READER FEEDBACK

Comments From A Warrior In Afghanistan

“You are right about the Army having no institutional memory. Worse, most of the officers don’t even read anything. I would say that about one in twenty officers that I know even reads any military history. A lot of these young lieutenants and captains are so into chat rooms, video games and DVD’s that they are experts at PlayStation2, but probably think that Sun Tsu is some kind of dietary supplement. Our main body is based out of Bagram. Bagram has plenty of creature (read REMF) comforts. The SF and the line grunts can’t take their TV’s and Playstations to the FOB’s/firebases, so there is a little more reading going on there. Still, when I ask, “have your read . . . ?” I am almost always disappointed by the blank stares I get.”

“On a personal level, many of my peers and I did benefit from lessons learned in Vietnam in as far as what was passed down from the NCO’s and warrant officers who trained us. When I went through basic infantry training, nearly all of my drill instructors were combat vets. The same was true of most of my primary flight instructors when I started flight school. They would tell me little tricks like, ‘when you are flying near a hot LZ, get in a level attitude and set the force trim before you go in. That way if the guy on the controls gets shot, the other guy will have a couple of seconds to take over.’ That kind of important stuff was never in any of our FM’s. When my infantry drill sergeant caught a guy smoking a cigarette during night training, he literally smacked him in the helmet with his rifle butt. You don’t forget shit like that. I was right next to the guy, and I heard the POW. He wasn’t hurt, but both of us were scared as hell. I was just glad that I was a non-smoker. He told another guy that he was going to “fuck him up the ass” if he wore perfume on a patrol again. Unfortunately, those guys are all gone now—and a drill would never get away with that kind of stuff these days.”

“From what I’ve read about Vietnam—and I’ve read quite a lot—I do think that the Army has come a long way since then. I wasn’t impressed with Schwartzkopf or most of the leaders we had in the Gulf, but I think that on the bottom side (E-1 to O-5) we have some well trained folks (although, sadly, my O-5 in the Gulf was a worthless piece of shit). I have worked for more good battalion commanders than bad ones. And most of the NCO’s continue to impress me.”

“I don’t know if there is any great fix to the green lieutenant thing. Even when I was in the paratroops in Europe, most of my lieutenants were clueless. But we had great NCO’s. Those NCO’s seemed to let the LT’s learn on their own until they were about to do something that was unsafe or completely fucked up. Then they would tactfully square them away. I remember humping through the woods all night in a German winter because we were completely lost. Finally, our platoon sergeant got fed up and took the map from the LT and took us to our PZ so we wouldn’t miss the birds. If the shit would have hit the fan and one of those LT’s were calling for fire, it might have been scary. But things weren’t much better in WWII or Korea on that score, were they? SF doesn’t let any green LT’s have teams—only warrants and captains. In aviation, though, we give a 1LT or 2LT supervision of four or five aircraft and crews (not in special ops aviation, though). Those same LT’s don’t even have enough time to be aircraft commanders. They are boss of the platoon while a warrant officer is boss of their aircraft. Doesn’t make much sense to me. It all has to do with ticket punching and rotating commissioned officers through all of the right billets.”

“I also agree with you that small unit basics are the most important things to focus on for future ops. I just got two new E-3 over here that are great with Powerpoint, but neither one of them can do even basic stuff. They have been working up at regimental HQ for the past year doing details. What skimpy skills they had are just about gone. It was the same when I was an instructor pilot. The schoolhouse would stress the advanced stuff when the guys coming out of flight school couldn’t even tell me the maximum effective range of their primary weapons systems. It’s always the basic stuff that fucks up operations. People can’t talk on the radio or can’t read a map. They don’t know their weapons inside and out or they don’t take care of them. We don’t train the basics nearly enough.”

“As far as how things are going over here—there’s not much new to report. The bad guys are watching us and waiting. We get somebody hurt/killed by a landmine or a hit and run about once a month. Not sure what the endgame is. I wanted to come over here because I wanted to be part of the solution. I wanted to serve with the guys who were doing the real work in the War on Terror. But I’m not much less of a REMF here than I was at Bragg. I’m sure that they will give me another meaningless couple of ribbons and tell me that I did a great job, but I don’t feel like I’m doing much at all. Even the SF guys are being held back. We need to shit or get off of the pot.”