Irregular Army Read online

  There was one course of action that would have instantly sewn up the military’s unraveling seams, namely: the draft. But it was too controversial. Involuntary conscription had been abolished by Congress in 1973 at the end of the Vietnam War. At the time Krepinevich was writing, it did enter into the national conversation, although the Bush administration remained implacably opposed for reasons of naked self-interest. When Rumsfeld testified at a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee in April 2005 the issue was raised by Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI). “For the first time in many years the Army and Marine Corps are not meeting their recruiting targets. There are some who are already discussing the draft,” he said with diplomatic tact. An exasperated Rumsfeld shuffled forward in his seat and put his mouth closer to the microphone: “I think the only people who could conceivably be talking about a draft are people who are speaking from pinnacles of near-perfect ignorance,” he replied. “The last thing we need is a draft. We just don’t.”20

  The Democrats kept pushing until Charles Rangel, a Congressman from New York, reintroduced the Draft Bill in February 2006, which if passed would have reinstated conscription for all those up to forty-two years old. “Every day that the military option is on the table, as declared by the president in his State of the Union address, in Iran, North Korea, and Syria, reinstatement of the military draft is an option that must also be considered, whether we like it or not,” said Rangel. “If the military is already having trouble getting the recruits they need, what can we do to fill the ranks if the war spreads from Iraq to other countries? We may have no other choice but a draft.”21 It was rejected by Congress, much to the delight of President Bush. “I applaud the House of Representatives for soundly rejecting the ‘Reinstate the Draft’ bill,” he said in the aftermath. “If this bill were presented to me, I would veto it. America’s all-volunteer military is the best in the world, and reinstating the draft would be bad policy. We have increased pay and benefits to ensure that our troops have the resources they need to fight and win the war on terror. I want every American to understand that, as long as I am President, there will be no draft.”22 Reinstating it wouldn’t have made the US an anomaly among its allies: many still run compulsory conscription programs, including Israel and (until 2011) Germany. The draft also has deep roots in the US historical narrative: during the Civil War, America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, had put forward the Conscription Act which called for the military service of all healthy males between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five for a three-year term. But the opposition from President Bush and his administration should be understood from the perspective of the still-raw memories many Americans have of the last draft. In a war so unpopular and with a president under so much pressure, the administration was aware that conscripting the nation’s youth into the military could well be the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a 2006 CBS poll, 68 percent of respondents said they opposed re­instating the military draft.23

  The Vietnam-era draft has also come under concerted attack ever since that war because of its targeted recruitment of certain demographics in the American population. Roughly 80 percent of the soldiers sent to Indochina were from working-class and/or ethnic minority backgrounds.24 One Vietnam veteran, Mike Clodfelter, who grew up in Plainville, Kansas, wrote in his 1976 memoir: “From my own small home town . . . all but two of a dozen high school buddies would eventually serve in Vietnam and all were of working class families, while I knew of not a single middle class son of the town’s businessmen, lawyers, doctors, or ranchers from my high school graduating class who experienced the Armageddon of our generation.”25 Even though the draft was never reinstated during the War on Terror, there were symmetries with recruitment trends from the Vietnam era. In the War on Terror, the US military again focused on enlisting society’s poorest. Denied the draft, however, it fell back on another method learned from attempts to swell the ranks during Vietnam: changing the regulations on enlistment. In 1965, as the troop buildup in South Vietnam grew, the military started to abandon its standards for recruitment and hundreds of thousands of men who scored among the lowest IQ percentiles were admitted for the first time. “Prior to American escalation in Vietnam such men were routinely rejected, but with a war on these ‘new standards’ were suddenly declared fit to fight. Rejection rates plummeted,” writes one historian.26 In 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara instituted a program called “Project 100,000,” which aimed to increase the levels of troops by that number within two years by admitting civilians who had previously not met the required standards.27

  The New Look

  Without conscription and with recruitment targets being consistently missed, the Bush administration and the Pentagon devised a similar plan. By subcontracting out myriad operational tasks to private military institutions like Blackwater and DynCorp, who received billions of dollars in government largesse to man the frontlines in the War on Terror, the government had partially dealt with the gap between its demand for cannon fodder and the supply of quality troops. A thin coalition of countries, later including NATO troops in Afghanistan and the UN in Iraq, helped ameliorate the chronic troop deficits. But it wasn’t enough. In 2004, Bush took another unusual step to plug the hole: he called up 37,000 members of the National Guard to go to fight in the deserts of Iraq.28 Not since the Korean War had there been such a mobilization: the National Guard had served in the Gulf War and Kosovo, but in nowhere near such huge numbers. By June 2005, they accounted for 45 percent of the total army in Iraq.29 Then there were the monetary inducements, which became quite lucrative for service members and crippling for the Pentagon. The Rand Corporation conducted an in-depth study which found that the DOD budget for enlistment and reenlistment bonuses had skyrocketed between 2000 to 2008, more than doubling to $1.4 billion for reenlistment bonuses. The average army enlistment bonus increased from $5,600 to about $18,000 per soldier over the same period.30 In just three years, from 2006 to 2009, the army dispensed with $1 billion to recruit 64,526 active-duty and reserve soldiers. Army Reserve recruits saw their bonuses more than double over the same period, to $19,500. But the study also found that in the army recruiters themselves tend to be a more cost-effective way to swell the ranks of the military than enlistment bonuses or pay increases. The Bush administration took that route too. To achieve its 2007 goals, the army increased its 8,000-strong recruiting force with 2,000 new assistants.31

