Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (18 page)

B
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“T
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OLDIERS
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ECRETARY
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As president of Texas A&M, I had devoted a lot of time and effort to looking after the interests of the students. They would often send me their complaints by e-mail, and whenever I thought they had a legitimate gripe, which was pretty often, I would be sure the university responded. I invited the student body president to be a regular participant in my executive staff meetings. I participated in countless student events. In many huge universities, the president is just a name to the students. I wanted them to think of me as their advocate in that huge bureaucracy. By all accounts, I was successful in establishing that kind of relationship and reputation. As mentioned earlier, ten thousand students turned out to say good-bye on my last day there.

I wanted the same kind of personal relationship with our troops. At Texas A&M, I would walk the campus all the time and see eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds
in T-shirts, shorts, and backpacks. Now suddenly I was in Iraq and Afghanistan and seeing young men and women the very same age in full body armor, carrying assault rifles and living in wretched conditions. The contrast had a profound impact on me. Having been a university president made my transition to secretary of defense more difficult emotionally, and it would continue to affect me as long as I was in the job—especially as I reflected that one group of young people had set aside their dreams, made sacrifices, and were risking their lives to protect the dreams of another group the same age, and all the rest of us as well.

Establishing a personal relationship with two million troops required innovation. When I suggested establishing a designated e-mail account so they could communicate directly with me, as the students had at A&M, my chief of staff, Robert Rangel, looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Two million potential e-mails! That was the end of that.

There were no shortcuts to what I wanted to achieve. Young people are inherently skeptical, if not cynical, about the rhetoric of older people and those in authority, because too often their actions do not correspond. In the military, that is compounded many times over. The only way I could make any impact on the troops and dent their indifference to who might be secretary of defense would be through actions that demonstrated how much I cared about them.

Coincidentally, many decisions intended to help the troops were also necessary for success in our military campaigns. Our fundamentally flawed and persistent assumption from the outset, that the Iraq War would be a short one, caused many problems on the ground and for the troops. As the months stretched into years, those at senior levels nevertheless clung to their original assumption and seemed unwilling to invest substantial dollars to provide the troops everything they needed for protection and for success in their mission, and to bring them home safely—and if wounded, to provide them with the very best care. Who wanted to spend precious dollars on equipment for today’s troops that, after Iraq, would just be surplus? So for years in Iraq, our troops traveled in light vehicles like Humvees (the modern equivalent of a jeep) that, even with armoring, were vulnerable to weapons such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and explosively formed projectiles (EFPs). These vehicles that could all too easily be blown up or become funeral pyres for our troops. While investments
had been made in remotely piloted vehicles (drones), there were no crash programs to increase their numbers or the diversity of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities for commanders. And here at home, while the quality of military medical care was absolutely the best in the world, outpatient and posthospitalization treatment of the wounded and their families was a scandal waiting to happen. Too few in the Pentagon responsible for training, equipping, and deployment decisions looked out sufficiently for the interests of the troops as individuals. This would become a principal preoccupation of mine for my entire tenure.

During my first months as secretary, I made these issues my own. As mentioned, I recommended an increase in the size of the Army and Marine Corps by 65,000 and 27,000 respectively. In September 2007, I would authorize a further, temporary increase in the Army of 22,000 soldiers. On January 19, I signed a directive that the National Guard thereafter would deploy as units (rather than individuals being shifted around to fill out units from other states) and that deployments would be limited to a year. Protecting that limit would be a challenge, and whenever the Joint Staff wanted to break it, I would send them back to the drawing board. I would repeat, over and over, “I gave my word to them they wouldn’t have to go for more than a year. Why would they ever believe me again if I break my word on this?” With respect to deploying as units, I would argue, if I’m an ordnance disposal specialist, I want to deploy with the team I trained with, know, and trust, not a bunch of strangers I just met. On a few occasions, harsh reality forced me to violate my commitment to one-year tours, but only under extraordinary circumstances. As hard as the decision was to extend tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to fifteen months, my only consolation was that it at least guaranteed those troops a year at home and provided predictability. I wanted to end the practice of stop-loss, a practice in the Army of involuntarily extending a soldier’s duty time. The overwhelming majority of those stop-lossed were NCOs, whose continued service was considered essential to unit cohesion. Stop-loss had been going on for some time, but the numbers increased fairly significantly as a result of the surge in Iraq, and during my tenure it peaked at about 14,000 soldiers. I considered the practice the equivalent of involuntary servitude and a breach of faith with those affected, and I was determined to end it. A few months before I retired, not one soldier was on stop-loss.

