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A New Generation of Heroes Surfaces By Austin Bay San Antonio Express-News A new greatest generation is emerging --- in Afghanistan, in Iraq and on the other, less-publicized battlegrounds of the war on terror. Focused on the U.S. political cycle, America’s media elite are missing the extraordinary story of the 19 through 35-year olds who are winning this war. The detailed history of this new cohort of American and free world leaders - the people who will shape the 21st century - is being written by themselves, chiefly on the Internet, via e-mail or Web logs.
This is a battle-honed bunch with exceptional talent and motivation, young people with a mature balance of idealism and realism, youthful cool and professional competence. I saw this on every patrol and convoy I made this past summer in Iraq. I had the privilege of working with these “kids,” inevitably chastising myself for referring to such able young adults as kids. Their comeback was always, “It’s OK, sir. We know colonels are old.” Sam, a U.S. Army private first class from Milwaukee, is an example of young soldiers who are both “boots and geeks” - troops who can handle digital technology and rifles. The unclassified laptop is on the blink. Sam taps out a half-dozen commands, and the machine functions smoothly. Need to run the eight kilometers of iffy freeway between Baghdad International “Airport and downtown? Sam pulls up in an SUV, his M-16 propped so he can drive and shoot. Sam goes through the pre-trip procedures calmly, carefully. If we “meet trouble” and can’t drive through the ambush - and Sam is very good at high-speed swerves; I’m talking NASCAR level - he’ll take the best firing position available and try to suppress the attackers. Cool? He does this every day.
I know Sam has several gripes with “the system” - every real soldier earns the right to gripe. But in four months, I never saw a gripe deter this young man from doing his job right. Then there’s James. He’s a captain in the Australian army (note, I said “free world leaders”). He’s 27, with a law degree but, more importantly, on-the-ground experience. He has a special talent for seeing the “big picture” - strategic assessment. Every night the analytic group he organized would meet in Al Faw Palace to discuss the day’s events, with particular emphasis on economic and political issues affecting Iraqi governance. James’ “chess club” consisted of lieutenants, captains, majors and a handful of young enlisted troops, with a couple of old fogies allowed to kibbutz. From the discussion, James would produce four or five concise PowerPoint slides. He usually finished his chore around 2 a.m., when he e-mailed the slides worldwide. By 9 a.m. the next morning, there’s James, back in the office, with a huge cup of coffee, starting the process again. James “product” attracted a large readership. One day we got a complaint from headquarters Supreme Allied Commander Europe, that “the interesting slides SACEUR likes to see” hadn't arrived by e-mail. Australia, James said one morning, was America’s most reliable military ally in the 20th century and those shared values extend into the 21st century. As a senior officer told me the day before I left Baghdad: “You’yet gotten to see what I see, Austin. These young people are so smart.”
“Where do they come from?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s the pressure, circumstances,” I said. “Your know, terrible challenges, the old saw of rising to the occasion?” We both looked at each other. No doubt that is the case - but the challenges these young people meet day in and day out are dangerous and daunting.
Troops Turn Out In Droves To Vote
Associated Press October 29, 2004 "This is something that is on a lot of sailors' minds, definitely," said Lt. Brooke Dewalt, a public affairs officer on the Kitty Hawk, the only aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy that has its home port outside of the United States. "Making sure they can vote is a very high priority for us." Along with electing a president, next Tuesday's vote will also decide whether President George W. Bush or challenger John Kerry assumes the title of commander in chief. In Japan, one of the largest stations away from home for U.S. troops not in combat, the results will directly impact tens of thousands of troops and their families. Nearly 50,000 troops, including the largest contingent of Marines based abroad and a major air base on the southern island of Okinawa, are in Japan under a mutual security pact. Japan is also home to the U.S. 7th Fleet, the largest in the Navy. Some 20,000 sailors and Marines are assigned to the 21-ship fleet, though they are away from port roughly six months out of the year. Military personnel assigned overseas are treated much like other absentee voters. They must register in advance with their hometowns in the United States, and then await their ballot in the mail. Dewalt said officers aboard the Kitty Hawk began a drive to register voters several months ago, while the aircraft carrier was still at sea. It is now back in port in Yokosuka, just south of Tokyo. "We have constant reminders onboard about voting - don't forget to register, don't forget to vote," he said. "We've had exceptional participation, registering more than 2,000 sailors." Dewalt noted that for many of the sailors - who average 19-20 years of age - this will be their first presidential election. The carrier has roughly 5,000 sailors aboard. "Everyone has access to the news," he said. "We're inundated with it. It's something a lot of sailors are talking about."
