it sounds so much simpler when he says it

I know this blog has been silent for so many m0nths: more than six! How can it be? But I  didn’t feel like I could keep writing here until I had the book actually delivered to the publisher.

That has now happened, and I’ll say more about it later. But right now, I wanted to talk about the clip below, in which Lt.  Dan Choi is unapologetic in his support for whistleblower Bradley Manning. (At right, the March rally in which Daniel Ellsberg and Ann Wright were both arrested, protesting Manning’s treatment at Quantico.)

“A soldier who lived up to the mandate of the soldier.” That’s elegant. I now wish I’d managed to interview him directly, before including him as one of the major figures of my final chapter. Manning, of course, is a far more major figure, embodying at least three of Ain’t Marching’s core themes. And the first change suggested by my editor, when she read the book, was in its title: it’s now I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Soldiers Who Dissent, From George Washington to Bradley Manning.  I couldn’t say it better than Choi above, though I certainly did at greater length.

Like Choi and almost everyone else expressing an opinion about his case, I’ve not had the opportunity to speak to Spc. Manning, or even to his attorney or best friend. I’m trying not to project onto him my own ideas about dissent, or whistleblowers as mavericks, or the inherent challenge thrown at militarism by its gender issues. I’m hoping to be able to cover his  court martial this fall, and perhaps to offer some somewhat more direct observations.

But right now, it’s both true and poetic that the whole Wikileaks scandal has punctured anyone’s ability to make conventional assumptions about our foreign policy. And if that’s not dissent, I’m not sure what is.4

What do you think?

Evan Thomas at Guernica: how he pushed the Iraq war like Citizen Cane

If I’d been nattering here as much as on Facebook, you’d have heard more than you care to about my interview with former Newsweek editor Evan Thomas. But I’m pretty happy with how it came out. At the bottom, click to read it at Guernica Magazine, and maybe throw in your two cents?

Wolf in the Heart

Chris Lombardi interviews Evan Thomas, September 2010

The historian and departing Newsweek editor on how he (like Remnick and Keller) caught war fever after 9/11, the obsession with being a man, and how his dad glowed in Navy whites.

In the October, 2001 “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker editor David Remnick called George Bush’s post-9/11 speech “reassuring.” Despite the fears of some, he explained, “taken as a policy pronouncement of sorts, it pointed in the right direction.” Even as it became clearer that the “policy pronouncement” was signaling war in two countries, many, if not most, writers and editors were as much participants in the preparations as observers. By April 2002, the New York Times’s now-notorious Judith Miller was deep in her dance with Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, reporting enthusiastically on the “important new discoveries” of weapons of mass destruction. The New Yorker again chimed in with similar reporting by then-staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg, whose 2002 stories led with graphic details of the gas poisoning of Kurds in 1988. “In five years,” Goldberg wrote in October, 2002, “I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” So adamant was The New Republic’s plumping for war that editor Peter Beinart recently felt the need to write an entire book, The Icarus Syndrome, bemoaning American war hubris. Also caught in the fervor was Newsweek’s Evan Thomas.

Newsweek, which emblazoned “God Bless America” on its post-9/11 cover and followed that issue with articles in the coming weeks entitled “A Fight Over the Next Front” and “Blame America at Your Peril,” became perhaps the most visible of the Ernie Pyle-wannabes. By December of 2001, Thomas, an editor-at-large who announced last month he will be leaving the magazine he joined nearly twenty-five years ago, was on CBS calling Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “a great war leader,” and by March 2002 his byline was on a story about a “growing consensus” in the Bush administration that “the next target” in the war on terror was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. All this less than twelve months before the magazine’s “Shock and Awe” cover breathlessly reported the devastation that resulted.

Seven years later, all of the media outlets above have recanted some of what they published back then, even as the buzz for a new war with Iran threatens to repeat the cycle (with participation of some of the same personnel, such as Jeffrey Goldberg, now with The Atlantic). Beyond a few journalism-ethics seminars, few have tried to examine why they did it. Thomas, who now admits that he and the others were in the grip of “war fever,” has turned to history to help himself understand what that means.

History, and controversy, are familiar ground for Thomas. The grandson of an old-line pacifist who helped found the Fellowship of Reconciliation and son of a World War II vet who was a giant in the publishing industry, Thomas spent much of his early career covering intelligence during the end of the Cold War and writing books about that war’s beginnings. In 1998, he won the National Magazine Award for coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and in 2004 he oversaw similarly award-winning Newsweek coverage of the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Among Thomas’s seven published books are many works whose subjects span all of American history. He is both a fellow of the Society of American Historians and a former trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. It may have felt more natural to him than, say, the New York Times’s Bill Keller, to wield a historian’s tools to ask why Americans love war.

The resulting book, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, is both exploratory and questioning, especially regarding the role of a single publisher, William Randolph Hearst, in cheering the government to war.

