Angry Planet - Different Perspectives on America’s Wars

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

Children born on Sept. 11 are old enough to fight in the war that began that day. When they go into battle, they will only know the video of the Twin Towers falling, of the Pentagon wounded and smoking, as historical footage, much like the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination looks to an earlier generation.Will they know why they’re fighting in Iraq in Afghanistan? Do we still know?CJ Chivers of The New York Times joins us to talk it through.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Competence can overcome a doctrine or a strategy or a set of operational ideas that are unlikely to work. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields.

And I'm Matthew Galt. In a few weeks, the U.S. will have been at war long enough for kids born after September 11th to join the military. Fighting, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, shows no sign of ending. More than 3 million men and women have done that fighting, often with little recognition. C.J. Chivers of the New York Times aims to change that with this new book. It's called The Fighters, Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. In it, he brings American troops into focus, and he relates their experiences along with their doubts. And he's here with us today. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. The book is built around individual stories. Can you give us a brief outline of the people you're profiling? So there are six primary profiles in the book, along with one of their mothers, so it comes to seven. And they are a set of characters who I selected that represent different places and phases and times in the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And one is a strike fighter pilot and other Special Forces NCO.

Another is a Navy corpsman, which is the marine term for a trauma medic who's assigned to the Marines. There's a Marine infantry lieutenant. There's a infantry soldier from the army. And there's a Kiowa Scout helicopter pilot. How did you find these people that you're talking to? I had met many of them and worked alongside them overseas as a correspondent for the New York Times during the wars. And so I already knew most of them. and others were recommended to me by friends or veterans who I covered as I was looking to find characters who were a little different than some of my reporting experiences.

I had to reach out. But most of my reporting experiences were with the infantry. And I didn't want a book that was only about the infantry. So I had a number of referrals that came to me several years ago from friends. Robert Soto's story, as it appears in the Times, gets some of the, its drama from the danger he faced in Afghanistan, and I think the story is just from a reader's point of view, very, very well told. But nearly as moving is his disillusionment. Can you talk a little bit about what killed his optimism? So I see reality killed his optimism. I mean, Robert Soto was

10 years old when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. And within a very short time, He had visited Ground Zero as it was still a spoldering pile. And he was profoundly affected by the attack upon his city. And he vowed there at age 10 to join the army, which he did when he was 17. So you probably won't find a more direct or even a more pure route to military service than his. But by the time he got into uniform and made his way through the training and arrived with his unit in Afghanistan, the war had, drifted quite significantly to seeking justice after the attacks of 9-11 and had taken on a number of roles and missions and assignments in Afghanistan that were beginning to feel futile to many

of the people involved. And Robert sensed this quite quickly that he was having trouble drawing a line from what he was doing in the Afghan mountains with his platoon and his company to the safety of his friends and family back home in New York. He couldn't draw that line. And it was exceptionally dangerous. And he was grieving. He lost friends. He lost people he admired mentors.

He lost his squad leader all in a very short period of time. I mean, we're talking literally two months from arriving. He'd suffered these losses and he had 10 months to go. And his views hardened. I wouldn't call it in a. epiphany because it took a little time, but it was a very swift accumulation of sorrow blended with his sense that what they were doing didn't quite in his view make sense. Did you find that with many of the people that you interviewed? Were there any true believers?

Well, it's interesting you say that because the characters all have their own views and they do cover a range of perspectives and I didn't try to impose my feelings upon them. And so in the book, yes, there are characters who have a different point of view than Roberts. There are characters, one in particular who believes the attack on Iraq, the invasion of Iraq is still justified. There are others who think that it didn't succeed and so that it's a sorrow that it didn't work, but it was more of a mechanical failure. And there is one character who chooses not to think about those things. He assesses himself based on the performance of his unit and how he led his Marines.

And he doesn't look at the larger picture. He kind of during the course of his service in Afghanistan decided that, you know, this was a template upon which his personal record would be left. and that's something he could affect, that he could be the best infantry Marine that he could be, and that would be it. And he chooses not to look at the larger, as they say, blue arrow. So would you say that everyone's reasons for fighting are sometimes divorced from the way that they feel about the war itself? Well, I would say, and you've probably heard this many times, I'm sure you have, that when people are fighting, when they're in a place, and they're in a time,

and they're in a situation that the war can become and usually does become very small. What are you doing now? Who are you doing it with? And what happens? I mean, that's the war for people. You're in the now and you're trying to, or they were trying to, in that very narrow context, do their best. And I don't think that politics had, in my experience, much of a place in the very crowded heads of the people who were going out on these daily missions across these years.

