For Memorial Day: ‘Service Before Self’

By Bill Doughty

The first-person stories in “Walk In My Combat Boots” haunt this Memorial Day. This is the second of a two-part Navy Reads review of this important book filled with the voices of combat warriors, medics, and defenders of freedom. Part one was posted May 21.

"Walk In My Combat Boots" by James Patterson reveals “the courage, the sense of duty, [and] the patriotism of this young generation,” according to Adm. William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy, ret.).

This weekend the nation is commemorating and honoring those who have fallen in combat. We should also reflect on the service and sacrifice of young men and women who served in recent war zones and saw death first-hand, up close, heartbreakingly personal.

Lt. Col. Sherry Hemby, 455th Expeditionary Aeromedical Evacuation Flight commander, ensures the brackets are in working order on a C-130 Hercules for an aeromedical evacuation flight to Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, June 28, 2011. (Senior Airman Krista Rose)

Many of the patriots in this book are children of military veterans. Such is the case of Sherry Hemby, an Air Force flight nurse who remembers her dad: He taught me about patriotism –– to think of others. Service before self.”

Andy Prososky, a United States Marine veteran, is the son of a Navy Corpsman who served in Vietnam.

While serving in Iraq nearly two decades ago, he mastered the ability to compartmentalize, to not think of family and home, especially when out on a mission. “I don’t care about me, only my Marines,” he says.

Prososky encapsulates the tragedy of war in one episode involving RPGs, IEDs, a JAG, and a Marine killed in action. “Back home people ask me what death is like. You can’t explain it. It’s not dramatic, there’s no music, it’s sudden, it’s violent, it’s reality.”

Marine Cpl. Rory Hamill

The final section of this book is titled “Coda: Memorial Day.” And the final featured interview and story is by former Marine Corporal Rory Patric Hamill, son of two Navy parents. An extended excerpt follows:

“The amazing thing our brains do for us is compartmentalize any kind of trauma.

And therein lies the problem: people don’t address PTSD or what psychologists call a moral injury –– the feeling of overwhelming shame and guilt, even rage, anger, or betrayal over compromising your moral conscience. If you don’t address these actions and reactions, they come back to haunt you down the road.

I learn all this stuff later. Much, much later …

…The demons from all my deployments start eating away at me day and night. I can’t sleep, and I’m drinking too much. I’m smoking like a chimney. I’m not seeing my kids, and I’m shirking my responsibilities –– and it’s all because I’ve been ripped out from the familial structure of the military. And I miss the camaraderie.

From day one in the military, your entire day is regimented. It’s scheduled and structured down to the minute. You have a mission. You go out and get it done. Now I don’t have anyone telling me to do anything. I don’t have anyone keeping me in check.

My second marriage ends.

I find myself sitting outside a marsh by my dad’s house in Atlantic City. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, holding a pistol.

I raise it to my head, about to end my life, when for maybe a half second my kids flash through my mind.

What the fuck am I doing?

I start crying.

I disassemble my weapon, take all the bullets out of the magazine, and throw everything out of the car.

I need to address this. I need to get some help.

I get diagnosed with PTSD. I start seeing a therapist full-time and get my head out of my ass. I quit binge drinking and stop smoking, which I’ve been doing since I was thirteen. I learn the importance of exercise and nutrition and taking care of myself. I begin to claw and scrape my way out of my self-loathing. I stop hating myself for everything. I stop blaming myself for my friends dying and every other shitty thing that’s ever happened to me.

I start speaking to other people about my experiences.

Over time, I start to learn to love my fate. Instead of letting it control me, send me into a deep, spiraling depression. I discover a way to turn it around for good –– to help others. If I can help one person every day, regardless of how I do it, then that’s a win for me. If I can use my experiences, my story, to help a person every single day, then everything I’ve gone through in my life is worth it.”

Hamill writes with appreciation about the honor of receiving the Purple Heart from President Barrack Obama at Walter Reed Hospital.

Cpl. Rory Hamill, a combat-wounded Marine, pauses to look at the Navy Sailor's Creed on the wall of the base gym on Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., Dec. 4, 2017. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Matt Hecht)

 

James Patterson, Matt Eversmann, and Chris Mooney help people tell their stories in “Walk In My Combat Boots” –– tragedies and victories, comedy and pathos. Mostly pathos, considering the sacrifices required in war.

We honor the men and women lost in war on Memorial Day. And we also remember those who gave so much in service to their country. True heroes live the values of honor, courage and commitment. They confront demons and find the truth. True patriots ensure we think of others and ask why we go to war. “Service before self.”

