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TWO UNNECESSARY HEROES

Now, I’m going to go off-script here for a second and just say I really like this guy. . . . [W]hen you meet Sal and you meet his family, you are just absolutely convinced that this is what America is all about.

—President Barack Obama

I was brought to tears when I watched with enormous pride and humility a November 2010 White House ceremony in which SSgt. Salvatore “Sal” Giunta became the first living Soldier awarded the Medal of Honor since Vietnam. For many of us who served in that long-ago war, the circumstances under which Giunta was awarded his medal felt frighteningly familiar: an inhospitable and forbidding mountainous battlefield that looks very much like Vietnam’s Central Highlands; a diabolical, fanatic enemy skilled in the tactical art of war; a lone squad patrol, armed with the same class of weapons we used more than four decades ago, engaged in a desperate firefight against an enemy who remained undetected until the patrol entered the kill zone. The results were both heroic and tragic: two of Giunta’s buddies died in what appeared to have been, sadly, too fair a fight.

Similarly, almost exactly two years later I watched with the same emotion during the Medal of Honor ceremony celebrating the heroism of Capt. William Swenson and his team in Afghanistan. Swenson’s men had walked into a three-sided ambush. All five members of Swenson’s lead element, four Marines and a medical corpsman, had been killed in the opening exchange of fire.

This book is about these two men and hundreds of thousands of other close-combat fighters like them who have done most of the killing and dying in wars fought since the beginning of recorded time. Policy makers, politicians, academics, and big weapon makers still assert that the day of close-in killing by men like these is gone. The techno-warriors continue to promise that technology and the material fruits of Western civilization will lessen the role that the Giuntas and Swensons play in winning future wars. From this expectation come legions of commentators, writers, think-tank gurus, and learned men and women who chase the idea that war has changed. Tomorrow we will fight distant wars from space, fighting machine against machine. Future battles will pit cyber electrons versus cyber electrons; virtual pilots will fight drone against drone.

Washington’s defense intellectuals tell America to expect tomorrow’s wars to be short, sharp, distant, bloodless, and glorious. Expect our enemies to be “shocked and awed” by our matériel greatness. Expect them to fight the way we fight—and remember that they are stupid, illiterate, and cowardly. President Obama almost started a war against Syria in 2013 based on this premise: a few hundred missiles fired from submarines and destroyers and it is over. This book tells a different story, one from the ground, standing on the firing step of a foxhole or inside the turret of a tank, from where Giunta and Swenson have seen war. The world looks quite different from there. I believe that the past is prologue, that a close look at the circumstances that overwhelmed and almost killed Giunta and Swenson hold the keys to future victories.

The stories of Giunta and Swenson are remarkably similar, in that neither of these incredibly brave men should have been in a position to receive their medals. Had Soldiers in these engagements been adequately provided with a few cheap technologies, they might have avoided the bloody traps that precipitated their heroic actions. The tactical fights of these two heroes raise a question, particularly for those who have served before: Why, after fourteen continuous years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, are our Soldiers still involved in these fair fights against primitive, ill-equipped, and poorly trained enemies?

In his debrief, Captain Swenson railed justifiably about the failure of staff duty officers hidden away in a distant command-and-control center to approve the delivery of artillery and airpower in support of his desperate action. Imagine for a moment that Swenson had a simple GoPro-like camera on his helmet capable of displaying the ground situation and linked to screens in the control center. Had officers in the center seen the action in real time though Swenson’s eyes, these graphic images might have convinced them immediately to approve supporting fires from a mortar unit located only a few kilometers away. You can buy the GoPro-like camera at Walmart.

According to unclassified reports of the battle, an aerial drone had shown up over Swenson’s unit five hours after the Taliban sprang the ambush. What if our military had been able to deploy enough drones to put a set of aerial eyes over every ground patrol marching into a dangerous and uncertain situation? Surely had a drone been overhead the Taliban would never have dared to open fire. You can buy small drones with a camera attached during your shopping trip to Walmart.

What if one of the lead Soldiers in Swenson’s patrol had carried a sensor that detected movement or the metabolic presence of humans nearby? Such devices are easy to develop; the technology has been in use by civilian security companies for years. Again, had Swenson’s team been warned, there would have been no ambush and no medal. You can buy a home security system that detects human movement at Walmart. Add another item to your cart. . . .

The Taliban engaged Swenson’s team from behind the protection of large boulders and stone walls. Swenson was able to keep his attackers at bay only by throwing a hand grenade at them, just as his grandfather did in World War II. Had Swenson had a means actually to engage enemies behind the wall, maybe he would not have enjoyed his visit to the White House. The Germans developed such a weapon system—the M-25 “Smart” grenade launcher—before 9/11. The U.S. Army did not buy the system until 2014 and has yet to get it to troops in combat.

