Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Once an Eagle, a novel by Anton Myrer originally published in 1968, has long been required reading for American officers. The edition in my personal library contains a special foreword by Gen. John W. Vessey, Jr., a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The US Army War College Fund underwrote the cost of adding it to the earlier “civilian” edition. The book is on the US Marine Corps Professional Reading list; this excerpt from the list explains its significance:

Thirty years after its initial publication, Once An Eagle has become a touchstone for the military professionals who devise and carry out our nation’s defense. According to the New York Times, “Once An Eagle has worked its way over a generation into the mindset and lexicon of the American military.” Named to the Marine Commandant’s Reading List, it is required reading for all marines, is assigned to West Point cadets, and is featured in the United States Army War College’s annual leadership seminar. Soldiers emblazon the protagonist’s name–Sam Damon–across their tanks, and military officers at every level make decisions by asking themselves, “What would Sam do?”

Once An Eagle compellingly recounts the making of one special soldier, Sam Damon, and his adversary over a lifetime, fellow officer Courtney Massengale. Damon is a soldier’s soldier, the consummate professional, decorated in both world wars for bravery under fire, who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above self-interest. Massengale, the consummate political animal who disdains the average grunt, brilliantly advances by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington’s corridors of power.

I thought of Sam Damon this morning when I received an email from Maj. Robert Bateman, an Army officer and friend of mine who is posted in Baghdad. Bob periodically sends out circulars to friends and associates commenting on news items he finds striking in light of his current assignment. It would surprise me very little to learn that Bob thought of Sam Damon when he read an item in today’s Los Angeles Times online. Here’s Bob’s preface to the article:

Articles such as the one I’ve pasted below are, obviously, very painful. It hurts when I read something like this, because I love my nation, my Army. I believe in both, and this quite obviously hurts them in an immediate, albeit shallow, way.

But on another level, a more fundamental level, this is a story that demonstrates how good, true, and honorable are my nation and my Army, at the core.

War is an abomination. I happen to fall into the camp which believes that it is sometimes a necessary abomination, but that does not remove the first element. Because, however, I have no blinders about war, because I have some understanding of what is unleashed when men go to war, reports of bad things, such as that below do not surprise me. But how they are revealed in the American Army is almost unique in history.

This story is as much about the success of my Army, in creating good men and true, as it is about the abominations that occur in war. That we, as an institution, contain elements that led to the first event (the abuse), is not just not unique, it is more like the norm in the history of warfare. That we, as an institution, contain elements that do whatever it takes to make the institution adhere to its own stated values, well that is unique.

The article itself is headlined, “Officer’s Road Led Him Outside Army.” It’s by Richard A. Serrano and appears in this morning’s Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — When Army Capt. Ian Fishback told his company and battalion commanders that soldiers were abusing Iraqi prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, he says, they told him those rules were easily skirted.

When he wrote a memo saying Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was wrong in telling Congress that the Army follows the Geneva dictates, his lieutenant colonel responded only: “I am aware of Fishback’s concerns.”

And when Fishback found himself in the same room as Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey at Ft. Benning, Ga., he again complained about prisoner abuse. He said Harvey told him that “corrective action was already taken.”

At every turn, it seemed, the decorated young West Point graduate, the son of a Vietnam War veteran from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, whose wife is serving with the Army in Iraq, felt that the military had shut him out.

So he turned to those he knows best. He sought guidance from fellow infantry commanders and his West Point classmates, and learned that they agreed with him that abuse of prisoners was widespread and that officers weren’t adequately trained in how to handle them.

Then, in a lengthy chronology obtained Saturday by The Times, recounting what he saw in Iraq and his numerous efforts to get the Army’s attention, he wrote that “Harvey is wrong.” He wrote that Army guidance was “too vague for officers to enforce American values.” He concluded that violations of the Geneva Convention were “systematic, and the Army is misleading America.”

This summer, after weighing the possible effects on his career, he stepped outside the Army’s chain of command and telephoned the Human Rights Watch advocacy group. . . .

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