Ten Is Enough

The alleged massacre of 16 Afghan villagers by U.S. Army staff sergeant Robert Bales has occasioned another classic, tortured American effusion of explanation and commentary. Bales’ despicable actions have been attributed to traumatic brain injury and posttraumatic stress disorder, the relentless burden of four deployments to war zones in the past decade, financial and marital tensions back home, disappointment over not getting promoted, anger over a friend’s getting blown up. All of which are appropriate topics for discussion, and yet careless and premature and profoundly incomplete.

Once again, the 2.4 million young Americans who have served with honor in Iraq and Afghanistan are portrayed as victims and a potential menace, ready to pop at any moment. There has been little acknowledgment that the overwhelming majority of our veterans–even the overwhelming majority of those suffering from posttraumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries–have come home to lead productive and, often, inspiring lives. The unfairness of laying the burden of this stereotype on them, after they assumed the burden of fighting impossible wars for the rest of us, is infuriating. “You don’t want to embed in the culture’s consciousness the idea that everyone who comes back is somehow damaged,” says Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL whose organization, the Mission Continues, gives fellowships to veterans who come up with creative public-service ideas. “What I’ve seen is that out of that pain can come wisdom. Out of that stress can come resilience.”

And so I decided to check in with some of the other veterans I’ve come to know over the past few years, men and women who are leading exemplary lives back home, to see how they were reacting to the news from Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, almost all of them were infuriated by the spew of stereotypes. “The media have done nobody any favors,” said Jake Wood, a former Marine sergeant who co-founded Team Rubicon, a network of combat veterans–many sergeants–who provide disaster relief. “You see headlines like SERGEANT PSYCHO, and what can you say?”

The veterans were naturally curious about the precise details of what happened on the morning of March 11 in Panjwai district. They talked about how unusual it was for a lone trooper to go “outside the wire” at a combat outpost and how, sometimes, troops became obsessed with individual families. “There’s so much we don’t know about this,” said John Gallina, a former specialist who suffered a traumatic brain injury and posttraumatic stress disorder after his humvee was blown up in Iraq and who went on to co-found Purple Heart Homes, which builds housing for disabled veterans.

But there was unanimity about one thing, at least among the veterans I spoke with: enough was enough. “I’m outraged that we still have these soldiers over there, in these incredibly harsh conditions, getting hurt, going through deployment after deployment–and for what?” Gallina said. “What are they really doing over there? People are dying, and you wonder what the core ideals and values of the mission are. It just breaks my heart.” Eric Greitens said the Obama Administration has the responsibility of explaining to the troops serving in Afghanistan exactly what their current mission is: “I thought it was appropriate for us to go to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda. It’s important for the troops to know how this mission relates to that. Defeating the Taliban is a different mission. Building a democracy in Afghanistan is a different mission.”

So why are we still in Afghanistan? We have accomplished a lot: We kicked out the Taliban regime that protected al-Qaeda. We successfully used special operations and drone attacks to destroy most of the al-Qaeda hierarchy and infrastructure, including Osama bin Laden. The struggle against Islamic terrorism will continue to require vigilant attention and occasional military action, but it is more diffuse now, and our ongoing interests in Afghanistan are limited. We should continue to provide some equipment and training for the Afghan National Army in its civil war with the Taliban. I suspect that the amped-up ANA, which is mostly composed of Afghanistan’s northern, non-Pashtun ethnic groups, will prevent the southerners from retaking Kabul. It would be nice if we could continue to base special forces and intelligence operatives in Afghanistan, given the mayhem across the border in Pakistan, although their activities can probably be staged from naval vessels in the Indian Ocean.

But it’s long past time for the bulk of our troops to come home–which means the Obama Administration should announce that our drawdown will not pause, as previously planned, in September but will continue in an orderly fashion. For the life of me, I can’t see the rationale for the loss of even one more American life or limb there.

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