After fourteen years of war the ground services, the Army and Marine Corps, remain starved of new, cutting-edge, lifesaving matériel, while the Department of Defense and its big defense company allies continue to spend generously on profitable big-ticket programs like planes, ships, missiles, and computers. Soldiers’ “stuff” today is more Popular Mechanics than Star Wars. However, Captain Swenson and his six colleagues might have had a better day in Afghanistan had the nation spent a bit more to give them an overwhelming, in fact dominant, technological edge over the enemy.

After suffering almost nine thousand dead Soldiers and Marines, the nation still cannot offer an advantage to those who do most of the dying. Our Soldiers and Marines should have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan ready for an unfair fight—that is, unfair in their own favor—at the squad level. Giunta’s life was saved by state-of-the-art body armor. More Soldiers and Marines might have been saved had this body armor been provided before they started on the march to Baghdad in 2003. Too many Soldiers and Marines died from primitive roadside bombs, “improvised explosive devices,” or IEDs, during the early days in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon weapons-buying bureaucracy was too slow in supplying the troops with explosive-resistant vehicles to protect against IEDs. We must also ask why the Taliban were able to see Giunta’s squad first, simply by observing his Soldiers from the surrounding high ground. After fourteen years of war, no small unit in such peril should ever have to move exposed to unimpeded observation.

Army and Marine Corps infantry squads were outgunned in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese army’s superior AK-47 assault rifles. One would think that maybe, fifty years later, infantry Soldiers would be able to fire a bullet costing about thirty cents that did not disintegrate in the air. A two-hundred-dollar aiming device developed for hunters would provide the precision needed to hit a distant enemy target with the same relative precision as that of the rifles used by the Taliban. The Army has yet to buy it.

For more than two-thirds of a century, this country has preferred to crush its enemies by exploiting its superiority in the air and on the seas. Unfortunately, these efforts to win with firepower over manpower have failed to consider the fact that the enemy has a vote. From Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh to Osama bin Laden, all our enemies have recognized that our vulnerable strategic center of gravity is dead Americans. It is no surprise that the tactic common to them all has been to kill Americans, not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. Every enemy has ceded us those domains where we are dominant—the air and the sea. They challenge us instead where we are weak: small units, on ground unfamiliar to us but familiar to them.

Memories fade fast. Already the process of denial has begun again, even as smoke still obscures battlefields in the Middle East and South Asia. Politicians on both ends of the political spectrum have called for cutting the ground-force budget as a means of paying down the national debt. The experiences of Captain Swenson and Staff Sergeant Giunta and their gallant men should remind lawmakers of their unpaid debt to those who do the dirty business of intimate killing. We hope policy makers watched both White House Medal of Honor ceremonies and paused to reflect on their stories. Our leaders should be asking why the richest nation on Earth could not have done more to help these small infantry units prevail on the tactical battlefield. For the sake of both these great men, please: no more fair fights.

Who are these (mostly) men? A popular rallying cry for those who want to redistribute the nation’s wealth is, “The wealthy 1 percent versus the rest of us!” In American wars there is the other 99 percent, those who do not have to go to war thanks to the 1 percent who serve. A cynic might say that all the good citizens who shake hands with servicemen and say “Thanks for your service” are really saying, “Thanks for doing this so my son can go to graduate school.”

Yet the Swensons and Giuntas—the ones who do the real fighting and dying—constitute an even smaller slice of American society than the honored “1 percent.” In fact, the United States’ “intimate killers” account for only about 0.02 percent of the population. For the most part, America is clueless about the uniqueness of guys like these. I witness this sad perceptual divide every time I pass through the Baltimore-Washington Airport on my way overseas. Take a moment sometime and walk over to the BWI Military Airlift Command Gate as young servicemen and women drag themselves through the dark corners of the customs gate to debouch into sunlight and the arms of loved ones and the hugs of grateful citizens. It is an interesting study. A natural line forms. Single file, these desert sand–clad youngsters shake hands as if they were walking off the court after an NCAA basketball game. The greeting crowd is always drawn to the American beauties. The first to be deluged is always a tall, blond airman (actually an “airwoman”) with tightly braided hair, smelling fresh even after twenty hours stuffed into a crowded aluminum tube. I look at her rank and badges and know from them that this is her first tour and that she has spent the past four months in an air-conditioned “hooch” with shiny toilets, running water, and an Anthony’s Pizza or a Starbucks just around the corner.