Hearst, the iconic newspaper mogul, zealously nudged America into its first full-fledged overseas wars in Cuba and the Philippines. The War Lovers notes that as early as 1895—not long after he bought the New York Journal, hoping to compete with Joe Pulitzer’s New York World—Hearst responded to diplomatic troubles in Venezuela with “Is This a Prelude to War?” and reported on Civil War veterans “ready to fight.” For the next three years, he kept up the pressure, and eventually sent to Cuba a notorious yellow journalist named Frederick Lawrence (a sort of proto-Judith Miller). Throughout 1896 the Journal published Lawrence’s entirely fictitious stories. At least one—an account of the Spanish using “women soldiers, known as ‘Amazons,’ who fought with machetes” against the noble Cuban insurgents—was read aloud on the floor of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

After exploiting the famous USS Maine incident, Hearst was equally enthusiastic about the subsequent invasion and occupation of the Philippines—where, as Thomas also notes in a rare reference to the present day, “the United States plunged into a counterinsurgency that cost the lives of nearly four thousand American soldiers, roughly the same number as lost in Iraq between 2003 and 2009.” Moreover, he adds, it was in that war that American soldiers “pioneered the practice known as waterboarding—one of several inhumane practices” used to garner intelligence from Filipino insurgents. Those practices now have new names, thanks to the consensus of many of the media outlets mentioned above: and it’s that kind of consensus that is Thomas’s real target in The War Lovers.

Thomas also looks at Congressmen shouting on both sides of the issue, writer William James, and the rest of the post-Civil-War former-abolitionist crowd. The latter included Civil War widow Josephine Shaw Lowell, who joined Mark Twain in the short-lived Anti-Imperialist League. The book’s vivid scenes of James, Lowell, and others agonizing about post-Civil-War militarism are followed by glimpses of Hearst as he helps escalate pro-war fervor—from popularizing the term “Remember the Maine!” to vivid newspaper covers about “Spanish butchery.” Its focus on the symbiotic relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and Hearst thus goes far beyond the moment some of us remember from Citizen Kane: “Get me the pictures, I’ll get you the war!”

During our interview, Thomas admits he was inspired to write The War Lovers out of a sense of partial responsibility for the war he had unwittingly helped nurture, and that he’d done so partly by dismissing his own reporter’s instincts in the face of the seemingly inevitable war to come: “I felt like this is what the media did during World War II.”

I spoke to Thomas by phone, both from his office at Newsweek and from Martha’s Vineyard. As perhaps befits a man about to leave journalism behind to concentrate on writing books and teaching at Princeton, he alternated between genial author/professor and the wary, somewhat weary, journalist he was for thirty-plus years. Prepared to talk about his new book, he was less immediately forthcoming on other subjects. But his voice warmed significantly when asked about his father, especially as he remembered how great his dad looked in his dress whites. “He was literally glowing.”

–Chris Lombardi for Guernica

Guernica: One of the first things you said, even before The War Lovers came out, was that it was your way of trying to explain why you got swept up in the pro-war season of 2002-2003.

Evan Thomas: I was a hawk on the Iraq war. And if I’m honest with myself, I think I did feel a kind of war fever. A lot of journalists did.

Even before the war—but post-9/11—I have to confess I had almost this sense of relief. After what felt like years of superficial subjects, from Monica to Gary Condit, we were so glad to be writing about serious subjects. And after the attack, we kind of felt like editors during World War II: the time was over for that old adversarial relationship.

There’s a kind of excitement about going to war.

Guernica: Do you think you made some serious journalistic mistakes as a result?

Evan Thomas: Two things come to mind. First, when Colin Powell gave that speech at the UN [in February 2003], with “proof” of WMD and Saddam’s al Qaeda connections, right around then, Michael Isikoff was getting some cautionary signals from the CIA, which we did not pursue the way we should have.

Second, I have to admit that the very tenor and tone of Newsweek during February-March 2003 was pretty excited about war. Even when I wrote cautionary articles about What Could Go Wrong, there was a kind of energy to them. Even antiwar articles had it.

There’s a kind of excitement about going to war. And there was—it’s hard to describe now—that atavistic need for revenge many of us felt post-9/11. Especially if you were in New York or Washington. In March of 2003, a lot of other editors besides me were hawkish on Iraq: Bill Keller, David Remnick.

Guernica: And Peter Beinart, who like you felt so bad he wrote a whole book about it.

Evan Thomas: I know. I haven’t read it, but I have bought it.

Guernica: Is Richard Haass’s story, “Rethinking Afghanistan,” an effort to do things differently? To not just go along with an administration’s war plan?

Evan Thomas: I’m not sure. Haass makes good arguments. The problem is that the kind of limited effort he wants doesn’t work. I went to Afghanistan a year ago, and talked to the people around McChrystal. They too had some pretty convincing arguments. Any anti-terror war, they said, you can’t do it without intelligence. But you can’t depend on your intelligence without the support of the local people. I found it very convincing.

There’s no question that an embedded reporter gets seduced. They end up writing from within “their” units.

Guernica: Except when the people you thought were allies turn out to not tell the truth, or shift sides too quickly. A lot of those WikiLeaks docs seem to point to that. And then there’s the inherent tendency of people not to want foreigners running things.

Evan Thomas: Look. When I was thinking about this a year ago, one thing came clear: There is no actual winning scenario. Just ways that are worse than others.

Guernica: A lot of what we’re learning right now did not come from embedded reporting, which you and the major dailies participate in. Even before WikiLeaks, we had the Rolling Stone story by a “rogue” reporter. Do you think embedding hurts your ability to get the story right?

Evan Thomas: Look. There’s no question that an embedded reporter gets seduced. They end up writing from within “their” units. The good side of it: our military gets represented correctly, as hardworking, brave kids. And as armies in wars go—with exceptions we all know about—the American military does pretty well in avoiding war crimes.

