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Ph: 703-451-2476, Fax: 703-451-6870

Talking Points

When you return from battle, you will either bear your shield or be borne upon it.
—Spartan soldiers' creed

Why We Fought: For Our Fellow Marines

I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home. I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn't beat us. I hope life improves for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but that's not why we did it. We fought for each other. (page 369)

* * *

Every member of the all-volunteer military raises his or her right hand and swears an oath. Not to the president or to any particular policy, but to the Constitution and to the principle of following the legal orders of a democratically elected government. The time for doubt and debate is before taking that oath, not before deploying overseas to fight a war.

My stance—prowar or antiwar—didn't matter. I volunteered to be a Marine officer and pledged that I would do my nation's bidding to the very best of my ability. In the end, it was about survival and loyalty to my fellow Marines. 

Marine Corps Training: Trust and Discipline

For ten weeks [at Officer Candidate School] , the staff owned us. They could yell and scream . . . and harass us from reveille to taps. But after commissioning, the authority would shift. The candidates would become lieutenants, then captains and colonels. They would be the commanders leading enlisted Marines in battle. The staff had a very real, vested interest in killing bad candidates before bad officers killed Marines . (page 20)

We learned that indecision is a decision, that inaction has a cost all its own. Good commanders act and create opportunities. Great commanders ruthlessly exploit those opportunities and throw the enemy into disarray. (pages 37-38)

* * *

It's about trust and discipline. Twenty-year-old Marines are out leading combat patrols, responsible for a dozen other lives, while some of their college counterparts can't be trusted to avoid spilling their coffee in the school library.

The training abuse wasn't about how much I could take. It was about how much I could give. You need discipline most when it's hardest to muster. Missions can't be compromised because someone is tired, hungry, or outside his comfort zone. And when you have a platoon of forty guys all come to that same realization, you have a very powerful group that can suffer unbelievable hardship together and take care of one another as a team.

Recon: A Thinking Man's Game

If you are still conscious, then you have quit.    —Recon training motto

Every Marine thinks he's the toughest guy in the room. Most will agree, though, that the toughest unit in the Corps is Recon. Of 175,000 active-duty Marines, fewer than 3,000 serve in Reconnaissance units. Recon lacks the cachet of the Navy SEALs and the Army Special Forces because a bureaucratic decision in the late 1980s kept Recon out of the U.S. Special Operations Command. The Corps's leadership vowed that there would be no "special" Marines and chose autonomy over the command's money and missions. The result is a slight inferiority complex manifested in brutally hard training. (page 145)

* * *

I joined the Marines after college because I wanted the hardest challenge, the biggest test. After a combat tour with the infantry in Afghanistan, that same desire encouraged me to try out for Recon.

Since 2001, the news has been full of "special forces this" and "special forces that." I wanted to see it from the inside, see what it was about their selection and training that makes America's elite warriors so special. Many people have a stereotypical view of the military: that it's all unquestioning obedience to orders, all platoons of automatons marching around doing what they're told. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in units like Recon.

Operations in the First Recon Battalion, when I was there, were mostly run by team leaders and platoon commanders—sergeants and lieutenants in their mid-twenties. We had tremendous firepower at our disposal, and a lot of latitude to use it the way we saw fit.

The whole U.S. military today is a thinking man's game, and units like Recon most of all.

Killology: Prepping to Kill and to Die

Dr. DiGiovanni defined "killology" as the study of healthy people's reactions to killing . . . [He] explained that the first step toward understanding the topic was exposure to violent death.

The photos were indeed of young men like us, but after suffering horrific trauma to their heads and torsos . . . I could not help but contextualize the pictures. Platoon commanders, recent graduates of this same school, who shipped off to take their first commands. They woke up one morning, pulled on their boots, ate breakfast, and never guessed that nightfall would find them as exhibit A in the killology curriculum of other lieutenants. (pages 50-51)

* * *

"War is about killing people and breaking things." When I first heard this line during my training, it struck me as needlessly crude. After serving in two wars, I now know it is true.

Killology is about learning to survive in that environment while still retaining your humanity—for your own sake, for the sake of those you lead, and also for all the innocent people caught up in the churn of the war.

