The Cold War Versus the Iraq War: The Mission Shapes Reality

From 1972 to 1984 on active duty and in the Army Reserve, I was a Cold War soldier. My Mission, with a capital M, was to “Defend America against the Soviet Union and her Warsaw Pact allies.”

In the military and in every organization, there is a “Big M” Mission that the whole organization works toward and a “small m” mission for individuals and units.  During the Cold War my Big M mission was clear.  It began with a verb: Defend.  The enemy was defined: Soviet forces and their allies. 

Because the Big M was so well defined, the “Small m” mission was equally clear:  I trained my tank crew to fight the invading forces of the Soviet Union.  When I was stationed in Germany, we trained to fight at Fulda, our alert area.  When I was in a reserve unit in the U.S., we had pre-positioned tanks in Baumholder, Germany.

During all the time I served in the Cold War, I knew the mission of the entire U.S. military and the mission of my tank.  While on active duty, that tank was Bravo 13, Company B, 1^st Battalion, 70^th Armor.  Also, the rules of engagement were clear if and when the war started—Kill Soviets until we win. 

In 1984, I left the clearly defined world of the Cold War Army and became a civilian.  Twenty-three years later, in 2007, I re-enlisted.  I jumped into the murky water of our wars in the Middle East.  I could not tell you now, nor could I tell you in 2009 when I deployed to Iraq what the Big M mission of the U.S. Army was in that ill-fated war, or it is now in the War in Afghanistan. 

We defeated Saddam Hussein’s Army three weeks after the war started in 2003.  What were we doing after that?  “Winning hearts and minds” is the phrase I remember most clearly.  Judging by the looks I got from the Iraqis I met in the local market or working on our base, we did not win a lot of hearts and minds.

Even when the Big M mission is murky, the Small m mission can be clear.  I worked hard every day I was in Iraq, whether it was in the motor pool or on the flight line or in an office or flying across southern Iraq in a Blackhawk helicopter.  But I never had the clarity of purpose that I had as a Cold War tank commander.

And in retrospect, I see my Cold War service as being more clear, more real than my service during the IraqWar.  

When I finally leave the Army either in May of this year or next year, I will look back on my service in the Cold War as having an edge of reality that my service in Iraq never will.  It is also easy to make the case that we won the Cold War.  By making the Soviets spend hard currency on huge military, the regime went bankrupt.  We won the Cold War without actually firing a shot.  In Iraq, we fired a lot of shots, and a lot of people died, and everybody lost.

Sunset on Muir Field After the Big Snowstorm

I took pictures from several angles of the sun setting on Muir Field, Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., after the big snowstorm.  The angles and blades of a Blackhawk helicopter do wonderful things to the light.  I hope I captured a little of that.

One Soldier's Trash is a Teenager's Treasure!

Yesterday I was walking through the Flight Facility--the big hangar for helicopters--at Fort Indiantown Gap and saw a box lunch sitting on the corner of a recycling bin.  Inside were the various packaged treasures below.

In our household, we do not buy snack food.  Really.  My wife blogs about frugality.  This post for instance. No bags of chips, no cookies, nothing processed and printed with pretty faces.  So while many soldiers simply toss these packaged meals, for my sons they are blessed manna from the Army Gods.

So I brought the box home.  My sons ate it almost instantly.

The Army gives soldiers many benefits--and gives a few to my teenage, snack-limited sons.

MK03:Lunch/Dinner

Smuckers Peanut Butter &Jelly Potato Skins – Sour Cream & Cheddar Chocolate Chip Cookies Peach Cup Bottled Water Cutlery Kit Moist Towelette

Armor in the Snow: A Cold Day for Cold War Armor

A year ago, I took pictures of the static display Armor at Fort Indiantown Gap after a snowstorm.  Today I took pictures of the same tanks and howitzers after the big storm.

M203 8-inch howitzer

M42 Duster 40 mm Anti-Aircraft

M60A1 and M46 Patton tanks and M3 Sherman 76mm

M60A1 Patton

M3 Sherman 76mm

M60A1 Patton

M1A1 Abrams

M203 8-inch howitzer

Cold War Reheated: Resurgent Russia and Vladimir Putin

At the end of the Cold War, Russia fell into poverty and almost fell apart.  Whether you date the end of the Cold War as the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the crumbling of the Soviet Union in 1991, post-Soviet Russia was in a dismal state in the 1990s.  The collapse of government at nearly all levels made Russia a third-world economy with an enormous nuclear arsenal, as well as thousands and thousands of tons of nerve gas in rotting containers in rotting storage facilities.