Guernica: You’ve looked at this in a number of your histories. But I want to ask you about a military veteran in your own life: your father, Evan Thomas II, who was in World War II before becoming a sort of giant in New York publishing. What, if anything, did he share about the war when you were growing up?

Evan Thomas: My dad kinda got into the war sideways. Before Pearl Harbor, he was an interventionist, and signed up with American Field Service as a noncombatant. He was an ambulance driver.

Guernica: Very Ernest Hemingway of him.

Evan Thomas: Yes, exactly. Then after the war started he switched to the the U.S. Navy, so he got to experience both the sands and heat of North Africa and the raging seas of the naval war.

So I heard about World War II, but in a sort of complex moral context, since my grandfather was a pacifist—though not really, since he wasn’t against World War II. So dad’s war stories came in this very complicated moral dimension of how to have it both ways.

I’ve always felt a little guilty, because it was kids without the privilege I had going to war.

Guernica: Did you ever hear stories about your great-uncle Ralph, who fought in World War I?

Evan Thomas: Not much. I heard a lot more about his younger brother, my great-uncle Evan, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for being on a hunger strike, because he refused to go to war. A life sentence for not wanting to fight! I knew my great-uncle Evan, so I heard about the war from that perspective. But my great-uncle Ralph was long since gone. All I know about him was that he was in the Army, and that he was an engineer.

Guernica: I’ve actually seen a few of the clippings about Evan and your family back then. And I thought that the climax of that story—when your great-grandmother marches into Fort Riley to talk her grandson into eating—was something for the movies.

Evan Thomas: My daughter is writing a book about it, called Conscience. It’ll be out next year.

Guernica: Speaking of war and conscience, how did your own ideas about war develop?

Evan Thomas: Well, I’m Vietnam generation—but not really. By the time I turned eighteen and graduated from high school it was 1973, and nobody my age was going to war. Not anyone middle-class, anyway. I’ve always felt a little guilty, because it was kids without the privilege I had going to war.

Guernica: So you don’t go to Vietnam; you go to Harvard instead. In those days, did you just assume you’d be a wordsmith like your dad?

Evan Thomas: They left me alone to do what I was gonna do. Students today are thinking about their careers constantly. I don’t remember thinking much about my career until I graduated and didn’t have a job. I went to law school, and eventually became a journalist.

Guernica: Once you were doing that, was history a natural next step?

Evan Thomas: In retrospect, it was an obvious choice. But actually, I didn’t think about writing a book of any kind until Walter Isaacson suggested I write a book with him. After The Wise Men [about the birth of cold-war liberalism] I obviously got the bug, because I’ve been writing books ever since since.

Guernica: One of your early books was The Very Best Men, about the OSS, which became the CIA. It came out in 1986, when some ugly truths about the Agency were coming to life. Were you thinking about the contemporary stuff when you were writing about its origins? Had you done any reporting about it?

Evan Thomas: Only sort of. I’d done a little writing on intelligence. I had covered the Hill at TIME Magazine for a while and at Newsweek. Certainly those misadventures were on my mind at least somewhat.

Guernica: You went on to what I think of as a naval series, starting with the John Paul Jones biography.

Evan Thomas: A series? Nothing that intentional. [Laughs] I guess the nice thing about being a journalist and author is that you can do what you want. But if all biography is really autobiography, I guess it’s true that I’d always been reverential about the Navy. I remember that my mother used to keep on their dresser, for years, a photograph of my father in his dress whites from 1943. He glowed.

Guernica: A man in a uniform—there’s an undeniable pull to that.

Evan Thomas: Absolutely. He was literally glowing. He had a deep tan; it was the spring of 1943, he was the picture of health—radiant. It definitely led me to romanticize the Navy, and that’s probably what led me to John Paul Jones and the books after.

Guernica: You got to your father’s war with a battle I never knew about until recently. What drew you to the engagement in the Battle for Leyte Gulf, which drew in the entire Japanese Navy and most of ours?

Evan Thomas: It’s definitely in the realm of battles people have never heard of. People asked me: Why are you writing about this battle? It was a complex battle. I was drawn to it partly because it was a fuckup, and journalists love writing about disasters. It had embedded in it a lot of stories—of loyalty, heroism, a lot of drama. It was complex, but it was a pretty compelling story.

Guernica: Does The War Lovers feel like an extension of that series or something very different?

Evan Thomas: It’s an extension, I think. By the early two thousands I was writing a lot about the government, and terrorism, and the misdirection that got us into the Iraq War. It got me thinking about the whole notion of war fever

Guernica: So you didn’t start with Teddy Roosevelt.

Evan Thomas: No. I started with William James, actually. I was reading Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, and James is one of the characters. There’s a section where he quotes James on the heroism of Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the Massachusetts 54th regiment of black soldiers, and what that kind of heroism stood for thirty years later.

So I wanted to look at that period, when war was brewing, as a way of looking at our own. And the instant you start thinking about 1898, bing! Teddy Roosevelt pops up. It wasn’t easy. He’s been written about a lot, so it’s tricky to bring out something people haven’t seen.

In explaining war, the gender studies people talk about this obsession with being a man, what Roosevelt called “the wolf rising in the heart.”