There's a vignette in Evan Wright's Generation Kill that describes my platoon preparing to set out on a mission. We've been mortared and sniped at for days, frequently by people wearing civilian clothes or using kids as human shields.

I'm quoted as ordering my Marines to shoot anyone with a weapon, even if it's a woman with a rifle slung across her back. The order made sense in context, but it is harder to justify in a quiet living room at home.

When I applied to business school after leaving the Marines, an admissions officer called me to ask about the quote. She expected me to retract it or try to explain it away, but I declined. She simply would never understand the circumstances under which it had been given. The normalcy of violence in combat is difficult to convey.

Violence is intrinsic to conflict—even to so-called peacekeeping or low-intensity missions. Commanders have more than a right to self-defense; they have a sacred obligation to accomplish their missions and protect their men from needless harm. This is why even supposedly benign missions like passing out rice in Haiti can, and do, turn violent.

The Real Thing: Death, Clarity, and Jessica Lynch

Bloody hands had pawed at the doors, leaving plaintive prints. Bulletholes frosted the windshields. Congealed blood, more blood than I thought a human body could hold, pooled around the flattened front tires. These were the sad remnants of the Army's 507th Maintenance Company, which had blundered into Nasiriyah after making a wrong turn and was all but wiped out by fedayeen militiamen. At least nine soldiers had been killed and six captured, including Private First Class Jessica Lynch. All we knew that afternoon, though, was that Americans had been in those Humvees, and it looked like those Americans had died.

We were only three kilometers south of the bridge. Every tree, every wall, and every building looked hostile. I was afraid for the first time in Iraq. Against the white noise of the blood rushing through my head, I heard my feet tapping involuntarily on the Humvee floor. My knees stitched up and down like a sewing machine. My mouth felt dry and gummy. Everything seemed to pass in a blur. I thought of war stories that talked about hyperclarity in combat, seeing every blade of grass and feeling colors more intensely than ever before. But for me, whole city blocks faded into a gray fuzz. I feared I was processing information too slowly, seeing only one of every ten things I should. I felt shortchanged. I wanted hyperclarity, too. (page 204)

* * *

When the shooting started, I expected hyperclarity. So it came as a shock to realize that I was going into some mild form of shock, where I turned inward and was less aware of my surroundings than I'd hoped I'd be. It took a few minutes to get over the intense realization of "holy shit, people are shooting at me" and then just calm down and fight back.

How did I make it through that period before the shock wore off? I have no idea. I suspect that it was mainly because each of us in the platoon was affected differently at different times. When some of us were weak, others were strong, and they carried us. When we were strong and they were weak, we did the same, and in that way everyone made it out the other side in one piece.

What Combat's Like

Combat is a form of vertigo. I was trained to thrive on chaos, but nothing prepared me for the fear of doubting my own senses. Frequently, I found that my memory of a firefight was just that—mine. Afterward, five Marines told five different stories. I remembered turning left off a dirt road onto a paved street running west through Al Gharraf. I saw fire coming from buildings to the right and remembered a drag race of four or five kilometers out to the highway. That was my memory, my accepted truth of what had happened.

But the map showed the distance was only about fifteen hundred meters, less than half of what I'd estimated. Some in the platoon remembered armed men standing to our left as we made the turn; I never saw them. The domed mosque was burned into my memory, but only Colbert and Wright could remember seeing it as I described it. One of us was adamant that we had driven across a bridge during our sprint to the highway. Not one other person in the platoon remembered a bridge, but there it was on the map. (page 219)

* * *

Clausewitz famously wrote that war is characterized by friction and fog. The simplest things are difficult, and you never seem to have enough information. Our training tried to prepare us for this by making us do more with less—less sleep, less food, less water, less information. But the one thing that can't be replicated in training is the sense of gravity.

It isn't fear really; fear is more acute, a response to one particular moment in time. Gravity is the sense that lives are at stake, that decisions will have swift and irreparable consequences. That sense of responsibility, coupled with the daily grind of fatigue, confusion, and dehydration, can start playing tricks with your mind. Minutes can pass like seconds, and seconds like minutes. Men standing only feet apart can tell totally different stories after a firefight. There's an overwhelming sense of relativity.

