For Better or For worse

by Sandy Cook

Veterans don’t all come in the same flavors.

Some served reluctantly, hated it, and still hate it. Some served reluctantly but are yet proud to have served. Some served willingly and felt that they were performing an essential duty and relish that performance. Some extended that duty to a profession and a career and take great pride in it.

No matter what you believe, you owe it to your country, if not to yourself, to study the problems, find the best sources you can to understand what is really happening, examine those sources critically, examine their sources if you can, and then decide what is best for the country and what you can do about it. Don’t just look for those who agree with your inclinations – find those who disagree too, and listen to them Then make up your mind.     For Better or For worse
by Sandy Cook

Veterans don’t all come in the same flavors.

Some served reluctantly, hated it, and still hate it. Some served reluctantly but are yet proud to have served. Some served willingly and felt that they were performing an essential duty and relish that performance. Some extended that duty to a profession and a career and take great pride in it.

Just as the nature of their service and the views veterans currently hold about that service differ, so do their attitudes toward their nation, their service and themselves. Some believe “my country right or wrong” and use that slogan to support a blind and unthinking allegiance. That view is easily extended to their service and then to themselves, and it usually ends up as something like, “I am an American, and Americans can do no wrong.”

Some expand that slogan to the words of one of its strongest supporters, Carl Schurz, general officer in the Grand Army of the Republic, and Senator from Missouri, “…our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism:  "Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."”

Some find only wrong with what we do and are blind to the right and the good, and most of us feel sorry for them, while respecting their right to dissent.

Through all of that varying opinion and feeling, there runs a strong thread of reason which also varies in its intensity and its inclusiveness, but is reason nonetheless.

That thread of reason leads us to examine what we do, how we do it, how we act toward our fellow countrymen and to strangers, how we spend our treasure or waste it. From that examination we derive new ways of thinking about what we do, and about our strengths and weaknesses,

From that analysis ultimately come new ways to go forward and to continue along the extraordinary path first laid out for us by our founders. They gave us directions – they pointed the way, but they didn’t lay out a hard and fast trail. We have to find the pathway ourselves, and that takes work and study.

All of this is by way of leading into the view that we veterans are wed to our country almost in the same way we wed that special person in our life. We love her (or him) despite the faults, and are grateful that they love us despite ours. We are with them, “For Better or Worse”.

So we are with our country, “For Better or Worse”. Whereas we can live gladly day to day with a spouse who has as many faults as (or perhaps fewer than) we do, and live our whole lives that way, we have an obligation to do a little better toward our nation. All citizens owe their nation their thoughtful loyalty, and in pursuit of that loyalty to examine our nation, warts and all, understand for ourselves when and how we may go wrong, glory in where we have done right, and build on a certain knowledge of both toward a better future, and a better way of going about it next time.

Not all would agree, but many of us veterans believe that we have made some extraordinary mistakes in the last few years. Those who believe that we should not have gone into Iraq are numerous; those who believe that we should not have gone into Afghanistan are fewer. Even those who believed that we should have gone into Iraq don’t all agree that we have done it well, and daily more are saying so.

Veterans have earned a special place in the ranks of Americans (even though you can’t always sense that very clearly these days). Veterans almost universally believe that because they have fought for their country, or at least volunteered to fight if necessary, they have earned that special place. Well, we didn’t just earn a place for ourselves, we also took on a grave obligation.

We didn’t fight for nothing. We fought for our nation, and it is our obligation to make sure that that nation is the best that it can be, and that it doesn’t go astray and waste the effort and the sacrifice that we and our brothers and sisters gave.

So much of what gets stated as “fact” these days gets started from some website or some blog, has no foundation, but gets repeated enough times so that it becomes “true”. These pseudo-facts then become the basis for action and generally send us off in the wrong direction. Too few of us dig for the truth, try to discern fact from rumor or worse yet from lies, and many of us have become so lazy that we become a major part of the problem and no part of the solution.

Some things have to get fixed. Even if you support the war, you have to believe that the services were not prepared to fight this kind of war, and you should want some things changed at least – doctrine, training, weapons, diplomacy – something. If you support war only when we or our real allies are directly threatened, you have to believe that the mix of military, diplomatic and economic “solutions” has been wrong for a long time and needs some very hard tweaking.