Guernica: I love your evocation of Massachusetts back then—especially the recounting of James at the Shaw memorial, and the ping-pong of emotions after Civil War. And thank you for introducing me to Josephine Shaw Lowell, sister of Col. Robert Gould Shaw and ancestor to poet Robert Lowell, who went from celebrated Civil War widow in 1865 to anti-war activist in 1905.

Evan Thomas: You know, I wanted to make her a major figure, but I didn’t have enough of a paper trail to flesh her out enough for that.

Guernica: You illustrate well the effects of the 1893 economic crash. Do you think it played into the war fever then, the same way George W. Bush saw war as a way to boost the economy?

Evan Thomas: You know, I tend to veer away from economic explanations for war. There’s been a predominance of that kind of thinking, in the histories of the time. If anyone in academia gets it right, I think that the gender studies people are closer to the truth here. They talk about this obsession with being a man, what Roosevelt called “the wolf rising in the heart.”

Guernica: You also write about the Anti-Imperialist League, which James co-founded and which once had as vice president Mark Twain (whose antiwar views are in the news with the upcoming publication of his long-suppressed memoir). What’s your overall impression of the group, which allied Civil War vets with plutocrats like Andrew Carnegie?

Evan Thomas: One word: feckless. But you know? They represented something, a real trend. Everyone thinks of this period as some historic Beginning of American Imperialism. But it wasn’t! By 1900, even though the anti-interventionists lost, McKinley wasn’t a big fan of the occupation either, and Americans had gotten sick of the whole thing. In 1902 Roosevelt declared victory and got out, and the country very quickly became isolationist. Same after World War I.

Americans are very ambivalent about this stuff. To this day, the issue bugs us. People ask: what are we doing there? Now it’s what are we doing in Afghanistan? I wonder why we haven’t heard more of that. Maybe we will now.

Guernica: Do you think public sentiment is turning against this war, as with Iraq?

Evan Thomas: The elites this summer are starting to turn against it, for sure. Americans overall aren’t paying attention to it, at all.

Guernica: Unless you have a family member in uniform.

Evan Thomas: I think about this a lot. We fought this nine-year war, Americans didn’t feel it. No war bonds, our taxes never went up. The nature of these wars is a cruel aspect of how we’ve constructed our society. One tenth gets all the pain. It was bad during Vietnam, as I said before. Now it’s grotesque.

Guernica: About that earlier movement: I was surprised not to see mention of some of the League’s Civil War veterans, especially Carl Schurz and Charles Francis Adams.

Evan Thomas: There have been very good books about the Anti-Imperialist League. And I had to pick and choose: I kind of have a rule not to have more than about six characters that people have to remember.

Guernica: And Roosevelt and Hearst are so outsized, they make up about four right there!

Evan Thomas: It is an issue, because you run the risk of skewing your story. But if you don’t, you end up with what we used to call at Newsweek “the Russian novel problem.”

But here’s the real problem: Life is a Russian novel. It has too many characters and too many plots. When you narrow it down, you run the risk of distorting history.

Guernica: I’m still going to ask you about one more stream you didn’t include: Lewis Douglass, Frederick’s son, who fought with the 54th and was very vocal in opposition to that war, and on the other side Booker T. Washington, who appeared at rallies for McKinley to promote black enlistment as a way of illustrating black patriotism.

Evan Thomas: Again, you make choices. I was only tangentially aware of Lewis Douglass’s involvement; I touch on the black-soldier issue a little, because of some statements Roosevelt made about their capabilities. But there can be whole books—are whole books—about black soldiers in that war. It wasn’t a choice I made.

Guernica: When you write about historical disputes over other wars, do you ever feel echoes of those divisions in your family? I’m thinking of your grandfather’s generation again, your uncle Ralph going to war while Evan starved for peace and the rest of your family worried—including your grandfather Norman, who helped form the iconic antiwar group the Fellowship of Reconciliation. When you wonder why sentiment against the Afghan war isn’t stronger, do you hear those ghosts in the back of your mind?

Evan Thomas: I don’t think that much about it. Not that way.

Guernica: How about when you’re writing about politics, since ours has moved so far from that postwar consensus your father lived in? When an offhand comment where you said “Obama is God” was talked about for weeks, and lives on on the Internet?

Evan Thomas: [Laughs] Oh my word, the headlines! “Newsweek thinks Obama is God—Proof that the Media are a Left-Wing Conspiracy.”

Guernica: And some mention the fact that your grandfather, Norman, ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket. Does that make things difficult for you?

Evan Thomas: I’m proud of my grandfather, though I think socialism doesn’t work at all. Norman’s socialist identity was all bound up in specifics, not ideology: He got involved helping poor people in tenements. And if you wanted to organize against World War I, they were the only game in town.

Guernica: How would he have reacted to the fact that, when asked in a survey, 55 percent of Americans consider “socialist” an accurate label for President Obama?

Evan Thomas: [Laughs] What would he have thought? He’d have snorted at it.

To read the rest, including the Guernica comments, click here.

Don’t ask, don’t tell — don’t fight? queer notes from another pacifist for soldiers

Photo: Stephen Voss for The Advocate

I mentioned David Mixner back on Groundhog Day, when, appropriately enough, the Senate held their first-ever hearings on DADT. Now, you can click here to read a longer version of my interviews with him, including one about Sec. Gates’ slow-mo plan for repeal. The money quote, to me:

If Obama had to live by (DADT) regulations, he couldn’t. He couldn’t mention Michelle, the girls. She couldn’t live at the White House, she would get no benefits, and he couldn’t have pictures of them at his desk. He can’t live like that: why the hell does he think we can?

