Keep the Home Fires Burning

[don]

By JANET MASLIN

YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE

By Siobhan Fallon
226 pages. Amy Einhorn Books/G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $23.95.


Siobhan Fallon tells gripping, straight-up, no-nonsense stories about American soldiers and their families. It’s clear from her tender yet tough-minded first book, “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” that she knows this world very well. The reader need not look at Ms. Fallon’s biography to guess that she, like her book’s characters, has spent time living in Fort Hood, Tex., watching the effects of soldiers’ leave-takings and homecomings on men and the wives they leave behind. Married to a man who is on at least his third tour of duty, Ms. Fallon now lives where he is stationed, in the Middle East.

Virtually all of the military personnel in this loosely linked eight-story collection are male, with one dangerous exception. “Inside the Break” begins as Bravo Company leaves for Iraq, and a gathering of tear-stained wives bids their buses farewell. “It was fine to look this horrible now that the men were too far away to see their faces, fine to finally grieve, messy and ugly,” Ms. Fallon writes.

But the pain of separation becomes quite different when one of the wives looks at the last bus in the lineup, and sees that it holds “a threat that had never occurred to any of them when they thought of faraway insurgents and bombs and helicopters crashing.” The threat: 15 women.

Here is a situation that could be played for suspense, soap opera or ambiguity. But Ms. Fallon pulls no punches. When one of the wives, Kailani Rodriguez, hacks into her husband’s e-mail, she finds an uncomplicatedly treacherous message (“are u coming over tues?”) slugged “So lonely” and sent from michelle.c.rand@us.army.mil. Ms. Fallon does not insult her readers by making Kailani, who was uprooted from Hawaii to follow her husband to Fort Hood and now has nothing but a potted hibiscus to remind her of her real home, waste time wondering what the message means.

In “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” what matters most about any military family crisis is its order of magnitude. So yes, Kailani has to deal with a husband whose best response to being accused of infidelity is to claim feebly that there must be some mistake. (“Crazy, huh?”) But she lives in a world where life feels tentative every single day, where women must brace for the fact that men come home lovingly, abashedly, unhinged or not at all. She must come to terms with that reality. The Army’s boilerplate efforts to provide helpful guidelines for returning soldiers (“Take time to be charming!”) are no help at all.

Most of the meltdowns that occur in “You Know When the Men Are Gone” are far more dire than sexual betrayal. “Leave” opens with the image of the suspicious Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash breaking into his own Fort Hood basement in the middle of the night. Nick’s specialty is interrogation, and he doesn’t like what he’s been hearing from his wife, Trish, when he calls home from a suburb of Baghdad. So he sneaks back to Texas on leave, moves stealthily into the basement and begins covert surveillance of his wife and daughter.

Ms. Fallon’s emphasis is not on the negative. It’s just that life is tough at Fort Hood. Fears tend to be justified. So “Leave” follows its trajectory toward a searing dénouement, studded with memorably ominous details along the way. Nick and Trish’s bed is made of heavy, nail-studded mahogany, but Nick likes the fact that it reminds Trish of the Inquisition. A soldier Nick knew in Iraq once had a fit of jealousy and destroyed a radio playing “Love the One You’re With.”

And Nick is haunted by the Grimm fairy tales that his daughter reads because his own life is full of latter-day versions of them. Why is the story of starving Hansel and Gretel any worse than that of a young Army corporal killed three days before he was due to see his wife and newborn baby?

“Such vicious twists dealt to the undeserving,” Ms. Fallon writes. And a vicious twist is dealt in “Leave” once Nick actually finds his nightmares justified and he approaches his wife and her sleeping lover with his Gerber knife at the ready.

“The knife continued to move from hand to hand, the blade catching the moonlight, a pendulum swinging from one side to the next, a judge’s gavel raised,” Ms. Fallon writes stunningly, “and Nick waited to see where it would land.”