As I’ve said, every place I went, I learned a lot from the young troops I insisted upon spending time with. Having conversations with maintenance NCOs on board ships and at Air Force bases and hearing about shortages of manpower “to do the job right” played a big role in my decision to stop further reductions in both Air Force and Navy personnel. Visiting Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where many of our drones operating overseas are controlled, I learned that the crews had more than an hour commute each way to their homes at Nellis Air Force Base and little in the way of amenities—places to eat and work out—at Creech. Those problems would be fixed. At Camp Pendleton, I observed Marines training in a fake Iraqi town before their deployments, and I learned that the commanders did all their training on how to use drones in simulators because there were no real drones available. We largely corrected that, though it took considerable time.

I tried to meet with families and spouses of soldiers whenever possible. Most of those meetings were emotionally draining. I visited Fort Campbell, Kentucky, a few weeks after becoming secretary. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne were preparing to deploy. I met with some of their spouses, whose tears showed that they had been down this road before and that they were feeling the stress of multiple deployments. Some were very young, still teenagers, but with one or two babies. Many of those women were scared and frustrated with problems that only added to their stress, like marginal medical care on post, long waits to see a doctor, or the need to drive sixty miles to get care from a pediatric specialist.

The compliments that always meant the most—until the day I left my job as secretary—were from the troops and their families.

The hardest part of being secretary for me was visiting the wounded in hospitals, which I did regularly, and it got harder each time. At the outset, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. People would tell me not to worry, that “they will lift you up” with their courage, determination, and resilience. But I would think, particularly as time went along,
Yes, they do, but there is one difference between all of you—members of Congress, military officers, whomever—and me: I’m the one who sent them in harm’s way
. It tore me apart to see fit young men who’d had limbs blown off, suffered devastating gunshot wounds, and experienced every sort of trauma to their bodies and their brains—wounds both visible and invisible. Some were in comas or unconscious. Many had their families there, often including a young wife and little children, a family whose life would never be the
same. I approached one soldier’s room and a doctor emerged to suggest that I not go in because the young man had an open, gaping leg wound and he refused to cover it while I visited him. I steeled myself and went in. He was neither bitter nor self-pitying. I visited a young soldier at Walter Reed who was the first quadruple amputee, losing both legs above the knee and both arms below the elbow. He said he just wanted to drive a car again. And his father told me, “We have been to the valley of despair and the mountain of hope.” The father asked me to make sure his son received the most advanced prosthetics, and I promised he would. I met a soldier from Texas A&M who had been shot in the throat. He rasped out to me that he was able to choose the music played in the operating theater during his surgery, and he had them play the Aggie “War Hymn” over and over. I kidded him that he should have made sure his surgeon wasn’t a rival University of Texas Longhorn.

In May, I made my first visit to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where the military’s finest burn treatment facility is located. I was to visit the Center for the Intrepid, a new rehabilitation facility for amputees paid for by private donations, and also the burn center. I told Pete Chiarelli that I didn’t think I was strong enough to visit the burn unit. He was silent, and I asked him, “Do the kids at the burn unit know I’m coming?” He said yes. I closed my eyes and told him, “Well, then I have to do it.”