Mixner was less convincing, I thought, when asked about the vexing nexus of pacifism and GI rights. Perhaps he should come to the next GI Rights Network conference this spring. and talk to others for whom that dance is important.

For black soldiers, the wound goes that far back

The photo is of Sgt. Major Lewis H. Douglass, survivor of the battle of Fort Wagner, who never complained about  his pension but did observe,long before he became outspoken against the next war, that the supposed unity of the “Grand Army of the Republic” —given the differing treatment of black and white veterans groups — existed only on paper. I thought of him when he read this:

A pension system established to support Civil War soldiers did not provide equally for black and white veterans. A newly published study from Brigham Young University concludes discrimination faced by black soldiers during the war was in part to blame for the discrimination they suffered for decades afterward.

You almost don’t want to read the next paragraph, which goes on to say that essentially, that was just the beginning. Good on the BYU researchers for finding it, and the Salt Lake Trib for including it on its military site.  I guess past really is prologue.

Bring back the draft? A-gain?

Last time there was a national call to resume conscription, it came from former Marine and zillion-term Congressman Charles Rangel (left), who fought on the famous Hill 902 during the Korean War.

Rangel’s bill to do so, introduced on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, was mostly meant to highlight the still-deep inequity between the people who decide to start wars and those who die in them. (The book at right is only one of many others, including by Civil War historian David Williams and Vietnam-War sociologist Christian Appy, whose titles are nearly identical to that World War I-themed volume.) But the buzz this week is about a piece in Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, author of  the iconic 2006 “A Failure in Generalship” (a blast at Rumsfeld first highlighted for me by Capt. Luis Montalvan). Yingling has kept up the pressure ever since, as noted last month by Tom Ricks in his Foreign Policy blog The Best Defense.)

In the new piece, Yingling gives a brief history of the Founding Fathers’ view of how war would be conducted before noting:

Many of the difficulties in civil-military relations today are attributable to our departure from the elegant system of checks and balances established in the Constitution. Congress has all but abdicated many of its war powers, including raising forces, confirming the appointment of officers, providing oversight to operations and declaring war. This has made the U.S. weaker by allowing hasty, ill-considered and poorly supported executive actions to imperil national security. The remedy for these failures requires not innovation, but rather a return to the time-tested principles of America’s founding.

And part of that return, Yingling adds, is a full return to the citizen soldier.

The U.S. should therefore abandon the all-volunteer military and return to our historic reliance on citizen soldiers and conscription to wage protracted war. This approach proved successful in both world wars and offers several advantages over the all-volunteer military. First and most important, this approach demands popular participation in national security decisions and provides Congress with powerful incentives to reassert its war powers. Unlike the all-volunteer force, a conscripted force of citizen soldiers would ensure that the burdens of war are felt equally in every community in America. Second, this approach provides the means to expand the Army to a sufficient size to meet its commitments. Unlike the all-volunteer force, a conscripted force would not rely on stop-loss policies or an endless cycle of year-on, year-off deployments of overstressed and exhausted forces. Third, conscription enables the military to be more discriminating in selecting those with the skills and attributes most required to fight today’s wars. Unlike the all-volunteer force, a conscripted force would not rely on exorbitant bonuses and reduced enlistment standards to fill its ranks. Finally, this approach would be less expensive. Unlike the world wars of the 20th century, today’s dangers will not pass quickly, allowing for a return to a smaller and less expensive military establishment. Imposing fiscal discipline on the Pentagon would not only strengthen America’s depleted finances, but also constrain executive ambitions for adventures abroad and congressional appetites for pork-barrel projects at home.

Yingling does not, for all his historical spin, acknowledge that the Founding Fathers also considered a place for conscientious objectors, nor does he think of military conscription in the context of a broader national service requirement as others have done. I just deleted my own comment on where I stand on this, though you might be able to guess.

It can be argued that “A Failure of Generalship” was incredibly influential (see the “surge.”). Will this one be? Will it at least create a debate that lives in more hearts than his, ours and a handful of historians and military families?

War films and books: Who can’t handle the truth?

Last fall, I thought a lot about what writing about war really meant.  Two articles this week went at that question kind of sideways:

First, a Week in Review piece by Washington insider Elizabeth Bumiller, about the newest rack of books on the Iraq and Afghan wars, saying that these soldier-writers “explore the futility of war but wars that they for the most part support. I found that slug less than fully supported by the books/writers mentioned therein, even given the weasel-phrase “for the most part.”

Bumiller also states that such pro-war narratives are different from previous wars, though she writes from little knowledge: “I do not believe much soldier writing about the US Civil War, or World War II, for instance, opposed those wars. I think she is implicitly reacting to some of the books about Vietnam,” wrote science writer Jonathan D. Beard on one of my war-history listservs. Beard’s mostly right, although “not much” does not equal “none” and in that gap much of my book resides.

The same day as the Bumiller piece, A.O. Scott discussed what he called  the new breed of “apolitical” war movies:

It may be that movies, at least as they are currently made and consumed, can’t bridge the gulf between the theater of war and the arena of politics. It is also probably true that the soldiers who are the main characters in fictional and nonfictional war movies don’t talk much about the larger context in which they struggle to survive and get the job done. But in previous wars — in older war movies, that is — they could be a bit more forthcoming. Sailors and infantrymen in World War II combat pictures were known to wax eloquent about the pasting they were going to give Hitler and Tojo, while the grunts in the post-Vietnam Vietnam movies often gave voice to the cynicism and alienation that were part of that war’s actual and cinematic legacy.

