A Bulletproof Mind (Special Forces in Afghanistan--good read)

New York Times Magazine ^ | 11/10/2002 | PETER MAASS

[ArcLight]

Maj. Christopher Miller lay awake on a cot in a filthy room, no larger than a prison cell and cluttered with weapons and ammunition. He couldn't sleep. It was a cold January night at the Special Forces base in Kandahar, and Miller was on the verge of commanding an assault against six Qaeda fighters barricaded inside a nearby Afghan hospital. So many things could go wrong, Miller realized, and it could be disastrous if any of them did. For the first time in his life, Miller would be engaging in C.Q.B. -- a military abbreviation for ''close-quarters battle.'' After years of training, he would finally become, as he told me recently, a ''manager of violence.'' An eight-year veteran of the Special Forces, he had never killed before, had never given an order to kill, had not even seen a dead soldier. All that would change at dawn, because men would surely die in an attack he would initiate with a one-word command: execute.

''That was the first time when I really thought of the human dimension of it,'' Miller recalled. ''At first, it's an intellectual challenge. Then you go, 'We're really going to do this.' All of a sudden it dawned on me, Those bastards are in there right now and they don't have a clue what's fixing to come their way. It was the oddest damn thing.''

[ArcLight]

Very good story.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

All of a sudden it dawned on me, Those bastards are in there right now and they don't have a clue what's fixing to come their way.

I've never been a soldier. But I imagine that you can be a lot better off when you have the initiative. That is the right way to think to calm yourself down. FReegards....

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Too bad there are so many registration hoops to jump through there. For what? To read the NYT? LOL! Ok, ok. I'll do it. Urrgh.

[Gritty]

I would love to read the rest of the article, but I refuse to register with the Neuw Yawk Slimes! No telling what sort of porn they would slide my way....

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Registration was a pain in the rear. Now reading. So far, I'm not barfing yet. But it 'aint easy. The writer is walking a tight rope:

The attack was the kind of urban warfare American soldiers will be engaged in should the United States have to shoot its way into Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. When the Cold War ended, many thought that C.Q.B. would become a thing of the past. Conflicts would be fewer, and any interventions undertaken would rely on overwhelming force and precision munitions, not house-to-house fighting. Yet since 9/11 we have begun a war that may draw our soldiers into many battles involving intimate killing. What will that mean for Miller and his men?

The last time this kind of fighting occurred on a grand scale, in Vietnam, 50,000 Americans died, and many survivors had injuries that were not just physical but emotional. The clunky phrase ''post-traumatic stress disorder'' entered the national lexicon. Today, the military believes, the United States is fighting an intimate war in the right way, because soldiers have been prepared and equipped in a manner that increases the prospect of their victory and decreases the prospect of their injury -- whether physical or psychological. Just as smart bombs are less likely to go astray, 21st-century warriors are more lethal than before, yet less likely to suffer P.T.S.D., according to military instructors and psychologists. Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and West Point professor of psychology, refers to this phenomenon as ''the bulletproof mind.''

Such confident assertions may seem surprising, considering what happened this summer at Fort Bragg, N.C. Four soldiers there murdered their wives; three of the soldiers had Special Forces training and had served in Afghanistan. The news media rushed to link the murders to post-combat stress, although there is little proof and investigations continue. Military officers, not surprisingly, doubt the idea that P.T.S.D. played a significant role, and they may have a point. Fatal spouse abuse, sadly, plagues the military even in peacetime. As they see it, the furor over this incident has obscured a broader truth. Today's Special Forces soldiers, they claim, have been unusually well trained to succeed not only at war -- but also after war.

Ok so far....

[Free the USA]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

When I stopped by the Schoolhouse in September, about 200 soldiers were starting their third day of training. In a dirt pit, they were hoisting logs over their heads, then shifting the logs from one shoulder to the other, then crawling through the dirt, then carrying one another on their shoulders, then doing push-ups and cartwheels, then hoisting the logs again -- over and over, until some began weeping.

Is this a slap? It's sure not flattery.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

American soldiers have not always pulled the trigger with such reliability. During World War II, according to the military historian S.L.A. Marshall, as many as 80 percent of the American infantrymen he interviewed failed to fire their weapons in combat. Marshall attributed the low ''fire ratio'' to a mixture of poor training and a natural reluctance to kill.

I admit that's interesting. Thank God for violent movies.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Grossman interprets the process of a target popping up, a soldier's shooting the target and the soldier being praised or criticized for accuracy, as a classic conditioning model. ''What makes this training process work is the same thing that made Pavlov's dogs salivate and B. F. Skinner's rats push their bars,'' he writes.