No matter what you believe, you owe it to your country, if not to yourself, to study the problems, find the best sources you can to understand what is really happening, examine those sources critically, examine their sources if you can, and then decide what is best for the country and what you can do about it. Don’t just look for those who agree with your inclinations – find those who disagree too, and listen to them Then make up your mind.

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”

To help you, I have compiled a reading list . Summer is coming on, and unless you spend your entire life at the ball park or on the golf course, you ought to spend some real productive time and get caught up.

Here are my recommendations, and they naturally reflect my own studies. The books are generally available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Abe’s, Powell’s, and your local bookstore. The list will be on the VUFT, Inc. website as a permanent item, so if you have any suggestions for reading, especially for books that thoughtfully counter the arguments in those presented here, let me know and I’ll add them.

THE CURRENT CONFLICT

The Decision–making That Got Us into Afghanistan and Iraq
Fiasco;  Thomas E. Ricks
Cobra II; Michael Gordon and Gen. B. E. Trainor
Hubris; Michael Isikoff and David Corn
The Assassins’ Gate; George Packer

The Conduct of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Imperial Life in the Emerald City; Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The Gamble; Thomas E. Ricks

Observations by Reporters and Other Non-military on the Wars
Beyond the Green Zone; Dahr Jamail
The Three Trillion Dollar War; Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
The Forever War; Dexter Filkins
The Acidental Guerilla; David Kilcullen

The Experiences of Soldiers on the Ground in South Asia – Soldier’s Narratives
The Unforgiving Minute; Craig M. Mullaney
Packing Inferno;Tyler E. Boudreau
Blackhawk Down;  Mark Bowden [Africa]
Blood Stripes; David J. Danelo
The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell; John Crawford
The War I Always Wanted; Brandon Friedman
One Bullet Away; Nathaniel Fick
Chasing Ghosts; Paul Rieckhoff

HISTORY
There are times and ideas in history that have been well-recorded, and which we should study if we want to understand both how to fight the current war and how to move forward to peace, and if possible, to reconciliation.

History of the Middle East
A History of the Arab Peoples; Albert Hourani
A History of the Middle East; Peter Mansfield

History of Islam
What is Islam?;C. Horrie and P. Chippendale
Engaging the Muslim World; Juan Cole
Soldiers of God; Robert Kaplan
Taliban; Ahmed Rashid
The Crisis of Islam; Bernard Lewis

Diplomatic and Military History
Dereliction of Duty; H. R. McMaster
Imperial Grunts; Robert D. Kaplan
The March of Folly: Barbara Tuchman
The Face of Battle; John Keegan
The Best and the Brightest; David Halberstam

CONDUCT OF ASSYMETRIC WAR AND EXPERIENCES ON THE GROUND
These are not “how-to” books to be followed slavishly; they are “how it was done” books that contain good lessons.

Malaya
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife; John Nagl

Algeria
Counterinsurgency Warfare; David Galula
A Savage War of Peace; Alistair Horne

Vietnam
Street Without Joy; Bernard Fall
A Rumor of War; Philip Caputo
Dispatches; Michael Herr
Vietnam: A History; Stanley Karnow
Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam; Lloyd Gardner editor
And a Hard Rain Fell; John Ketwig
On Strategy; Harry G. Summers

MILITARY PUBLICATIONS
FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency Field Manual [download the 13.6 Mb pdf file]
FM 27-10: Law of Land Warfare [download the 2.4 Mb pdf file]
FM 2-22.3 (FM 34-52) Human Intelligence Collection Operations (Interrogation) [download the 4.7 Mb pdf file]

SERVING MILITARY AND VETERANS’ ISSUES
On Killing; LTC Dave Grossman
On Combat; LTC Dave Grossman
Achilles in Vietnam; Jonathan Shay
Odysseus in America; Jonathan Shay
War and the Soul; Edward Tick
The War Comes Home; Aaron Glantz
Vets Under Siege; Martin Schram
When the War Came Home; S. Bannerman
Down Range; Bridget C. Cantrell
Moving a Nation to Care; Ilona Meagher

And for those who will spend all of your time on the golf course or at the ball park anyway
Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book; Harvey Penick
Game Time: A Baseball Companion; Roger Angell