And so, yes, you could call that divorced from the wars, or you could just say that their bandwidth, their mind share, their attention, what they're able to actually focus on in a given time, didn't really have space for a lot besides immediate concerns, and politics was not one of them. One thing that really surprised me in reading Soto's story, and you mentioned it already, was the number of people who were killed in his time in this mountaintop outpost. I think, for me at least, there's this very false sense that this war is almost bloodless. The numbers of people killed, 7,000, more than 7,000, just don't seem to come close to what we're, you know,

it's not close to what has happened in single battles in World War I or World War II. or the Civil War, but I was shocked by how dangerous it is on a given day for individual soldiers. Do you think Soto's experiences was very common for people who serve? So that's a good question because, though, the numbers are small, the traumas were large, and because medical care became what it became during the course of these wars and both immediate trauma care on the battlefield, the speed of evacuation to, you know, staff NATO or military hospitals and the protocols by which trauma patients were treated meant that the fatality rate went way down even though often the casualty rate was quite high.

So the toll is larger than much larger than raw numbers. But was Soto's experience typical? So the way I sort of understand the wars having traveled through them for years was that, yes, It was typical for certain soldiers in certain times. There were many places that were exceptionally dangerous in their cycle of the wars. The wars have gone on long enough that there were different phases and places and cycles and the worst spots, if you can put air quotes around that, if there's such a thing as a worst spot.

But let's say the most difficult and lethal spots, they moved around different months, different years, different commanders, different emphases by. the commanders where soldiers were operating meant that there are some very, very resident named. His was Coringal. But, you know, you can talk to others who would say Sarder City. You can talk to another who'd say Fallujah or then someone would say the Argonob or out in Sengen or in Marja or up in Nuristan and Lurishtan. There are spots along the Kunar and Pesh rivers that were also exceptionally dangerous. And it rotated around. And so, yeah, I would say that Rob's experience was representative of a type of experience that was shared

by many people across many years in a lot of different spots. You just talked about the resonance of places like Coringal, and I'm wondering if there is, we are now to the point where multiple generations are fighting in this war. And are there places and things that, like, how do those generations communicate, I guess is what I'm trying to ask? Do those names, places stay resonant kind of throughout the course of almost 20 years of fighting? Well, I would say there's different forms of communication and different forms of residence. And so, yes, those who fought in particular places often are varying network together. Of course, there's not 100% attendance.

I don't want to overstate it. There's people who don't, veterans who don't participate as much in some of the gatherings and reunions and in the daily. Facebook posts and groups for the different clusters of veterans. But those who served in particular spots and particular years on particular deployments often are very networked together at a surprisingly large fraction. And then those across time often communicate too. There are many sites where they gather. There are many friendships that have been formed back at home.

There is a, you know, it's not like a union of veterans. I don't want to suggest that at all. There's disunion among veterans like any segment of our society. But they do find ways those who are inclined to be together both physically and digitally and revisit a lot of what happened and discuss often where things may be headed. One thing that you mentioned, and I've also heard mentioned in other places, is that each new group of senior leadership, for example, it's like they're coming into Afghanistan cold.

And would you say that's accurate? Would you say that the same lessons are being learned over and over again? Well, it'll depend on the leader. Some of the leaders have and gained a lot of experience. And so, you know, by year, you know, six or seven of these wars, there were company commanders who had been platoon commanders in previous cycles of the war in Iraq and to some extent to Afghanistan. Early on, many of the senior officers did not have much experience.

And I'd argue that it showed. I think it's sort of irrefutable. But later, the battalion commanders had been, you know, the battalion commanders in Afghanistan had a lot of Iraq experience. They'd been operations officers or company commanders. And the military got, I would say, much more competent. and more agile and more capable, more, well, better equipped even at this sort of operational low and mid-level ranks.

There's always new soldiers who, you know, any deployment involves a very large cohort of people who've never left the United States before and the new soldiers naturally take time to develop their skills. But the cadre of NCOs and mid-career officers became very, very, very. well-rounded, very, very competent at their tactical and leadership tasks. I mean, we all saw that. I don't think there's any argument about it. But this is important, though.