I walked into the rehab center at the burn unit, and standing in front of me was Marine First Lieutenant Dan Moran, wearing a Texas A&M Corps of Cadets T-shirt and holding his graduation picture of me handing him his diploma. His beautiful wife and four-week-old baby were with him in the unit. He asked me to sign the graduation picture and then asked if I would present his Navy commendation medal with V for Valor to him at some point at Texas A&M. I said of course. (On October 27, Bush 41 and I presented Dan with his medal at halftime during an A&M home football game, with 85,000 in attendance cheering their lungs out for this young hero. If only all our wounded and veterans could get such recognition.)

The burn unit was nearly full. There was a young soldier who had been there for nearly two years with horrific burns; we did a fist bump because he had no fingers. After a long and heroic struggle, he would die a few months later. I visited a sergeant in an isolated room, badly burned, missing limbs, in a coma. There were others, ambulatory and sharp, who
still faced dozens of surgeries in the months and years to come. There are no words to describe their courage. Because Brooke is not in Washington or on a coast, not very many VIPs from any walk of life visit there. The patients would talk about how rarely they got official visitors. After my visit, one Army sergeant told the press that it meant a lot when someone “comes here in person.” He said, “I don’t need more medals or money, just someone to say thanks.”

I would never have forgiven myself had I fallen victim to my self-doubt and not gone to the burn unit. I would visit again on a number of occasions. There are no adequate words to describe the compassion, commitment, and skill of those at Brooke—and at all our military hospitals—caring for our sons and daughters.

Soon afterward I visited the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, where nearly all wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan were sent before returning stateside. I was told I was the only secretary of defense to visit that hospital since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, for the first time, I presented Purple Hearts, six of them. One was to a young soldier who was unconscious, and I had my initial experience with a mother in my arms crying. The next time I saw him, months later, he was sitting in a chair having lunch at a Pentagon event for wounded warriors. With a certain insouciance, he said, “Bet you don’t recognize me!”

I increasingly felt a personal responsibility for those kids in the hospitals, and it weighed more and more heavily on me. Yet in the hospitals there was still hope. Not so for those who were killed, or for their families.

Every morning, first thing, I would receive written notifications of servicemen and women killed and wounded in combat during the preceding twenty-four hours. There were no names, just a description of what had happened and the raw numbers. Immediately upon taking office, I starting signing condolence letters to parents, a spouse, or a child of someone killed in action. It wasn’t long before just a signature didn’t seem enough, and at night, I started hand-writing notes at the end of each letter. As the surge in Iraq progressed, I was soon signing well over a hundred letters a month. Sometime later even the notes didn’t seem enough. I was determined not to let these men and women ever become statistics for me, and so I asked for a picture of each, and the hometown news accounts of the life and death of their local heroes. I could look at the picture and read accounts from family, friends, coaches, and teachers
about how fun-loving they had been, how they loved to fish and hunt, how they excelled at athletics, about their willingness to help others. Or I learned how they had been aimless until joining the military, where they found purpose and direction for their lives. And so virtually every night for four and a half years, writing condolence letters and reading about these mostly young men and women, I wept.

That was in private. But after only a few months as secretary, my emotions over the sacrifices of these amazing men and women in uniform began occasionally to ambush me in public. The first time was in a speech at the Marine Corps Association dinner on July 18, 2007. I was cruising along just fine until near the end of the speech, when I began to talk about a Marine company commander, Capt. Douglas Zembiec, and his actions in the first battle of Fallujah (Iraq) in April 2004. He said his men had “fought like lions,” and he was later himself dubbed the “Lion of Fallujah.” I talked about him volunteering to go back to Iraq in early 2007, but “this time, he would not return—to his country or to his wife, Pamela, and his one-year-old daughter.” I began to lose my composure at that point, though I was able to say that more than one thousand people—including many enlisted Marines—had attended his funeral at Arlington, where an officer told a reporter, “Your men have to follow your orders; they don’t have to go to your funeral.” I simply could not go on. Press accounts would say that I was clearly struggling and suffering. I was. But I finally pulled myself together and closed with these words: “Every evening I write notes to the families of young Americans like Doug Zembiec. For you, and for me, they are not names on a press release, or numbers updated on a web page. They are our country’s sons and daughters.”