You can almost feel the warmth of love and respect this NYT writer has for the military.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

I wasn't sure what to think when Col. Charles King, who commands the First Special Warfare Training Group at Fort Bragg, told me that he trains his soldiers in negotiation and combat -- and that they can turn from one to the other in a split second. ''These guys have got to be able not only to work with you but to shoot you, if necessary,'' he said. We laughed awkwardly, and he quickly added that Special Forces soldiers would never shoot a journalist. We laughed again, awkwardly, and I chose not to mention that a U.S. military commander had threatened to shoot a Washington Post journalist who was trying to visit a site in Afghanistan where an American airstrike appeared to have killed civilians.

Perhaps a minor gastric upset alert would have been a good idea....

[chaosagent]

Is this guy really saying that only 20% of our infantry men fired in combat.

Didn't anyone ever notice that the other 80% weren't doing anything?

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

I know one thing's for darn sure: draftees in modern warfare are a waste of logistical resources. I had heard a similar stat that 75% were unwilling to kill in WW2, and according to that researcher, that % is still the norm in most countries, but the US is somewhere around 20% now. He 'blamed' it on violent movies. What's to blame? I think it's a good thing.

[Gritty]

''These guys have got to be able not only to work with you but to shoot you, if necessary,'' he said. We laughed awkwardly, and he quickly added that Special Forces soldiers would never shoot a journalist.

I rather doubt the Colonel is talking about "shooting journalists" here, despite the writers' inferences.

Perhaps he is referring to those awful choices a soldier may confront on the battlefield when wounds are so grievous they defy description or recovery, or maybe having to unwillingly leave a wounded soldier to the "mercy" of the Afghan enemy?

I don't know, but it seems the journalist is too willing to project himself as a target that really isn't in anybody's sights?

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

The first assault had failed. The Qaeda soldiers were riled up. Moreover, the grenade explosions had inadvertently started a fire inside the building. This was a problem because a building that was torched courtesy of the Special Forces would not look good on CNN.

Gee. I suppose not. Perception is supposedly everything to our military, right? /sarcasm.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

We laughed again, awkwardly, and I chose not to mention that a U.S. military commander had threatened to shoot a Washington Post journalist who was trying to visit a site in Afghanistan where an American airstrike appeared to have killed civilians.

Ok....

[Future Snake Eater]

Fascinating article...I get the impression that this writer is a commie but he was won over by the good Major.

[r9etb]

You can almost feel the warmth of love and respect this NYT writer has for the military.

I disagree. He's done a creditable job discussing something in an unbiased manner. It is conditioning, after all -- they're conditioning these guys to be able to handle surprises.

All in all, I think Mr. Maass has gained tremendous respect for these guys, and it shows in what he wrote.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

It gets better. I can't say it's all love and respect for the military. But in the end, it's a good read. Worth registration. Here's a teaser:

----------------------------

Then something unexpected happened. Smoke prompted two Qaeda fighters to stand next to a window for fresh air. Miller had placed snipers at nearby vantage points, and one of them, just a few feet away from him, leaned over and said, ''Sir, I've got a guy who keeps poking his head up.''

Miller immediately told him to fire. He got on the radio and told the other sniper to shoot. One Qaeda soldier was dropped, then another. Miller gave the order for smoke grenades to be thrown inside the building, to encourage window visits by the others. But the remaining Qaeda men realized the cost of fresh air and stayed put.

They were given a final warning. ''We can end this right now!'' a Special Forces soldier shouted to them in Arabic. ''We promise you won't be mistreated.'' Arabic curses were shouted back.

Miller ordered another Afghan assault. A squad of Afghans rushed inside the building but rushed out after a small explosion was heard. Peaks, who enjoys an absurd moment as much as Miller, told me, with a good laugh, what happened: ''These Afghan guys come running back to us with big wide eyes going, 'They got grenades!' We said, 'Well, yes.' ''

That's when the decision was made for the Special Forces to go inside. This would be the real thing, C.Q.B., against an enemy eager to kill Americans. Three Special Forces fighters moved down the main corridor with three Afghans, closing in on the room where the Qaeda fighters were barricaded. The Special Forces tossed several grenades into the room, but the Qaeda men scooped them up and tossed them back. It was a lethal game of hot potato. The American team dove for cover...

------------

God and Heavanly Angels, watch over our troops. [I'm close to posting too much of the article, so a reluctant snip. FReegards....]

[r9etb]

Fascinating article...I get the impression that this writer is a commie but he was won over by the good Major.

I'll certainly agree that the good Major won him over. That's one of the reasons they picked the good Major in the first place: for his ability to talk to anybody, and win over most.

A civilized journalist is a pushover for a guy like that. Not only is the journalist basically polite, but he's also arrogant enough to think that he's got the intellectual upper hand on the Good Major. In reality, these SF officers tend to be really smart -- the best of the best. They're born leaders, and it's pretty difficult not to be won over by them.

I wonder if Maass realizes it yet ... and whether it would bother him.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

The respect is obviously grudging and borderline paranoid. In a way, that kind of respect is the purest form.