Registration was also high among soldiers at
the U.S. Army's Japan headquarters.
Maxfield said the process has been smooth.
"Some people were panicking that they might not get their absentee ballots in time," Maxfield said. "But that doesn't seem to be a problem." He said that although encouraged to register and vote, the actual decision is a private matter left up to each soldier.
Wives of U.S. Troops Share Pain -- and Often Politics By Michael Powell Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A01
"Hey babe."
Her feel for the geography of Iraq matches that of a long-haul truck driver from Basra. Her husband is a corrections officer who now lives in the 110-degree heat of the Iraqi desert. He rides shotgun on the truck convoys that cut across the horizon like video-game targets for jihad snipers and roadside bombers. New Hampshire ranks second per capita in the percentage of National Guard members serving in Iraq. These soldiers -- diesel mechanics, auto parts managers and school counselors -- have left behind families in states -- such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- that are divided with almost mathematical precision between Republican and Democrat, hawk and dove, President Bush and John F. Kerry. The families may or may not swing an election. But there is little doubt where most stand. Polls show that two-thirds of them favor Bush. Shona is no different. She may absorb a grim vision of war in her early-morning electronic exchanges with her husband, but she remains a ready vote for Bush, even if Jesse does another tour.
"My husband's a hunter and a warrior," she
says. "He's totally pro-Bush."
Their conversation winds through gales of laughter and chatter before turning to the war. They keep careful track of the New Hampshire men killed in action; their dread is that an official military car might pull up in their driveway. Shona's and Laura's husbands have gone temporarily deaf in one ear from the concussive explosions of roadside bombs.
"Do I get nervous?" asked Jennifer, a former
soldier and a realist. "Am I ever not nervous?"
In a society where income and stock options often rule, these women measure their working-class men by a different standard: They answered their country's call. Each can recite her husband's unit by heart: HHB 197 Field Artillery. A Company 118 Medical Battalion. 172 Field Artillery. Laura wears her husband's dog tags. Shona, Jennifer and Dawn sleep in their husbands' Army shirts.
"When 9/11 came, I knew he was following his
heart," Shona says. "He re-enlisted in the middle of us having two kids."
"I've got friends who say to me, 'Oh, I know how you feel,' " Shona says. "And I want to scream: 'Oh, no, you don't!' " Laura nods. A few weeks back, the kids were screaming and the microwave was spinning and there was homework to be done and the phone rang and her husband, Dion, was on the line and she knew something was up. Two mortar shells had landed near him -- shrapnel had pierced his shirt, his ears were ringing.
"The first thing he asks me is: 'Baby, how
much do you want to know?' " Laura says. "I never know how to answer that."
The Election
He wrote back: "Yeah, when he talks, he talks
from the heart."
"People laughed at Ronald Reagan for fighting
the Cold War," Shona says. "We won't beat the terrorists in one year."
There are voices of dissent. Martha Jo McCarthy and her husband, Ryan, cleaned homes and scrimped for years. Last October, they bought a home in Wakefield, a town tucked along New Hampshire's eastern border. A few months later, Ryan, 31, flew with his National Guard artillery unit to Iraq. He was assigned to military police duty at a prison. His e-mails to Martha Jo talk about 115-degree temperatures and dehydration and getting shot at. Nothing he writes smacks of victory. "No one is going to die from the heat but it sure is hell," he writes. "We heard firing Sunday night but we always hear firing." Martha Jo has a yellow ribbon on her car and war wives to talk with when her skin starts to crawl. But her car also bears a sticker that says: "My Husband is Protecting Dick Cheney's Stock Price, Not Freedom." She has spoken at rallies for Kerry. "Ryan and I felt like going to Afghanistan was about protecting freedom," she says. "But Iraq? We've turned it into a breeding ground for terror, casualties have gone up since the handover. . . . It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see it's going terribly." Ryan's best friend got married a few months ago, and Ryan was supposed to be the best man. Martha Jo went in his place. "Ryan sent me an MP3 recording from Iraq and I blew up a life-size cutout photo of Ryan holding an Arabic Pepsi," she recalled. "When my turn came to give a toast, I played the recording of Ryan."
