He walked into the mini-mart with his Class A uniform on, specialist, with three rows of medals and a mountain division patch. I asked if he was stationed at Fort Drum, he was. Asked if he was deploying to Iraq again, and he is. Two tours already completed, he’s going back over on the exact date he’s scheduled to leave the Army for good. No orders have been issued pertaining to his seperation date, as ‘stop loss’ has become an assumed reality for thousands just like him. His unit doesn’t talk about it, in typical Army fashion it’s treated with the same “suck it up and drive on” explaination given to any situation where the government is responsible for most, if not all, of the bullshit a soldier is being forced to deal with against their will.
I asked whether he was even being given word on whether or not this final deployment will be the end of his obligation, and his answer was, “it’s useless even asking about that, because nobody knows anything”. I didn’t press the issue, knowing from experience that hashing out such things over and over only makes it worse. Instead I asked about the equipment his unit was shipping out with, what condition it was in. Turns out, this unit he and others were transferred to was new, and hadn’t yet received, inspected or operated up to half of the vehicles they’ll be deploying with in two months. What they did have was hand-me-down from other units, received “as is”, meaning the broken down equipment was on the new unit to fix. This is how the Army system works when units have to give up men or equipment to another, unfortunately, the best is retained while problems are passed on for someone else to deal with.
One rotation at NTC (45 day training rotation – in peace times combat units do this around 3 times a year), with an entirely new unit, half of the required equipment, and a dreadfull reality to face, that nobody in their chain of command, from squad leader to the President, knows how, when or if ever this military unit is going to receive what they need to do the job, let alone whether each individual is ever going to be able to take off the uniform. Indeed, this Army of ours is in dire straights, and while you and I don’t have to actually DO any of this work ourselves, it should concern everyone who cares about our military that this is the best we can do right now.
Like a carpenter asked to build a house without tools, this soldier is told he’s going back to Iraq (contract seperation date be damned), with guys who have only been together for a few months and half of the required equipment, most of which is already on its last legs.
I’M SO GLAD I GOT OUT WHEN I DID, BECAUSE NOBODY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THIS GUY!
Funny about the crappy equipment. Recently the Army up here was doing some kind of exercise where they had a fairly large convoy moving from Ft. Richardson down here in Anchorage up to Ft. Wainwright up in Fairbanks. I commute in every morning and I was amazed at the number of Army humvees broken down on the side of the highway. I kept thinking that it was a good thing these vehicles aren’t deployed in a hot spot right now.
The sad thing is anyone who does give a shit is accused of being anti-american.
I’m not dissing today’s American soldier here, but read the book All Quiet on the Western Front. Those WWI soldiers (especially Germans in 1917-18) had it pretty tough. By those standards our guys have it pretty cush right now.
And an aside, I’ve been on a WWI kick the last week. I highly recommend the movie “A Very Long Engagement”. The battle scenes are right up there with Saving Private Ryan, as far as battle footage impact goes. It’s all in subtitles but definitely worth a watch.
I took a class on ww 1, they talked about about french and german soldgers betting on the dog fights, sort of unoficial truces, trench warfare must have been very strange in that you were probably a few hundred yards away from your enemy.
Seems like europe learned after ww2 that war is a bad thing, I wonder if our leaders will ever learn that.
“Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay, and the war would be over and done in a day.” All Quiet on the Western Front ~ Erich Maria Remarque
I think Chris’s last sentence pretty much sums up my sentiments. I thank God i am not in the army anymore.
The equipment problem rolls downhill and in each instance is most stressfull for the actual operator, crew and supervisor for whatever vehicle you’re talking about. Generals can augment plans to account for this, but what you have to consider is that as far as the Pentagon is concerned, when the asset is counted for, assumption is that figure on a spreadsheet is capable of doing what needs to be done…and military officers are an ambitious group. This equipment problem, while hellish on the troops, is the stuff of Meritorious Service Medal writeups…once this thing is over, if the company commander survives, his citation will read like the Ken Burns talking about Babe Ruth.
