[wordup] Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

[Adam Shand]

Not trying to be trite, but how come we keep managing to forget that  
war sucks?

We shouldn't have to send our children off to die periodically in  
order to remember this ...

Adam.

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight...>
Source: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147052,00.html

Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they  
battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get  
through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is  
struggling to cope with the crisis

Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer

Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he  
does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot  
between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He  
is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are  
operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports  
that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda  
that requires his attention and wakes him up.

When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin  
about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.

The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat  
outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they  
get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something  
tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time  
and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating  
base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they  
will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols  
and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins  
up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is  
nothing but Iraq.

Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A  
whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers  
washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting  
to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body  
armour on floors and in the dust.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these  
men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda -  
these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing  
the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated  
as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping  
people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the  
US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how  
well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another  
of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed  
to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people  
are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like  
we've become no more than numbers now.'

The first soldier starts in again. 'My husband was injured here. He  
hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury.  
The blast shook out the plates. He's home now and has serious issues  
adapting. But I'm not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted  
to see him I'd have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army  
counts it.'

A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks  
privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another  
patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much  
more plodding we've got left in us.'

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a  
corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring  
unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol.  
'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that  
this army is exhausted?'

It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition.  
There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the  
back fall asleep on long operations - not because they want the men  
alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall  
asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to  
stay alert and wired.

But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the  
details of these soldiers' frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you  
go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or  
problems with the girlfriends that they don't see, or about the  
children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them.

'I counted it the other day,' says a major whose partner is also a  
soldier. 'We have been married for five years. We added up the days.  
Because of Iraq and Afghanistan we have been together for just seven  
months. Seven months ... We are in a bad place. I don't know whether  
this marriage can survive it.'

The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent  
among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State -  
have been insisting for months now: that the US army is 'about  
broken'. Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as  
combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are  
leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the  
US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the  
problem is expected to worsen.

And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq  
and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40  
per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count  
$212bn (£105bn).

But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories  
they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious,  
coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments,  
now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than  
those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.

The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of  
desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed  
earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before  
the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative  
discharges.

'They are scraping to get people to go back and people are worn out,'  
said Thomas Grieger, a senior US navy psychiatrist, told the  
International Herald Tribune in April.

'Modern war is exhausting,' says Major Stacie Caswell, an  
occupational therapist with a combat stress unit attached to the  
military hospital in Mosul. Her unit runs long group sessions to help  
soldiers with emerging mental health and discipline problems: often  
they have seen friends killed and injured, or are having problems  
stemming from issues at home - responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of  
their cases. One of the most common problems in Iraq is sleep disorders.

'This is a different kind of war,' says Caswell. 'In World War II it  
was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you  
would go through on the battlefield.' Now she says the threat is all  
around. And soldiering has changed. 'Now we have so many things to  
do...'

'And the soldier in Vietnam,' interjects Sergeant John Valentine from  
the same unit, 'did not get to see the coverage from home that these  
soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene.  
They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and  
confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.'

'Not only that,' says Caswell, 'but because of the nature of what we  
do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations -  
even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately  
planning and training for your next tour.' Valentine adds: 'There is  
no decompression.'

The consequence is a deep-seated problem of retention and recruitment  
that in turn, says Caswell, has led the US army to reduce its  
standards for joining the military, particularly over the issue of no  
longer looking too hard at any previous history of mental illness.  
'It is a question of honesty, and we are not investigating too deeply  
or we are issuing waivers. The consequence is that we are seeing  
people who do not have the same coping skills when they get here, and  
this can be difficult.

'We are also seeing older soldiers coming in - up to 41 years old -  
and that is causing its own problems. They have difficulty dealing  
with the physical impact of the war and also interacting with the  
younger men.'

Valentine says: 'We are not only watering down the quality of the  
soldiers but the leadership too. The good leaders get out. I've seen  
it. And right now we are on the down slope.'

'War tsar' calls for return of the draft to take the strain

America's 'war tsar' has called for the nation's political leaders to  
consider bringing back the draft to help a military exhausted by wars  
in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option  
had always been open to boost America's all-volunteer army by  
drafting in young men in the same way as happened in Vietnam. 'I  
think it makes sense to consider it,' he said. Lute was appointed  
'war tsar' earlier this year after President Bush decided a single  
figure was needed to oversee the nation's military efforts abroad.

Rumours of a return to the draft have long circulated in military  
circles as the pressure from fighting two large conflicts at the same  
time builds on America's forces. However, politically it would be  
extremely difficult to achieve, especially for any leader hoping to  
be elected in 2008. Bush has previously ruled out the suggestion as  
unnecessary.

Lute, however, said the war was causing stress to military families  
and, as a result, was having an impact on levels of re-enlistment.  
'This kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living- 
room conversations within these families. Ultimately the health of  
the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal  
family decisions,' he said.

A draft would revive bad memories of the turmoil of the 1960s and  
early 1970s when tens of thousands of young men were drafted to fight  
and die in Vietnam. Few other policies proved as divisive in America  
and the memories of anti-war protesters burning their draft cards and  
fleeing to Canada are still vivid in the memory.