She looks away, her voice hitches. "You could
have heard a pin drop."
Coming Home "In one way, it was like riding a bike -- it was sooooo easy to be back with him," Martha Jo McCarthy says. "But Ryan was blasting that heat. He was a little angry, too. He did a lot of venting." A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 90 percent of the soldiers deployed to Iraq reported being shot at, a far greater combat exposure than for soldiers in Afghanistan or the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Fifteen percent of the soldiers report feeling major depression and generalized anxiety -- almost twice the rate as recent wars. "There's a clear difference between training twice a year and living in a war zone -- we are seeing much more serious cases of PTSD," said Ehsan Biswas, chief of psychiatry at Manchester VA Medical Center, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder. "They constantly live with the threat of death. That hyper vigilance takes a great toll." Back in Londonderry, Shona and Laura, Dawn and Jennifer talk about the day their husbands will return for good, about packing tents and beer coolers and suntan lotion and going on a "wicked awesome" vacation together. "Our husbands better like each other," Laura says, "because we won't give them any choice." Their men have served nearly a year in Iraq and will remain through next summer. The two-week leave was fine, but also a tease. A soldier cannot unwind from a war in two weeks.
"When Dion came home," Laura says, "he just
sat in that hammock with his beer."
Military ballots no 'emergency By Guy Taylor THE WASHINGTON TIMES
TV Video May Show Explosives at Al - Qaqaa By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:25 a.m. ET
The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC. ``The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa,'' David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. ``The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal.'' The question of what happened to the tons of explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the presidential campaign. Democrat John Kerry says the missing explosives -- powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or set off a nuclear weapon -- are another example of the Bush administration's poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq. President Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam's forces before the invasion. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected. ``We would have seen anything like that,'' he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. ``The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable.'' The Pentagon also declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base. The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives. Rumsfeld, in one radio interview, also cast doubt on the suggestion of one of his subordinates that Russian forces assisted the Iraqis in removing them. John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, suggested to The Washington Times in an interview that the Russians may have been involved, prompting an angry denial from Moscow.
Rumsfeld said, ``I have no information on
that at all, and cannot validate that even slightly.''
The Pentagon has said it's looking into the matter, and officials note that 400,000 tons of recovered Iraqi munitions have either been destroyed or are slated to be destroyed.
A Look at U.S. Military
Deaths in Iraq
By THE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 28, 2004
The AP count is five higher than the Defense
Department's tally, last updated Thursday at 10 a.m. EDT.
Since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 973 U.S. military members have died, according to AP's count. That includes at least 738 deaths resulting from hostile action, according to the military's numbers.
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As War Changes, So Must
Homeland Defense, McHale Says
By
Jim Garamone
Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, spoke at the 35th Fletcher Conference. This year's theme is "Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland." He said the nature of war has fundamentally changed in the last three decades. McHale, a Marine Reserve colonel, said his generation of officers trained for a conflict with the Soviet Union. "A conflict involved a hostile nation state or coalition of hostile nation states – the Warsaw Pact," he said. "Throughout our history we believed it took the resources of a nation state to threaten the United States." But that has changed. "Transnational terrorist groups – unaffiliated with nations, but taking advantage of safe havens – can now acquire miniaturized weapons, including weapons of mass destruction that would bring to them … the destructive capacity that in the past could only be associated with the resources of a country," McHale said.
These groups could acquire and would use
weapons of mass destruction.
McHale said the common theme in the strategy is that a passive, reactive defense – one implemented only after the threat becomes clear – is too slow to be effective. "A passive defense, a reactive defense is a formula for failure," he said. Al Qaeda and similar groups are brutal and malevolent, but "they are quite professional," McHale noted. Terrorists look for seams in defenses and attack them, he said.
