Field Guide to Flying Death: MAD--Mutually Assured Destruction

The 60s was the heyday of “Mad Magazine” and MAD as the centerpiece of our Cold War strategy. MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—became the plan to preserve the future of the world once the Soviet Union first tested a hydrogen bomb in 1953. 

The US and the Soviets amassed so many nuclear weapons during the 50s and 60s that using them could only result in the destruction of the entire world, as we know it. 

Since the end of the Cold War, nuclear war remains in the unthinkable category, but for the fundamentalists who see the world as the stage for their own particular apocalypse, the unthinkable is not so unthinkable.

The Russian Federation still controls thousands of nuclear weapons, but the danger has shifted away from the Cold War scenario of one of the superpowers attacking the other. Then the world worried about living under the threat of a Superpower nuclear war.  Now the world worries about nations and terrorists who don’t care about MAD setting off a nuke because they want to kill everybody who does not see the world as they do. 

In the midst of Cold War, Hannah Arendt wrote the book “On Revolutions” talking about the rise in revolutionary thinking from the Reformation through the American and French Revolutions to the permanent state of revolution that characterizes the modern world.  We can no longer rely on MAD to constrain the nuclear arsenal. Superpowers cannot divide the world into client states they can control. 

MAD will not protect us. The overwhelming nuclear arsenal we have is not a threat to someone happy to die to bring on their personal apocalypse, or to the thug in charge of North Korea who will happily sacrifice his people on the altar of his own ego. 

In a world of revolutions, our security agencies have to doggedly keep track of all existing nuclear weapons to make sure a terrorist never gets one. 

I liked the Cold War draft army I served in better than the current all-volunteer army and, I admit, I liked the MAD world a lot better than the current threat of a nuke delivered in a truck or a shipping container.  

My Last Tanker Nickname: Oddball

Donald Sutherland as Oddball, a tank commander in the movie "Kelly's Heroes"

I got my last tanker nickname more than a decade after I earned the nickname Sgt. Bambi Killer.  I got that nickname on a business trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2000.  The company I worked for just bought a company in Brazil and I was part of a team that went to Brazil to introduce ourselves to the people who ran the business.

Sao Paulo has traffic that makes Los Angeles look like Omaha, so the local managers sent a limo for the four of us. This meant we could be more comfortable on the three-hour 20-mile trip from the airport to downtown. 

At the time I had a beard and still had a lot of brown hair.  Among the local staff people who were waiting to meet us was my now long-time friend Ivan Porccino. Ivan speaks five languages and was assigned as our interpreter.  When we got in the car, Ivan introduced us to the driver and said we would be in Sao Paulo for a few days. The driver said, “I love America. I learn English watching American movies.”

So we talked about movies. The driver mentioned he loved “Kelly’sHeroes.” Bob Lee (Robert E. Lee, no kidding, but he went by Bob) our CEO said, “Neil was a tank commander back the 80s.” The driver turned, looked at me again and said, “Oddball! You are Oddball!” And so I was. For the rest of the trip and the rest of the time I worked for that company, I was Oddball, especially to Bob Lee.

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Field Guide to Flying Death: ICBMs (InterContinentalBallistic Missiles)

LGM-30 Minuteman III ICBM.

The name of every type of missile describes how far it flies. So an ICBM, or Intercontinental Ballistic Missile can travel at least 3,400 miles carrying one or more warheads.  The standard American land-based ICBM, the Minuteman III, can fly 8,100 miles before releasing between one and a dozen individual warheads on target. 

Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota is the center of a missile launch area spread across the northern tier of America with 450 missiles carrying thousands of nuclear warheads. Minot also is home base for B-52 bombers, the main aircraft of the U.S. nuclear bombing force since the Eisenhower administration. 

Our arsenal of ICBMs and other nukes is so overwhelming, that if Putin used nuclear weapons and America responded in kind, the response would not likely come from the America’s land-based missile and bomber fleet.  Lurking in the oceans somewhere are Polaris submarines armed with Trident ICBMs are already on station, within range, waiting for the order to counter attack if Russia uses a nuclear weapon. 

My first job in the Cold War U. S. Air Force was live-fire testing of missiles.  I was assigned to the Aging and Surveillance branch of Air Force Systems Command on Hill Air Force Base, Utah.  

Every Thursday (except Thanksgiving and Christmas week) we unit fired one stage of a three-stage Minuteman missile.  The missiles were randomly selected.  They were pulled from their silo and shipped to Utah.  On the test range we froze them, baked them, put them in an altitude chamber, shook them and finally bolted them to a test pad and lit them up.  The test range was on the west side of the Great Salt Lake. On a clear day, you could see the cloud from firing in Ogden and Salt Lake City on the east side of the lake. 

We made sure the missiles were ready to fly to target. 