But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are different. They are being fought, for one thing, largely out of sight of the American public and largely by an army of professionals. And the respect afforded those professionals — an admiration that is the most pervasive and persuasive aspect of “The Hurt Locker” — extends across the political spectrum. At the same time, though, the political contention about the wars themselves has been vociferous and endless, even as it has involved a measure of ambivalence and, as the wars have gone on, a lot of position-changing and second guessing.

Perhaps the decision to stay out of these debates is a way of acknowledging this ambivalence. Or perhaps filmmakers, aware of the volatility of popular opinion, are leery of turning off potential ticket buyers on one side or another. Or maybe, in the end, the gap between beliefs about war and its reality is too wide for any single movie to capture.

Scott comes close to getting at the core of the issue in one way, though he never addresses the central paradox of writing about war at all. Some of us — yes, I mean you Wilfred Owen, Oliver Stone, Tim O’Brien, let alone us civilian amateurs — instinctively feel that to provide actual, gory details about war is in itself an antiwar act. But I’ll never forget Anthony Swofford’s observation in Jarhead about Gulf War troops getting psyched for battle in 1991:

For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of those damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals. We rewind and review famous scenes, such as Robert Duvall and his helicopter gunships during Apocalypse Now, and in the same film Martin Sheen floating up the fake Vietnamese Congo; we watch Willem Dafoe get shot by a friendly and left on the battlefield in Platoon… the rape scenes when American soldiers return from the bush after killing many VC to sip cool beers in a thatch bar while whores sit on their laps for a song or two (a song from the fifties when America was still sweet) before they retire to rooms and fuck the whores sweetly. The American boys, brutal, young farm boys or tough city boys, sweetly fuck the whores. Yes, somehow the films convince us that these boys are sweet, even though we know we are much like these boys and that we are no longer sweet.

Then is it  the rest of the writing that tells you the politics? If it’s determinedly free of any clues, is that also political? And where does this all fit into my zig-zag definitions of dissent? Those are the questions roiling around in my head right now; I’d love some suggestion from any of you, especially the warrior-writers Bumilller largely ignored.

People who Died: Now Murtha, too (UPDATE Two)

Murtha endorses another whistleblower, a year after the "Murthquake."

Three obituaries inside a week or so: first the World War II-vet peers Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger, only one of whom became a dissenter. Now Murtha, of the Vietnam generation but only a dissenter much later, who I sort of pre-eulogized last week when he went into hospital. Respect to CBS News for not playing politics with the obit notice.

I’ll add more to this when I see how people react.

—-

6:32 p.m. OK, the news blips have gone from not-shocked-quick-notices to something more nuanced. The President’s statement was actually pretty elegant saying a lot in very few words:

He was a devoted husband, a loving father and a steadfast advocate for the people of Pennsylvania for nearly 40 years. His passion for service was born during his decorated career in the United States Marine Corps, and he went on to earn the distinction of being the first Vietnam War combat veteran elected to Congress. Jack’s tough-as-nails reputation carried over to Congress, where he became a respected voice on issues of national security.

The Washington Post’s obit noted that Murtha also exhibited that tough-as-nails approach to the president’s new “budget freeze,” noting that “He has to come to us,” meaning Congress.  Their full coverage includes a slide show and a range of responses.

The announcement that has replaced Murtha’s Congressional site gave more details on his military background, for the curious:

He learned about military service from the bottom up, beginning as a raw recruit when he left Washington and Jefferson College in 1952 to join the Marines out of a growing sense of obligation to his country during the Korean War. He earned the American Spirit Honor Medal, awarded to fewer than one in 10,000 recruits. He rose through the ranks to become a drill instructor at Parris Island and was selected for Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. He then was assigned to the Second Marine Division, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. In 1959, Captain Murtha took command of the 34th Special Infantry Company, Marine Corps Reserves, in Johnstown. He remained in the Reserves after his discharge from active duty until he volunteered for Vietnam in 1966-67, where he served as the S-2 intelligence officer for the 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division and received the Bronze Star with Combat “V”, two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. Upon his retirement from the Marine Corps Reserve in 1990, he was awarded the Navy Distinguished Service Medal by the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.

It was Sam Stein, at Huffington Post, who got to the reason why Murtha ended up in my book title, saying that “the Johnstown native forever cemented his legacy during a mid-November afternoon in 2005 when he went public with his skepticism about the course of the Iraq War.” Calling that day “the Murthquake,” Stein adds:

It is rare that a political figure can literally re-chart the course of his political party. But in coming out for an immediate troop withdrawal, Murtha gave his Democratic colleagues the cover they needed to express their own reservations about the war. Those who worked closely with the congressman at the time — both on and off the Hill — credit him with elevating Iraq on the Democratic platform and in turn putting the party in a position to benefit from the wave of anti-war sentiment that swept the 2006 elections.

“John Murtha showed us how to be strong,” adds MoveOn’s  Tom Matzzie. Click here for some delicious footage of Murtha  refusing to back down when chicken-hawks abused him.