I just finished reading Steven Lee Myers book "New Czar: Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin." This excellent book brings together many of the details of the life of the most powerful autocrat on the planet today--and is especially good on how a mid-level KGB agent went from the shadows to the heights of power and to enduring popularity with the Russian people.

Before I say any more about the book itself, reading the book gave me a huge feeling of a lost opportunity.  The circumstances of Putin's rise made me think, "It did not have to turn out this way."

In 1945, Germany was ruin and squalor with every level of government operating on totalitarian principles.  Yet America rode to the rescue with the Marshall Plan and set Germany, at least West Germany, on the road to democracy.  After we spent billions and billions trying to defeat the Soviet totalitarian state, why did we leave it to be run by a drunk selling off the assets of the state to his cronies?

The grinding poverty of the vast majority of Russians coupled with Yeltsin's cronies becoming billionaires put Putin in the presidency and kept him there.  Putin was unknown in 1999 when Yeltsin put him in power.  Ironically one of the reasons for Putin's rise to power was his honesty.  He worked very hard in government and did not take bribes like so many others in government.  Yeltsin put him in the presidency because no one had bought him off.

Myers makes very clear that Putin has been in charge since 2000 and could well continue in power till 2024, or even beyond.  Putin is, as Myers makes clear, on the way to being a new Tsar.  And he is popular.  Even with sanctions and the current crash of oil prices, the average Russian is far better off under Putin than in the 1990s.

Which brings me to another irony I felt reading this book.  The US did not rush in to prop up and bring order to Russia in collapse as we did with post-war Germany and Japan.  Yet in 2003, we went into Iraq saying we could do "nation building" in a state seething with sectarian hatred.

We may have won the Cold War, but the current state of Russia and other former Soviet states says that we lost the peace.  In the depths of its 1990s collapse, Russia was fending off Islamic extremism inside Russia and along its borders.  In the same way Germany became an anchor in the NATO defense of Europe, we could have worked with Russia as a front-line state in the fight against Islamic terror.

Putin was born just seven months before I was.  I grew up in a suburban house near Boston: safe, warm, happy and well-fed.  Putin grew up in the wreckage of Leningrad, arguably the most ravaged city in World War 2, under Nazi siege for almost three years.  Putin grew up hearing stories of the Great Patriotic War and the sacrifices his family, city and nation made to defeat the Nazis.  Putin is a patriot.  Restoring Russia's place as a world leader is and has always been part of his program as president.

A strong Russia could have been, should have been, our ally in the War on Terror.  Myers book is a great read, but it ends on a somber note of repression, deception and the tragedy of an airliner shot down either by Russian soldiers or separatists armed by Russians with advanced missiles.  If Myers writes a sequel in another decade, I hope it is about a Democratic Russia and not a 21st Century Tsarist Russia.  But the trend lines all point to a New Tsar.

Tank Vs. Citroen 2CV: Polezei on German Roads

This

Versus This:

During the three years I was a tank commander in West Germany during the Cold War, we rolled through towns, down country roads and along the autobahn in miles-long columns.  Our battalion, the 1st-70th Armor, put 54 tanks and nearly 100 support vehicles on the often narrow roads for field training exercises.  

Most of the time, the local drivers fell in line behind our columns and waited for us to get out of the way.  Sometimes they got impatient.  

One night as Bravo Company rolled along a narrow country road near Fulda, a blue Citroen 2CV started passing tanks in the column, swerving back between the tanks to avoid head-on collisions with oncoming traffic.  

You would think it is easy to avoid hitting a tank, but in the dark, the edges of a tank are not clear--no marker lights like a semi.  And the drive sprockets are in the rear of a tank.  The 1750 cubic-inch engine propels the tank through those sprockets.  

Here is a view of the sprocket.  Smoke from the V-12 diesel engine pours through the center grill, obscuring the back of the tank more.