Armies win or lose wars for any number of reasons, but in modern war, the difference between winning and losing is often the reliability of the weapon.  Testing those missiles meant American missiles were ready. 

In 1973, at the same time I was on a team test firing every missile from Sidewinder wing rockets to ICBMs, Israel was hit with a surprise attack by three Arab armies who outnumbered Israel 100 to 1.  Israel repelled the invaders and won that war for many reasons.  But one reason was weapon readiness.

Taking tanks as an example, when Jordan rolled its Soviet-made tanks toward Israel across the Golan Heights, one in four of those tanks broke down before getting to the battle.  For every hundred Syrian tanks, only 75 made it to the fight.  Israeli tanks were ready to fight.  It really fucks up your war plans if a quarter of the tanks don’t even shop up, and it affects moral. The other crews are wondering if their tank will break down.  There are few targets easier to hit than a tank sitting still in a battlefield.

The missiles in U.S. submarines and silos are tested to make sure they are ready if needed.  As many failed North Korean tests have shown.  The short life of a launched ICBM is full of stress and strain. 

When Trident, Minuteman or other ICBMs launch, they begin the half-hour-long trip to a target on another continent or just very far away.  The three-stage Minuteman is in boost phase for five minutes, flying out of its silo on the North Dakota prairie to target. By then end of boost phase, the three-stages have burned their solid fuel and fallen away.  The warhead has accelerated from 0 to more than 15,000 miles per hour and has broken through earth’s atmosphere, flying in space.

In the launch phase, the rocket is subject to an average of 5gs of acceleration with two big jerks when one stage burns and falls away and the next stage lights up. The skin temperatures on the missile zoom up from 70 degrees to hundreds of degrees as speed approaches 15,000 mph. As the final stage burns and separates the warhead bursts out of the atmosphere into space, buffeting the warhead at the same time it rapidly cools as it leaves the atmosphere. 

The warhead is now in ballistic phase, coasting at 15,000+ mph to re-entry and target.  If the U.S. launched a Trident Missile from somewhere in the some ocean it would now be flying thousands of miles in 10 or 20 minutes toward its target. 

Less than 100 miles from target, the terminal or re-entry phase begins.  At this point the warhead drops back into the atmosphere heats to thousands of degrees from re-entry friction then delivers one or a dozen warheads to target.  The already baked and frozen warhead heads to thousands of degrees and shakes with hundreds of gs of vibration as it drops back into the upper atmosphere.

American missiles are thoroughly tested for this horrendous ride. Even so, solid fuel missiles are big cans of gunpowder designed to burn rather than explode.  I have seen, and almost been killed by, missiles that blow up when they were supposed to burn. But when they reach their target, ICBMs are apocalyptically deadly.

One Trident ICBM with eight warheads could turn Moscow into rubble. Each Polaris submarine can carry 24 Trident missiles.  Each of the multiple warheads are hundreds of times more powerful than the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.  And one submarine fully loaded with Trident missiles can deliver 192 warheads on target.

If these terrible missiles are ever launched, the destruction will be beyond anything in history. 

Real Senior Moment and a Book About the Iraq War

I just had a real senior moment about a book about PTSD. The book, Thank You For Your Service by David Finkel will be released soon as a movie.  Here's the trailer: 

On Thursday of this week, I was talking the professor in a writing class I am taking. He asked if I read much about the Iraq War then mentioned the book Thank You For Your Service.  I wrote down the title. 

But 20 minutes later, I realized the book sounded very familiar.  Three years ago, I read the book.  Worse still, I reviewed the book for Books and Culture. The review is here. So I wrote back to the professor with proof positive I am 64 years old! 

It is a good book about the worst parts of service in Iraq. 

Best Day in the Army and The Best Job I Ever Had

Two weeks ago I started writing about the best day of my life as a soldier out of the 6,575 days (18 years) I served in uniform. That day (I have to find the exact date) was Table VIII tank gunnery at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the Spring of 1976.  It was my first tank gunnery, and my first gunnery as a tank commander.  Why was I tank commander first time out?

I was in the U.S. Air Force from 1972-74 and got out a few months after being temporarily blinded in a missile explosion.  After a year as a civilian, I re-enlisted in the Army and went to Fort Knox for Tank training in July and August 1975.  I re-enlisted as an E4 and made E5 in January of 76.  I got my own crew and was determined to qualify--not bolo as the old hands predicted the ex Wing Nut would.  I had a great platoon sergeant and my crew fired Distinguished on Table VIII. 

I will be re-reading gunnery procedures and interviewing at least four tankers who fired Table VIII at Carson that year.  If all goes well, it could be a book.

I admire the "Day in the Life of..." form. Especially the books A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin.  So I am writing Home on the Range: A Day in the Life of a Cold War Tank Commander with the idea of telling a much larger story of the effect that day would have on my life, but never leaving that one day.

