The Return of Marco Polo's World

by Robert D. Kaplan

  This is not necessarily a function of our prosperity, given that in relative terms the economy is stagnant and many people are out of work. Nor is it a matter of hostility toward the military: The post-9/11 Middle Eastern wars have not bred aversion to the soldier’s profession as did Vietnam. It is a matter of the particular wages of what are termed “small wars”—that is, hot, irregular wars that are big enough to be intensely fought and are seemingly endless, but are limited in that they do not demand a state’s total resources, and therefore leave the home front unscathed and unaffected, without context for the horror occurring thousands of miles away. Big wars are fought in response to a direct threat to the homeland, and by definition involve the whole society; they are wars that play to the strengths of a mass democracy. But small wars are imperial wars, even as proponents of small wars eschew the term; they are fought to preserve the balance of power and to stamp out disorder in far-flung places, motives beyond the grasp of the home front. Small wars, because they are often unconventional, lack a well-defined narrative. There is no army to follow as it marches toward its objective. Thus, the home front finds these wars confusing—that is to say, meaningless.

  The wounded and other uniformed warriors who come home to such a confused and distracted society suffer a very special kind of loneliness and alienation. They might also fall prey to a dose of “cynicism,” according to the French war reporter and novelist of the mid-twentieth century Jean Larteguy, who wrote of paratroopers in Vietnam and Algeria unable to adapt to the mores of civilian society after having gone through an intense and lengthy bonding experience defined by constant combat in irregular, small wars.

  Because of modern communication, today’s fighting men and women are arguably under greater degrees of stress regarding family issues than ever before, even as they find it difficult to talk to their families once they are back home about what is really on their minds. In the barracks every night in Iraq or Afghanistan, there is a constant stream of communication with spouses and children via email and various websites. But these troops are psychologically cut off from loved ones even as they are electronically connected to them. I can remember several instances when, as an embedded reporter, I was in a Morale, Welfare, and Recreation facility in the Middle East, overhearing American troops having heated arguments with their wives or girlfriends over a phone line, while other soldiers lined up impatiently behind them, waiting to use the same phone. Indeed, domestic disputes take on an especially intense urgency precisely because the means of contact is virtual, and yet in no way does this prepare individual soldiers for what they will encounter when they do arrive home, particularly if they are wounded or come to suffer a variant of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  The returning soldier, too, is burdened by the particular experience of small, irregular wars. Colonel Brown explains that when soldiers are killed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), “catastrophic explosion rips them apart.” Those soldiers who survive will see and hear explosions in their minds continually, which only amplifies their fear. This fear is cumulative and debilitating over the course of a deployment. In a conventional war you most fear being in the front lines; in an unconventional one you can be killed almost anywhere, at any time, so there is no time or place for fear to dissipate.

  Furthermore, in an unconventional war, in which a soldier sees his comrades killed and lose limbs in explosions, there is no tangible measure of accomplishment as there is in a conventional war, where large swaths of territory are rolled up. This adds to the soldier’s demoralization. And as soldiers deploy and redeploy to war zones, they and their families suffer the knowledge of what the last deployment did to them, knowing that they now have to relive it. And as the years go on, with no end in sight to at least one of these wars, Brown notes that military communities at bases in the United States become more insular, more psychologically cut off from the rest of the home front.

  In A Son at the Front, Wharton countenances the efficacy of war in providing for historical progress: “The liberties of England had been born of the ruthless discipline of the Norman conquest,” and “more freedom and a wiser order” had been born of the “hideous welter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.” It is thus tempting to argue, or at least to think, that over the course of the decades, the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan will bear fruit. After all, even a weak democracy in Iraq will be the first of its kind in a major Arab country; in addition, Iraq might become a de facto ally of the United States, with a civil society engrossed in domestic problems rather than confrontations with Israel. Moreover, the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein in power to restart his weapons program and become the new, anti-Western “Nasser” of the Arab world were dreadful. Afghanistan, too, could yet evolve as a new Silk Road nexus of Central Asia.

  But even if the United States gains strategically from these two invasions, this is mere abstract historical thinking. Policy is about the here and now. It is about taking or not taking action based on a near- and middle-term cost-benefit analysis. To subsume policy making completely to long-range historical projections is to risk constantly getting involved in grand schemes, and to ignore the concrete effects that such policies have on real people—both Americans and others. Thus, in the face of this human devastation, there is little absolution for those like myself who supported the Iraq War. Of course, the results of the Iraq War were born as much from the disastrous way in which the war and postwar phase were carried out as from the decision to invade itself. That could well be true of the war in Afghanistan as well. Still, to talk of complete absolution given these statistics is too convenient.

  And yet there is a danger of taking this line of argument too far. For to focus solely on the hell to which so many families have been subjected is to blind oneself to the very real great-power responsibilities the United States has. For example, if U.S. military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s had resulted in, say, 500 American dead and 5,000 seriously wounded, physically and psychologically—rather than virtually none, as was the case—would those deployments still have been worth it? I think so, because they stopped an ethnic killing machine. But where do we draw the line? When does this many or that many dead or this many wounded or that many traumatized add up to failure? The question has no good answer. But it is important that we always ask it.

