Tag: US Army

Lactation Station Nation

readyandresilient_header5
Where do lactating troops fit in this picture?

Walter Stewart (Guest Post)

Sleep tight tonight, America.  At least some of the roughly one million soldiers of your Modern Volunteer Army (MOVAR, a dated acronym), part of the “finest fighting force in the history of the world,” remain awake.

A relative few are awake because they are in harm’s way.  Sleep in “Indian Country,” as my gun platoon warriors called the Mekong Delta badlands in Vietnam, is difficult.  More of our MOVAR troops are awake because of the harm their countrymen did to their bodies and minds by launching them on one of this nation’s many undeclared and therefore unwinnable wars – their restlessness will last a lifetime.

And then there are those awake breastfeeding infants or “expressing milk,” whatever that means.

It’s hard for this old soldier to get his mind around the concept of lactating troops and the realities of dealing with new Department of the Army guidance, such as “Non-restroom lactation areas must include a flat space where the soldier can rest her breast pump.”  It’s even harder to fathom how lactating “Ranger Janes” can be anything but a drag on the common defense.

Regarding the common defense, I observe that in my pre-MOVAR days there were more than enough America males to fill the ranks of a far larger army – and from a national population roughly half what it is now.  Countrymen, what happened to turn so many of us boys to beating the war drums while hiding behind skirts?  To borrow a term from Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s as if “girly-men” have taken over to do nothing more than cheer the troops into battle while chugging one cup of “finest-military-ever” Kool-Aid after another.  Too many of us, gentlemen, are pantywaists.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Throw enough money at the MOVAR, promised big government facilitator Alan Greenspan, and more than enough quality males would enlist as servicemen.  Regrettably, this bit of Greenspan happy talk wasn’t any better than his pre-meltdown assurance of bank health, so now, with the ordered opening of all service positions to females, we launch on a quest to flesh out service ranks with quality women, some nursing, some expressing.

Having led troops in war and peace, I’m trying to figure out how I would accomplish giving female soldiers time to express milk “with the intent to maintain physiological capability for lactation.”  I’m not sure what that means, but if we’re at war can the noise of a lactation pump reveal friendly positions to the enemy?  These questions, and more, need to be asked and answered.  However, and with certainty, service seniors will just go along to get along.

That’s what I would do – go into survival mode.  Take the pay, perks, pensions, and “thank you for your service” platitudes, while remembering Rudyard Kipling’s admonition to keep your head while all those about you are losing theirs.

Lactation station nation, that’s us, pumping pap to those so delusional as to believe that in the world of warriors, males and females are universally interchangeable.

Walter Stewart rose from a private in the army of regulars, reservists, and draftees raised to fight in Vietnam, to a major general serving with the thousands of citizen-soldiers of the 28th Infantry Division, Pennsylvania Army National Guard. Now retired, Stewart is a strong advocate for a citizen-military and a saner world.

A Few Letters to My Dad during World War II

My Dad in 1945
My Dad in 1945

W.J. Astore

My dad was in the Army in World War II.  He was a dental technician in an armored headquarters group and never went overseas.  But many of his friends did go overseas and saw combat.  What follows are some excerpts from letters sent to my dad.

Bill Zerby was attached to the 781 Tank Battalion, 7th Army, in France and Germany.  In December 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge, Zerby wrote to my dad that:

“Here we have plenty of mud and rain and 24 hours a day the field artillery lays down a barrage with everything they have.  The outfit is making out pretty well so far.  One good thing these boys don’t believe in taking prisoners…. We all live in houses and have lanterns for lights.  Everything is blacked out at 5 P.M. till dawn.”

I’d like to repeat Zerby’s 3rd sentence: One good thing these boys don’t believe in taking prisoners.

The fight against the Nazis was tough, and it wasn’t just the Germans who violated the Geneva Convention and its rules about taking prisoners.  War, in short, should never be sugarcoated.

At the end of March 1945, Zerby wrote to my dad again, a letter that contained this telling sentence:

“Bookbinder [a fellow soldier] sure got a break [by not going overseas] but he better hope he don’t get sent to Germany.  It seems they don’t like the Heb’s [Jews].”

By this point, Allied troops were beginning to liberate German concentration camps, and beginning as well to realize the murderous hatred the Nazis had for the Jewish people.

On a lighter note, Zerby regales my dad with the following story:

“The place where we live now is a large estate that belongs to a German big shot.  He got chased out and we moved in.  He has a wine cellar that runs all over town—all underground passages, and the dates on some of the casks run back to 1755.  Well some of the wine was really good.  The boys made a tour of the place and took all the best drinks for their own use.  Yes, I was in on it too.  Now we are tired of it and don’t take anymore.  Of course it’s bolted up now but that don’t mean anything.”

In another letter, Zerby writes about American soldiers hunting for deer.  Yes, American troops knew how to have a good time. Wine, venison, and women.  After all, who knew from day to day if you’d live to see home again?

At the end of 1945, Zerby writes again to my dad that “I am now a proud civilian and no more lousy Army life.”  And to my dad’s mention of a few of their friends from the battalion, Zerby writes with painful honesty: “I don’t remember many of those guys anymore.  A hell of a lot of them got bumped off also last winter [in action in France and Germany].  I guess we were just lucky.”

