I guess I knew it would eventually come down to this: Blame the Army's institutions in some way for the horrific and senseless slaughter of 16 innocent Afghan civilians in Kandahar, allegedly by a U.S. infantry noncommissioned officer (NCO). In their search for a villain, the media seem to focus on Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, where the accused was stationed before his fourth combat-zone deployment.
Before attacking institutions, it may be right and proper to suggest the underlying issue here is not the failure of our Army. Could it perhaps be that no institutional effort can make up for trying over the past 10 years to fight too many wars with too few soldiers?
I recently talked with infantry soldiers at Fort Benning, Ga., and couldn't help contrasting them with those of my generation of Vietnam veterans. Their amazing stories of patient, selfless, introversive commitment caught my attention. I took to heart the enormous disparity in stressful, extreme Iraq and Afghanistan experiences between the infantry and other branches and services. The senior NCOs all had at least three, and in some cases five, tours, virtually all in close-combat units. Most Vietnam-era NCOs had only one tour in Vietnam.
Infantry combat in Vietnam was perhaps more intense, but close fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan was more pervasive and lasting -- to my mind, thus more likely to cause personal trauma. Fort Benning's infantrymen were different from my generation's -- more emotionally exhausted and drained, less spontaneous, humorless. We spent Friday nights at the officers' club, talking over a beer about Vietnam's Catch-22 nature and our stupid and hilarious experiences. None of this at Benning today. No clubs, no public hilarity and certainly no beer. These guys seemed to view their time in combat as endless and repetitive. My sense is that their collective, intimate exposure to close-combat horrors was far more debilitating than ours.
This of course in no way justifies what happened in Kandahar. But I think if someone wants to place blame, it should be on national leaders who fail to recognize that combat units, particularly infantry, just wear out. Lord Moran concluded in his classic "Anatomy of Courage" about World War I that the reservoir of courage begins to empty after the first shot is fired. Intimate killing starts moral atrophy. He rightfully concluded that nothing short of permanent withdrawal from the line will bring soldiers back to normalcy.
The media are trying to make some association between this terrible crime and the Army's inability to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Perhaps it could have done more. But I think Lord Moran was more right; the real institutional culprit is the decade-long exploitation and cynical overuse of one of our most precious and irreplaceable national assets: our close-combat soldiers and Marines.
If someone just after 9/11 had told me a very small Army and Marine Corps would fight a 10-year-long set of close-combat engagements in two wars and still remain intact, I would have called him crazy. Well, we've done just that. But at what cost to the few who have borne an enormously disproportionate share of emotional stress?
Robert H. Scales, president of the consulting firm Colgen, retired Army major general and former Army War College commandant, wrote this for The Washington Post.