Competence can overcome a doctrine or a strategy or a set of operational ideas that are unlikely to work. So you can take a very competent unit and put it in a very difficult situation and give it a mission that seems to conflict with its circumstances and you're not going to succeed at the level you like. And let me give you an example. I was in going to say it was, it was 2006 and we're part of Anbar province in Iraq. And I was talking to a battalion executive officer who was on, I think, probably his third

deployment at this time and eventually did five deployments. and we were talking about two incidents that I had been accompanying his Marines on in the previous days, in which Marines had been shot in separate instances by snipers. And he told me, you know, after these incidents that he had monitored them on the radio and he, you know, read the reports. He'd gone out and talked to people involved. And he was, I think, talking to me because I had been there and he was interested in, you know, my impression of it. And he said initially he was really impressed because the nine line, which is the procedure that is used to someone, a Medivac helicopter had gone so well.

It had been done quickly. It had been done accurately. And I had a very effective casualty evacuations at both instances. And he was impressed with that. The Marines who he was leading were very well drilled and on the ball both days. And then he kind of looked at me and he said, you know, Jesus, like, that's not really how I want to measure this war. I mean, if I'm out here saying we got our casualty drills nailed down, and we're really kicking this thing in the ass on that,

we still may be losing this. That's not how I want to measure my Marines. Like, that's not the mission. That's a task within the mission in the circumstance we didn't anticipate or that we didn't expect at that instant and we did it well, but that's not the mission. And that stuck with me across time. That, yes, you can be really good.

but if you're put in a situation that's not going to work, it's probably still not going to work. Do you think both of these wars are total failures? Well, I'm glad you said both because we've got to sort of pull them apart. The wars had, you know, on the terms by which the wars were run, our own terms, the terms that were expressed to us, they have not succeeded. I don't think that's, I don't think we can have an argument otherwise. You know, on our own terms, we did not do what we set out to do. The military did not do accomplish many of the tasks that it gave to itself and that it promoted as its reasons for being where it was and doing what it was doing. That's one of the sorrows here because of the tremendous efforts of that cadre of people I talked about in the lower and middle ranks who applied themselves to this in good faith.

and also for the suffering of the Iraqis and the Afghans, which is on a scale, many orders of magnitude of ours. One of the people in your book is Navy pilot. F-14 pilot and later an F-A-18 pilot when the F-14s were decommissioned. The question I had was, what was his perception? I mean, was his war different from everybody else's that you talked to? Well, I tried to present characters who had different perspectives, and his is distinct from many of the others for a few different reasons. One is he was in the air, not on the ground.

So he has a different vantage point, very different vantage point. And he's very open about that, that he doesn't put his service in some ways on the same level of the ground troops who he was supporting. So he also was it to, he sort of bookends the war. He was in the North Arabian Sea when the terrorist attacks occurred in 2001. So he was on a carrier as part of a fighter squadron, and he was assigned to some of the initial attacks into Afghanistan. And he had done this literally weeks after one of the last attacks by American aircraft in Iraq that was left over from the U.N., you know, the presence that endured from the U.N. mandate, left after the Persian Gulf War in 19. 1991. And so when he initially showed, he was fueled with a sense of clear mission. World Trade Center was a smoking pile of Pentagon had a hole on the side. And there were thousands of Americans who had died in an attack that shocked him as much as it shocked pretty much everyone else. And so he flew into Afghanistan, very eager and feeling fortunate to be able to participate in that mission. And his role in it lasted from October. to December and he rotated home to continue his Navy career.

He'd been accepted to some career schools and he had to leave his unit a little bit early. And he flew home and is interesting because as he left in late 2001, he felt very fortunate to have participated because he didn't think it was going to last very much longer and not many people were going to get to go. He saw it in some ways like a shorter campaign like you would think of Kosovo. And in fact, in his diary and in conversations, he'll talk about that. You know, that the, in Costa World United States and its allies, defeated the modern, developed, you know, functioning military in a short period of time. So how would it be that the Taliban could, you know, which was much less organized on the surface, at least, stand up to what was coming?

So when he left, he was both feeling satisfied and feeling that he was feeling that he'd, probably wouldn't be coming back and that many of his friends probably would not be there at all. And he returns many years later as a squadron executive officer now in F-18s. And he flies over some of the same places and it's utterly changed. He had initially flown into Afghanistan flying up the boulevard, you know, an air corridor from the beach in Pakistan up through Pakistan and then, you know, in layman's turns, taking a left and going into Afghanistan and flying over patrol. in patrol boxes. And when he first went into Afghanistan, there was nothing.