Another of my dad’s friends was Corporal Ed C. Sarna, who was assigned to a headquarters battery in Divisional Artillery.  He wrote to my dad in December 1944 that:

“To date, I have seen a number of [German V-1] buzz bombs at a very close range.  A little in regards to Germany.  If Hitler decided to fight until we hit Berlin, I can sincerely feel that the destruction will wipe Germany right off the map.  At our present place – there isn’t a place found to be livable.  Our forces are really doing a good job of it.”

The Allies wanted to make sure the Germans knew they had been well and truly beaten in this war, so as to prevent the myth that emerged after World War I that the German Army had not been defeated in the field.

This was a sentiment seconded by Corporal Paul Vella, 5th Depot Repair Squadron, Maintenance Division.  He wrote to my dad in March 1945 that “You’re right, Julie, the Germans are getting the shit kicked out of them and the quicker it’s over the better I like it.  I sure would like to see the states after a couple of years of being away from it.”

Corporal Vella also jokingly mentioned the “Soldier’s Prayer” in his letter: Please, Dear God, distribute the bullets like you do the pay and give officers first dibs. Yes, there’s some grim humor shared in the front lines.

There’s nothing really that special about these letters to my dad – and that’s their value.  They are the typical sentiments of American dogfaces in Europe in World War II.  Men who saw the destruction of Germany and the deaths of their friends.  They had no illusions about war, and they didn’t spout patriotic platitudes.  They just wanted the war to be over so they could get back to living their “real” lives.

As one soldier put it to my dad in 1945, “I sure hope that I’ll get my discharge soon, I’ve got plans to complete, my girl is getting tired of waiting so long.”

And thus baby boomers like me followed.

Wars Are Not Won by the Suppression of Truth

Shock and awe, and awesomely deadly
Shock and awe, and awesomely deadly

W.J. Astore

The American way of war has often relied on massive firepower as a way to reduce American troop casualties.  This was true of World War II and Korea, which were conventional “big battalion” wars, and it was also true of Vietnam, which was an unconventional war involving much smaller units.  The problem in Vietnam was the wanton use of firepower, to include napalm and Agent Orange as well as traditional bombs and artillery shells, which devastated the countryside and destroyed the lives of so many innocent Vietnamese.  The horror of this approach to war was recently captured in Nick Turse’s bestseller, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, the American government was at pains to deny that massive firepower was being misused, even when that criticism came from within the ranks.  This lesson was brought home to me while reading Douglas Kinnard’s Adventures in Two Worlds: Vietnam General and Vermont Professor, in which he looks back on his earlier book about Vietnam, The War Managers.  Upon publishing The War Managers in the mid-1970s, Kinnard says in Adventures (127-28) that he received the following note from an informed reader:

“Another [note received] from a colonel who had had two tours of duty in Vietnam and had tried in 1969 to publish an article criticizing the tactical conduct of the war, especially the overuse of fire power.  Indeed, any of us who were connected with the use of fire power knew it was overused, and certainly this was true in 1969.  The publication of his article in The Military Review was turned down not by the journal itself but by the office of the Secretary of Defense.  Let me point out that the turndown was not a rejection based on international policy or strategic implications.  ‘Colonel X’s article has been reviewed by this office and is returned without clearance on the basis of policy objections.  The main thrust of the article is in conflict with the announced policies of reducing US casualties and of Vietnamization of the War.  Publication of an article of this nature is also considered detrimental to the national interest in that it erroneously lends validity to charges of catastrophic death and destruction in the Republic of Vietnam.’ Signed, Roger Delaney, Deputy Director of Security Review.  The article, by the way, was a very interesting and informative one.  The turndown is incredible, but it is part of the history of the War.” [emphasis added]

It’s fascinating how the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) acted to suppress internal criticism within the U.S. Army itself that was aimed at curbing excessive firepower and its devastating impact on South Vietnam, which was after all our ally in that war.

Three factors seem to have driven OSD’s decision:

1.  Firepower (the more, the better) was linked to reducing U.S. casualties, thus making an unpopular war more palatable to Americans.

2.  Firepower (the more, the better) was used as a prop to Vietnamization, i.e. a crutch for ARVN (the South Vietnamese Army) in the field.  When ARVN didn’t perform well, massive firepower came to the rescue, which served to mask the inadequacies of Vietnamization.

3.  Even with this massive firepower, you as an American soldier were not allowed to say that it was causing widespread death and destruction, leading to the loss of the very hearts and minds that we claimed we were trying to win.  In other words, you had to deny logic as well as the evidence of your own eyes.

There’s a famous paradoxical saying about the Vietnam War: Americans had to destroy the Vietnamese village to save it.  What General Kinnard’s anecdote makes clear is that by 1969 you weren’t even allowed to say that you were destroying the village even as you burned it, since such acts so obviously contradicted the announced policy of Vietnamization as well as the idea of pursuing “peace with honor.”

But how can there be honor when honest efforts by American troops to critique deeply flawed and immoral tactics are suppressed in the name of political expediency?