For instance, my family in Maryland thought of Iraq as a dangerous place. I, in Iraq, knew that some towns were dangerous and others were safe. Within a dangerous town, some streets were dangerous and some were safe. Even on those dangerous streets, I could stand beside a stone wall and feel perfectly safe. My Marines came up with a term to explain why some get hit and some don't: the sacred geometry of chance. The difference between life and death can be seconds and millimeters. It's almost enough to make a fatalist out of anyone.

Rules of Captivity and Interrogation

SERE's first week was a gentleman's course, half days in a classroom at Coronado's Naval Air Station North Island. On the instructor staff were men who'd spent more time in foreign prisons than I had in the Marine Corps. The purpose of the course, they said, was "to learn to overcome the mind-fuck of captivity." They taught us our rights under the Geneva Convention—food, shelter, medical attention, and mail—with wry smiles. "Don't expect to get any of 'em." (page 149)

The rule of captivity is to bend, not break. Be the willow, not the oak. Getting killed means you failed the test. (page 152)

* * *

SERE, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, taught us the rules of captivity from a prisoner's point of view—our rights under the Geneva Convention and how to survive in captivity while giving up minimal information under torture and duress. But it worked the other way, too—we learned how to treat prisoners we captured, and the lessons were useful in Iraq.

In his classic 1964 book, Counterinsurgency Warfare , the French army officer David Galula makes clear that prisoners must be treated well in any campaign seeking to win over the hearts and minds of a wider population. This is why transgressions like prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib make me so angry—they are strategically counterproductive in addition to being morally repugnant.

General Mattis and Leadership

Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.—Major General James Mattis, USMC

In the middle of a gravelly flat near the runway's end, I approached another fighting hole . . . It was an assault rocket team, and there should have been two Marines awake. In the moonlight, I saw three heads silhouetted against the sky . . . General Mattis leaned against a wall of sandbags, talking with a sergeant and a lance corporal.

This was real leadership. No one would have questioned Mattis if he'd slept eight hours each night in a private room, to be woken each morning by an aide who ironed his uniforms and heated his MREs. But there he was, in the middle of a freezing night, out on the lines with his Marines.

General Mattis asked the assault men if they had any complaints.

"Just one, sir. We haven't been north to kill anything yet."

Mattis patted him on the shoulder . . . "You will, young man. You will. The first time these bastards run into United States Marines, I want it to be the most traumatic experience of their miserable lives." (pages 118-19)

* * *

General Mattis made headlines for saying it is fun to shoot some people. His comment was lifted from context and bandied about as a sign of eroding morals at the top of the military's hierarchy. I worked for General Mattis in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I know that the sound bite doesn't accurately capture the feelings of a man who insisted that his division demonstrate that there was "no better friend" to the Iraqi people than a U.S. Marine. Mattis's only mistake was a political one: allowing his candor to be recorded and then (inevitably) misinterpreted.

It's a curious feature of our society that we like to honor our warriors without really addressing what they do. Being a Marine was like being a trauma surgeon. You see terrible things every day, and you can respond either by crying or by laughing. If you cry, you lose your ability to function, to do your job. So you build up a shell that allows you to distance yourself. Black humor is self-protection, and it's necessary. Unfortunately, that state of mind doesn't play very well when it's lifted out of its context. But we have to understand that it's exactly the attitude we need our warriors to have, and to castigate them for it does all of us a grave disservice.

A Culture Apart

When I returned to the tower, Jim was standing over a cardboard box, looking disgusted. A Christmas card from the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Middle East, based in Bahrain, was taped to the outside. It was addressed to "U.S. Marine Platoon, Camp Rhino, Afghanistan." Inside were two dozen bags of microwave popcorn, an electric fan, and Jackie Collins novels with titles like Hollywood Husbands and The World Is Full of Married Men.

"Bro," he said as I climbed the stairs, "do you ever get the feeling that no one has a clue what we're doing out here?" (pages 137-38)

* * *

Life in the Marines frequently seemed like being a monk—living in an ascetic, all-male world apart from most of society. When I first joined, family friends asked me questions like "Do Marines get paid?" For most people in American society, the military is simply outside their scope of daily thought. Several years ago, a civilian defense official named Sara Lister accused the Marines of being "extremists." She was right, but not quite in the way she intended. Marines, individually and as an organization, live according to a code that has disappeared from much of society. The Corps's "core values"—its three watchwords—are honor, courage, and commitment. They're more than just words, and putting them to work is what sets the Marines apart. I think it makes for a cohesive and resilient organization, but it can create problems when trying to interact with the wider world.