  At the same time—and perhaps most importantly—those who should have been kicked out were being allowed to stay. In June 2005, the Wall Street Journal turned up an internal memo to senior commanders which called the growing dropout rate—called “attrition” in military jargon—“a matter of great concern.” “We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend,” it read. “By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That’s 3,000 more soldiers in our formations.” It was an explicit call to drop standards: the message being that soldiers addicted to alcohol and drugs, those who lose their fitness, or their mental poise, shouldn’t be discharged. It was batten down the hatches time. The Wall Street Journal quoted a battalion commander as saying: “It is the guys on weight control . . . school no-shows, drug users, etc., who eat up my time and cause my hair to grey prematurely . . . Often they have more than one of these issues simultaneously.”32 Such sentiments did not occur in a vacuum. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were, in fact, allowing the dismantling of the whole regulatory structure for enlistment and retention that the US armed forces had built up in the twenty-five years since Vietnam. The slim military needed fattening up and this was the only way to do it. In the end it constituted a complete re-evaluation of who was qualified to serve in the US armed forces, a full-works facelift of the service unheard of in the annals of modern American history. In the relatively halcyon days of the First Gulf War in 1990, the US military blocked the enlistment of felons. It spurned men and women with low IQs or those without a high school diploma. It would either block the enlistment of or kic
k out neo-Nazis and gang members. It would treat or discharge alcoholics, drug abusers, and the mentally ill. It would pass up the services of foreign citizens to fight its wars. No more. While the Bush administration adopted conservative policies pretty much universally, it saved its ration of liberalism for the US military, where it scrapped all the previously sacrosanct regulations governing recruitment to the most powerful fighting force in the world. Under the aegis of the War on Terror, the US armed forces became a Mecca for the “different,” the weird and wonderful (and dangerous) of America.

  Throughout all this, however, the military maintained a rictus, everything-in-order, smile for the public. As late as August 2007, when the crisis befalling the institution had become widely known, Michael Dominguez, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, began his testimony to a Congressional hearing with a slap on the back for the US military: “Let me begin by acknowledging an historic achievement that many, including some of our own experts, would have thought impossible a few years ago,” he said. “We have taken an all-volunteer military to war. We have done it in a strong economy with 4.5 percent unemployment. We often have asked that force and their families to do more on short notice. And through it all, we have manned this nation’s military with people far above average relative to their peers.”33 It was simply untrue. The average member of the US military was no longer far above their average peer. The following chapters will show how the Bush administration, together with a pliant Pentagon (and the succeeding Obama administration), enabled the US military to undergo the biggest and fastest transformation in its history. Each chapter will cover a different group of people who have been enfranchised through the War on Terror as the US military scrambled for troops. The different weightings and amount of reporting on each group reflects the fact that some of these changes in regulation have been explicit (for example, rules on body weight and IQ) while others have been completely denied (from neo-Nazis to gang members). Still others have been hushed up as far as possible—such as the vast numbers of young Americans scarred for life by mental illness, left untreated and forsaken.

  It will become clear quite quickly that it is not just American soldiers who have been short-changed by Rumsfeld’s vision—the occupied populations have been sacrificed with rivers of their own blood. Many of the wars’ worst atrocities are linked directly to the loosening of enlistment regulations on criminals, racist extremists, and gang members, among others. Then there is the domestic US population, which has had to put up with military-trained gang members marauding around their cities; as well as Mexican civilians who have paid with their lives in the drug wars facilitated in part by the US military. The effects of this will be felt for decades to come. Finally, there’s the safety of the troops themselves. Loosening standards on intelligence and body weight, for example, compromised the military’s operational readiness and undoubtedly endangered the lives of American and allied troops. Hundreds of young Americans may have paid with their lives for this folly.

  US society changed profoundly after the September 11 attacks and during the subsequent wars. In many ways, the military is a reflection of the society from which it is drawn, and the changes in the composition of the US military and its regulations over this period reflected a country in political, cultural, and economic reverse gear. As America became increasingly bigoted and inward-looking, so radicalism in the US military increased. As young people became ever fatter, so too did the soldiers. As the criminal justice system locked more and more people up, so the military had to increase the numbers of felons it allowed in. “Today’s young men and women are more overweight . . . and are being charged for offenses that in earlier years wouldn’t have been considered a serious offense, and might not have resulted in charges in the first place,” an army spokesman complained in 2008.34 At the height of the War on Terror, only one in three men in the general population met the pre-9/11 physical, mental, educational, and other eligibility requirements needed to enlist in the armed forces. “The numbers of people who meet our enlistment standards is astonishingly low,” grumbled Under Secretary Dominguez at the end of his testimony lauding the military’s success.35 To enlist the rest, the US military had to change in profound and dangerous ways.