Other stories in this brief, tight collection — and there’s not a loser in the bunch — include “The Last Stand,” in which Specialist Kit Murphy comes home to every soldier’s nightmare. He is married; he is wounded; his initially chirpy wife (“Helena is so happy you are coming home!”) is going to abandon him. He realizes as much when she sleeps on her own side of their twin-bedded motel room on the night of his return.

So Kit goes out to a bar called the Last Stand, a First Cavalry Division favorite, and destroys what is left of his injured leg by getting onto a mechanical bull. Because Ms. Fallon can be blunt without being heavy-handed, she ends the story as Kit tries to stand up one final time as Helena — with a blithe “We’ll talk soon. I promise” — walks out of his life.

Kit reappears in “Gold Star,” the final tale. He goes to visit a Gold Star wife, i.e. the widow of a soldier killed in combat, whose loss has earned her the right to certain perks. “Family members received a few special privileges like this lousy parking space,” Ms. Fallon writes, “but that meant the pity rising from the asphalt singed hotter than any Texas sun.”

Now equipped with a permanent limp and a prosthesis, Kit wants to thank Josie Schaeffer, the widow of a sergeant who has been mentioned several times earlier in the book. Sergeant Schaeffer is said to have saved Kit’s life. Kit, for his part, unintentionally lets the widow realize that the official version of how her husband died was untrue.

He awkwardly lets her sit on his lap. What does she want? Ms. Fallon keeps the answers to such questions simple, tough and true. Josie just wants to rest her face against the chest of a living, breathing man in uniform one more time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/books/11book.html?hpw

[don]

Re: Keep the Home Fires Burning

Surging Tit for Tat in Afghanistan

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

President Obama's ballyhooed surge of US forces in Afghanistan added 17,000 troops in early 2009 plus an additional 30,000 by 2010, in effect doubling the number of troops in Afghanistan (not to mention the concomitant surge in the camp-follower contractor force). The Taliban may not have doubled its troop strength, but as Tom Vanden Brook reports in the 10 January issue of USA Today, the insurgents have doubled the the total number of casualties inflicted by mines in just the last two years of the nine year war. [See graphic]

Of course, as any veteran of Vietnam (or Algeria) will tell you, mines and booby traps are favorite weapons of guerrilla fighters.

Mine warfare is extremely cost-effective for the guerrilla. It is dirt cheap, yet it creates a powerful hidden menace that slows down the adversary's battlefield decision cycle. That is because the real or imagined presence of mines increases uncertainty and fear, which turn the focus of a soldier's attention inward on self-protection, as opposed to maintaining a mental state focused outward on neutralizing the enemy. Defeating the mine becomes the objective, but the presence of mines and booby traps fix soldiers' attention and make them more vulnerable to the blind-side effects of enemy initiatives, like sudden hit and run attacks or ambushes. That combined-arms effect is why force protection has become such a obsession in Afghanistan.

Ask any soldier what it is like to be been stuck in a minefield in any war, and he will tell you the dominant psychological effect is a sense of paralyzing fear and vulnerability.

Put abstractly, the uncertainty and menace posed by the real or imagined presence of mines creates an intense psychological pressure that builds up a reactive emotional mindset that strains the body, saps initiative, and slows down decisions and action. In a relative sense, this effect on one side of a conflict increases the freedom of action for the other, in this case, the guerrilla.

Despite the land mine's long indisputable history of high effectiveness, the US military was caught flat footed by the sudden appearance of this threat after the U.S. militarized its response to 9-11 with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indeed, the Pentagon coined a revealing new mechanistic term of art to describe the mine threat: "improvised explosive device (IED)." The very wording of the term implies the battlefield booby traps in Iraq and Afghanistan were something new and unexpected to the planners in the Pentagon and strategists in the field. Despite the subsequent expenditure of billions of dollars to neutralize this threat, much of it wasted on high tech boondoggles and bizarre robotic gimmicks that benefitted program managers in the Pentagon, defense contractors, and the Congressmen whose districts benefited from the torrent of dollars, the combat effectiveness of the mine threat in Afghanistan has surged in parallel with President Obama's troop surge, according to the Pentagon's own casualty data.