Inadequate protection and support

T he battalion gave each platoon five Humvees, two Mark-19 40 mm automatic grenade launchers, and two .50-caliber heavy machine guns. Most of the modifications needed to make them battle ready were up to us. Most of the gear was old, but the Marines weren't fazed. They just wanted permission to make the changes they needed.

Gunny Wynn and I suspected that the company would deny any unconventional requests to modify the Humvees. "Wouldn't make us look good," I said, mocking my CO's oft-repeated criterion for whether or not we should do something.

So we opted to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission. I knew from Afghanistan that the rules would change when the first shot was fired. By then it would be too late. Using their Afghan experience, Colbert and Sergeant Larry Shawn Patrick opened Second Platoon's chop shop   . . .

By the time we had finished outfitting the Humvees for combat, we had invested hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars from our own pockets. The vehicles were concrete examples of the lessons learned on patrols in Afghanistan. The day the teams declared them ready to go, the battalion sergeant major, its senior enlisted Marine, came down to the motor pool to take a look. Sergeant major is a position of great influence when held by the right man. Our sergeant major, though, was distrusted by the Marines because of his fixation, on the eve of war, with trivialities such as proper haircuts and polished boots.

Looking at the Humvees, he sneered, "Y'all are nothing but a bunch of cowboys who don't trust the Marine Corps to provide you with everything you need to win."

Except for the cowboy part, he was right. (pages 165-66)

* * *

I was on a ridgeline in Afghanistan one night in November 2001, and a resupply helicopter brought in mail from the States. There I was, watching bombs fall on Kandahar and eating cookies baked by my sister ten days before. The United States is able to marshal tremendous resources, which makes it all the more infuriating when our troops don't have everything they need—it's usually a matter of will, not of ability.

Before the Iraq invasion, when roadside bombs weren't an issue, I made a conscious choice not to use armored Humvees in my platoon. More armor means less fuel, less water, less ammo. Armored humvees are heavy—they break axles and get stuck more often driving off-road. We chose speed and maneuverability over armor. I would make a different choice today. Failing to armor U.S. vehicles today is willfully ignoring one of the greatest threats in Iraq, and that's a decision no commander can defend.

Shooting and Saving Children

By the time I reached them, Bryan had unwrapped the bundles, revealing two young boys, both in their teens. Brothers. The older one had a bullet wound in his leg. Coagulated blood crusted his calf and ankle   . . .

Bryan inspected the wounds for a few seconds and announced they were from 5.56 mm rounds. The only such rounds in Iraq were American, and the only Americans there were us. In horror, I thought back to our assault on the airfield a few hours before. The pieces fell into place. Those weren't rifles we had seen but shepherd's crooks, not muzzle flashes but the sun reflecting on a windshield. The running camels belonged to these boys. We'd shot two children.

The platoon jumped into action. Two teams took over security while Doc Bryan went to work on the boys   . . .

I expected everyone else to feel the same urgency we felt, but I was wrong. I ran into company headquarters, breathless, and explained what had happened. The captain simply said that a decision to help the kids was above his head. There was no time to fight with him. I moved on. Major Benelli sat in the shade of the battalion headquarters tent, digging at an MRE.

"Sir, I have two wounded children in my lines. We shot them during the assault this morning. My corpsman's doing what he can, but one of them's urgent surgical."

He shrugged. "So?"

I explained again that we had led the attack just after the call that all personnel on the field were declared

hostile. We had seen people, flashes, maybe rifles, and had fired. But they weren't soldiers. We had shot two kids, and now at least one of them was bleeding to death in front of my platoon.

"The colonel's asleep. Just tell them to go back to their house. We can't help them." He went back to his food, dismissing me.