  What follows, then, is a soldier’s-eye history of the War on Terror, told by the men and women who have often paid the highest price (alongside, of course, the occupied populations). Through it all, the military rationalized its transformation program as an altruistic democratization of the fighting force or denied outright they had loosened regulations. “In the 1990s what you saw was they just kept raising the standards for who they would accept, as a way of weeding out less desirable people, it was a buyer’s market,” John Pike, a military analyst, told me. “When the war came along they decided that a lot of these standards didn’t have anything to do with war fighting.”36 It was a lie, as this book will reveal in its attempt to remedy the relentless propaganda.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Other “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

  HITLER IN IRAQ

  The military has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt . . . they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.

  US Department of Defense report, 20051

  My journey into the dark underworld of the US military begins on a rainy Tuesday morning in March 2008, with a visit to Tampa, Florida, on the south-eastern tip of the country. The mission is simple: to meet Forrest Fogarty, a diehard American patriot who has served the US Army proudly for two years in Iraq, the central focus of America’s War on Terror and the country’s most controversial foreign adventure since Vietnam. The twist is that Forrest doubles as a white supremacist of the serious Hitler-worshipping type. Over the preceding months, I’d been speaking to him intermittently on his cell phone after his brother had put us in contact. It was a necessarily convoluted route: getting inside the neo-Nazi network in the United States is no cakewalk, requiring endless appeals via phone and email to penetrate the thick walls put up against a hostile mainstream media. I’d been uniquely successful with Fogarty, who is an effortlessly loquacious character with a compelling story, so I take a flight from New York City to meet him.

  On arrival, I quickly check into the nearest hotel after the bus drops me off downtown, but it’s early afternoon so I walk along the deserted walkway next to the Hillsborough River that runs through the heart of the city, dividing the University of Tampa from the skyscrapers on my side. It is about 5 p.m. before I eventually muster the courage to call Forrest on his cell. He picks up after a few rings. “Oh hey, I didn’t think you’d come!” he says in his croaky voice, sounding happy to hear from me. “I usually go get a beer after work, why don’t you come?” Sure, I tell him.

  A couple of hours later I’m in a cab headed for his favorite hangout, the Winghouse Bar & Grill, which describes itself as “a casual sports-bar with delicious over-sized entrees.” I’d assumed the place was downtown, so it’s an unpleasant surprise when the taxi speeds along endless miles of pitch-black highway with the full moon barely lighting up the dense forests and thickets whizzing by. The situation is prime for a bit of macabre daydreaming: will I be jumped by a group of his mates, maybe even end up decapitated in the woods? Before too long we pull up at the sparkling Winghouse, located on a plain at the side of the highway, its bright lights a welcome interruption to the surrounding blackness. It’s an open-plan restaurant with a bar in the middle and a group of Tampa belles in low-cut tops taking orders. In our brief phone call I’d asked Forrest how I would recognize him. “Just look for the skinhead with the tattoos,” he said, laughing. And sure enough, sitting straight to my right as I walk in is a youngish looking man, plastered in tattoos, with tightly cropped hair, wife-beater vest, and bulging biceps—a poster-boy skinhead, the archetypal American Nazi. “Good to meet you,” I say, not bothering to get confirmation. �
��Hey Matt,” he replies. “Sit down.” He is bright and alert, his keen eyes darting around as he speaks. We order some chicken wings with buffalo sauce, and a pitcher of beer. “You’re British, right,” he says. “I remember seeing black guys with British accents in Iraq, shit was so crazy.”

  Forrest is obviously in his element in the Winghouse as he slouches in his chair, beer in one hand, chicken wing in the other. He doesn’t take long to start in with his life story, which, for shock value, is admittedly hard to beat. He tells me he grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Tampa at fifteen with some serious psychological baggage. In high school in LA he was bullied by Mexican and African American children and was just fourteen when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi. By the time his family moved and he switched to Leto High in Tampa, he had found his identity: “I eventually got kicked out of Leto High, for being a racialist,” he says, his voice quivering with anger still. “I was getting in a few fights. What they do in desegregation is bus blacks into the neighborhood. On the first day, a bunch of niggers, they said ‘Are you in the KKK?’ to me, and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and it was on. After this, I kept getting in fights, eventually they expelled me.”

  It’s nerve-wracking sitting in a bar with Forrest as he vents openly against black people and Jews. He has no qualms about flaunting his Nazism and I look like his friend. “I get into fights myself twice a month because I’m a Nazi,” he assures me, pouring a pint of beer and smiling. “I’m completely open about it.” When black people come into the bar he emits a hiss of disapproval. “I just don’t want to be around them,” he tells me. “I don’t want to look at them, I don’t want them near me, I don’t want to smell them. And people say, ‘Oh people who are racialist you’ve never hung around black people’ . . . bullshit, I’ve showered with them, I’ve lived with them, I don’t like them . . . they’re fucking savages, they’re tribal motherfuckers, they are different to us, how they think, how they conduct themselves.” Although he has two kids to look after, aged nine and thirteen, he has the mannerisms of an adolescent. He speaks a lot about “chasing pussy” and getting into fights, and bloviates about Jews and Arabs in between. I nod my head insincerely.