For anyone who doesn’t remember, here’s what happened that November day in 2005:

The flashbulbs started the moment Rep. John Murtha approached the podium. Despite all legislative business, on the last day before the 2005 Thanksgiving recess, the House press room was packed and the cameras on. CNN had even cut into its regular programming. The dais was lined with American flags.

Murtha looked around briefly as he took the stage. A beefy man with sharp blue eyes and brilliant-white hair parted on the side, the former Marine colonel wore a gray business suit, not his uniform or his medals. His colleagues, and the press corps, were already aware of his Bronze Star, his Purple Hearts, and his Silver Star. It was why they were there.

This wasn’t Russell Feingold or Nancy Pelosi, whose opposition to the war had been steadfast from the beginning. This was the first Vietnam veteran ever elected to Congress, a well-known hawk from the part of Pennsylvania often nicknamed “Alabama,” who prided himself on working behind the scenes with both Republican and Democratic Presidents. He’d been in the inner circle during the Persian Gulf War and voted to authorize military action against Iraq. What was he about to propose?

Murtha took a deep breath and summoned the spirit of his mentor and fellow Irishman, Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill, who had famously told Lyndon Johnson that the Vietnam War had gone horribly wrong. He knew this president wasn’t, likely, listening. But he hoped his fellow members of Congress were.

“The war in Iraq,” he began, “is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.” He blinked as the flashbulbs went off.

There was no whispering, no side conversations in the pressroom. Only Murtha, who was about to introduce a resolution calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq “as soon as practicable,” spoke passionately and slowly, blinking back at the cameras as if daring them to tell him to stop.

By the end of the speech, Murtha had named the presence of coalition troops as a source of the insurgency, and gone into more detail about troops who’d lost limbs in Iraq – “These are marvelous people!” — only to be hounded by bill collectors on their return.

“The future of our military is at risk. Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say that the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down, even as our military has lowered its standards. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made. We can not allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of their health care, to be negotiated away.” Murtha took a breath, looking as weary as the soldiers he was describing.

The flashbulbs hadn’t quite stopped before the political response began. As Murtha arrived at the House floor, ready to introduce his resolution, Democrats burst into applause. Republicans glared; a newly elected Ohio representative, Jean Schmidt, who had just been nearly beaten in her solidly Republican district by a young Iraq veteran, took the floor and gave Murtha a message from “a Marine I know” (who turned out to be a far-right state legislator). “Cowards cut and run, but Marines never do.” The response echoed that directed at John Kerry, both in the 2004 campaign and back in 1971, when the recent Navy lieutenant stood before a Senate committee and asked, “How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

The words above are actually mine, written nearly four years ago; at least some of them will end up in the book. I’m so sorry we never got to talk (we were working on an interview date when he got sick) but there’s no question he belongs there. If there’s a non-rogues gallery for “my” soldiers in heaven, he’s sharing a beer with Ambrose Bierce and explaining to William Sloane Coffin that his scorn in the 1970s was nothing personal.

Wednesday, Feb. 1o – Last update: I can’t leave out John Nichols’ remarkable obit for The Nation. He describes the moment how Murtha, long an ally of Bush I, won against the chicken-hawks when he changed his mind.

The clearest evidence that Cheney really did not “get it” when it comes to defense policy was his decision to take on Jack Murtha. The draft dodger who had admitted that he “(didn’t) know a blankety-blank thing about defense” looked the fool when he picked a fight with the Marine he called in to help him understand military matters.

America had a chance to choose between Cheney and Murtha. And as the results of the 2006 and 2008 election cycles (in which Murtha became a key campaigner for Democratic challengers) confirmed, they chose to side with the old soldier, as opposed to the old armchair general.

Nichols also pointed out that Murtha was also beginning to sour on Obama’s Afghan policy, too. For that reason alone, this loss is huger than many know. Semper fi, sir.

I still want to hear the song below a few more times.

Nashville tea party? Not.

I wake up and  the ‘nets are buzzing with a speech last night made in Nashville by that shapeshifter from Alaska (Governor?  Talk show host? Avatar?). But another quiet buzz came in a report about another Battle of Nashville, one that was hardly a tea party. Unsurprisingly, it’s from a Fort Campbell-oriented paper, Clarksville Leaf-Courier, about some often-overlooked troops fighting in that other battle:

“These troops were here, for the first time, under such fire as veterans dread, and yet, side by side with the veterans of Stone’s River, Missionary Ridge and Atlanta, they assaulted probably the strongest works on the entire line, and though not successful, they vied with the old warriors in bravery, tenacity and deeds of noble daring,” said Col. C.R. Thompson in his report.

These troops were members of the 13th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, freed black slaves — recruited from Clarksville and other Middle Tennessee cities.

“This was a very active area for black troops,” said local historian Dr. Richard Gildrie. “They saw a lot of action.”

Newsflash to some: The story of black recruits in the Civil War is hardly limited to those Massachussets units we keep valorizing (mostly because of that movie about the 54th). To this weekend’s Nashville warriors, the thought of armed Negroes is enough of a surprise, I know.  (If that feels harsh, read this roundup of the crowd at the Gaylord Hotel.) But the rest of us need to keep being reminded — thank you, the best-writer-on-the-web-Ta-Nehisi-Coates — of the dimensions of their full role in bringing forward emancipation’s promise.