Right there is the thing civilians generally don’t get about the military…how bad conditions, be it poor planning or lack of equipment, can equal hell on earth for most, yet for a few high level positions in the unit it’s an opportunity to move up…and while you can bet your ass the company/battalion/brigade commander and XO, command sergeant major/first sergeant are all riding around in the best of what’s there, for those going through the worst of it, it’s ‘get it done – get it done – get it done’…regardless of whether or not it’s even possible.
And a broken down vehicle has to be the biggest pain in the ass there is…I drove a Humvee while I was in Germany, and was responsible for the upkeep of two. I’ve got stories for days, but the important thing I want to point out here is that I wasn’t a mechanic…so when something went wrong, I had to become one real quick or spend hours getting it into the mechanics somehow…in the field this can be difficult, and there’s no answer acceptable besides “soon”…I go back to my platoon sergeant who’s a prick and tell him what the master sergeant mechanic said, and if there’s no example of me trying to hustle whoever turned me back in the story, I’m screwed, and this prick is on me every chance he can get asking 100 times in a day about whether I followed up and who I spoke to, was it on the singars or land line, who does he report to, who does he have under him, does he know that you need to be someplace at whenever…on and on, and the lesson always is, ‘I can tell this is bothering you, I know it’s stressfull – so what can you do to get me off of your back? that’s right, get your fuckin’ vehicle squared away already! How about doing that, then I can stop wondering whether or not you understand, whether or not you’re in need of something else to motivate you’
That’s called shit rolling downhill, and it’s a symptom of large organizations, but epidemic in organizations where just about anything can happen, and not only will nobody hear you scream…if they did, nobody would care.
I cringe at the thought of this poor guy…supposed to be going home for good, and instead he and the ‘close to ETS’ crowd on post are lumped together in a new unit with shit to deploy with.
My platoon sergeant at the time of my story was a buffoon, a sadist with one thing on his mind…the delegation of misery. A soldier came out of the experience of working for him just hating the guy 99% of the time – – – there are a lot of them out there. Some are super pissed about having to go to Iraq again…
Guess who’s going to feel the most pain over all that? This guy I talked to…that’s who. The Captain in charge of his company will run these guys down to nubs and become a Major when he returns.
It’s just like the mafia…
Come to think of it (a wave of memories just smashed the shores of my mind) – – this platoon sergeant is the guy who…let me set this up…in the military there are guys who can talk and work the system just right to get what others must wait for – and I was very good at this…be it acquiring something, getting paperwork pushed to the front of the pile up at brigade or division, putting out a fire by pulling and manipulating data for the unit to satisfy a higher up gone rabid…this was my bag…the one thing I wouldn’t do was steal.
So we’re in the field and the captain I’m driving complains to my platoon sergeant that the roof of the truck is leaky. He comes to me and I lay out how it’s not something I can get at motorpool…he leans on me and basically says he expects me to boost one from another truck that night. I explained how my religious belief at the time was that by stealing a roof from someone else, it would end up coming back to me in some way. I wouldn’t do it – so he had me fucking around with sandbags in the sun for a few hours, and the rest of that rotation was hell.
I’ve probably got a hundred stories like this…just need to remember them.
What made you guys join in the first place?
There are plenty of reasons for someone to use explaining “why we lost a war”, and this one isn’t short on any of this…the one reason I can’t stop thinking about is “our troops were forced to serve and ordered to carry out a mission without adequate equipment”.
Why does this guy possibly get his legs blown off on his THIRD TRIP? If we can’t afford it, we can’t afford it! Call it off…do these people a favor! Are we as a country saying that, “as long as there’re bodies to throw into this, we’re going to stick with it…even if we can’t afford the tools they need to win”?
Republican/Democrat – it doesn’t matter in this instance!!! I met the soldier, identified myself as one, and we talked for a couple minutes. He didn’t lie to me.
My #1 thought since walking out of that store until right now has been “FUCK THIS BULLSHIT GOVERNMENT for GRINDING people like HIM for the sake of POLITICS!”