Unspeakable Tulsa Massacre

Review by Bill Doughty––

Combustible racial tension ignited one hundred years ago when a number of whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, took up arms and threatened to lynch a black teenager. Two thousand whites fought with a group of thirty black men, including World War I veterans, who tried to protect the teen.

The white mob then attacked and burned down the Greenwood district, a black middle class neighborhood known at the time as “Negro Wall Street.”

Dozens of people –– most of them African Americans –– were killed in what was called a riot but is now known as a massacre. Between 150 and 300 people may have died, according to historians. Police joined the white mob in attacking black people in Greenwood.

Carole Boston Weatherford (author) and Floyd Cooper (illustrator) capture the tragedy of Greenwood in a new book for young readers. The irony of the title “Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre” (Carolrhoda Books, 2021), is that the disaster of May 31/June 1, 1921, was not spoken about for decades.

Twenty years ago, Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating signed the Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act into law. But true reconciliation and accountability –– and prevention of similar violence –– cannot be achieved without an honest examination of events, especially massacres (or insurrections). That’s one reason this book by Weatherford and Cooper is so important and timely.

This book offers a short but clear and truthful history of what happened in Tulsa a century ago.

“Unchecked and, in some cases, deputized by the police, the white mob stormed into Greenwood, looting and burning homes and businesses that blacks had saved and sacrificed to build. Threatening to shoot, the mob blocked firefighters from putting out the blazes. African American World War I veterans took up arms to defend their families and property. But they were outnumbered and outgunned. Families fled with only what they could carry.” 

Some of the veterans were killed, just a day after Memorial Day. The hate-filled white mob destroyed hundreds of businesses and buildings. Thousands of black citizens were relocated to internment camps outside Tulsa.

Weatherford writes, “Black residents had to carry passes to enter the city.” Some stayed to rebuild the community while others left and never returned. It took 75 years before lawmakers launched an investigation into what had happened in 1921.

In an author’s note at the end of the book, Weatherford speaks to the history of the era and what moved her to write about the massacre, one of several against successful African American communities and thousands of murders of blacks after the Civil War and under Jim Crow laws.

“For me, racist backlash hits close to home. One cousin in Tennessee burned to death in his home, a rumored lynching. In the 1920s, whites allegedly burned down a store that belonged to another of my cousins in an all-black village cofounded by my great-great-grandfather during Reconstruction. In my adopted state of North Carolina, another ‘Black Wall Street’ anchored Durham, once a hub of black enterprise. And another race massacre occurred –– in Wilmington in 1898. Thus, family lore and proximity to history led me to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.”

Last summer Navy Reads published a post about the Wilmington tragedy of 1898 and the Navy’s unfortunate connection to that massacre. The Wilmington massacre was instigated in part by a white supremacist newspaper publisher who would later become Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels.

Again, confronting the truth of our past can help us reconcile. The vestiges of systemic hate-filled animus by some whites toward blacks was on full display one year ago when police officers in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd. Gun violence and mass shootings –– as well as other incidents of hate-based violence –– are on the rise in the summer of 2021. Seeing the truth can show us how far we have evolved, how much more we have to do, and where we need to continue to focus efforts toward greater equality, reform, and accountability.

In his illustrator's note, Floyd Cooper shares the story of his grandfather who grew up in Greenwood. Cooper says this about Grandpa Williams’s recollections:

“Everything I knew about this tragedy came from Grandpa; not a single teacher at school ever spoke of it … Now, the same way my grandpa told the story to us, I share it here with you. My grandpa passed away many years ago, but I hope that my art and Carole Boston Weatherford’s words can speak for Grandpa.”

Cooper’s gorgeous art does indeed honor the men, women, and children who were victims of the Tulsa tragedy. He creates emotional tension in the shading, perspective, and colors –– but most of all in the expressions –– of his subjects: women, men, and children. Their expressions speak volumes of truth.

"Unspeakable" concludes with an uplifting scene at the Tulsa Reconciliation Park, created twenty years ago as “a place to realize the responsibility we all have to reject hatred and violence and to instead choose hope.” Black and white people are pictured linking arms instead of taking up arms.

For adults interested in learning more about the unspeakable Greenwood tragedy, I recommend “Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and its Legacy” by James S. Hirsh (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) and “Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921" (Louisiana State University Press, 1982). Both books include many black-and-white images of the awful events of May 31 and June 1, 1921. Each book dives deep into the history of the massacre and helps explain how feelings of entitlement, envy, privilege, and superiority manifested into violence.