Walking some distance behind, bending under a heavy rucksack, is a kid who looks much older. He is not smiling. Most likely, he is trying to get around the pack and into a taxi that can take him to the nearest bar. His boots give him away. They are worn and discolored. He has pushed his trousers cuffs down over his boot tops to make his short stride more comfortable. If he is white, he is darkly tanned. Most of them sport unhealed blisters and deep scratches. Some show signs of having been recently wounded. And they all wear the same black badge. It is a long, thin rectangle about four inches long surrounded by a wreath. If you look closely you will see the faint outline of a Revolutionary War–era musket embedded in the rectangle. It is the Combat Infantry Badge (CIB), the most coveted and respected piece of apparel in the military services—because (to those few who know) it is worn by a tiny percentage of the 1 percent who do virtually all of the killing and dying in America’s wars today.

Only infantrymen can wear the CIB. Only recently has it come to symbolize those most likely to die in war. During World War II, the greatest chance of dying at the hands of the enemy was faced by submariners; the odds of a submariner dying at the hands of a Japanese destroyer or aircraft was about one in five. Next in this frightful roll came bomber pilots flying over the skies of Germany. Like the submariners of that war, airmen who flew in the Eighth Air Force have no battlefield memorials. They left no trace of the horror of their demise other than the odd monument or the headstones lined carefully, row on row, in our overseas military cemeteries. Third in proportion were infantrymen. Because of their huge numbers in World War II, “grunts” constituted more than 70 percent of all servicemen who died at the hands of the enemy, dying in the hundreds of thousands. If you are related to a member of the “Greatest Generation” who died in that war, chances are he was an infantryman.

Since the end of World War II, the dynamics of the dead have changed. Submarines are still dangerous vessels. But the enemy has sunk no U.S. submarine since 1945. The enemy killed a few bomber crewmen over the skies of Korea and Vietnam, but none have died since the Christmas bombing offensive against Hanoi in 1972. The infantry has not been so lucky. In a strange, ironic twist, the proportion of infantry killed at the hands of the enemy now is actually higher, 81 percent. In Afghanistan the proportion of infantry deaths at the hands of the enemy is even greater, 89 percent. Of those, more than 90 percent occurred within four hundred meters of a road. Today, some elite small units, like Delta Force and the SEALs, have suffered losses in Iraq and Afghanistan that proportionally approach those of submariners in World War II.

The number of Soldiers in this fraternity—it is predominately male, a “band of brothers”—is small. The total number of infantry serving today, Army, Marine, and Special Forces, would not fill FedEx Field, home of the Washington Redskins. Put in its starkest terms: 4 out of 5 of all Americans killed at the hands of the enemy have come from a force that makes up less than 4 percent of men and women in uniform. Not many of our citizens know that.

These men are our warriors. Others serving in uniform are not. In fact, the vast majority of men and women in uniform are employed in professions similar to those of their civilian counterparts: they fix or drive trucks, cook food, staff hospitals, and operate radios and telephones. Over the past fourteen years most of them have served honorably in Afghanistan and Iraq. On rare occasions these “incidental warriors” come under fire, in ambushes or by exposure to IEDs. Some in uniform are “almost warriors,” in that they are well trained to fight using small arms and might meet the enemy. These men and women get close to the infantry fight when they fire artillery, fly aircraft, remove explosive ordnance, guard roads, or defend firebases against enemy attacks. I am one of these. I spent my career as an artilleryman.

Only guys like Sergeant Giunta and Captain Swenson had the job that required them to go out every day with the intention of killing, and avoiding being killed by, the enemy. One would expect that those Americans most likely to die would gain the support of those pledged to protect them. Sadly, for too long this has not been the case. This book is mostly about them, the ones most likely to die. It will be the last of seven books I have written over the years about warfare. It is an unusual work, for two reasons in particular: first, it appears after the United States’ interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are substantively over. History has shown that armies reform successfully after wars end, especially after wars that do not end well. During wartime, armies, in particular, are too busy fighting to worry much about the next war. Wait too long after a war, however, and an army ossifies. It fights for money in peacetime rather than thinking of things anew. Second, as the stories of the two heroes testify, the United States has exhibited an unhealthy habit of trying to fight its wars with machines instead of Soldiers. Sadly, as you will read in the pages to come, our enemies continue to succeed against us because they are willing to sacrifice their fighters copiously to offset our matériel superiority.

My hope is that the logic of the argument to follow will convince policy makers in our defense establishment not to make these mistakes again. But I am afraid they will. My fear is that my grandchildren will have to pay in blood for our mindless return to high tech, matériel warfare. So this is my last shot to tell the sad story of neglect, ahistoricism, intellectual hubris, corruption, and ignorance about the nature and character of war that has left too many of our (mostly) Soldier sons needlessly dead on our battlefields.