We’re a democracy, but a dark-aged one. We’re a democracy that started the trend, yet recent history has managed to prove that democracy is bullshit as long as you have power and say it is. A situation from the dark ages has chased us all over, riding on a religion-fueled unicorn, into a state of mind where “1 plus 1 equaling 2” is something folks comment on like, “it all depends on how you look at it…”
This is the sign of an appocalypse all-right! Only one on a smaller scale than Revelations had in mind…it’s just going to burn you and I…not the guy in Brazil (who chairs a worldwide commission on vaccines) – – – blah blah blah
I joined because I was young and didn’t have money to go to college.
I’ve never been a soldier myself. Was planning on joining when I was a young teenager, before I discovered girls.
Politics aside, our troops signed up to do whatever they are told to do, regardless of whether or not they are adequately provisioned. Should the soldiers on Guadalcanal have surrendered or tried to flee the island because they were poorly supplied and abandoned by the supply ships? If you say no, then how is Iraq any different (politics aside)?
I joined because I was 20 and tried/afraid of being a bum for the rest of my life. I needed a jolt and to get the fuck out of Dodge for a while.
It’s different because what you described was a matter of strategic necessity, whereas now, it’s about money and the politics of this war. To give these soldiers what we CAN provide, Congress would have to authorize more money. For them to do this, the Pentagon first has to share information regarding the TRUE readiness of the units preparing to deploy (not what gets put on paper to please Rumsfeld) – and if that were to happen, the situation I described at Fort Drum would be publicized, talked about, written about, etc.
Once that happens, people would question whether it’s right to continue on in this way. Whether it’s worth it monetarily to send another unit over there, when doing it would require billions to give them the equipment needed.
Or…for the President, worse than that would be when questions arose about whether he knew these units were running as ragged as they are – why didn’t he know about it – who kept this information from him?
The general public doesn’t know what I laid out in this post about my conversation with that soldier.
Your opinion is that it’s about money and politics. I agree with your opinion, however there are many many Americans that feel troop deployment in Iraq is a strategic necessity. I disagree with you about pulling out the military because they are under-equipped. I haven’t made up my mind about our current deployment situation in the Middle-East, but withdrawing due to equipment shortages just doesn’t hold water with me and does nothing to strengthen the image of our armed forces. When I think of reasons to get out of Iraq, equipment problems isn’t one of them.
Out of curiosity, do you think there is a better-equipped army on the planet?
No, but there certainly is a better TRAINED Army out there in terms of the mission in Iraq. These units are comprised of trained killers and sent through scenarios pertaining to ground war…their equipment is all geared towards that as well. Now they’re policemen, targets, hunter one moment, cowardly button-fodder the next…
The mission calls for armored Humvees in good enough condition to drive hastily out of danger or hastily towards it – Hemmitts in good enough condition to fuel all of these vehicles and tow them when necessary – 2.5 tons to transport equipment, food and people around…
When you have only half of these things two months prior to deployment…from experience, you can basically count on a mechanical nightmare once in theatre…not only from the crap you hauled over there, but the busted out equipment you’ll be inheriting from units on their way out. That maintenance to the engine the last soldier put off for two months…it’s not going to be on him to fix that. It’ll be on the poor sap who gets it next.
My position is that if we’re so far in debt that we can’t equip these units, it’s unfair to everyone involved to keep heading in this direction. Murtha’s been right about this all along. And w/ equipment in mind…in a rear area, these problems can be solved. Nothing in the military is fast when it comes to the beurocracy, but not being under attack can do wonderful things to a unit’s productivity!
I hear you man.
The part of all this that concerns me I guess is the civil war issue. If our guys are the only thing keeping Iraq from exploding into an all out war then I have a hard time with pulling them out. I don’t know what the right path is.
Did any of you hear about the Sunni recruits that nearly revolted when they were told that they would be serving in areas outside of their home region?
Iraqis Begin Duty With Refusal.
Doesn’t look too good for the Iraqi army right about now. Do you respect these Iraqis for standing up for themselves, or are they worthless soldiers because they won’t follow orders?
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