The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  When I think about the support the Briests get back home, I am reminded of other young couples in working- and middle-class communities for whom the price of their service will go on forever. They’re part of our common heritage, and yet in the leafy, moneyed suburbs of Louisville, on Park Avenue in New York or the Gold Coast of Chicago, in pricey neighborhoods in Silicon Valley or the country club districts of Kansas City or Miami, they remain an invisible part of our population, these fellow citizens who have paid such a high price.

  In a nation of democratic ideals, including justice for all, this is manifestly unjust.

  It is time to renew the ideal of public service for all on a national scale—and answer the call John F. Kennedy made so memorably a half century ago.

  CHAPTER 10

  The United States Academy of

  Public Service

  FACT: In 2005, Teach for America had 2,181 volunteers teaching in some of the nation’s most distressed school districts. By 2010 that number had more than doubled to 4,458.

  According to VolunteeringinAmerica.gov, a website of the Corporation for National and Community Service, in 2010 almost seventy million Americans volunteered in a variety of public service programs. Among the states, Utah, with its strong Mormon tradition of community service, led the way: 43.5 percent of the Utah population volunteered in some fashion.

  QUESTION: If the political and military establishment has no interest in a renewal of military conscription, preferring instead the current all-volunteer concept, should we have as a national priority another form of universal public service?

  THE PAST

  For those who choose not to go into uniform, the menu of other public service options is uneven. The Peace Corps is still a viable government agency; more than seventeen thousand applied during the economic downturn. More than eight thousand are on duty or in training for duty in seventy-seven countries, the highest totals since 2009. Since the Peace Corps was established in 1961, more than two hundred thousand have served. Even so, the Corps seems ready for a hit on the refresh button.

  For my generation of males, the draft card issued when you were eighteen was a silent reminder that you owed your country military service. Every young man calculated his future by allowing for the strong possibility he would be in uniform at some point. That all came undone with Vietnam and the deeply divisive debate over just and unjust wars, college deferments, and other escape hatches. The draft went away in a storm of political and military rancor, and it is highly unlikely ever to return.

  It was, at best, an uneven distribution of national obligations. Women were not eligible for the draft, and the educated and elite had more advantageous options. It is remembered now more for its liabilities than for its call to public service.

  THE PRESENT

  At the State Department, Secretary Hillary Clinton initiated a number of programs to expand the presence of civilian agencies in parts of the world where too much of the burden falls to the military services. In her first two years in office, working with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, she doubled the development staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and made several internal changes to the agency to make it more efficient and more effective.

  Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, she made a strong case for so-called soft power—civilian efforts in finance, construction, health services, and agriculture—describing how the United States must draw on the pool of talent that already exists within the government to build a global civilian presence with the same capability and flexibility as the military.

  Clinton described the presence of civilian agencies and their highly trained employees on the ground in Iraq as “force multipliers,” as they work with local groups to take responsibility for the civilian services that were decimated first by Saddam Hussein and then by war.

  To those who question the expenditures on soft power and foreign economic development, especially during difficult economic times at home, Secretary Clinton argued that the investments in fact help the United States, because they strengthen fragile, failing states and create capable partners. She acknowledges not all efforts are successful in states such as Yemen and Somalia, but the alternatives are wars without end.

  One of her strongest allies in this effort was the late Richard Holbrooke, a supremely gifted public servant who died too young, at the age of sixty-nine, of traumatic heart disease in late 2010. Holbrooke had been involved in American foreign policy in one form or another since his days as a junior foreign service officer in Vietnam in the sixties.

  He was brilliant, brash, tireless, and unrelenting in his physical and intellectual quest to make this a better, more peaceful world. Holbrooke’s appetite for difficult problems on the world stage was legendary. As a private citizen he was among the first to recognize the moral and political imperative of dealing with Africa’s AIDS crisis. He was a forceful advocate for nongovernmental organizations—NGOs—that fostered greater understanding of Asia or worked on refugee problems.

  When he died he was commanding a vastly expanded force of economic, agricultural, and civilian political advisers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the most difficult assignment of his long and distinguished career. We talked often about the need to reorder the “hearts and minds” equation of America’s foreign policy investments.

  Personally, I think it is time to take the concept of civilian power one step further to complement the work Secretary Clinton has initiated with a major commitment to a new form of public service. Mandatory public service may be a hard political sell, but I think that bold new initiatives are in order. At the U.S. Naval Academy I outlined some thoughts for the brigade of midshipmen and an audience of academy graduates and friends.

  I reminded that audience that military units in Iraq and Afghanistan have the dual and, I think, incompatible assignments of fighting the bad guys in dangerous neighborhoods and then trying to win the hearts and minds of those not shooting back. Iraqi and Afghan locals are understandably wary of heavily armed American forces who come into their villages, establish checkpoints to search for weapons, don’t speak the language, and then, through an interpreter, say, “We’re here to help.”