After passing a half-dozen tanks, the driver of the Citroen misjudged the seventh.  He drove into the track at the rear of the tank.  The sprocket tore the front of the car off and flipped the rest of the it into the adjoining farm field.  The column stopped.

Two medics following the column ran to check the driver and passenger of the car.  All columns also had a jeep following with a German and an American officer and a lot of cash ready to pay claims for damage on the spot.  That jeep drove to the crash site.  Within another minute, the Polezei, German police, were at the scene.  The driver of the tank was a mess thinking he was in trouble for the accident.

The Polezei looked at the driver, waved off the settlement officers and the medics and said, "Betrunken."  Drunk.  They marched the driver to their car and took him away and told us to move on.

The driver was drunk.  It was his fault.  We moved on.  No breathalyzers, no legal niceties.  Justice is swift on German roads.

My Father's First Command: A Black Supply Company

Louis Armstrong Played for My Father's Soldiers at Camp Shenango, Pa.

My father, George Gussman, enlisted in the Army at the end of 1939.  He was 34 years old and at the end of his career as a middleweight boxer and a pitcher for the Reading Phillies.  He was the fourth of six sons of Jewish immigrants from the Russia.  They arrived at the beginning of the century.  My father and his older brothers only went to Boston Latin school until the 8th grade.  The younger boys got all the way through high school--business was better by that time for grandpa.

Dad was a warehouseman in a bad economy and the Army was a steady job.  He took a two-year enlistment which was to end in mid-December 1941.  Dad was packed up to go home in the second week in December.  He never left.

On December 8, 1941, all discharges were cancelled and enlistments extended for the duration of the war.

With war declared many rules changed and the Army sent George to Officer Candidate School.  In 1942 he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and sent to Camp Shenango, Pa., near Erie.  His first command was a black company, a supply company that also repaired stoves for camps and bases across Pennsylvania.

Dad kept a scrapbook of his soldiers which I am hoping to scan and post later this year.  Among those pictures is a picture of Louis Armstrong signed with a a note saying "To My Boy Guss."  It is one of the many pictures my father carefully kept from his first command.  Dad kept in touch with several of the soldiers he served with long after the war ended.

After more than a year in charge of the company in Shenango, Dad went to Fort Indiantown Gap where I serve now.  Then as a captain, he took command of 600 Afrika Korps German prisoners in what is now the Reading Airport.

It hadn't occurred to me until today, but it is possible my sons are related to one of my Dad's soldiers.  Most of his men came from Pennsylvania.  My adopted sons were born in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg.  It's not likely, but in a world so different from the one Dad lived in, there might be a direct connection between his first command and his son's family.

  

My People: Real Americans, Refugees Running from Killers

Millions of Americans came here from around the globe running from torment and death. They came here as my grandparents did, running from persecution and wanting a place where they could live and raise kids without being suddenly murdered in God's name or the Tsar's name.

My grandparents, Hyman and Esther Gussman, came to America from Odessa, Russia, in about 1900, coming ashore in Boston.  The picture above is one of the big reasons they left--pogroms by the Cossacks that killed at least a million Russian Jews.

It is clear when you look at other countries around the world that America does a better job of assimilation, of making immigrants into Americans, than any other country.

The reason, I believe, is that we have a common culture that is easy to understand and easy to adopt.

For good or for ill, the common culture of America is success and money.  To become American is to leave extremism and make money.  It used to be called making good.

In a cruel parody of faith, America even assimilated Christianity.  We lead the world in millionaire preachers.  Hellfire has almost disappeared from our pulpits.  Now the most popular Churches preach some version of health, wealth and success.  These Churches love celebrities and millionaires, and set them up as the Blessed, replacing the martyrs of the suffering Church.

My grandparents went from being oppressed Jews in Russia to being Americans.  In Russia a million Jews were killed for being Jews.  America takes people suffering under radicals of all kinds and gives them the possibility of health and wealth.

My father was the fourth if six boys born to Esther and Hyman Gussman.  In the names of the six boys you see assimilation. Beginning with the oldest they are Abraham, Emmanuel, Ralph, George, Lewis and Harold.  Every time my father spoke of his oldest brothers they were Abe and Manny.  The Gussmans lived on Blue Hill Avenue, a street known as Jew Hill Avenue at the beginning of the 20th Century.  In the 1920s, the Gussmans had 14 cars, trucks and motorcycles parked somewhere in the vicinity of the family home.  Hyman had a successful fruit business.  And his one return trip to the old country turned into two years of being hunted by the Russian Army.  He never left Boston again.