I was talking to a friend about how even after writing several hundred words, I have more questions the more I write.  One related question that came up was about travel. Part of loving the military and why I kept re-enlisting was travel.  I flew space-available flights across America and Europe as a young soldier, everything from a C-130 to a C-5A.

Now that the military part of my life is over, any travel I do will be as a civilian.  This summer I went on a six-week trip that began in Belgrade, Serbia; circled north and east to Ukraine; back west as far as the very western edge of the Normandy beaches; and then to Israel and back through Paris to Stockholm.

That trip included seven Holocaust memorials and changed my view of life profoundly.  So my friend asked if their were other trips that changed me as much.  The answer I just blurted out was: The trips with a gun.  The only two trips that had as great an effect on me as the trip this summer were deploying to Cold War West Germany with Brigade 76 and deploying to Camp Adder, Iraq, in 2009-10 with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade.

Tank gunnery 1976 was, in part, training for sending the entire 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division to Germany in October.  And that day made me so much more confident I could lead a tank crew if the Cold War heated up.

In the past 40 years, I have been to 44 countries on five continents.  The bicycle-train-plane-automobile-boat trip this summer is the only trip that has come close to traveling in uniform with a gun in its profound effect on how I look at the world.

If you read this blog, you likely made one or more trips with a gun.  What it means to travel with and without a gun has been stuck in my head since that conversation.

Being a tank commander was without a doubt the Best Job I Ever Had.

Different Water for Sinks and Toilets--Camp Beuhring, Kuwait, and Amtrak

On the train to Philadelphia recently, the toilets had water, but the sinks did not in the last two cars. I walked three cars away from my seat to wash my hands. On the way back, I let the conductor know about the lack of water.  He said there are different water systems for the sinks and the toilets.  Then smiled and said the water is blue in the toilets.  

I told the conductor about a morning at Camp Beuhring, Kuwait, in April 2009. We were there for training before we went to Camp Adder, Iraq.  During our two-week stay, we slept in 77-man tents.  Outside the tent were several sinks and mirrors just standing in the open on the sand. I wish I had a picture.  

About twenty yards away were Porta-Johns or Shit Ovens, which everyone called the plastic enclosures when the temperature approached 120 degrees.  One morning just after down I went out to the sinks, brushed my teeth, then walked toward the Porta-Johns.  One of the soldiers just stepped out of one and was walking toward me.  

He looked at my toothbrush, smirked, and sweeping a hand toward the Porta-Johns said, "Sergeant Gussman, there's some blue mouthwash in there."

"Thanks," was all I said.

Kuwait Porta-Johns

Home Sweet Home in Kuwait

A Cowboy Movie Set in St. Petersburg, Russia

Last week I watched the movie "Brother" of "Брат" in Russian.  The movie was filmed for just $10,000 in mid-1990s Russia, the worst economic times for Russia since the Mongol invasion in the mid-1200s. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union left Russia alone with a failed economy.  Along with putting tens of millions in poverty, Russia fell apart in many other ways.  Russia invaded Chechnya, but the Russian Army was all but abandoned by its failed government. Russian lost the war and veterans came home broke, broken and disillusioned. One of those veterans becomes a Cowboy, a friend and avenger for the poor. 

The movie is fun to watch for an old soldier that grew up on cowboy movies. It also has a lot to say about how terrible life in Russia was in the 1990s.  Part of the popularity of President Putin and his ability to hold onto power is that the economy got better under Putin--a lot better. 

The movie is available in eight parts on Youtube or for $4 from Amazon with subtitles.  Enjoy!

Six Days of War: Three Wars Lost in Six Days

Israeli Sherman Tanks in the Sinai, Attacking Egypt

Ignorance Can be the greatest ally or the greatest enemy of an army at war.  In the book Six Days of War, Michael B. Oren explains in considerable detail how Arab ignorance and mistrust was the real key to the vastly outnumbered Israelis defeating three Arab armies in just six days. 

Oren shows how the Israelis called up all of their reserves and prepared for weeks to attack Egypt before Egypt attacked them, or to defend if Egypt attacked first. And yet the Israeli attack on June 5, 1967, came as a complete surprise to the commander of the Egyptian Army.

The reasons are complicated, but Oren makes a strong case that Field Marshall Abdel Hakim Amer, supreme commander of Egyptian forces, filled the upper ranks of the Egyptian military with cronies, shoving aside talented leaders preparing for a coup against his childhood friend President Gamel Abdel Nasser.

The Israelis put Moshe Dayan in charge of the military just months before the war, another signal to anyone paying attention that the war plans were for an attack.  Also, just months before the war, the Egyptians blockaded the Israeli port in Elat and all shipping. Time pressure pushed the Israelis to act, and yet, the Egyptians blustered and waited and did not prepare for an attack, let alone prepare for their own.  

