[NYTr] US Army in Iraq is Plum Worn Out

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by tsimonds (activ-l)

The Observer - Aug 12, 2007
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147052,00.html

Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they
battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get
through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is
struggling to cope with the crisis

by Peter Beaumont in Baghdad

Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does
not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between
operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at
6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to
go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be
written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his
attention and wakes him up.

When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin
about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.

The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat
outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get
in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired
and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off
for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do
their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It
is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations,
over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any
memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.

Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole
army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up
like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on
leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on
floors and in the dust.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men
by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these
days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the
idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you
travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people
in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army
public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things
have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of
the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to
tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are
worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've
become no more than numbers now.'

The first soldier starts in again. 'My husband was injured here. He hit
an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The
blast shook out the plates. He's home now and has serious issues
adapting. But I'm not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted
to see him I'd have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts
it.'

A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately.
'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another
ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've
got left in us.'

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a
corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden
from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't
you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is
exhausted?'

It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition.
There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the
back fall asleep on long operations - not because they want the men
alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall
asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to
stay alert and wired.

But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the details
of these soldiers' frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you go you hear
the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or problems with the
girlfriends that they don't see, or about the children who have been
born and who are growing up largely without them.

'I counted it the other day,' says a major whose partner is also a
soldier. 'We have been married for five years. We added up the days.
Because of Iraq and Afghanistan we have been together for just seven
months. Seven months ... We are in a bad place. I don't know whether
this marriage can survive it.'

The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent
among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have
been insisting for months now: that the US army is 'about broken'. Only
a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready.
Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate
not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a
shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected
to worsen.

And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent
of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (#105bn).

But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they
tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming
amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now
amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with
one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.

The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of
desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier
this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in
Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.

'They are scraping to get people to go back and people are worn out,'
said Thomas Grieger, a senior US navy psychiatrist, told the
International Herald Tribune in April.

'Modern war is exhausting,' says Major Stacie Caswell, an occupational
therapist with a combat stress unit attached to the military hospital in
Mosul. Her unit runs long group sessions to help soldiers with emerging
mental health and discipline problems: often they have seen friends
killed and injured, or are having problems stemming from issues at home
- responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of their cases. One of the most
common problems in Iraq is sleep disorders.

'This is a different kind of war,' says Caswell. 'In World War II it was
clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you would
go through on the battlefield.' Now she says the threat is all around.
And soldiering has changed. 'Now we have so many things to do...'

'And the soldier in Vietnam,' interjects Sergeant John Valentine from
the same unit, 'did not get to see the coverage from home that these
soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene.
They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and
confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.'

'Not only that,' says Caswell, 'but because of the nature of what we do
now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations - even
as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning
and training for your next tour.' Valentine adds: 'There is no
decompression.'

The consequence is a deep-seated problem of retention and recruitment
that in turn, says Caswell, has led the US army to reduce its standards
for joining the military, particularly over the issue of no longer
looking too hard at any previous history of mental illness. 'It is a
question of honesty, and we are not investigating too deeply or we are
issuing waivers. The consequence is that we are seeing people who do
not have the same coping skills when they get here, and this can be
difficult.

'We are also seeing older soldiers coming in - up to 41 years old - and
that is causing its own problems. They have difficulty dealing with the
physical impact of the war and also interacting with the younger men.'

Valentine says: 'We are not only watering down the quality of the
soldiers but the leadership too. The good leaders get out. I've seen
it. And right now we are on the down slope.'

'War tsar' calls for return of the draft to take the strain

America's 'war tsar' has called for the nation's political leaders to
consider bringing back the draft to help a military exhausted by wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option
had always been open to boost America's all-volunteer army by drafting
in young men in the same way as happened in Vietnam. 'I think it makes
sense to consider it,' he said. Lute was appointed 'war tsar' earlier
this year after President Bush decided a single figure was needed to
oversee the nation's military efforts abroad.

Rumours of a return to the draft have long circulated in military
circles as the pressure from fighting two large conflicts at the same
time builds on America's forces. However, politically it would be
extremely difficult to achieve, especially for any leader hoping to be
elected in 2008. Bush has previously ruled out the suggestion as
unnecessary.

Lute, however, said the war was causing stress to military families and,
as a result, was having an impact on levels of re-enlistment. 'This kind
of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living-room
conversations within these families. Ultimately the health of the
all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family
decisions,' he said.

A draft would revive bad memories of the turmoil of the 1960s and early
1970s when tens of thousands of young men were drafted to fight and die
in Vietnam. Few other policies proved as divisive in America and the
memories of anti-war protesters burning their draft cards and fleeing
to Canada are still vivid in the memory.

(c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2007