  For years covering the military I was told by Marines and Army Special Forces troops that they did not want anybody’s pity, and that media fixation with the dead and wounded has the effect of turning all soldiers into victims. They prefer to think of themselves as warriors. That’s a fine attitude for them to have, but for the home front to think similarly would dehumanize it. The home front gropes for a way to connect with the wounded and their families. The fact that this is much harder to do than we suppose it ought to be is a particular wage of small wars—wars that we should do all in our power to henceforth avoid.

  Over the decades, the Medal of Honor—the highest award for valor—has evolved into the U.S. military equivalent of sainthood. Only eight Medals of Honor have been awarded since the Vietnam War, all posthumously. “You don’t have to die to win it, but it helps,” says Army Colonel Thomas P. Smith. A West Point graduate from the Bronx, Smith has a unique perspective. He was a battalion commander in Iraq when one of his men performed actions that resulted in the Medal of Honor. It was then–Lieutenant Colonel Smith who pushed the paperwork for the award through the Pentagon bureaucracy, a two-year process.

  On the morning of April 4, 2003, the Eleventh Engineer Battalion of the Third Infantry Division broke through to Baghdad International Airport. With sporadic fighting all around, Smith’s men began to blow up captured ordnance that was blocking the runways. Nobody had slept, showered, or eaten much for weeks. In the midst of this mayhem, Smith got word that one of his platoon leaders, Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith (no relation), of Tampa, Florida, had been killed an hour earlier in a nea
rby firefight. Before he could react emotionally to the news, he was given another piece of information: The thirty-three-year-old sergeant had been hit while firing a .50-caliber heavy machine gun mounted on an armored personnel carrier. That was highly unusual, since it wasn’t Sergeant Smith’s job to fire the .50-cal. “That and other stray neurons of odd information about the incident started coming at me,” explains Colonel Smith. But there was no time then to follow up, for within hours they were off in support of another battalion that was about to be overrun. And a few days after that, other members of the platoon, who had witnessed Sergeant Smith’s last moments, were themselves killed.

  Within a week the environment had changed, though. Baghdad had been secured, and the battalion enjoyed a respite that was crucial to the legacy of Sergeant First Class Paul Smith. Lieutenant Colonel Smith used the break to have one of his lieutenants get statements from everyone who was with Sergeant Smith at the time of his death. An astonishing story emerged.

  Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith was the ultimate iron grunt, the kind of relentless, professional noncommissioned officer that the all-volunteer, expeditionary American military has been quietly producing for four decades. “The American people provide broad brand-management approval of the U.S. military,” notes Colonel Smith, “about how great it is, and how much they support it, but the public truly has no idea how skilled and experienced many of these troops are.”

  Sergeant Smith had fought and served in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Kosovo prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. To his men, he was an intense, “infuriating, by-the-book taskmaster,” in the words of Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times, Sergeant Smith’s hometown newspaper. Long after other platoons were let off duty, Sergeant Smith would be drilling his men late into the night, checking the cleanliness of their rifle barrels with the Q-tips he carried in his pocket. During one inspection, he found a small screw missing from a soldier’s helmet. He called the platoon back to drill until 10 P.M. “He wasn’t an in-your-face type,” Colonel Smith told me, “just a methodical, hard-ass professional who had been in combat in Desert Storm, and took it as his personal responsibility to prepare his men for it.”

  Sergeant Smith’s mindset epitomized the Western philosophy on war: War is not a way of life, an interminable series of hit-and-run raids for the sake of vendetta and tribal honor, in societies built on blood and discord. War is awful, to be waged only as a last resort, and with terrific intensity, to elicit a desired outcome in the shortest possible time. Because Sergeant Smith took war seriously, he never let up on his men, and never forgot about them. In a letter to his parents before deploying to Iraq, he wrote,

  There are two ways to come home, stepping off the plane and being carried off the plane. It doesn’t matter how I come home because I am prepared to give all that I am to ensure that all my boys make it home.

  On what would turn out to be the last night of his life, Sergeant Smith elected to go without sleep. He let others rest inside the slow-moving vehicles that he was ground-guiding on foot through dark thickets of palm trees en route to the Baghdad airport. The next morning, that unfailing regard for the soldiers under his command came together with his consummate skill as a warrior, not in a single impulsive act, like jumping on a grenade (as incredibly brave as that is), but in a series of deliberate and ultimately fatal decisions.

  Sergeant Smith was directing his platoon to lay concertina wire across the corner of a courtyard near the airport, in order to create a temporary holding area for Iraqi prisoners of war. Then he noticed Iraqi troops massing, armed with AK-47s, RPGs, and mortars. Soon mortar fire had wounded three of his men—the crew of the platoon’s M113A3 armored personnel carrier. A hundred well-armed Iraqis were now firing on his sixteen-man platoon.

