“Support Our Troops” Is More Than a Slogan

It has been almost a year since Chief Warrant Officer Sharon Swartworth was killed in Iraq.

Chief, as we called her, was a person of high rank, and I was one of thousands of lowly JAG captains, but her warmth, compassion, and easygoing humanity belied her importance as the Army’s top JAG warrant officer. I will never forget the reception where she told myself and one other JAG lawyer the story of how she sneaked out of tiny Camp Colburn, Korea, to meet her boyfriend. At the time, she was a 21 year-old specialist, martial law was in effect in Korea, and she got caught. Her commander suspended most of the punishment he imposed, and as a result, she went on to be a leader and example to the JAG’s warrant officer corps. And she went on to die in a helicopter crash near Baghdad just short of her retirement, after 30 years of service. The date was November 7, 2003.

I had left active duty four days before. A few days later, as I was repacking some junk from my recent move, I opened a newspaper, and in the instant before I crumpled it into packing material, I saw her picture.

With her on that helicopter was Sergeant Major Cornell Gilmore, an enormous, affable, powerful man with a character as strong as his voice. When the Sergeant Major’s office was just across the hall from mine, I would hear the windows rattle when he spoke, yet not once did hearing that voice bother me in the least. To hear the Sergeant Major was to respect him.

For the rest of my life I will wonder whether I made the right decision to leave active duty when I did, even if I delayed my departure for two years after 9/11, even if I’m still in the Reserves, even if I know that my family simply could not make it through a deployment as families with older kids and American wives could. I still wonder why Chief Swartworth and Sergeant Major Gilmore had to be there, and I did not.

Please take a minute to get to know Chief, and look at the faces of the people who loved her.

Keep all of that in mind when I still say that winning this war is worth another thousand tragedies like that one. Even if I’m one of them. Because today, I read this:

I supported the Iraq invasion for the same reason that I supported Clinton’s decision to intervene in Bosnia—it appeared that an evil person had the reins of government and was using his power to commit acts of genocide. I will blow my own horn and add, however, that I literally scoffed at the notion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq . . . .

I suppose you can say that anyone could have bought the bad intelligence because many did. You must also consider, however, the demonstrable fact that this administration, in the persons of Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld deliberately misled the public about one aspect of the W.M.D. fiasco in that they took the fact of shipment of tubes to Iraq and jumped to the unsupportable conclusion that the tubes meant that Iraq was using them in a centrifuge for use in converting titanium to the stuff of war.

This person never believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction but now opposes the war because the Administration “jumped to a conclusion,” which apparently means they “deliberately misled” us about something that this person never found compelling or persuasive in the first place.

Of course, I was one of those who did believe in the WMD. I still believe Saddam had them to this day, which probably makes me one of a few. I have no doubt that he would have made more and used them, since past experience tends to be a good guide on such matters. I believe I’m better off not having to worry about what country Saddam will invade next, and without tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia preparing for just such an eventuality. I’m better off with the U.N.’s hand severed and bleeding in the bottom of the cookie jar. I also believe that Japan had stockpiles of WMD in World War II, but since those weapons most recently killed someone a year ago, it might still be a while before we know the full truth about that, too.

If you run a closed society, mass-slaughter your own people, and threaten your neighbors, I’m not going to give you the benefit of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Nothing is easier, of course, than applying hindsight to intelligence. Intelligence, as the President ought to have explained better, is not an exact science when you’re talking about regimes that stubbornly resist requests for more transparency and that would instantly kill anyone (Hussein Kamel, for one) who tells the truth about what they’re hiding. To look at a score of the CIA’s conclusions about a secretive regime and characterize every bad call as a deception–even without any evidence of an intent to deceive–is beyond disingenuous. It speaks of our fading will to preserve our lives and our nation, of a Euromalaise that must be convinced of its own right to exist and its need to preserve that right.

I do not need that kind of convincing.

In this author, I smell a dropout from the “cakewalk” school, someone who knows nothing about war but supported this one when he thought it would be easy. Since we have suffered 1,000 casualties–which is unprecedented in historical terms, because of how low the number really is no matter how much each one hurts us–he now revokes his support from the soldiers who have lost arms, legs, and lives after he and a majority of Americans and their elected representatives sent them there. He proposes to put them under the command of a man who still cannot decide that it was a mistake to send them there (which he voted to do) or to continue to fund them (which he voted not to do).

Fine. In which case, we should immediately give each of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines a final accounting of their pay and a plane ticket home. We have no right to go on deceiving the this way.

It is beneath this nation’s compact with those who volunteer to defend us to send them into battle and then to withdraw them from the field without victory once they suffer losses. There are losses in all wars, and on all sides, so by this definition, all wars are politically unsustainable. Using the same policy of decision-by-hindsight, we know that all intelligence is imperfect. Every attempt to protect American lives before they disappear in a plume of smoke is inevitably going to be based on some premises that turn out to be false. From this day forward, we must wait for the certainty of the grave and hope that there are some of us left to avenge the dead–and only if we can pin responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.

A country owes its soldiers better than to cheat them of their lives with a courageous bait and a cowardly switch.

While we’re at it, let’s also shut down our highways. The quagmire on our roads kills another thousand people every ten days. Those lives are precious, too, and it is worth any sacrifice to save them. But what of these lives? How will we ever save those who would share their fate if the world is on notice that we lack the will to fight and bleed to keep them safe?