Although all of my uncles married Jewish women, none of my relatives were particularly religious. My mother was not Jewish.  Growing up we had a small tinsel tree Dad called a Channukah Bush.   My father stayed home from work on some Jewish holidays because the warehouse where he worked was owned by Jews from the old neighborhood.  But we never went to Synagogue.  We went out to eat.

My father's family are real Americans.  They went from a place where religion meant death, and they embraced life in America.  Grandpa ran a successful business most of his life.  My uncle Lewis went into the same business and became a millionaire when that was a lot of money.  Lewis, like my grandmother Esther, lived to be 100. All of the the other brothers had houses in the suburbs and families.

Of all the uncles and cousins in the Gussman clan, only my father and I ever served in the Army.  We both were very old soldiers.  The rest of the family, like nearly all well off families in the northeast, did not join the military.  I enlisted partly because I had heard my Dad's stories from World War 2 all the time I was growing up and it was clear they were the best years of his life.  I also enlisted because my favorite uncle, Jack, my mother's half brother, was on his third tour in Viet Nam when I graduated high school.  Jack was the coolest guy in our family by far.

My aversion to Fundamentalism in any form, to religious extremism especially in politics, and to religion masquerading as science comes from my upbringing.  Because my family has kids later than most, I am just one generation away from people who escaped the Pogroms of Tsarist Russia.

My people run away from religious radicals.

When real Americans see fanatics, they change the channel.

Who Are My People?

When I was in Iraq, I started writing under the general title “Who Fights Our Wars?” when I wrote about the soldiers I served with.

At the end of June last year, I retired as a civilian.  In May of this year or next year I will leave the Army.  When I leave the Army, there will no longer be anyone in my life I am paid to hang around with.  Everyone in my life will be a friend, a family member, or someone I chose to associate with.

Which has led me to think about “Who are my people?”  So in the same way I have been writing about soldiers I served with, I will write about people with whom I share some activity, which means we share time and space together.  Some of these people are or were soldiers.  Some are not. 

I decided to write about these people because one of the reasons I had for going back in the Army at 54 years old was how much I missed the deep connection I had with some of the people I served with on active duty in the 1970s.

It turned out this ability to connect with people had to do with the circumstances we were in.  The regular Army puts people close together for weeks and months on end.  The National Guard brings people together for just one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer.  When we trained for and deployed to Iraq and really were jammed together, it should be no surprise to anyone that a 55-year-old guy does not quite blend into a group of 20 year olds.  Socially, I blended in like a Vegan at a Bull Roast.

So I have been thinking a lot lately about who my people are, what they do, what we do together. 

In his book “The Four Loves” C.S. Lewis writes about Friendship.  The key moment in finding a friend he says can be the moment of “You too?’  That moment in which we find someone else interested in something we thought no one else loved the way we do. 

So in addition to writing about the people who fight our current wars, or were ready to fight the Soviet Union, I am also going to write about people with whom I share one particular interest, even if the rest of our lives are very different.

Grace Got Married Yesterday

Today I got a wedding picture on Facebook posted by Grace Pak, front row, left.  She was married on December 31.  Earlier this month Lisa Vines was married. She is 6th from the left, next to the Marine, Tyler Giguere.  Ben Simon, fifth from the left, back row, next to me, got married last year.

I know it's not a crazy number of people getting married.  But almost half the class was married when we showed up so 30% of the class got married in just two years.  For that matter 20% got married since December 12.

Being in school with this group was a lot of fun.  I still am in contact with most of them through facebook, even Bill Howard who may or may not actually exist!

Congratulations to Grace and Cris:

To Ben and Heather:  

And to Lisa and Chris:

A World of Friends I Met in Iraq

Today is Fred Lameki's birthday.  He is my only Facebook friend from Kenya.  In fact, the only people I know personally from Kenya, Uganda and several other central African countries are people I met in Iraq.  Fred, like many people from Africa and south Asia worked on Camp Adder, Iraq, and at bases across the country making food and performing a hundred services for to keep the bases working while the soldiers patrolled the ground and the skies.