Now look at some of the rationalizations used to explain the increase in casualties as given to Vanden Brook by his sources:

A relatively mild winter enabled freer Taliban movements (presumably enabling Taliban guerrillas to deploy more mines in more places).

Increased mine-inflicted casualties are the result of added US troops forcing the Taliban to fight back.

Al Qaeda is directing the Taliban to return to areas they were pushed out of and to fight back.

Despite increased casualties caused by mines, the military says progress is being made against the mine threat.

Wounded troops are less likely to die because of improvements in battlefield medicine.

Rationalization #1 may be true. So what?

Rationalization #4 is vapid Pentagon-speak for justifying its continued expenditure of billions of dollars on hi-tech gizmos to defeat a primitive mine threat it failed to foresee, while it indulged itself by continuing to waste money on cold-war inspired turkeys after the cold war ended (Star Wars, F-22, SSN-21, Future Combat System, etc).

Rationalization #5 has nothing to do with the total number of casualties from mines, i.e., killed plus wounded. Indeed, from the guerrilla's perspective, it is often better to wound an adversary than to kill him, because wounding triggers rescue operations that shift decision-making focus inward toward self protection and ties up more manpower and material resources in high-cost extraction/medical operations.

Paradoxically, the increase in the wounded to killed ratio, while welcome to our side in the sense that it reduces US deaths, may even suggest that the relative effectiveness of mine warfare for the guerrilla is growing, because it is increasing its strain of our ever more costly efforts to wage an increasingly expensive and frustrating war is a distant land (we have now spent as much in Afghanistan, measured in inflation adjusted dollars, as we spent in much larger, albeit shorter wars in Korea and WWI and almost half as much as was spent in Vietnam).

Rationalization #s 2 & 3 at least relate to the question of the effectiveness in coping with the mine threat, but they reflect a somewhat bizarre mindset when viewed in terms of our counterinsurgency doctrine. The idea of measuring success by forcing the Taliban to stand and fight suggests we have reverted to a Vietnam-style attrition strategy (which implies greater firepower, focus on bodycounts, and more unintended death and destruction to civilians), as opposed to the counter-guerrilla oil-spot strategy of winning hearts and minds of locals that the surge was originally premised upon. This weird aspect was reinforced by John Nagl, an oft-quoted "expert" on guerrilla warfare and president the Center for New American Security (a pro-interventionist thinktank), when he said "We'll know a lot more about how effectively we've been able to put pressure on the enemy based on who comes out to fight in the spring."

By implication, Nagl is saying if that the Taliban don't come out to fight next spring, it is a sign that we are winning. Nagl is forgetting that the Taleban have disappeared before. In the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a triumphal President Bush and Pentagon mistook a strategic dispersal into the Hindu Kush for a rout and declared victory. Now, nine years later we are still fighting the Taleban, which in fact have expanded their areas of control. Yet Nagl would have us believe another disappearance, by itself, would be a sign of success.

T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), would have different take on Nagl's disappearing hypothesis, arguing instead that guerrillas may not choose to cooperate by standing and fighting, because the art of guerrilla war is "tip and run, not pushes but strokes", with "use of the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place" and "never being on the defense except by accident or error." Lawrence is saying the name of the game for the guerrilla is to wear the adversary down by stretching out the war. Mine warfare fits this game like a hand in a glove.

Lawrence is certainly not alone in this kind of thinking. Nagl and his fellow counter-guerrilla travellers in the Pentagon would do well to study William E. Polk's profoundly important book, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (Harper Perennial, 2008), because Polk explains quite clearly why the only combatants to benefit strategically from protracted war of insurrection are the guerrillas who are trying to expel foreign invaders — and mine warfare is good for protracted war.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney01122011.html