Every now and then, one brave, otherwise unremarkable person does exactly the right thing at exactly the right time and the course of world events pivots on that fleeting moment. Today that person is Army Specialist Thomas Wilson.
Thomas Wilson couldn’t be more of the average Everyman if he tried. The rank of specialist merits a little more pay than a private, signifies training in a specific skill, but does not carry the combat leadership credentials of sergeant or even corporal. His hometown, Chatanooga, Tennessee, is more or less your average American city. He’s a regular guy who supports George W. Bush, joined the National Guard in 2003 out of a profound sense of duty, and has the statistically-average two children. Even his name – Thomas Wilson – couldn’t be any more white-bread heartland-American.
However, on this day, Thomas Wilson may have significantly altered the American perception of the war in Iraq. On this day, one average soldier may have done more for our military than is accomplished by ten million magnetic yellow “Support the Troops” ribbons on the back of SUV’s.
For on this day, Specialist Thomas Wilson confronted our military leadership, speaking truth to power.
In case you missed the story, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq to give a pep talk to the troops. He urged the soldiers, mostly National Guard and Reservists, to ignore the critics of the war and to help “win the test of wills” with the insurgents. (You know, the ones that were supposed to be waving flags and greeting us as liberators eighteen months ago.)
Then the session was opened up for questions and answers, and Rumsfeld failed to learn a valuable lesson from Bush’s campaign – only take pre-scripted questions from an audience that has signed loyalty oaths.
Specialist Wilson wondered, “We’ve had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years… Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?” There was a brief silence as the assembled soldiers gasped at the chutzpah of an enlisted man confronting the top boss, followed by shouts of agreement and applause.
Rumsfeld seemed stunned by the realization that his pep talk was deteriorating into a critique of his protection of our soldiers. He used the time-honored technique of any man trying to escape an argument he is losing; he asked Wilson to repeat the question.
Wilson continued. “Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon. Our vehicles are not armored. We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.”
We’ve all known that the Army has been in short supply of protective body and vehicle armor for some time now. We’ve seen the stories of mothers holding bake sales to buy used equipment to ship to Iraq in hopes they could gain some small measure of protection for their sons. We’ve all watched the rising casualty numbers, now almost thirteen-hundred dead and thousands maimed, limbs amputated and minds scarred. So many of these lives permanently altered by roadside bombs, so many whose fates might have been different if they had the proper Kevlar and steel plating.
Then, in the most callous, thoughtless, revealing moment I have seen in Rumsfeld’s tenure (and that’s a large list to top), he answers Wilson by saying that the military is doing everything in their power to properly armor the troops. “It is essentially a matter of physics, it is not a matter of money, it is not a matter – on the part of the Army – of desire,” he said. “It is a matter of production and capability of doing it.” Then the money quote, “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
By golly, that’s one heck of a good answer – for March of 2003. But now it’s December of 2004 and you’ve still got soldiers driving through Iraq in vehicles with less protection than a civilian Hummer! With control over the presidency and Congress, with an $87 billion dollar funding bill that passed despite John Kerry and John Edwards, and with twenty-one months’ time, one soldier bravely pointed out that the Bush Administration is simply not supporting the troops.
“You go to war with the Army you have.” I guess he has a point – if you have no choice but to go to war! Iraq has all those weapons of mass destruction; we’ve got to go to war right now! They could deploy tons of sarin nerve gas and anthrax spores within forty-five minutes; we’ve got to go to war right now! We can’t wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud; we’ve got to go to war right now! So we don’t have enough body armor, armored Humvees, or active duty troops; we’ve got to go to war right now!
It’s interesting that this photo-op occurred the day after the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. My grandfather served in the Pacific and I recall talking to him and grandma about those times. Sure, the soldiers had shortages of equipment back then, too. War is always rife with supply shortages.
But the huge difference between then and now is when we went to war then, the whole country went to war. Women took over the factory jobs, working overtime to provide the troops with the supplies they needed. The nation instituted gasoline rationing, “meat-less, sweet-less, and wheat-less” days to ration food, limits on nylon and metal use, and so on. The whole country, under the leadership of that damned liberal Franklin Roosevelt, sacrificed to make sure that every effort was taken to properly supply our boys in combat.
What sort of wartime leadership did we get from our flightsuit-wearing, mission-accomplished-proclaiming, bring-’em-on-taunting, tough-on-terrorism, directed-by-God, compassionate-conservative Commander-in-Chief? Go shopping. And here’s a magnetic yellow ribbon for your car.
How many soldiers would still be alive today, or still have both arms and legs, if the president spent some of that “political capital” to open up a few abandoned auto factories to fabricate protective shielding for Humvees? Who in the Congress would vote against a bill that would help to protect our troops and provide jobs for laid-off factory workers whose jobs Bush helped corporations ship overseas? How many flak jackets could we purchase with the money that’s being spent on magnetic yellow ribbons and American flags for cars?
Rumsfeld continued answering the question, ignoring the other lesson learned by countless men cornered in an argument: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. He added, “And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up.” See, there’s no point in worrying about all that extra protection because the bad guys can blow you up anyway! Thanks for coming to the pep talk, have a nice trip to Fallujah!
Yes, Mr. Secretary, and if you think about it, you can have all the weapons inspectors on the ground telling you there’s no justification for immediate war, and you can go to war anyway with inadequate troop levels and inadequate protection for your troops. And you can have all the armor in the world on a Humvee, but if you let the enemy get a hold of 380 tons of high explosives you failed to secure, they can blow you up anyway.
“You go to war with the Army you have.” Well, what you have now is a disillusioned, demoralized Army. You have 57-year-old grandmothers and overweight desk-jockeys being pressed into duty long after retiring from the military. You have fathers and mothers who have been indefinitely “stop-lossed” from returning home after their enlistments are over. You have college kids that signed up for a weekend-a-month to pay for tuition that are coming home missing a limb or psychologically scarred for life, if they’re coming home at all. You have a dramatic rise in the rate of suicide among the military deployed to Iraq. You have servicemen so disrespected by their leader that he has yet to attend a single funeral and their flag-draped coffins are forbidden to be photographed.
Specialist Wilson’s ex-wife said they supported Bush “100 percent.” It will be interesting to see how the Army we have will vote in 2008. In the meantime, I’m hoping that Thomas Wilson’s fifteen minutes of fame changes the course of this war for the better.