Speaking of the 13th U.S. Colored Troops our old friend Ambrose Bierce was nearly the regiment’s commander. Born in the Appalachian section of Ohio, Bierce declined the commission, but later saw his racism challenged when he saw them in battle at Overton: ”“Better fighting was never done. Their chances were hopeless and they knew it. Still they showed courage and discipline.”

Back to current issues shortly. But I wish some of those USCT reenactors who threw their photos all over Flickr had showed up at the so-called Tea Party convention, just in time for Miss Sarah’s coronation by the likes of those at left/ They could have turned up in full uniform,  maybe with real guns. The woman who left college in Hawaii because of all the less-white folks in the state (“a minority type thing,” her dad said) might have then been slightly more restrained in her slanders.

the right to seek redress: now more of it for soldiers

Wow. Here’s a piece of news that snuck by many of us, at least me. From Legal Times:

The House Judiciary Committee has approved a bill that would expand the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, allowing it to review petitions filed by military service members challenging courts-martial decisions.

Under current law, a service member is barred from petitioning the high court if the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) has refused to review his or her court-martial appeal or has denied a writ for extraordinary relief.  The only exception is when someone is sentenced to death. In contrast, the government has the right to petition the justices in any case referred to the CAAF.

And in case that still makes you suspicious, in general distrust of the system, the Equal Justice for Our Military Act of 2009 is supported by the American Bar Association and a raft of other bar associations and veterans groups, as well as one of my personal favorites,  the National Institute for Military Justice.

The implications of this are pretty huge. My fear is that we’ll get gaybashers and those who abuse detainees clogging up the SCOTUS channel along with the media; while denying cert is one of the former’s favorite hobbies, the maw of the latter (me! me!) is never quite full. But the promise of the bill, especially as it pertains to those who speak out, is also huge.

I’ll contact some of the kickass attorneys I know and get them to explain how, sometime this week; but right now I’m thinking of course of Marc Hall, who I talked about yesterday, or Alexis Hutchinson, who had to choose her children’s safety. Meanwhile, good on Rep. Susan Davis, the bill’s sponsor, whose San Diego district includes more soldiers than any single one of the other 437.

“the erroneous belief that they have rights”

Certainly not those guaranteed by the First Amendment, with its pesky talk of free speech. This just in from Iraq Veterans Against the War:

The U.S .military plans to extradite stop-lossed Iraq war vet to Iraq for court martial over protest rap song

Fort Stewart, Ga. – The US military plans to extradite a stop-lossed Iraq war veteran to Iraq “within a few days” to face a court martial for allegedly threatening military officers in a protest rap song he made.

Spc. Marc Hall has been jailed in the Liberty County Jail near Fort Stewart, Ga., since Dec. 11 because he wrote a song called “Stop Loss” about the practice of involuntarily extending military members’ contracts.

“It is our belief that the Army would violate its own regulations by deploying Marc and it would certainly violate his right to due process by making it far more difficult to get witnesses. It appears the Army doesn’t believe it can get a conviction in a fair and public trial. We will do whatever we can to insure he remain in the United States,” said Hall’s civilian attorney, David Gespass.

Gespass claims the Army’s attempts to deploy Hall violate Army Regulations 600-8-105 and the Army’s conscientious objector regulations. Hall applied for a conscientious objector discharge Monday. The military’s move would also separate Hall from both his civilian legal team and military defender.

“The Army seeks to disappear Marc and the politically charged issues involved here, including: the unfair stop-loss policy, the boundary of free speech and art by soldiers, and the continuing Iraq occupation. The actual charges are overblown if not frivolous, so I’m not surprised the Army wants to avoid having a public trial,” explained Jeff Paterson, executive director of Courage to Resist.

An Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) member, Hall served 14 months in Iraq. He was scheduled to end his military contract on Feb. 27 but received a stop loss order that he would have to stay on active-duty to re-deploy to Iraq with his unit.

“Marc served his tour of duty to Iraq honorably,” said Brenda McElveen, Hall’s mother. “To his dismay, he was told that he would be deployed again. When Marc voiced his concerns over this matter, his concerns fell on deaf ears. To let his frustration be known, Marc wrote and released the song. Marc is not now nor has he ever been violent.”

Using stop loss orders, the US military has stopped about 185,000 soldiers from leaving the military since 2001. An additional 13,000 troops are now serving under stop-loss orders. President Obama said he thinks the practice should be stopped.

Hall, 34, was charged Dec. 17 with five specifications in violation of Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Conduct, including “wrongfully threatening acts of violence against members of his unit.” His arrest came about a month after 13 people were killed in a shooting incident at Fort Hood, Texas. Hall, whose hiphop name is Marc Watercus, mailed a copy of his “Stop Loss” song to the Pentagon.

Based at Fort Stewart, Hall said the song was a “free expression of how people feel about the Army and its stop-loss policy” not a threat. “My first sergeant said he actually liked the song and that he did not take it as a threat,” Hall added.

A South Carolina native, Hall wanted to leave the military to spend more time with his wife and child.

The title of the post is historical, of course: those who read my piece in Guernica might remember my talk of the 1819 West Point rebellion put down by superintendent Sylvanus Thayer, who was eager to correct such an “erroneous” belief. Speaking of Guernica, they’ve got me on assignment today, so this will likely be my only post till very late. In the meantime, listen to the song yourself and see whether it’s worth a courts-martial.