  Sergeant Smith threw grenades and fired an AT-4, a bazooka-like antitank weapon. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle from another unit managed to hold off the Iraqis for a few minutes, but then inexplicably left (out of ammunition, it would later turn out). Sergeant Smith was now in his rights to withdraw his men from the courtyard. But he rejected that option because it would have threatened American soldiers who were manning a nearby roadblock and an aid station. Instead he decided to climb atop the Vietnam-era armored personnel carrier whose crew had been wounded and man the .50-caliber machine gun himself. He asked Private Michael Seaman to go inside the vehicle, and to feed him a box of ammunition whenever the private heard the gun go silent.

  Seaman, under Sergeant Smith’s direction, moved the armored personnel carrier back a few feet to widen Smith’s field of fire. Sergeant Smith was now completely exposed from the waist up, facing one hundred Iraqis firing at him from three directions, including from inside a well-protected sentry post. He methodically raked them, from right to left and back. Three times his gun went silent and three times the private reloaded him, while Sergeant Smith sat exposed to withering fire. He succeeded in breaking the Iraqi attack, killing perhaps dozens of the enemy while going through four hundred rounds of ammunition, before being shot in the head.

  What impressed Colonel Smith about the incident was that no matter how many platoon members he solicited for statements, the story’s details never varied. Even when embedded journalists like Alex Leary and Michael Corkery of the Providence Journal-Bulletin investigated the incident, they came away with the same narrative.

  After talking with another battalion commander and his brigade commander, Colonel Smith decided to recommend his sergeant for the Medal of Honor. He was now operating in unfamiliar territory. Standards for the Medal of Honor are vague, if not undefinable. Whereas the Medal of Honor, according to the regulations, is for “gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his or her life above and beyond the call of duty,” the Distinguished Service Cross, the next-highest decoration, is for an “act or acts of heroism…so notable” and involving “risk of life so extraordinary as to set the individual apart” from his comrades. There is no metric to differentiate between the two awards or, for that matter, to set the Distinguished Service Cross apart from the Silver Star. It is largely a matter of a commanding officer’s judgment.

  Colonel Smith prepared the paperwork while surrounded by photos of Saddam Hussein in one of the Iraqi leader’s palaces. The process began with Army Form DA-638, the same form used to recommend someone for an Army Achievement Medal, the lowest peacetime award. The only difference was Colonel Smith’s note to “see attached.”

  There are nine bureaucratic levels of processing for the Medal of Honor. Smith’s paperwork didn’t even make it past the first. Word came down from the headquarters of the Third Infantry Division that he needed a lot more documentation. Smith prepared a PowerPoint presentation, recorded the “bumper numbers” of all the vehicles involved, prodded surviving platoon members for more details, and built a whole “story book” around the incident. But at the third level, the Senior Army Decoration Board, that still wasn’t enough. The bureaucratic package was returned to Colonel Smith in December 2003. “Perhaps the Board had some sort of devil’s advocate, a former decorated soldier from Vietnam who was not completely convinced, either of the story or that it merited the medal.”

  At this point, the Third Infantry Division was going to assign another officer to follow up on the paper trail. Colonel Smith knew that if that happened, the chances of Sergeant Smith getting the medal would die, since only someone from Sergeant Smith’s battalion would have the passion to battle the Army bureaucracy.

  The Army was desperate for metrics. How many Iraqis exactly were killed? How many minutes exactly did the firefight last? The Army, in its own way, was not being unreasonable. As Colonel Smith told me, “Everyone wants to award a Medal of Honor. But everyone is even more concerned with worthiness, with getting it right.” There was a real fear that one unworthy medal would compromise the award, its aura, and its history. The bureaucratic part of the process is kept almost deliberately impossible, to see just how committed those rec
ommending the award are: Insufficient passion may indicate the award is unjustified.

  “Nobody up top in the Army’s command is trying to find Medal of Honor winners to inspire the public with,” says Colonel Smith. “It’s the opposite. The whole thing is pushed up from the bottom to a skeptical higher command.”

  Colonel Smith’s problem was that the platoon members were soldiers, not writers. To get more details from them, he drew up a list of questions and made them each write down the answers, which were then used to fill out the narrative. “Describe Sergeant Smith’s state of mind and understanding of the situation. Did you see him give instructions to another soldier? What were those instructions? When the mortar round hit the M113A3, where were you? What was Sergeant Smith’s reaction to it?”

  “The answers came back in spades,” Colonel Smith told me. Suddenly he had a much fatter storybook to put into the application. He waited another year as the application made its way up to Personnel Command, Manpower and Reserve Affairs, the chief of the Army, the secretary of the Army, the secretary of defense, and the president. The queries kept coming. Only when it hit the level of the secretary of defense did Colonel Smith feel he could breathe easier.