  During reporting trips to the region, I was embedded with military units on the front lines. An hour’s helicopter ride north of Kandahar I accompanied American special forces troops into a poor village in the middle of a broad, barren valley where the Taliban had been very active. The Americans were accompanied by Afghan officers trying to raise and train a local force, and they were attempting to sell the concept to the skeptical merchants and village elders while the women looked on at a distance from behind their veils.

  I asked one storekeeper whether he would welcome an Afghan force in his community. He looked around at the heavily armed Americans in their helmets, Kevlar vests, and sunglasses and said, “We don’t need more people with guns telling us what to do.”

  I was reminded of what a former CIA terrorism expert once told me. “The problem with the Afghans,” he said, “is that they have reversible turbans; their loyalty depends on who is in town.” Two thousand years of foreign invaders have left them with an understandable wariness of the “we’re here to help” gesture.

  As for getting assistance from the locals, one encounter in an east central Afghan village at once defined the limits of their hospitality and offered a welcome laugh in the dusty intersection where members of the Tenth Mountain Division were walking that fine line between vigilance and cordiality. A gregarious Afghan man came running up to me, reached down into his raggedy robes, and produced a piece of paper worn from many folds.

  He handed it to me with great pride. I opened and it read, “This is Mahmoud. He worked for me for a couple of weeks. He was just okay in his job but whatever you do, don’t trust him around your personal belongings.” It was signed by a U.S. Army captain. Members of the Tenth Mountain squad and I suppressed our laughs and I returned the note, saying, “You should be very proud.”

&
nbsp; Who’s to blame the Afghans for taking whatever advantage they can, after all they have been through in their long history of one occupational force after another—all men with guns telling them what to do?

  It’s not the fault of the highly trained and well-meaning American forces. They just have incompatible missions and not enough of the right kind of help for the hearts and minds equation. For example, when the U.S. military units set up medical offices in rural areas, they were generally staffed by male combatants, which meant Muslim fathers wouldn’t send their daughters there for examinations or treatments.

  THE PROMISE

  I returned from two Afghan trips wondering, Couldn’t we establish a Peace Corps Plus or a Diplomatic Special Forces? Highly trained adventurous young Americans who take up the hearts and minds mission? These would be noncombatants stationed in forward operating bases as physicians, educators, technicians, agriculture experts, and engineers.

  USAID has committed and capable staff members doing this kind of work in the world, but as effective and passionate as they are, USAID workers have almost no public profile at home to draw in this country’s best and brightest.

  In this age of portable technology, why couldn’t instructional programs in midwifery, fundamental health practices, basic hygiene, water projects, nutrition, or agriculture be downloaded and fed through portable satellite dishes powered by portable, gas-fueled generators in modular structures placed in the village center? A small team of Peace Corps Plus technicians could set up such an arrangement in a short time and the U.S. government could launch a satellite dedicated to making just these kinds of programs available around the world, in an electronic glossary of languages.

  The twenty-first century should be a time for new, big, and bold ideas for a renewed America. It is time to establish public service institutions that are as prestigious and successful as the military academies so that people who are dedicated to their country but unable or unwilling to serve in the armed forces have a complementary opportunity.

  Why not develop a group of public service academies attached to land grant colleges and universities in a half dozen or so geographic regions? The intensive courses in languages, education, health, construction, and conflict resolution could range from twelve months to two years. When I discussed this in the presence of Bob McNair, a self-made entrepreneur who owns the Houston Texans of the National Football League, he had a good idea: Make the academies a public-private partnership.

  Imagine, say, a Johnson & Johnson fellowship in Third World medicine, at a state university. Or a Caterpillar fellowship in road construction; a GE fellowship in power generators or clean-water systems; an AT&T fellowship in telecommunications; a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation fellowship in health systems. Corporate America would be helping to train people, who could then operate outside the United States, or inside.

  The win-win for corporate America, which is increasingly operating outside the borders of the United States, is that the public service fellows would get accelerated training in can-do management skills that they could put to work abroad and then bring to the home office once their fellowship ends.

  Academy enrollees would be paid a subsistence wage during their training and then compensated at military levels once they graduate. As an incentive, their income would be tax free for three years, which could be the minimum commitment for every volunteer.

  Paul Farmer, the American physician who has dedicated his life to establishing clinics and bringing First World health care to Third World countries such as Rwanda and Haiti, should be a consultant in the construction and content of the curriculum and the training necessary to turn out productive graduates.

  David Harris, who first came to America’s attention during the antiwar movement of the sixties, is now a journalist, author, and a baby boomer who can look back on a life lived honorably. He was Stanford University’s student body president and a leading voice against the Vietnam War in 1968.

  Instead of burning his draft card or running off to Canada, he simply refused the call of the Selective Service System and went to federal prison for twenty months. He now lives in a log home in a eucalyptus grove high in Marin County, north of San Francisco. His inner flame continues to burn.

