel Franklin Jones, could do little more than assert their intuition in this, because the data connecting leadership performance and psychological injury rates have never been systematically gathered:

The soldier's confidence in the commander is also critical in protecting him from overwhelming battle stress…. [This confidence derives from] (1) belief in the professional competence of the commander, (2) belief in
his credibility, and (3) the perception that he cares about his troops. While in garrison all three components are equally important; in combat trust in the commander's professional competence becomes primary.
⁵²

These authors visualize the commander as a giant lens that focuses battlefield, unit, and individual factors into the soldier's appraisal of the combat situation, which in turn determines the soldier's success or failure in coping.

During the period of military self-reform described above, the Army Chief of Staff, Edward “Shy” Meyer, attempted to implant a culture of leadership that he called “positive leadership”:
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• Make it safe to tell the truth.

• Support subordinate leaders' professional growth.

• Trust them and work hard to assure their success.

• Assign missions without prescribing the means to accomplish them.

• Provide situations in which subordinate leaders practice what they've learned.

• Build their competence to assess situations and take the initiative to develop adaptive solutions.

• Mentor, rather than intimidate, subordinate leaders.

• Refrain from meddling in their spheres of responsibility.

• Require subordinate leaders to study their profession.

• Take responsibility for setting mission and priorities, not assigning every task as “highest priority, to be done immediately.”

• Listen to subordinate leaders' feedback on time budgets and resources, supporting realistic time management.

• Support self-maintenance, rather than defeat it.

In a painful historical irony, General Meyer was trying to undo the de facto leadership culture that came out of World War II: expectation of instant, blind obedience from subordinates. While demanding blind obedience and micromanaging their subordinates, American leaders were fond of making speeches to them and to the public about democracy and individual initiative. Here's the irony: the leadership practices listed above were brought to their fullest development by the Germans, who were
not
then practitioners of political democracy. The Israelis, who
do
practice political democracy, also follow these “German” leadership practices. In several important ways, the Communist Chinese in Korea also followed these practices at the small-unit level. My point is that there is
no
useful correlation between the leadership culture of a military organization
and the large-scale political culture of the nation that creates it. Conventional wisdom holds that military organizations mirror the culture of the nations that create them. This is like the truth pronounced by the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece: it may not mean what you think it means. The culturally prestigious ideas that the U.S. armed services imported from the civilian sector were the ideas of “scientific management,” not empowering subordinates or the “democratic” spirit of valuing the insight and collective wisdom of the lowly NCOs.