Most of the baristas in the Green Bean coffee shop were from Nepal, the affable Fred Lameki was one of the Africans who worked making designer coffee for soldiers.

As this new year begins, Iraq seems long ago and far away.  I am glad that with all the money we spent winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq, that some of it went to providing good-paying jobs for men like Fred.

Happy Birthday my friend.

I hope to see you again some day.

Year End Wrap Up: Exercise Turns Civilian, Reading Tops Riding

For the first time since I started riding a bicycle again in 1987, the total number of book pages I read exceeded the number of miles I rode.

This year I rode more than 8,000 miles, probably 8,300 by December 31, but I have read more than 10,000 pages in more than 50 books.  

Also, because I had trouble with my shoulder, I stopped doing pushups.  Every year since I re-enlisted I did more than 6,000 pushups, nearly 15,000 in 2011, but this year, less than 300.  

And I pretty much gave up running after the Ironman triathlon.  I also stopped swimming in September when I took four college classes.  But in the weirdest stat for the year, I swam more miles than I ran:  87 miles swimming, 74 running.  

The most troubling, beautiful, sad book I read this year was "Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman.  It is the 20th Century version of "War and Peace" centering on Stalingrad.  

Eleven of the 52 books I read this year were written by Russian authors, but all were in English.  I am continuing to study Russian language, but not at the point where I can read Russian.  I can still read French well enough that one of the books I re-read this year was an abridged "Three Musketeers."  

Next semester I will be taking Russian language and 19th Century Russian Literature, so I will continue to have Russian in my mind.  If I leave the Army in May, I will definitely be riding more.  My plan will be to ride 10,000 miles in 2016 to get ready for racing in the 65+ category in 2018.  It's great to be the youngest in an age group!

Our Former Allies: Training Iranian MIssile Technicians at Lowry AFB

Until the Ayatollahs took over in 1979, Iran was an ally of the United States.  They were a very close Cold War ally, bordering the Soviet Union.  Until the Shah's government fell, tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers and airmen trained in the United States.

For eight weeks in 1972, I was part of the training.

After Basic Training in April 1972, I went to Lowry Air Force Base near Denver, Colorado, for an 8-month missile electronics school.  The first eight weeks was basic electronics.  I learned basic electronics from a Ham Radio operator in the town where I grew up, so I tested out of the course, but had eight weeks to wait.

During that eight weeks, I was a tutor for lagging students and foreign students.  During the Spring of 1972, many of those students were Iranian sergeants.  They needed help with vocabulary in addition to the electronics themselves.  It was fun to be able to teach these older guys how a capacitor worked or how to calculate resistance and power in a circuit.

The Iranians really wanted to learn.  The chance to go to school in America was a big privilege, so these guys worked hard.  It was weird to have these mid-20s and older sergeants addressing me formally:  "Airman Gussman, may I ask. . . ".

Iran has always been and still is the most sophisticated and civilized of all the Middle Eastern countries.

The guys I trained would be in their 70s now, if they survived The Revolution.

Right now, Iran is the enemy and no one wants a nuclear Iran.  But Iran was our ally until their particular group of Fundamentalists took over.  They could return to sanity.  Some day.

Cold War Tanker and Star Wars

In May of 1977 the first Star Wars movie was released in America.  Several months later the hit movie came to Armed Forces theaters in West Germany, including the theater on Wiesbaden Air Base.

But many soldiers in 1-70th Armor missed the new film.  We and most other combat arms soldiers were on REFORGER 1977.  When we got back, the next movie was in the theaters.  The only way we could watch it was in dubbed German in town.  We Cold War soldiers missed Star Wars.

I did not leave Germany until November of 1979 and was not on post when the movie came back.  I finally saw Star Wars in the spring of 1980 in an independent theater that was re-running the film just before the June release of the second (and best) of the the first three films, "The Empire Strikes Back."

But I did not see that film until fall in that same theater.  In June of 1980 I had the worst motorcycle accident of my life.  I spent two weeks in the hospital and had surgery on both legs to repair the damage from a 75mph crash.

I saw the third movie when it was released, because I was in the 68th Armor in the Army Reserve in Pennsylvania in 1983.