On June 5, nearly the entire Israeli Air Force attacked air bases all across Egypt.  By the afternoon, more than 80% of the Egyptian Air Force was burning wreckage, most of it on the ground.  Cratering charges made the airfields useless.  At the same time, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rolled into Sinai in a multi-pronged attack that succeeded so fast and so well that the most optimistic Israeli leaders could not believe it.  

With so much of the IDF fighting on the ground and in the air in Sinai driving toward Egypt, if the Jordanian and Syrian armies had attacked, Israel would have to stop the attack and defend itself, at minimum pulling all air support away from Egypt.  

Both the Syrians and the Jordanians had sworn mutual aid in case of attack.   

But nothing happened.  Iraq also was to attack in support of Egypt.  It's forces sat in Jordan and Syria.  

On June 7, fighting started near Jerusalem. The Israelis had no plans to recapture Jerusalem, but the Jordanians fired on the IDF from the Mount Scopus and other heights in Jerusalem. the IDF attacked to take out the guns and by the night of June 9-10, retook Jerusalem and had the Jordanian army, including the vaunted Arab Legion in full retrat all across the West Bank of the Jordan River.

During this period, the Syrians shelled Israeli settlements.  The settlers on the frontier howled for help.  On June 10, the IDF attacked in the North toward Syria.  If the Syrians had attacked, the Israelis would have been obliged to stop their offensives in Jordan and Egypt. But the Syrians shelled civilians and stayed still.  Their army, like the other two Arab armies was in headlong retreat on June 11.  

In war, the mistakes of the enemy are often as important as the plans of the winners.  In this case, arrogance and mistrust among the Egyptian leaders was followed by a betrayal by their allies.  The end was Israel more than doubling in territory and smashing three Arab armies.  

Oren explains battles in great detail, especially retaking Jerusalem and the air attack that won the war on the first day. He also gives the reader a lot of detail about propaganda.  Egypt used its media to deny their losses and tell the world they were winning the war. Part of the hesitation of the Jordanians and Syrians to come to the aid of Egypt was the glowing reports Egypt was sending of their great victories.  

The other overwhelming impression the book gave me is of how ignorant the Egyptians were of what the Israelis were doing despite the evidence in front of them. The rest of the world was also largely ignorant of how bad the situation was on the ground and how fast everything changed.  It reminded me of how the world blundered into war in 1914.  

This book tells a complicated story very well. 

Visiting the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mere-Eglise

German Infantry Weapons on display in the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mere-Eglise

In June of this year I visited the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mere-Eglise on the western edge of the Normandy invasion. Thousands of paratroopers, jumped, floated in on gliders, and many gave their lives on the night of June 5-6, 1944.  

The museum gathered weapons, equipment, uniforms and aircraft used by the paratroopers and the Germans on the ground.

American infantry uniforms

C-47 Transport Aircraft

American infantry weapons

This photo and the two below recreate one of the iconic episodes of the paratroop landing on D-Day. Here is the story from Wikipedia:

On the night before D-Day (June 5–6, 1944), American soldiers of the 82nd Airborne parachuted into the area west of Sainte-Mère-Église in successive waves. The town had been the target of an aerial attack and a stray incendiary bomb had set fire to a house east of the town square. The church bell was rung to alert the town of the emergency and townspeople turned out in large numbers to form a bucket brigade supervised by members of the German garrison. By 0100 hours, the town square was well lit and filled with German soldiers and villagers when two sticks (planeloads of paratroopers) from the 1st and 2nd battalions were dropped in error directly over the village.

The paratroopers were easy targets, and Steele was one of only a few non-casualties. His parachute was caught in one of the pinnacles of the church tower, causing the suspension lines of his parachute to stretch to their full length, leaving him hanging on the side of the church. The wounded paratrooper hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. He later escaped from the Germans and rejoined his division when US troops of the 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment attacked the village capturing thirty Germans and killing another eleven. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the Purple Heart for being wounded in combat.

 

Just across the road from the Airborne Museum is a Tour de France themed barn

Visiting the Base Where I was a Tank Commander from 1976-79 in Wiesbaden, Germany

When I visited Wiesbaden Air Base this summer, the tank in the photo above was the only tank on the base.  When I arrived the first time in October 1976, the 54 tanks of 1st Battalion, 70th Armor were combat loaded with 63 rounds of cannon ammo. We were on the East-West border within 48 hours after we landed at Rhein-Main Air Base.  

The building above was post headquarters for 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division as soon as we took over the base.  It still serves as headquarters, now for the reserve forces in Europe, commanded by Major General John Gronski, my division commander in Pennsylvania before he took over this new command in Europe.  