My vision narrowed to a tunnel. There was no clean, clinical explanation for what I felt and what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell the major that we were Americans, that Americans don't shoot kids and let them die, that the men in my platoon had to be able to look themselves in the mirror for the rest of their lives. I wanted him to get out there and put his hands in the kid's chest to stop the blood that flowed in rhythmic spurts from the holes. I wanted to cradle the major's head between my arms and twist.

But there wasn't time . . . So I walked away and found the battalion medical officer, Navy Lieutenant Alex Aubin. I briefed him quickly. Aubin's eyes were wide. He grabbed his equipment and went to join Doc Bryan while I returned to battalion headquarters. We still needed permission to evacuate the boys, and I couldn't do that on my own. Benelli smirked when I approached.

"The colonel's still asleep, Lieutenant. I'm not waking him, and I'm not endangering Americans to evacuate those casualties. Deal with it   . . ."

Doc Bryan looked up expectantly as I approached. He and Dr. Aubin had stabilized the boys but made it clear that the younger one would die without immediate surgery. The older child would probably linger on for a few days before infection killed him. Colbert stood there with tears in his eyes.

I pulled Aubin aside. "Sir, the battalion says these kids can get fucked. They want us to let them die. What're the rules if you take control of a casualty?"

There was our escape. Once the battalion medical officer had control of wounded civilians, we were legally and ethically required to give them all available care. We gathered eight stretcher bearers and struck out, on foot, across the field to battalion headquarters.

"Here you go, sir. You want to let them die, they can die right here in front of your tent." Doc Bryan gingerly lowered the stretcher in front of Major Benelli, who, for once, had nothing to say. Faced with a small-scale mutiny and the growing realization that posterity would frown on Marine officers who sat by while children died of Marine-inflicted gunshot wounds, he slipped around the back of the tent to wake the colonel.

Ferrando ordered the boys' immediate evacuation to RCT-1's field hospital, where they would be treated by a shock-trauma platoon. Doc Bryan rode along with them to maintain continuity of care until they were turned over to the surgeons   . . .

As darkness fell over Qalat Sukkar, I sat alone in the dim green light of the radios. I felt sick for the shepherd boys, the girl in the blue dress, and for all the innocent people who surely lived in Nasiriyah, Ar Rifa, and the other towns this war would consume. I hurt for my Marines, goodhearted American guys who'd bear these burdens for the rest of their lives. And I mourned for myself. Not in self-pity, but for the kid who'd come to Iraq. He was gone. I did all this in the dark, away from the platoon, because combat command is the loneliest job in the world. (pages 239-43)

* * *

I remember an instructor during my earliest Marine training saying that we, as officers, had three responsibilities: to be ready, always; to win, every time; and to return our Marines to society better than they were when we got them. The hardest for me in combat was the last. I knew that my men would live long lives after the end of the war, and I wanted them to be able to look themselves in the mirror every morning while shaving and know that they had fought their little piece of the war with honor. Psychologically, there's a bright red line between killing enemy combatants and killing innocent civilians. I was infuriated that a senior officer, someone who had control over hundreds of Marines, didn't understand that. Leaders are the moral compass of their units, and that means pouring water on the fire, not gasoline. In hindsight, treating those boys was the best decision I made in Iraq. Ironically, it had nothing to do with inflicting damage on our enemy. I think it's instructive that there's more psychological damage after shooting an innocent person than there is pride or satisfaction after shooting dozens or hundreds of enemy soldiers. There's a lesson in there about our common humanity.

The Draft and Declining Recruits

The biggest opponent of a draft today is the U.S. military. We hear the argument against the draft from civil libertarians all the time, and we hear it from people who are self-interested—kids of draft age and their parents. But ask anyone who served in both the conscripted force prior to 1973 and the all-volunteer force afterward. They're like night and day.

The all-volunteer force is one of the great social successes of the twentieth century. There are no more "dumb grunts." Today we have what the Marine Corps calls the "strategic corporal"—one young guy who, because of CNN and modern firepower, makes decisions with strategic consequences. Today's force is the smartest, best trained, and most capable in American history because it's made up of volunteers.