  I interviewed Harris for a taping about the legacy of the baby boomers. “The body politic has to step away from its own militarization and understand we’re gonna survive in the future by our capacity to make common cause with as many other people as we can,” he said. “The big issues facing us are the ones that demand a kind of global unanimity if we have any hope of survival. Climate change and health issues are not going to be solved by armies. As long as we relate to the rest of the world just through militaries, we’re not gonna be able to grapple with the issues that are really gonna kill us.”

  The assignments of these daring new young men and women in soft power public service would not be confined to operations in war zones.

  We now live on a crowded planet where natural disasters have cataclysmic consequences. The 2004 tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, Katrina, the 2010 Haiti earthquake: All drew the U.S. military as first responders.

  Matt Pottinger, the son of a longtime friend, was a Wall Street Journal reporter based in China when the killer tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004. He rushed to cover it and came away so impressed with the esprit de corps and quality of the U.S. Marines he met, it changed his life.

  He went back to Beijing, befriended Marines stationed at the U.S. embassy, and persuaded them to help him to train as an officer candidate for their service. It was not easy—he was thirty-two at the time—but he made it and served with distinction on two deployments to Afghanistan and one in Iraq before returning to the United States to become a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

  “I have zero regrets about my decision,” he told me, adding, “Becoming a Marine opened my eyes to aspects of my country I would not have understood if I had stayed a journalist.”

  As a primary example, he cites the role of the military as an integrator of social and ethnic groups in which everyone has an equal opportunity and there are common expectations and standards.

  “Take the Marine Corps,” he said. “It depends on excellence at the bottom and so those at the top are responsible for training and molding the grunts. If an officer doesn’t get that job done, he’s held accountable.

  “As a result,” he said, “I go out on patrol with a Marine squad in Iraq and the leader is a twenty-year-old corporal who is part sociologist, part waterworks engineer and full-time warrior. He has awesome responsibility.

  “Why can’t the Marine Corps model be an example for education reform?”

  Pottinger is troubled by one critical missing element in the military ranks. “We have the middle class and the working class, we have a representative ethnic mix but we don’t have the elites. That’s wrong.”

  As a result, when it comes to decision making in Washington, where the elites dominate the salons of power, Pottinger notes that “more mistakes are made by non-vets than veterans when it comes to military matters.”

  For this son of privilege, with his Chinese-language skills and degree from the University of Massachusetts, the bottom line is this: “I understand my country better from inside a military uniform than I did as a civilian and as a journalist.”

  Nonetheless, he also fully understands we’re rooted by law, custom, and experience in a civilian society.

  To my mind, we ask too much of the military and not enough of the rest of us when it comes to putting forward our greatest strengths.

  Soldiers, guardsmen, and Marines bring discipline, energy, and authority to their assignments, but in a world in which the U.S. military is already stretched thin to fulfill its combat missions, it should be a national priority to develop a civilian force to meet the needs of domestic and international disasters.

  Our daughter Jennifer, a seasoned emergency room physician who spent six months working with refug
ees on the Pakistan-Afghan border, volunteered for duty at the time of Katrina and came away frustrated with the inefficiencies of the organization thrown together to meet the needs of displaced residents of New Orleans. When she arrived at the Memphis airport there was not a one-stop desk for physicians to check in, present their credentials—which could be certified online—and report to the area of their expertise.

  She spent most of her exasperating first day trying to get credentials and an assignment so she could put her physician’s skills to work. In the future, wouldn’t it make sense if she were to carry a card certifying her ER credentials so when she reported to a disaster zone the card could be fed into a computer at a single site and she could be assigned a task within moments?

  In this increasingly crowded world, natural and manmade disasters will have ever larger consequences and will require a first response that is cohesive, efficient, and interdependent. Hurricanes and exploding oil wells along the U.S. Gulf Coast, tornadoes and floods in the heartland, and homegrown terrorist attacks such as the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City are all the domestic equivalents of war, assaulting the general welfare of the citizens affected, disrupting commerce and education, and destroying property values.

  A new army of public service cadets could be a huge asset for federal, local, and international agencies responsible for managing the crises.

  There is a long and rich national history of Americans finding common cause and responding with a common effort. Let us not forget that the Founding Fathers represented many beliefs but were bound together by a determination to establish free will as a governing principle.

  The pioneers of the nineteenth century who pushed oxen teams and rode horses into the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West were from different origins and brought with them different faiths but also a singular determination to expand their new country’s horizon and give it a latticework of community, economic development, and political opportunity. The organized labor movement of the early and mid-twentieth century was a courageous populist uprising against the rapacious exploitation of workers by wealthy interests who answered primarily to their own greed. The civil rights movement of the sixties forced a moral and legal resolution of racism by uniting like-minded citizens of many colors and standings.