Preventing Burn-Out Among U.S. Military Units

Before I write too far, I must first admit that I've only deployed once in my life, and it was a very quiet deployment. I was with the 82nd Airborne during a 2005-2006 deployment to Afghanistan, and it was a very quiet deployment. So I don't have vivid memories of thick combat action - the only real "action" I saw was a sniper taking potshots at our convoy. But among my friends in the service, I've seen serious personal and professional disappointments stemming from the uncertainties of multiple deployments. Families remain separated for months and years at a time, children grow up with one parent far, far away, and it becomes impossible to plan for a future "after the army" when stop-loss can hold a service member well past his or her contract.

Unfortunately, the individual strain on the members of our military is beginning to have serious and far-reaching effects on the combat effectiveness of our units. In a recent article by Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press, it's shown that our elite special operations units are shouldering the brunt of this burden - of our 60,000 special ops troops, around 12,000 remain deployed at a time, covering Iraq, Afghanistan, and other contentious regions such as Yemen. One of the major results of this is that many of our soldiers entering the middle of a military career - those who joined soon after September 11th and have served for eight-to-nine years - are deciding not to reenlist.

So far, we haven't seen much of the real damage caused by this loss of reenlistment. Despite the current tenacity of the insurgent threats in Afghanistan, we have been steadily (albeit slowly) transitioning military authority to the Iraqi and Afghan governments (see this report on how one military police unit has been training the Afghani National Army to eventually replace its American counterparts).

The real danger for our military forces will not be seen for a few years yet. When I was in training, I remember very well the way one NCO described the Army following Vietnam. "Our involvement in Vietnam ruined the Army for over a decade." Overstretched by a conflict that lasted nine years without any prospect of success, our military suffered nearly 58,000 deaths and 153,000 wounded.

Although these numbers represent a significant personal tragedy suffered by millions of American service members and their families, the damage to our military effectiveness ran deeper still. As my NCO explained, the good soldiers - the dedicated and loyal individuals who are an essential component of every effective military - left the service. Whether volunteers or conscripts, they saw no future and much pain in the prospect of continued service. Because they were smart, they left. As a result, many of the personnel who chose to stay were individuals who did not have real employment prospects outside the military.

This is not to discredit the service of those soldiers who stayed in the military following Vietnam - their sacrifices were genuine. They maintained the military which is today the most powerful armed force in history. But the loss of life and talent made their jobs more challenging. Just as companies like Apple and Microsoft depend upon intelligent and charismatic individuals like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, so too do our military units depend upon the leadership of talented individuals, individuals who find that the personal rewards of military life outweigh the necessary sacrifices of long hours, dangerous missions, and continuous responsibility.

I am not a grizzled combat veteran.  I served five years in the Army - including three years in the 82nd Airborne with a ten-month deployment to Afghanistan.  The conditions of my deployment were mild, but they revealed a serious shortcoming in our military's attitude toward the individual skills and abilities of our soldiers.

I enlisted as a linguist after September 11th, and (no surprise) I was assigned to Arabic.  And military language training is an intense experience - I can honestly say that the military provides some of the best language training in the world.  We experienced a year-and-a-half of daily immersion followed by rigorous language testing.  Many soldiers such as myself who didn't pass the test on the first try were required to continue immersion for longer still.

I do not know the exact price tag for this training - it was covered by taxpayers.  But it gave me a new respect for the military.  All of our teachers were highly-educated native speakers - many were actually from Iraq, and they could tell us about the places being attacked during our 2003 invasion.  It was clear that, at some level, our leaders wanted to make sure that we received the best language and cultural training possible for our missions.

Unfortunately, I never deployed to Iraq.  Instead I went to Afghanistan, a nation where Arabic is rarely spoken.  Worse still, while the situation in Iraq remained unstable, my unit deployed to Afghanistan with around fifteen military linguists - twelve of us spoke Arabic, and the others Spanish.