Low recruiting numbers are certainly a problem, but reinstituting the draft isn't a viable solution. How, then, to attract more people to the armed forces? We keep seeing appeals to potential recruits' lower sensibilities—higher pay, bonuses, skills training. But we've seen no appeal to young people's ideals, no call to public service by our elected officials. In fact, we've seen just the opposite. After 9/11 we were told to go shopping, that to change our daily lives was to concede victory to the terrorists. In the president's prime-time speech on Iraq in June 2005, his call to sacrifice was for people to write a letter to someone in uniform on the Fourth of July. I think many of our military's problems stem from this schizophrenic attitude about whether or not we are a nation at war.

ROTC: Liberalizing the Military, Not Militarizing College Campuses

Thucydides wrote that the nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. Military service in America has become increasingly the career path of those for whom it's a family tradition and those without many alternatives. It's a travesty.

Studying classics in college really emphasized civic duty, the responsibilities of citizenship. Tom Ricks, then the Wall Street Journal 's Pentagon correspondent, spoke at Dartmouth during my junior year, and he argued for putting ROTC back on all the Ivy League campuses. A woman stood up after his talk and said that ROTC at Dartmouth would militarize the campus. Ricks told her she was wrong, that it would liberalize the military. And that's a good thing for all of us.

"Liberalize," in this sense, isn't a political term. It means that the military in a democracy cannot be "them"; it has to be "us," collectively, all Americans. Ask yourself who you want representing the United States and making hard decisions about the conduct of our nation's wars. I want the best young leaders this country has to offer, people who are intelligent, humane, and fair-minded.

Vietnam

The Vietnam comparison with Iraq is an interesting one, but it is so politically charged as to render real analysis almost impossible, at least in public. I believe that Iraq and Vietnam share little tactically, but they share significant similarities strategically and politically.

Tactically, Vietnam's jungles sheltered its insurgents. They took refuge in haven countries along its borders, enjoyed superpower support from the USSR and China, and had charismatic, unified leadership. Iraq really has none of these things. You could argue that the haven exists in Syria, but we have the ability, if not the will, to cut that off.

Politically and strategically, the two wars are similar in that they seem to require increasing pledges of American blood and treasure to prop up regimes that may or may not have the will to survive on their own. They are creating schisms at home, eroding the trust the American people have in their military, and having costs and repercussions far beyond themselves.

There is one crucial difference between Iraq and Vietnam: whereas the United States had very little to lose in Vietnam, it seems we have a great deal to lose in Iraq should we be unable to prevent it from sliding into civil war, anarchy, and failed statehood. If Iraq's connection to global jihadism before the invasion was an illusion, there's little doubt that it's now real.

War on Global Terrorism vs. War Against Extremism

I've never liked the "global war on terror" tagline. Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on aerial bombing or on armored blitzkrieg. Diplomats and lawyers know that language matters, and so it makes sense to define this conflict more accurately. Calling it a global struggle against extremism is arguably a better phrase. But it's hard to make the case without resorting to semantic silliness. It reminds me of the president's 2004 State of the Union address, where the line about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" prompted snickers.

The underlying point, though, is sound. Forward-thinking, civilized societies committed to tolerance and open debate have to oppose religious fundamentalism in all its forms. Sometimes this will require policing our own. When Lieutenant General Boykin was allowed to get away with public comments, while in uniform, about his God being real and Allah being an idol, it sent the wrong message to our adversaries. When President Bush used the word "crusade"—not once but twice—after 9/11, it sent the wrong message to our adversaries. So yes, to define this as a struggle against extremism is arguably more accurate, but it will require holding ourselves to the standards we set for others.

Iraq, Military Readiness, and the Next War

Much of the talk-show chatter is about how overstressed the U.S. military is, how it weakens our ability to respond to the next crisis, whether that's Iran, North Korea, the Taiwan Strait, or someplace that's not yet in our common vocabulary. Fortunately, American naval and air forces aren't much affected by the Iraq War. And ground forces are more adaptable and resilient than we give them credit for. The army is currently reshaping itself, increasing from 33 combat brigades to 43 modular, easily deployable combat brigades. If we take a step back and think about it, the premise that the U.S. military, which fought World War II and Korea and then slogged through ten years and 58,000 dead in Vietnam, is being "broken" by 1,800 dead in Iraq is slightly ludicrous. An unasked question is how we, as a society, could have allowed our military forces to be degraded to that sorry state.

