My “Gates Is no Rumsfeld” post is getting a bit crowded with updates and comments. Thus, it might be a good idea to start a new column — a final one, before we all get the chance to read the book for ourselves and review and comment on the book from that unusual perspective…
(Gates’ book is set to be released officially today and Dana Milbank over at the Washington Post does one final “pre-publication” review, saying mainly that “Gates should have made his objections known sooner, when he still might have been able to do something about them.”)
Anyway, one of the topics those who have read Gates’ memoir have been writing about in the last day or so has been the great empathy and respect — emotional attachment — Gates says he had for the troops doing the fighting, and the dying, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During a conversation with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep over the weekend, Gates said he “came to realize in the early spring of 2011 that my preoccupation, my priority had become protecting [the troops] from further sacrifice, perhaps at the expense of hard-headed objectivity in terms of the use of our military. And I was becoming emotional when I was around the troops and thinking about the troops. And all of that contributed to my decision on the specific timing that it was time to go.”
While one can debate all day the possible inconsistency in sending the troops you love into battle, I do not doubt Gates’ sincerity. His affection and respect for the troops was, in my opinion, repeatedly on display.
One example that comes to mind is when he made an emotional speech in July 2007 to the Marine Corps Association in Washington, DC.
At that time we had already lost 3,600 troops in Iraq and 409 in Afghanistan.
Towards the end of his speech Gates came close to tears when he paid an emotional tribute to one of the Marine Corps’ fallen heroes of the war, the Marine who came to be known as “The Lion of Fallujah,” Marine Capt. Douglas Zembiec.
Marine Capt. Douglas Zembiec, the commanding officer of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, gives orders to his men over a radio prior to leaving their secured compound for a short patrol in Fallujah, Iraq, April 8, 2004. The company entered Fallujah on April 6 to begin the effort of destroying enemy held up in the city. Zembiec was killed in action May 10, 2007. He was 34 years old. Photo by Sgt. Jose E. Guillen
Honoring Captain Zembiec, who volunteered to deploy to Iraq a second time after the Fallujah battle, Gates said, “This time, he would not return — to his country or to his wife, Pamela, and his 1-year old daughter” and continued:
Every evening, I write notes to the families of young Americans like Doug Zembiec. For you and for me they are not names on a press release or numbers updated on a web page, they are our country’s sons and daughters. They are in a tradition of service that includes you and your forebears going back to the earliest days of the republic.
I remember this aspect of Gates’ tenure as Secretary of Defense very well — and very fondly.
In the same Morning Edition interview with Steve Inskeep, Gates talks about the condolence letters he would write each evening to the families of fallen troops:
“I was determined that these young people would not just become statistics for me. And so I started out by handwriting parts of the — of the condolence letters.
“And then — and even then that wasn’t enough, I felt. And I so then I started asking that every time one of these packets came to me, that it’d have a picture of the — of the soldier or sailor, airman or Marine who’d been killed, along with the hometown news so that I knew, you know, what their coaches and their parents and their brothers and sisters and teachers were saying about them, so I felt like I had some personal knowledge about each one of them.
“And I would write those condolence letters every evening.”
Asked whether that became difficult, Gates said:
It didn’t take too long. I think that quite honestly, in the — in those evening sessions, writing the condolence letters, there probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep.
Another Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War did not personally sign condolence letters to the families of our fallen soldiers in Iraq, but used a “signature device.” After “soldier-turned-writer David H. Hackworth penned a column on Nov. 22 [2004] reporting that two Pentagon-based colonels told him that Rumsfeld ‘has relinquished this sacred duty to a signature device rather than signing the sad documents himself,” and Rumsfeld acknowledged such, the Pentagon said that from then on Rumsfeld “would stop the use of signing machines and would pick up the pen himself,” according to the Washington Post.
No, Gates is no Rumsfeld.
Lead image: www.shutterstock.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.