The problem here is that, as linguists, we were assigned to units rather than theaters of combat.  My unit - 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne - alternated between Iraq and Afghanistan.  I joined the unit a few months after their return from Iraq - we deployed to Afghanistan several months later.  Clearly, this was a decision made out of fairness to the unit - it wouldn't be right to send the same unit to the same "hot zones" of combat for every deployment, particularly at a time when many soldiers were heading out on their second, third, and fourth tours.

"Fair" as this decision may have been, it's clear we would have been more effective in Iraq as trained Arabic linguists than we were in Afghanistan.  As soldiers, we still filled a critical role in Afghanistan, but ours were duties which could have been filled by individuals with two or three months of training rather than the nearly years of training we had each received.  And we can't ignore the factor of personal and professional pride involved in this experience.  Among my friends, the linguists tended either to join the special forces in order to actually use their training, or they tended to leave the Army in order to pursue genuine opportunities.

Although I fulfilled my full initial-entry contract plus a few months, I was discharged due to medical injury.  And my experiences during my medical discharge revealed that many of the flaws in military decisions stem not from a lack of thought or intellect, but rather from a culture which discourages consideration of the individual needs and talents of each soldier.  Because of this, our military has squandered the talents of its most dedicated personnel while failing to keep many of those soldiers who are highly skilled and highly trained and yet unable (or even unwilling) to serve.

Naturally, my experience with deployment left me somewhat fatalistic regarding military decisions.  There was no point trying to change units or "requesting" Iraq.  Our unit was deploying, and there would have been no one to replace me - if I'd been dumb enough to request such a transfer, you can imagine what the commander's reaction would have been.  Add to this the fact that our language skills were neither needed nor valued by the unit.  We were an Airborne unit - our focus was on maintaining our vehicles and equipment.  There wasn't even enough time for adequate combat training, let alone for losing one or two days a week to study Arabic.

After I was injured, I began to see how much more difficult it was for soldiers who couldn't manage even that much.  Honestly, I was very fortunate - my own unit was very understanding, and they reassigned me to lighter duties to prevent further injuries.  Basically, I worked in the office filing paperwork - mostly transfer orders and permissions to take leave.  I trained to be the unit postal clerk, which included repairing mailboxes, repainting the mail room, and arranging to get a new door.  It's not that I minded this duties - people need their mail, and they need dependable administrators - it's just that these were the only duties I was allowed to do.  I couldn't deploy, and the unit had nowhere else to transfer me.  I literally had to sit tight for the year it took to process my discharge paperwork.  Or, as my first sergeant put it, "you better not get more hurt."

I'll be honest - this wasn't a life I enjoyed.  I don't think many people would.  By the time it came to actually processing my medical board - actually going before a panel of officers, NCO's, and the Division Surgeon - I was not about to fight tooth-and-nail to stay in the military.  The head of the board - a full-bird colonel - accused me of being "unmotivated" because I felt my injuries prevented me fulfilling certain duties.  At another meeting, the Division Surgeon asked if I wanted to stay in the military - I said that I felt I could make contributions, but that the physical pain was preventing me from doing very much.  He said that the answer wasn't good enough, especially coming from an NCO (as I was by then).  In a way, he was right.  A leader - especially a combat leader - must personally feel a level of conviction that I lacked.

I was discharged from the Army in 2007. Since that time, my friends who stayed in have either deployed one, two, or three more times. Most of my friends, though, have left the Army. Some have sought jobs as military contractors and many have returned to school, but all of us still feel some resentment regarding our experiences.

This feeling was most visible when I first went to the Baltimore VA to register myself as a new patient. This was in mid-2009, getting into the seven-year mark for today's wars. To register, we were first required to attend a briefing regarding the hospital's appointment policies - this took place in a lecture hall filled with around four-hundred veterans, veterans who had served in every war from WWII on to the current conflicts.