That's not to say that this war isn't doing damage to the force. A real danger, I believe, is the reallocation of defense funding from R&D and procurement (the so-called modernization budget) to current operations. In the long run, this could leave us unprepared to fight a technologically sophisticated enemy that can threaten us in the air, at sea, and electronically. A military cliché is that armies train to fight the last war, and it's a safe bet that our nation's next war will bear little resemblance to the current fighting in Iraq.

Returning Home: Post-Traumatic Stress, Coming Unhinged, and Strength of Support

I stroll in the summer sunlight at a lakeside family reunion. Young cousins splash in the water while adults laugh over drinks. In the distance, a band plays. I approach people to join the conversations, but no one can see or hear me. I am invisible to them. Looking down at myself in confusion, I see that I wear desert camouflage and carry a rifle slung across my chest. Blood soaks my clothes.

For months after coming home, this dream woke me. Not every night, only a dozen times in all, often enough to make sleep an act of will. Sometimes I got up and took a walk. Sometimes I did pushups on my bedroom floor until I collapsed in exhaustion. Mostly, though, I stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something, anything, else   . . .

Delusions of normalcy continued as I settled back into my daily routine   . . .

Bit by bit, little things dragged me back. On a Saturday afternoon, a Marine friend who had not been in Iraq invited me to go skeet shooting with him at Camp Pendleton's range. I accepted reflexively, thinking nothing of it. I noticed him looking at me as we drove up the freeway. Finally, he spoke.

"What the hell are you doing?"

I was swerving randomly under overpasses. In Iraq, that made it harder for people above to drop hand grenades into the Humvee.

"Sorry. I wasn't paying attention."

When we got to the range, I stood on the firing line with a shotgun and a bag of shells. Suddenly I had no interest in shooting skeet. I had last fired a gun shortly before midnight on April 1, on the highway north of Al Hayy.

I sized people up on the street, looking head to toe for the telltale bulge of a pistol or a bomb. Not having a tourniquet and IV bag nearby made me vaguely uncomfortable. I ate up every scrap of news about the men still fighting but preferred not to talk about it. I cried sometimes for no reason at all. When a driver cut me off in a merge lane, I visualized, without emotion, pulling his head back and cutting his throat with my car key. On the Fourth of July, a firecracker sent me diving behind a car door, reaching for a pistol that wasn't there. I felt older than my father. And I had the dream.

I thought I was losing my mind. The only way I knew I was still sane was that I thought I might be going crazy. Surely that awareness meant I was sane. Crazy people think they're sane. Only sane people can think they're crazy. I was reduced to taking comfort in a tautology. (pages 361-63)

* * *

It took me a year to adjust after coming home from Iraq. Afghanistan was different—our role wasn't very violent and we came back on a ship. We had a month, including some vacation time in Perth and Sydney, before getting back to the States. But I left Iraq on a Sunday night and was in San Diego on Tuesday.

It was surreal. I had all the stereotypical little signs of post-traumatic stress disorder—jumping at loud noises, nervous in crowds, short-tempered, insomnia. And you know what? I came back to a loving family and supportive friends. I had a good education and solid prospects for the future. This experience almost unhinged me. What about all the men and women who don't have the support I had? What happens to them? This is a question the military—and our society more generally—should be addressing.

Would I Do It Again?

The question of whether I would have signed up if I could have known what those five years would hold is nearly impossible to answer. 

It's naive for anyone to join the military without realizing that going to war is a possibility, but it was 1998 and war seemed impossibly remote. A "big" mission for us, we thought, would be a peacekeeping patrol in the Balkans or an embassy evacuation in Africa. In fact, only one of my instructors had ever been in a firefight, and we thought he was a god. Now the instructors at every level of Marine training are combat-blooded.

The best way to get at the question may be to reiterate what I tell guys in the Harvard ROTC. They face a much harder decision than I faced, since they know they'll end up in Afghanistan or Iraq with almost 100 percent certainty. Military service is so good in so many ways—the satisfaction of serving, the skills and experience, the induction into a lifelong fraternity. But, and this is a crucial but, they have to emerge on the other side both physically and psychologically intact.

I tell them to do it, because our country needs them, but do it with both eyes open, aware of the gravity of their commitment.