Why ‘Walk In My Combat Boots’?

Review by Bill Doughty

“These are the stories America needs to hear about the remarkable young men and women who serve.” –– Adm. William H. McRaven, US Navy (Ret.)

“Walk in My Combat Boots” by James Patterson, Matt Eversmann, and with Chris Mooney (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) focuses on military service members from each key service. Each warfighter tells their individual stories –– often about how and why they joined, what combat is like, and how war impacts the people who deploy. Most of the combat scenes are in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of the stories ask, sometimes in screaming prose: Why? Collectively, these recollections give the reader a better appreciation of the service and sacrifice of these young men and women.

The authors present the stories in crisp first-person voice and in honest brutal detail –– what Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, US Army (Ret.), calls “painfully raw, improbably funny, and completely human.” The individual stories are short, the language is conversational, and the font-type is large, but the content is sometimes hard to read; the authors pull no punches. This book is not for kids.

President George W. Bush presents the Purple Heart medal to US Army PFC Jeddah DeLoria of Chosen, Colo., Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007 at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. DeLoria was recovering from injuries sustained in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. (Joyce N. Boghosian)

Some of the most interesting stories include those by Miguel Ferrer, a Navy corpsman who had challenges working with the Afghan military; Jeddah Deloria (pictured above), born in the Philippines, who received a Purple Heart from President George W. Bush; Navy Chief Petty Officer Ryan Leahy, whose great grandfather was one of naval history’s most influential leaders, Adm. William Leahy; Staff Sgt. Lisa Marie Bodenburg (pictured below), a Marine door gunner, who says, “I would do it all over again in a heartbeat, because I love the Marine Corps. I love leading Marines. There is nothing greater, no greater feeling, no greater responsibility or achievement.”

Then-Cpl. Lisa M. Bodenburg, a UH-1N crew chief with Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 367, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (LCpl. Frederick J. Coleman)

The service members, like Army intelligence collector “Red,” whose father served in the Navy, describes what it was like every day in Iraq. For example:

“When you’re in Iraq, you don’t have any days off. If you’re here for a year, it’s 365 days, every day. You never get a break, and it takes years off your life. Big years. There’s the physical demand –– always being on patrol or being stuck doing time-sensitive target (TST) missions and not sleeping for forty-eight hours –– and then there’s the mental aspect of seeing all the shit you see, doing the shit you do. Sometimes you do things that don’t feel right. You question your own morality. It’s mentally and emotionally and spiritually draining.

Every. Single. Day.”

Election Day in Baghdad, Iraq, 2010. (Spc. Edward Siguenza)

Dozens of stories ask "why?" –– why did I join, why did I step on an IED, why did I have to face life-or-death decisions, why can’t I go back to be with my troops, and why can’t the locals reject the violence in their culture?

Patrick Kern attended West Point and joined the Army. His brother chose the Marines. Patrick expresses the frustration of serving in Iraq, where the local population was not just generally thankless for attempts to ensure fair elections but also often dangerous to the service members trying to help them.

“When the Iraqis are not attacking us, they’re attacking the elections that are going on. A chief of police from one tribe gets elected, and the other tribe assassinates him. We have another election. Another guy wins, and then he gets assassinated. The Sunnis go after any Shiites who go out and vote. Suicide car bombs go off and kill anywhere from seventy to eighty people.

It’s a daily occurrence.

When they’re not killing each other, they’re mortaring our forward operating base and using IEDs to try to take us out on the roads…

… What people have a hard time understanding is the Iraqi culture isn’t wired for democracy … Their culture values death.”

Jason Burke

Jason Burke, who retired as a Navy captain, laments the corruption he confronted in counterinsurgency missions in Afghanistan against the Taliban. “Trying to reduce corruption –– it’s a difficult and, at times, impossible task.” He describes Afghanistan in 2008 as "like the Wild West."

"The level of poverty here –– people can't imagine it. In some of these area, you see groups of kids running around without shoes in forty-degree weather, dirty from head to toe, hair in dreadlocks, snot in their noses. But as a whole, they smiled and played like children anywhere else on the planet. They had hope."

Burke tells with teeth-clenching tension about his role in the capture of Aafia Siddiqui, “Lady al Qaeda,” a Pakistani terrorist who studied in the United States at the University of Houston, MIT, and Brandeis, before returning to the region to try to kill Americans in Afghanistan.