It was unlit. There were very few Americans on the radio net. They flew at radio silence even on the way up. When he returns, you know, roughly a decade later, he likens it to trying to fly into LAX and kill a gang member nearby with a 500-pound bomb. And what do I mean by flying to LAX? Well, there was a whole set of aviation and air traffic protocols. The sky was busy with drones and aerial refuelers coming and going.

There's a sprawling military presence on the ground below with helicopters and rotary ring aircraft. There's this constellation of American bases spread throughout much of the countryside, often visible from the air, because they're very geometric and they jump out at you in Afghanistan. And some of them had small plimps tethered to them with surveillance devices. on them. So he flies into this crowded airspace. It's crowded with rules. It's crowded with aircraft and it's crowded with people below. And by now he has a somewhat different view or a much different view. He's now watched a near decade of the two wars and he's wondered how it works. He's no less committed. I don't want to suggest doubt about what he himself was doing because

his role was to support troops on the ground and many of the troops were so far away. from each other in small groups, in small remote places that without air power and without the Taliban being aware of the pretty quick response times of American air power, some of these places would have been overrun. And he was, you know, in a role that helped assure that didn't happen. So he remained committed. But he, like most of the pilots I knew in that phase, wondered how this all played out. You can't keep troops on the ground forever in these small places.

and you can't keep aircraft above them forever. It's extraordinarily expensive. It wears the aircraft down. And there's just a question of how it's even functioning on the ground and what it's accomplishing. And he was aware of all of this. But again, to speak to the middle and the lower ranks, people work within the policies.

They don't make them. They don't choose the strategies. So, you know, you'd show up for each flight, trying to keep other Americans alive. and that seemed to him a worthy mission. How do you think all of this ends? Oh, I don't know. What's that joke that we hear sometimes?

Things are hard to predict, especially the future. I don't know where it goes. And I also tell people, I've been saying this for years, my job is I see it, and I'm as imperfect at it as anyone else, But my job is to do description, not prescription. It's not my job to guide these wars, to suggest what shape they should or should not take. It's hard enough to try to figure out what happened yesterday without writing about what we should do tomorrow. And they're going to go on for a long time.

It feels adrift to me. It feels a drift to a large fraction of the people I know and talk to and who are intimately involved and have been involved in all this for a long time. There is not clarity. It deals often like there's a big machine with an on switch, and it got switched on. In 2001, I think most of the people who were in this book would argue it got switched on for good reason. But in 2018, nobody's really sure where the off switch is. I guess my question leading from that is, you know, I think the American public cares about the soldiers, right?

They care about the individual soldiers coming home. It feels like they are tuned out of these wars, though. No, they are tuned out. Doesn't feel like it. I mean, in the main, they are tuned out. You know, I don't live in, you know, a journalist capital. I'm a telecommuter. I live remote.

I travel on stories wherever the stories take me. I'm not part of the military correspondence daily. conversation and I know that the people who cover the military covered intently and they think about these things. But where I live outside of that circle, it almost never comes up. I almost never hear anybody mention it, even to me, knowing that it's my job still to cover it, much less overhear it talking among themselves. People just don't.

It's almost like they don't realize the wars continue. They maybe didn't much notice the wars in real time. And the way the country is set up, most people don't have a sense of stake in this. That's my take. You can argue with me. But it doesn't feel around me in my life that people are paying attention to this in any real significant numbers, much less critical mass. This or any of its elements, you know, you can comprehend.

examine these wars with a lot of very different lenses. I mean, we're talking about one particular set of lenses, which I wrote about here, which is this human experience of the Americans in combat, but they're not the only one in combat. Wars don't happen on practice ranges. You know, they happen in other people's countries and in their fields and around their homes and places of business in their social circles in every sense. And I don't see much from the perspective of that, much less the perspective you know, trying to understand many people were fighting here or there for one reason or another.

It's a pretty small lane, and it tends to people who are talking and thinking about this all the time. And the rest, large fraction of the people around us seem quite disengaged from it. CJ Chippers, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me on your show. The book is The Fighters, Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is out August 14th. It should be out as you're listening to this. If not, it'll be out the next day. Thanks for listening to this week's show.

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