My Favorite Star Wars Magazine Cover--About a Real War

In 1980, just two months before "The Empire Strikes Back" premiered in America, Britain declared war on Argentina and sent a fleet 8,000 miles to take back the Falkland Islands from an Argentine invasion force.

Newsweek ran this cover.  My favorite magazine cover ever.

I have a longer Star Wars post tomorrow, but I wanted to post this separately.

Adultery and Hypocrisy in the Army

"Don't drink! Don't watch porn! Don't commit adultery!"  These warnings were at the top of the list of the many warnings soldiers received on their way to deployment in Iraq.  I got a half-dozen of these briefings during training for deployment in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and in Kuwait before we actually flew to Iraq.

These briefings were always ironic, sometimes funny.  In 2009 I wrote about one briefing by our 25-year-old company commander who told the married guys about keeping their wedding vows.  He was not married, but he did have a girlfriend.  His lecture is here.

Of course, the hookup culture on the big bases in Iraq was as vibrant as on a college campus.  What the Army was trying to stop was the very common and toxic relationships in which a young enlisted woman becomes the deployment girlfriend of a senior sergeant or officer.

More senior officers than that young commander were more gentle in their warnings.  They said don't sleep with other soldiers.  They could not say watch porn when you are horny, but twisted themselves in verbal knots to suggest the trouble you would get into for porn was much less than for sleeping with another soldier.  That lecture is here.  In that blog post, I mention General Order #1.  One of the stern briefings we received was from General David Petraeus on video telling us we better not commit adultery or it will end our careers!  Turned out it was true in his case.

For the tens of thousands of soldiers lectured by Petraeus, the general's downfall for adultery was sadly funny.  Even more funny because the title of the biography written by his lover is "All In."

But the oddest thing for someone like me who served in the 70s was how different the moral lectures were during the Cold War and the Viet Nam War.  As I wrote yesterday, the main warning on bases in Europe was "Sleep NATO."

No one expected 20-year-olds to be paragons during the draft or the post-draft volunteer Army.  

When I first re-enlisted, I called my best friend.  We were both tank commanders in West Germany in the late 70s.  I said at the time in 2007 that Petraeus and I were about the same age when we were joking about what it meant that I was a 54-year-old enlisted man.  Abel said, "That's right Gussie, you Petraeus both have college degrees, you are both in the Army, except he's a success and your 54-year-old Spec. 4."  Four years later we were joking about how I was a sergeant and Petraeus was a civilian.

But the best line I heard on this whole topic was from a 52-year-old sergeant who was missing several teeth and did not like to wear his dentures.  After one of the morality lectures this sergeant turned to me with a toothless grin and said, "This ain't about us Gussman.  It's about those young bucks."

Speeches, Spys and Sleeping NATO

One of the first things we soldiers of 1st Battalion-70th Armor were told when we deployed to West Germany was, "Sleep NATO."

Even in the 1970s, people from Soviet-controlled nations were fleeing for the West and prosperity.  And among the immigrants were spies.  Spying is a profession with both men and women, but our leaders were mostly concerned about female spies.

Men are most likely to forget their inhibitions and talk too much when their egos are inflated and they are feeling adored and impressive.  In my work in corporate communications, I have occasionally dealt with the aftermath of a CEO or other top executive who gives a speech then answers a reporter's questions afterward saying way too much.  Once in Singapore the CEO I worked for gave a speech that got a resounding ovation.  A reporter asked him about a plant we were building in China and our proud, happy CEO told the reporter, "Yes, it is ahead of schedule." 

We had never admitted in public we were building in China.  The next day, our CEO wanted to know who had leaked the information.  He did, but post-euphoria amnesia made him forget what he said.

A female spy can do exactly the same thing by asking questions at the moment a guy rolls over on his back and smiles at the ceiling.  And he may not remember that he told the spy who just loved him when his unit will be leaving for the border.

I watched the show Alias with my family.  We also watched the series Nikita together.  Sydney Bristow of Alias (Jennifer Garner) and Nikita (Maggie Q) of the series of the same name, are both married to handsome co-stars and manage to conduct successful spy operations around the world without sleeping with their targets.

The Army expected that the soldiers living in Germany during the Cold War would be looking for and finding sex.  They tried to warn us not to sleep with spies. I am sure there were soldiers with conflicting priorities.