During this briefing, they asked all the veterans of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom to stand up. I stood, as did around twenty other veterans. We all looked around at each other - none of us felt very comfortable standing up. It was worse when everyone else around us began clapping, began genuinely thanking us for serving. It wasn't just that we had served in the military - it's that many of us had signed up after September 11th, knowing full-well that our military would be going to war. Americans - especially veterans from past wars - recognize this. We are thanked by a proud nation ways that the veterans of Korea and Vietnam never were.

Yet we ourselves do not feel this pride. After we were asked to stand, we were told that OEF and OIF veterans would have a separate briefing regarding benefits specific for us. That's when we saw some of the true ravages of this war. When called to stand and be recognized, half of my cohort remained seated. Soldiers who had deployed two, three, and four times - or more - for the sake of their country were embarrassed to admit it.

I cannot speak for every veteran who has served. We are each of us individuals. Many are proud of their service, and others have mixed feelings. But I can say this for my own experiences. As an American - as someone who just finished a master's degree last May, as a student currently applying for Ph.D. programs - I still miss the Army. I miss waking up and pulling on the uniform and knowing that, whatever happened, I had Airborne wings on my chest, an 82nd deployment patch on my shoulder, and sergeant's stripes. A diploma hangs on the wall - a uniform is who you are, what you've become. There are days I seriously wish I could go back to that.

It is not that I don't take pride in my military service. I am proud of my time in the Army and - more importantly - proud of the man it helped me become. But I feel that I've let people down. I feel as though I should have fought to stay in and deploy again. I know that I made the "right" decision in deciding to take care of myself, but it never feels quite right.

This, then, is the reason I believe why myself and so many of my fellow veterans - the recent veterans of OEF and OIF - do not express great pride in what we've done. As a group, we've accomplished something that almost no other military could accomplish: we invaded two despotic nations on the far side of the world, pacified much of the insurgent resistance in those nations, and begun the transition to a new and truly democratic government. But as individuals, most of us have been compelled to leave the task before it is finished. We have given up service to the country that we may serve as parents to our children, that we may be husbands and wives instead of the static on the other end of the phone line. We have left our friends - often our best friends - to fight a war we gave so we could return to school.

As I hope you'll realize, soldiers who deploy four and five times will reach a point where they are no long able-bodied.  For myself, I didn't even make it all the way through my first deployment - I wasn't shipped home, but I wasn't much use.

But I could have been.  Shifted to the right position - especially if I had been in Iraq, where I could have used my training in Arabic - there were documents I could have worked with and other information I could have analyzed.  And I am not alone in feeling this way.  There are several cases of amputees who have fought for - and earned - the right to return to duty.  Yet there are many other duties that can be filled by soldiers who are not as injured.  For many who have already deployed two or three times, the simple promise of stability would keep them in the service - they would be more than willing to share their experiences with new recruits, passing on the hard-earned lessons of our wars rather than allowing it to be forgotten.

Further, we must stop abusing the the use of our personnel in the Reserves and National Guard.  They have enlisted to serve our nation in need - in the past, many active-duty veterans would choose to continue service in the Reserves as a way to earn extra income and remain part of the military.  But they can't afford to do this if Reserve Duty inflicts the same uncertainties and upheavals of the Active Duty service they've had to leave.

This is about more than maintaining our pride or helping veterans earn some extra cash - this is about keeping our experienced war fighters at the ready.  We shouldn't kid ourselves - Iraq and Afghanistan have placed a strain on our military and our economy, but they hardly represent all the threats in our modern world.  We face continual provocation from Iran and North Korea, and there are countless smaller threats emerging every day from nations experiencing poverty, political unrest, and social upheaval.  We depend on our service members not only to fight our ongoing wars, but to be ready for the unexpected wars, the wars that can't be forecast in advance.  Because whatever the future holds, we need to have the manpower - the experienced manpower - to face the dangers to our liberty.