"We must seize the initiative," he pointed
out. Defenses must change daily, and defenses must be in depth and layered.
The American military applying pressure in Afghanistan forced Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda leaders into the mountains. This had a direct impact on al Qaeda operations, he said. Defeating the threats as far away from U.S. shores is another focus of the strategy. He said the idea is to push out the borders of interdiction. "From our perspective, homeland defense begins overseas," McHale said." When Marines and soldiers went into Kandahar during military actions against the Taliban in Afghanistan, their achievement in Kandahar contributed directly to the security in California and Kansas."
Another portion of the strategy is to ensure
that no enemy attack will degrade U.S. ability to project power.
Finally, the strategy calls for DoD to share its knowledge and expertise with state, local and international partners. He said the services have been prepared to work in contaminated environments since the chemical attacks of World War I. "DoD has the legal and moral obligation to migrate those capabilities to the civilian community," he said. Civilians Can Free Up Military for Other Duties By Gerry J. Gilmore American Forces Press Service
"There are a significant amount of (military) units that don't deploy by definition," Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David S. C. Chu told members of the Association of the United States Army at their annual meeting. Therefore, he said, DoD is looking "at using civilians in these positions." That initiative, Chu observed, is part of DoD's efforts to transform and realign its military and civilian workforce to become more efficient and to better meet 21st century challenges like the war on global terrorism. Chu said the department wants to inject more flexibility in managing its 2.7 million active and reserve-component service members, 650,000 civilian workers and 96,000 non appropriated-fund employees. Regarding military force structure, "a significant degree of rebalancing is necessary," Chu said. For example, he pointed to a current project that draws down outmoded active-duty field-artillery units and replaces them with high- demand military police.
The current voluntary military system "is
splendid," Chu said, noting, "we are not going to have a draft."
Another recently adopted initiative involves calling up reservists to active duty for training before they're mobilized, Chu said. For example, he pointed to the recruitment of 200 reservists for training in Arabic. Forty of those linguists, he noted, were recently deployed to Iraq.
And, he said, DoD still is evaluating if
300,000 military slots can be converted to civilian positions.
The adoption of the National Security Personnel System now being crafted, Chu said, will create a "more responsive and flexible" DoD civilian workforce. The NSPS, he pointed out, would "make the civilian component of our personnel system equally effective with the military" force. NSPS, according to the system's Web site, gives DoD greater authority over hiring, rewarding and firing civilian employees. The new system does away with the current 150 occupational/pay scales in favor of four broad pay bands. Under NSPS, according to the Web site, employees are rewarded for performance instead of longevity. NSPS regulations are being written now, Chu said, noting parts of the new system will be brought on line in mid-2005, with total NSPS implementation envisioned in the 2007-2008 timeframe. The NSPS and other personnel initiatives -- like the recent Air Force merger of the management of its senior military officers and senior executive service civilians -- will expand DoD civilians' role in departmental affairs, Chu said, while fostering the "one force" concept.
Veterans vital to outcome
of '04 election
Kerry has tried to use his Vietnam War
service to neutralize Republican advantages on defense and national-security
issues. His service has been a focal point for his campaign, and he has
promised to increase benefits for veterans. Kerry has criticized Bush for
abandoning veterans during a time of war by cutting benefits to veterans and
their families. Many veterans judge him for protesting the Vietnam War after
his discharge and for suggesting that Americans committed war crimes on a
broad scale. There are also those veterans who disagree with him for voting
against the flag-protection amendment that President Bush supports. , 2004
It is obvious that the veteran vote can be the crucial vote necessary to elect a president. It also becomes obvious that veterans make their voices heard by pulling that lever inside a voting booth when that curtain closes. After all, it's why veterans are called veterans. They offered their all to preserve the privilege that guaranteed all Americans their right to cast a ballot for their candidate. Don't fail on election day. Bill Smith writes for and about veterans. Write to him c/o the Times Leader, 15 N. Main St., Wilkes-Barre, PA 18711-0250.
October
17, 2004 Sunday
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