Ron Silverman, an Army MEDCOM major general, performed dental work on Saddam Hussein. He shares some of Hussein’s last thoughts before the former Iraqi leader was put to death by hanging. And, he speaks about being back home in the United States and taking long walks on the beach, even in the middle of the night.

“Tonight, as I’m walking along the beach, the sky is beautiful and clear, the moon glistening over the calm, still waters. It’s serene. I think about how, for over a year, I couldn’t go anywhere alone –– I certainly couldn’t walk anywhere by myself at night.

And here I am outside, walking along this beach in freedom, and it brings tears to my eyes. Most people don’t recognize or understand what we have here, in the United States.”

Providing security during an assault on an air assault near Tikrit, Iraq, 2008. (Rick Rzepka)

That’s the reason why this book is a must-read. It’s why we cherish freedom and those who fight to preserve freedom and defend elections.

Consider the idiomatic adage, “unable to see the forest for the trees.” This book is an up-close examination of the individual “trees,” with less consideration of the forest –– and the concept of how it grew there. But war is more than a concept, and these necessary stories show the realities and effects of combat up close and personal.

President Bill Clinton writes, “This book will take your breath away, break your heart, and leave you in awe of the hard work, raw courage, ingenuity, and resilience of the men and women who wear the boots. You’ll hear them say why they do it and how they deal with triumph, tragedy, and living with the legacy of their service. Every American should read it.”

(This is part one of a two-part review of this remarkable book for Navy Reads, with the second to be published in time for Memorial Day.)

Physics & People in a War for the World

Review by Bill Doughty

In the biggest war imaginable, who are the enemies and what is the science needed to do battle? Also, who are the warriors on our side?

Two recent books about climate change frame those questions for critical thinkers. The books come at the climate change challenge from nearly opposite perspectives –– one focusing on people, the other explaining the science.

“The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet” by Michael E. Mann (PublicAffairs, 2021) is all about people, strategies, and tactics. Mann shows the ways enemies of change –– “inactivists” –– go to battle with the environment and environmentalism. Once a climate skeptic, himself, Mann shows how he learned about the science of the somewhat misnamed “greenhouse effect” and quickly became a warrior for the planet.

“The Physics of Climate Change” by Lawrence M. Krauss (Post Hill Press, 2021) concentrates on science rather than tactics and strategies of warriors. He purposely stays away from left/right politics while presenting evidence of the problem and growing threats: rising concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, rising temperatures, and rising sea levels (which threaten naval installations worldwide).

Science and facts are the lingua franca –– common language –– to discuss how the war on behalf of the planet can be fought.

Krauss writes, “If it isn’t possible to explain the scientific principles and predictions associated with climate change in a straightforward and accessible fashion, then what hope is there for any rational public discourse and decision-making on the subject?”

To be expected, Krauss’s hard-science and matter-of-fact approach is cold, analytical, and sometimes dense. He presents chemistry and physics equations as long as a thumb. And he includes dozens of charts and graphs to back up his analysis.

Sometimes Krauss comes across as professorial and even condescending. Despite or because of this approach, Krauss will be relatable to engineers and left-brain thinkers.

He becomes most passionate when addressing the ecological threats to the Mekong River, to Greenland, and to West Antarctica, above. Tipping points in the ongoing assault on Earth include warming and acidification of the oceans, dieback of forests in North America (due to fire and disease), loss of permafrost in Siberia and the Arctic, deforestation in the Amazon, and –– of interest to the Navy –– slowdown of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation).

Krauss shows how those tipping points can have a domino effect toward “a future that might be.” He begins his book with observations aboard a boat in Vietnam on the Mekong River and ends with reflections of what it will mean to lose this very special river to the effects of climate change. He writes, “While many factors present in the Mekong Delta make it particularly sensitive to the impact of rising sea level, the Mekong represents, in microcosm, the threat facing much of the world’s population from sea level rise.”

Krauss’s warnings are a call for action. Mann’s book is a perfect companion read.

Unlike Krauss, however, Mann dives into what can and should be done to combat appeasement, fight denialism, and defeat deflection and “doomism” (arguments that it’s already too late to do anything). Mann says we must understand the “fallacy” of “conflating physics and politics.” From "The New Climate War":

“While the laws of physics are immutable, human behavior is not. And dismissiveness based on perceived political or psychological barriers to action can be self-reinforcing and self-defeating. Think of World War II mobilization or the Apollo project. Had we decided a priori that winning the war on landing on the moon was impossible, these seemingly insurmountable challenges would never have been met. We have encountered compelling evidence that a clean energy revolution and climate stabilization are achievable with current technology. All we require are policies to incentivize the needed shift. That doesn’t violate the Newtonian laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics. It only challenges us to think boldly. Scratch the surface and we find that most soft doomism is premised not in the physical impossibility of limiting warming, but in a cynical, pessimistic belief that we lack the willpower to act. It’s giving up before we have even tried. And once again, the inactivity are smiling all the way to the bank.”

