Thomas Ricks' Generals

This is a perfectly sunny morning in Ohio as I write, with all the harbingers of spring appearing, even a red robin on my lawn. I feel lucky to be alive.

And yet, on this lovely, warmest day of the year so far, with all its hope and glory, my mind is very much occupied with this new book that I was reading late into the night, Thomas Ricks' The Generals: American Military Command from World War II until Today.

The first paragraph on the jacket flyleaf pretty much describes the thesis:

History has been kind to the American generals of World War II – Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley – and less kind to the generals of the wars that followed. In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks sets out to explains why that is.

The thought that keeps coming back to my mind as I read this book, for all its wealth of learning and insight, is that the most important fact is still missing.

For example, Ricks says on p. 309 that the My Lai crime “was the low point of the U. S. Army in the twentieth century,” not just because of the crime itself, or secondly because of “the chain of command's coverup” but thirdly,

“the failure of the Army leaders to react properly to all of it...Instead, it went into a defensive crouch, letting the general responsible for the affair off the hook and blaming others for its problems. In sum, the generals who were running the army acted less like stewards of their profession and more like keepers of a guild, accountable only in themselves. This posture would have long-lasting pernicious effects on American generalship.”

Now, Ricks is right, yes, yes, but it seems to me that his own perspective is still too local, still too small, despite his persistent criticism in the book of the modern generals' perspectives.

I think the problem ultimately goes back to the fact that you simply must think it through very carefully before you decide to kill someone, and before you support and participate in the killing of large numbers of people.

Senator James Webb, a Viet-Nam “war hero” and scion of a military family, recently said that he “may now be the only member of the Senate who thinks the Viet-Nam war was a good idea.” There are probably a couple others, like war hero John McCain who still think it was a good idea.

I notice that war heroes, former Senators Chuck Hagel and John Kerry, who recently have been appointed to Cabinet postions by President Obama, now believe not only that the Viet-Nam war was a bad idea but also the Iraq war was a bad idea. These heroes killed people, large numbers of people, without having first thought it through adequately. Neither of these Cabinet appointees, or any other of the war heroes, Colin Powell included, have adequately accounted for their killings, or even been seriously asked why they did not adequately pre-think through these killings which they now see to have been “a bad idea.”

Look, if I could see through these wars beforehand, surely these high-powered Generals and Senators and Presidents could have done so. There was plenty of reasonable doubt at their inceptions, plenty of people pointing out the falsehoods and pretensions of the explanations for those wars. A child could see what they were about: arrogance, ego, money, careers, the system, and all that. World War II's justifications were stronger, clearer, and probably still are. It's this larger issue of the purpose of a war itself that I think Ricks himself does not appreciate.

I go so far as to say that, if you kill large numbers of people without adequate justification, just as in the case of killing a single person, you will not ultimately get away with it. There will be a price to pay, even though it looks like you won, you “succeeded,” you prospered, you received hero's honors, you advanced in your career and reputation. It's the idea of “The mills of the gods grind slowly but they grind exceeding fine.”

And what of that child who sees it's wrong, refuses to go along with it, and who goes down to the dust unhonored and unsung, who is never able to get work in this town again because he or she spoke and lived the truth? There is a whole lot to be said on this, but for now I will end with Elias Canetti's observation:

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Whom men would destroy, they first make sane.”