This building was my barracks in 1976-77, before I moved off post.  It is offices now. Bravo Company was mostly on the second floor.  The barracks were carpeted and had relatively luxurious living spaces.  I shared a room with three other sergeants.  Enlisted men were eight to a room.  Sergeant Daniel Rosera was the first one to buy 300 Watts of stereo to play Peter Frampton Comes Alive out his barracks window.  Her also bought a mic so he could belch at 300 Watts.  He could belch short sentences.  A man of considerable talents.

Across this fences is a few dozen trucks and a dozen more Blackhawk helicopters.  The tanks are gone and aircraft sit where M109 howitzers and their support vehicles were parked 40 years ago.

I rode up to Wiesbaden Air Base from Darmstadt and visited John and Berti Gronski. They live in the housing area. Gronski and his wife still ride. I didn't find out until this visit that they were really serious riders.  When Gronski left active duty as a lieutenant in 1981, he and Berti rode home from Washington state to Mossic, Pa. on bicycles! John towed a trailer carrying their 15-month-old son.  

The unit motto of the 28th Division, Pa. National Guard, is "Roll On!"  Gronski would say that at formations and public ceremonies. I had no idea in 2012 - 14 when he was division commander that he took "Roll On" so literally. He and Berti rolled on for 3,000 miles across the country.  

The Flag of Israel, A White Falcon, Beeping Horns and Real Pride

On Sunday, June 11, 1967, in mid-afternoon, a small parade of cars drove north on Oak Street in Stoneham, Massachusetts, past my house.  I happened to be in the yard. I went to the street to see what was going on. The first car of the six or seven in line was a white 1962 Ford Falcon convertible with a tattered Israeli flag tied to its antenna.  It seemed like a dozen men and women in their 20s or so were sitting on the doors and the trunk and standing on the seats, waving and yelling.

"Israel won! Israel beat the Arabs! Israel!" They also yelled in Hebrew.  Most of them were wearing something blue or white or both.  The lead car was the only convertible. The rest of the cars were sedans with people sitting on the doors or hanging out the windows also waving and yelling.

Israel won!

Stoneham is a suburb nine miles north of Boston. When I was 14 years old in 1967, the population was 12,000 and growing.  But the Jewish population was in the hundreds. Most of the town was divided between old families that went back to the Revolution or further. Stoneham was incorporated in 1636. The other half was Irish and Italian Catholic families.  It seemed like the entire Jewish population of Stoneham was in those cars, at least those between 18 and 25 years old.  I am technically not Jewish, my father is Jewish, not my mother so I am not Jewish by Israel's official definition.

But on this day, for the first time I can remember, I was really proud to be Jewish.  Israel beat Egypt, Jordan and Syria in just six days.  The victory was crushing. Israel was outnumbered 100 to 1 and sent all three armies fleeing. Until that day, when I thought about being Jewish, I thought about being a victim. I did not know much about my heritage or the Holocaust, but I know that millions were killed by the Nazis.

The Six-Day War changed that for me. Israel could fight and win against impossible odds.  Israelis were not victims, they were warriors.  I just finished reading Six Days of War by Michael Oren. This book brought together all of the details of a war I knew from news reports at the time. Oren makes clear the cascade of errors and arrogance by the Arab leaders that led to such a quick and crushing defeat.  He also details how many of the victories were last-minute decisions in the moment that could have gone another way. Taking Jerusalem, for example, was not a plan. There was an opportunity. Israel took it.

Reading this book was also a counterbalance for me to my visits to Holocaust sites and memorials this summer.  I spent the summer being reminded of how dangerous Nazi and white supremacist ideology really is.  Oren's book reminded me that Israel is ready to fight any enemy of the Jewish people.

Eight Years Ago Matt Jones Was My Mentor, and the Same Age as My Kids

From Left: Me, Matt Jones, Dale Shade and Andy Mehler

Ten years ago this month I moved from Echo Company to Task Force Diablo HQ. My new mission was to write about as many soldiers as I could and take hundreds of pictures.  

The last time I took photos professionally was in the 70s. Cameras had film. I needed help.  At Brigade Headquarters there were two Public Affairs sergeants, but only one had been to the Defense Information School. The sergeant who handed me a digital camera and showed me how to use it was Matt Jones.  Of course he was less than half my age, everybody was. But this young, quiet sergeant who was about the same age as my oldest daughter was also my mentor. He showed me how to use the new camera, how to frame shots, how to care for the camera in sandstorms and prop wash from helicopters, and how the Army does public relations.  

I had more than 20 years experience in public relations, but the Army is a much more controlled environment than the civilian world. Matt guided me through the virtual land mines of Army approvals. He is also an excellent line editor and made several of my stories better and more focused. 

Although we occasionally worked in the same office and we were both in the same Brigade, Matt's work environment was sadly different than mine. The people I worked for in Task Force headquarters gave me everything I needed within their power to help me do my job. Matt worked for a headquarters with a troubled commander and the infighting that always happens in that kind of situation. While I got praise and encouragement, Matt got criticism and disdain.  

Matt is now just another old guy, over 30!, with kids and a career. Ten years ago, he helped me to succeed while he handled his own set of difficulties.  

Thanks again Matt. 

The Army is Progressive When the Country is Divided

When I enlisted in 1972, racial integration was a fact in the American Army, but was an on-going mess outside the gates of every base. At that time, the very few women in the military were very separate and no one could be openly Gay, but the Army was ahead of the civilian world in racial integration.

Part of the success of integration in the Army was shared suffering.  Everyone in Basic Training of whatever background had a common enemy in the Drill Sergeant. After Basic, soldiers of every color had a real enemy in Vietnam. Rifle squads live by trusting each other.

During my first enlistment between 1972 and 1984, I lived in an Army that changed from a draft to a volunteer Army.  By 1977, one of the Volunteer Army infantry battalions in the armored brigade I served in was majority minority--Blacks and Hispanics were almost 70 percent of the soldiers in the unit.

By the way, in the 70s the ranks of Black Drill Sergeants grew rapidly. It was still difficult for minority soldiers to achieve officer ranks, but Drill Sergeant was open to every career sergeant who mastered all the essential soldier skills. And that meant soldiers of every background were taking orders from a Black man from the first day of their service.

When the Army became "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the 90s, it was far ahead of a culture in which old people (voters) were against Gay Rights and young people (non-voters) were mostly in favor of Gay Rights.

The Iraq War saw the integration of women in the Army in a way they never had been before and later Gay soldiers were allowed to serve openly.  Last year Transgender soldiers joined the ranks. The President is issuing orders to ban Transgender soldiers, but he is fighting a trend that toward inclusion that is more than a half century old and will continue.

The military squeezes people into tanks, destroyers, Humvees, submarines, aircraft and holes in the ground. In those confined spaces, they learn to survive and thrive.

I wish there was a civilian equivalent of a bunker or a Stryker vehicle. We would have better world.

GRUNT by Mary Roach--Funny, Brilliant Book on Military Technology

I reviewed this delightful book for Distillations magazine. Here is the text:

Mary Roach. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. W. W. Norton, 2016. 288 pp. $27.

Mary Roach had me in the palm of her hand from the opening sentences of Grunt, her latest look at science’s stranger endeavors:

The chicken gun has a sixty-foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four-pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile, the intent is not to kill. On the contrary, the chicken gun is designed to keep people alive.

Roach loves detail and understands technology. These chickens are fired at military aircraft as “stunt doubles” for all the birds—ducks, pigeons, geese, gulls—that collide with jets. But chickens are denser than ducks and geese, so their carcasses slam into engines and canopies with different effect. “Nonetheless,” writes Roach, “the chicken was the standard ‘material’ approved by the U.S. Department of Defense for testing jet canopy windows. Not only are chickens easier to obtain and standardize, but they serve as a sort of worst-case scenario.”

Despite the almost cartoonish vision of a gun designed to shoot chickens, Roach’s opening—and the rest of Grunt—is about the work of researchers who find ways to keep soldiers alive and healthy through the many hazards of war and military life in general.

Almost 20 years of the past 44 years of my life have been spent in the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Army National Guard. In the 1970s I served in the United States and West Germany, then switched to the reserves. I left the military in 1984 only to re-enlist in 2007. I had one tour in Iraq and finally retired in 2015. After reading Roach’s rollicking review of sweat, diarrhea, hearing loss, penis repair and potential replacement, maggot medicine, and much more, I felt almost glad about my retirement. But her book did lead me to recall my time in Iraq and to think about what my fellow soldiers and I really worried about.

When I deployed in 2009, the army issued me four full duffel bags of gear. Some of it was important: the uniforms, boots, socks, and underwear that were my daily companions. Some of it was crazy. We all got cold-weather gear good to −60°F. I left that gear in my locker in Pennsylvania, where it stayed until I was discharged.

Of all the things I carried, what did I have with me on every flight and every mission? Joining my helmet, rifle, ammo, Kevlar body armor, and other requirements was an empty Gatorade bottle stashed in the right cargo pocket of my uniform. Many of my fellow soldiers carried a Gatorade bottle so they would have someplace to spit tobacco. I carried that bottle because a 56-year-old man in a Black Hawk helicopter might not make it to the next landing zone before needing to recycle his last cup of coffee. In the army a single mistake can follow a soldier through an entire career, and I did not want to be known as the old sergeant who pissed himself.

Roach devotes a whole chapter, “Leaky SEALS,” to the body’s exit ramps, though she focuses on diarrhea. She turns to Mark Riddle, who runs an army clinic devoted to the study of the subject, and in her delightful, snarky way quotes Riddle on his work as saying, “I live and breathe this stuff.”

In past centuries the statistics on diarrhea among soldiers were grim. Roach tells us that 95,000 soldiers died from diarrhea or dysentery during the American Civil War and quotes William “Father of Modern Medicine” Osler as saying, “Dysentery ‘has been more fatal to soldiers than powder and shot.’ ” Modern medicine has made diarrhea far less fatal, but a soldier with a failed digestive system is out of the fight and in the latrine. According to Roach, 54% of American combatants in Afghanistan and 77% in Iraq came down with diarrhea, with 40% of the cases serious enough to require medical help. Soldiers may not die from it these days, but I have heard them mutter “just shoot me” while curled into a fetal position in between sprints to the latrine.

While fear of intestinal disease varies among soldiers, a different type of fear trumps all others. But first a word about war movies and videos: if you want to give a soldier a reason to laugh, just give him or her a war movie. The great exception to that rule is the HBO series Band of Brothers, which I never heard a soldier criticize. Why’s that? In episode three there is a moment that perfectly illustrates the greatest fear every male soldier brings to war.

In the scene, First Sergeant Carwood Lipton is in a street directing his men. An explosion blows him back against a wall. He collapses. Another sergeant, Talbert, runs to Lipton and binds his injured arm. Then Talbert’s eyes follow Lipton’s down to the injured man’s crotch, which is bloody and getting worse. Talbert rips open Lipton’s pants and looks inside. “You’re OK, Lip. Everything’s right where it should be.” Lipton nods, relieved and grateful. The shrapnel that cut through his thigh and caused the bleeding is insignificant in comparison.

I remember many scenes from Band of Brothers, but few of them are clearer in my mind than the look on Lipton’s face before and after Talbert finds everything in place.

Roach followed a real soldier who was not so lucky and required several reconstructive surgeries; the book describes in detail how skin is removed from inside the cheek to rebuild the urethra. Skin tissue in the mouth has no hair and is tolerant of pee, she tells us. But the relatively small number of soldiers with this type of injury meant the military pushed such surgeries down the priority list: there were 18,000 amputations of limbs during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq versus 300 soldiers in need of reconstructive surgery “for their junk.” Despite the small number of affected soldiers, the psychological impact was huge: men who could adapt to the loss of both legs or both arms were devastated at the prospect of living their lives without their “short arm.” Army doctors had to be convinced that this surgery was vital to the well-being of soldiers, even if the numbers needing it were low.

For those soldiers too mutilated for reconstructive surgery, Roach introduces the prospect of transplants. Such transplants do not yet exist, but even the possibility of this radical surgery may brighten the future for the affected soldiers. As of 2015 Roach had found a French surgeon with one partial success and several failures. (As for women, given the way female anatomy is arranged, any significant damage to reproductive organs likely involves a fatal injury.)

In addition to pee, poop, and penises Roach introduces the reader to the latest research on, among other things, the use of horrible smells as weapons (a failed experiment Roach has fun reporting on) and sweat and heat injuries. In the desert it’s common for soldiers to wear more than 60 pounds of gear in 120°F heat; without frequent hydration soldiers can develop heat stroke, which the military now goes to great lengths to avoid. (In the past this problem wasn’t taken seriously.) While I was in Iraq, there were pallets of water bottles all around my air base, and sergeants constantly asked their soldiers when they last drank.

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U.S. Army soldiers training with a virtual-reality simulator in Grafenwöhr, Germany, December 2013. 

U.S. Army photo by Markus Rauchenberger

Many of the topics Roach covers, including roadside bombs, hearing loss, digestive failure, and the fear of being shot below the belt, are part of my lived and shared experiences in the army. Her discussions of the sea (and sharks) resonate less with me, though the chapter on submarines and sleep deprivation captures the corrosive culture of pride that both fuels much of the military and is one of its greatest threats. I have former “Nuke Boat” sailor friends who wore their sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. Yet, as Roach points out, sleep deprivation correlates with a decrease in mental ability. These confident, sleep-deprived sailors get progressively more error prone as the hours tick on. On a positive note I was surprised to find that the navy took sleep research seriously enough to make changes that address the problem. I can’t imagine the army doing the same thing.

Grunt is both entertaining and informative in the best tradition of science writing, and its author is well versed in the fine art of footnotes. Throughout the text she races from erudite explanations of how bacteria explode intestinal cells to what she learned by attending a bowling party for amputees. These relevant but parenthetical facts are kept on the page rather than hidden away in endnotes. In a chapter on foul smells Roach footnotes the difficulties of creating an odor that is universally sensed as vomit. International Flavors and Fragrances was asked to design such a smell and eventually gave up. The initial request came from a diet company that wanted to make certain foods repellent to dieters. The military investigated vomit and other smells as weapons to keep enemy soldiers away from certain areas. But, as Roach explains, few smells are universally repellent: some small percentage of people like what most people sense as the smell of vomit. Go figure.

In her introduction Roach writes, “Heroism doesn’t always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man’s life.” This sentence is not a bad summary of the book. Roach tells us about the strange work of those who try to keep soldiers alive in a profession that routinely puts them in the way of death. In telling that story she offers many smiles and, in my case, some real laughs.

Ten Years Ago I Re-Enlisted at 54

Ten years ago this week I raised my right hand in front of the flag in the lobby of the Aviation Armory at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. and re-enlisted. I left the Army Reserve in June of 1984 and spent the intervening 23 years as a bearded civilian.

On the day, if I remember correctly, the officer administering the oath was Frank Tedeschi, an Apache Longbow pilot. Other witnesses were Chad Hummel, who was the Training NCO for the unit I was joining, and Miguel Ramirez, an admin NCO who was one of my roommates during pre-deployment training.

My wife, Annalisa, and my son, Nigel, were also there.  I had put off the enlistment day until two weeks after I got the neck brace off from the crash in May that left me with a smashed C7 and nine other broken bones.  Everything healed up and I was ready to be a soldier again.

As soon as I could, I called my friend from the 70s Army, Abel Lopez, and told him I actually did it. I re-enlisted. I was back in starting again as an enlisted man, a Specialist.  I also pointed out that General David Petraeus and I started our Army careers the same year and both of us were still serving. He said, "You and him are a lot alike Gussman, except he's a Four Star General and you're a Spec 4." Once an old friend made funny of me, I knew I was really back in. As it turned out, Petraeus did not stay in as long as I did.

From Trying to Convert Each Other to Wedding Invitation

In 1979 I lived in the military housing area in the Wiesbaden Military Community. One day, a Jehovah's Witness came to my door. Back then, military housing was open and Germans came into the housing area for many reasons. The top reason was dumpster diving. The Germans thought (they were right) Americans threw away perfectly good stuff!

And then there was Martin. He was an earnest, committed Jehovah's Witness. He spoke four languages and wanted to convert Americans to his faith.  Martin was in his late 20s, tall, thin and very serious. He had thinning hair which he wore short, but not military buzz cut short. He looked straight into your eyes with his ice blue eyes and radiated sincerity.

When Martin came to my door, he started with his practiced presentation then went off script when he found I had actually read the Bible through in two translations. He was even more delighted when he found out I was taking a correspondence course in New Testament Greek. Martin was studying Greek. After 90 minutes of talking about how best to parse irregular Greek verbs Martin said he had to go, but said he would be back the next week. We set a time to meet and he was off to tell the rest of the housing area about his faith.

Martin came back the next week and every week I was in town for several months until I went home at the end of my enlistment. Martin was getting married the month after my discharge. He invited me to the wedding. I was sad that I could not attend. We continued to disagree about matters of doctrine until the last time we met, but at the same time thought that there was no way to be serious about reading the Bible and read it in translation.

At the same time I was studying Greek with Martin, I was visiting my friend Cliff every week in Darmstadt where he was a novice in the Franciscan Brotherhood at Canaan. Cliff left the American military on May 2 of 1979 and started on the road to becoming Bruder Timotheus, which he is now at Canaan.

While I was in the Cold War Army, I met many people who were serious about their faith. When I re-enlisted in 2007, I expected to find the same kind of people, but the world and the Army had changed a lot between the 70s and the Iraq War.  The "Whatever" culture affects everything. In the 1970s, there was a guy in our unit who could have been "Bible" from the movie "Fury." I never met that guy in Iraq.

Coffee in Iraq--Fred Lameki and Green Beans

In Iraq, good coffee was on one of the few pleasures that was not banned by order of somebody.  Green Beans Coffee was the place I would meet friends, enjoy good coffee and talk to the men who made the coffee.  Green Beans was mostly staffed by men from Nepal, but Fred Lameki was one of the baristas at Camp Adder, Iraq.

Fred is from Kenya where he currently runs a video and photo business. He is on Facebook where we have been friends since Camp Adder. Fred is the kind of person who can sense when someone is down. He would make a point of saying something to cheer me up when I looked down.  We also talked about public relations and photography.

He acted on what we spoke about, starting a communications company in Kenya.

It is one of the amazing things about Facebook and other social media that I can continue to follow Fred as his career goes forward and his life goes on. And if I ever get the chance to travel to Africa, the trip will definitely include a visit to Kenya and Fred Lameki.