Mann is responsible for the iconic hockey stick graph published on Earth Day, April 22, 1998, showing the “unprecedented nature of modern global warming.” He says that in a war of this scale it’s important to know your enemy, even if the enemy’s prime tactic is to grind the gears of change through inaction and continue to rely on extraction and burning of a finite resource, damned the consequences. It’s a familiar combination of strategies and tactics by tobacco companies, plastics industry, opioid manufacturers, and COVID deniers, anti-vaxxers, among others. Give ‘em a “D” for dividing us:

“The forces of inaction –– that is, fossil fuel interests and those doing their bidding –– have a single goal –– inaction. We might henceforth call them inactivists. They come in various forms. The most hard-core contingent –– the deniers –– are, as we have seen, in the process of going extinct (though there is still a remnant population of them). They are being replaced by other breeds of deceivers and dissemblers, namely downplayers, deflectors, dividers, delayers, and doomers –– willing participants in a multipronged strategy seeking to deflect blame, divide the public, delay action by promoting ‘alternative’ solutions that don’t actually solve the problem, or insist we simply accept our fate –– it’s too late to do anything about it anyway, so we might as well keep the oil flowing. The climate wars have thus not ended. They have simply evolved into a new climate war.”

Carl Sagan

Mann’s heroes withstood attacks in a decades-long war but proved to be prophetic even back in the 1960s and 70s; they include Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and especially Carl Sagan. Despite Mann's similar dire warnings, he is optimistic about the future. He sees resilience as people move away from denialism toward “a more worthy debate over climate policy.”

Mann lauds the activist Swedish teen Greta Thunberg and other young people who demand corporate and governmental accountability together with personal responsibility.

Written before the Biden administration came to power and well before Russian hackers disrupted the Colonial pipeline, Mann says presciently, "A renewable energy transition would create millions of new jobs, stabilize energy prices in the absence of fuel costs, reduce power disruption, and increase access to energy by decentralizing power generation."

Krauss, author of “The Physics of Climate Change,” is also cautiously optimistic but only somewhat so; in a seemingly unintended reference to infrastructure, he says the roadbed to oblivion is not an “inexorable” given.

“The future is charging at us like a freight train, but it is doing so on tracks we have built. We may have time to divert the train, or perhaps build a bridge so it safely bypasses us. We will never know unless we try. I wish I had some some silver bullet, but all I can offer is what I have tried to do here, to provide some perspective on the realities we face and how we can understand them.”

Returning to the thoughts of the Mekong, he hopes for rational, reasoned action.

“I hope for the sake of the Cambodians and the Vietnamese, and also for hundreds of millions of Bangladeshis, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Africans, Polynesians, Indonesians, Middle Easterners, North and South Americans, Europeans, and all the rest, that technological ingenuity combined with rational action, tempered by simple grace and empathy, might supersede our longstanding human traditions of xenophobia, greed, and violence in the face of the national and international challenges we now face.

But hope and expectation are two different things.”

Louis Pasteur

Krauss concludes his book with thoughts –– in the context of the COVID pandemic –– about his own prophetic hero: Louis Pasteur. He also lifts the curtain a bit on politics:

“I have had numerous times over the past month to think back to the example of Louis Pasteur, the French biologist and chemist whose groundbreaking work contributed to the principles of vaccination, as well as the technique of pasteurization, named after him. His breakthroughs didn’t end diseases, and they didn’t force government officials to listen to reason. The current nonsensical anti-vaxxers who are rabidly fighting against reality and the social contract, testify to the limitations of rationality among the human species.

Yet Louis Pasteur anticipated that when he said fortune favors the prepared mind. It makes no guarantees. It just offers better odds. I’ll take that any day.”

These two books and the two authors offer a yin-yang, left-brain/right-brain, science/politics (people) approach to the greatest threat facing the world.

In conclusion, a haiku:

we are warriors

to protect our planet if

we choose to enlist

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environment and Energy Resilience Richard G. Kidd IV poses for a photo after an interview about climate change, the impact it has on the Department of Defense and what steps the DOD is taking to mitigating it, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., April 12, 2021. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase)