Failing to Survive

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FAILING TO SURVIVE

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF AN ACCIDENTAL EDUCATOR

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION PRACTICE

June 2021

Gregg Nakano

Dissertation Committee:

Deborah Zuercher, Chairperson Kealalokahi Losch Katherine Ratliffe

Keywords: Existential Education, Experiential Learning, Climate Change

Acknowledgements

Praise be to God for creating this reality to explore. My lifelong thanks to my parents for being the doorway to my life. All my love to my family for giving me reasons to remain.

If life is a book with many chapters, then completing a doctorate is one written with the encouragement, guidance and support of others. As my self-image is not defined by scholarship,

I often found myself a stranger in a strange land in the University of Hawaii’s College of

Education. Thus, my first expression of gratitude goes to Dr. Sarah Twomey for encouraging me to apply to the EdD program and start the journey once accepted.

During Dr. Twomey’s tenure as EdD Director, Dr. Sachi Edwards, Dr. Veselina Lambrev and Dr. Amy Sojot provided welcome support in getting through the coursework. Deep thanks go to Dr. Lori Ideta and Dr. Walter Kahumoku III for providing the transformative leadership that made the EdD program sustainable and to Dr. Truc Nguyen for helping me identify multiple areas for future academic growth

If education is defined by self-reflection, then I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my classmates for awakening me. Throughout our common course of study, discussions with fellow

EdD cohort members were invaluable in testing, expanding and refining my assumed perceptions of reality and research priorities. A special note of thanks to Pumehana Silva, Poki’i Seto,

Mapuana Hayashi-Simpliciano, Julie Mower, Alex Teece, Kamehamililani Waiau, Juliet Crane-

Cory, Courtney Tsumoto, Roxanne Keliʻikipikāneokolohaka, Kona Keala-Quinabo and Kapolei

Kiili.

Of course the most difficult work of helping me craft, refine, polish and frame my research was provided by Dr. Deborah Zuercher, Dr. Kealalokahi Losch and Dr. Katherine

Ratliffe. Their willingness to help me transform raw thoughts and findings into a coherent logic

and narrative are the only reason my dissertation is readable. An especial thanks to Dr. Zuercher for inspiring me to share beyond my comfort zone and being endlessly patient as I did so. I can only hope to do the same for others in the future.

Finally, as an autoethnography, my dissertation would be empty without the mentors, colleagues, friends and antagonists who have shaped my life chapters up to this point. While too numerous to include in toto, Maj Mike Edwards, LtCol Greg Murray, COL James Brown, Mike

Monroe, Maria De la Fuente, Dr. Skip Burkle, Paul Hadik, CAPT Joe Hughart, Scott Paul and

Dr. Eric Rasmussen stand out as mentors who led without moving and taught without speaking.

Through their daily actions, each of them reflected the ideal that what you do and how you live are what define you. My hope is to honor all my teachers and supporters with this work. I only pray that my actions can match my words in the life chapters yet to be written.

Most practically, my deep gratitude to Aunty Vi and Uncle Walter for providing me the refuge to hide away, think and write in peace. And finally, to my wife and two children, who gave me the will to carry on.

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Abstract

The potential for humans to influence Earth’s climate was theorized by scientists like

Svante Arrhenius as early as 1896. Yet, as late as 2020, political leaders, like the former

President Donald Trump, and the people who follow them continue to doubt the possibility. With growing scientific evidence that human activities are degrading our planet’s ecosystem carrying capacity and creating a 6th mass extinction event (Naggs, 2017), the need to address climate change as a national security issue has become urgent.

Our obligation to prepare the next generation for man-made climate change threats is recognized by teachers, students and parents alike. But while more than 80% of American teachers and parents believe that climate change should be taught in school, fewer than 60% of the teachers feel it falls within their classroom subject area (NPR, 2019). And without the additional personnel, funds and resources political recognition would bring, humanity’s accelerating climate crisis remains largely untaught.

In 2016, I began creating Pacific ALLIES, an experiential service learning curriculum designed to teach students, cadets and midshipmen the climate change impacts on national security by transforming Kwajalein Atoll into a living sustainability laboratory. “Failing to

Survive” constitutes my reflections on the research question: From an autoethnographic perspective, what were the critical turning points in my life that led me to develop Pacific

ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century?

My use of qualitative evocative autoethnography allowed the intentional self-reflection of past learning to provide a personal perspective on a shared cultural experience (Ellis, 2004) while personal conflicts and perceptual turning points in my life were used to examine and

critique issues of larger social consequence (Jones et al., 2016). Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

(1943) provided my perceptual theoretical framework while Marcia’s (1980) framework for identity in adolescents provided a chronological roadmap to identify the metamorphic “phase changes” in my personal identity.

My research found that my decision to create Pacific ALLIES was the result of four distinct identity transformations driven by internal struggles created by gaps between the norms I had been taught in school and the realities I was living as a Marine infantry and intelligence officer, international student in China and Iran, and disaster coordination officer for USAID’s

Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

More than a positivist offering of exemplary scholarship, “Failing to Survive” is an academic attempt to make an honest accounting of my life. In revisiting how many times I’ve failed my expectations of myself, I offer this study as a cautionary tale. My only hope is that as the reader identifies the many shortcomings in my research and life decisions, they will be reinvigorated to teach in a way that prepares the next generation for the climate change challenges we leave unsolved.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ..……………………………………………………………………… ii

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………….... iv

List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………….. xi

Chapter 1: Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 1 Anticipated Significance of the Study ...……………………………………………1 Background Setting ……………………………………………………………….. 2 My Value of Existential Education ………………………………………………... 3 Preparing Next Generation Leaders for Climate Change Challenges……..………. 5 Autobiography Informs Autoethnography ………………………………………... 9 Becoming an Accidental Educator ………………………………………………... 9 Statement of the Research Problem ……………………………………………...... 11 Statement of the Research Purpose ………………………………………………...11 Statement of the Research Question ……………………………………………..... 11 Shortcomings, Liabilities and Limitations ………………………………………… 11 Time Scale ……………………………………………………………....… 12 Planetary Scope ………………………………………………………….... 14 Interdisciplinary Complexity ……………………………………………… 15 Shared Values ……………………………………………………………... 16 Existential Education’s Philosophical Challenge …………………………………. 18

Chapter 2: Review of the Literature ………………………………………………………. 22 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….. 22 Theoretical framework ……………………………………………………………. 24 Marcia ……………………………………………………………………... 25 Maslow ………………………………………………………………….… 29 Climate change as place-based and problem based education ………………....…. 30 Infrastructure ……………………………………………………………… 37 Disasters …………………………………………………………………... 42 Pandemics …………………………………………………………………. 44 Maslow’s gap …………………………………………………………….... 49 Me versus We ……………………………………………………………... 52 We = me …………………………………………………………………… 57 Why do we need a national security education for climate change? ……………… 61

Chapter 3: Methodology …………………………………………………………………... 69 Research Design: Qualitative Evocative Autoethnography ………………………. 69 Introduction to the term autoethnography ………………………………………… 70 Alignment of Autoethnography to the Research Question ……………………….. 75 Advantages of Autoethnography …………………………………….……. 75 Limitations of Autoethnography ……………………………………….…. 78 Role of the Autoethnographic Researcher ………………………………………... 79

Participant ………………………………………………………………… 81 Time and Space …………………………………………………………… 81 Place-based ………………………………………………………………... 82 Data Collection Procedure ………………………………………………………… 82 Data Analysis ……………………………………………………………………… 83 Theoretical Framework ………………………………………………………….... 85

Chapter 4: Research Findings …………………………………………………………….. 86 Tongue of Fire ……………………………………………………………. 86 Beginning the Journey ……………………………………………………………. 89 Shooting Stars …………………………………………………………….. 90 Military Gypsies ………………………………………………………….. 92 Operating Instructions ……………………………………………………. 94 Origin Myths ……………………………………………………………… 97 Family Matter ……………………………………………………………... 98 Earning Worth ……………………………………………………………... 101 Warrior’s Spirit ……………………………………………………………. 104 No Place to Call Home …………………………………………………..... 107 Stage 1: Identify Foreclosed ………………………………………………………. 109 Searching for a Tribe …………………………………………………...... 113 Know Your Rates Today ………………………………………………...... 116 The Honor Code …………………………………………………………… 123 What are We Really Teaching? …………………………………………. 125 Our “world” versus the WORLD …………………………………………. 129 Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) …………………………… 135 Jump School ………………………………………………………………. 140 Loving Education ….. ……………………………………………………... 144 First Class Summer ………………………………………………………... 148 Generally Proficient versus Artisanal Expertise …………………………... 151 The Home Stretch …………………………………………………………. 153 Ranger School …………………………………………………………….. 154 Major Mike Edwards, Officer of Marines ……………………………….... 156 Recycled …………………………………………………………………... 171 TBS - The Basic School …………………………………………………... 176 3rd Platoon, India Company, 3rd Battalion 9th Marines ………………….. 178 Textbook Solutions ………………………………………………………... 182 Seeing the light ……………………………………………………….….... 188 Know the rules before breaking them ……………………………….……. 192 Everything by the Book ………………………………………………….... 195 Transforming Stages of Grief …………………………………………….. 198 Walking to the batter’s box ……………………………………………….. 199 ARAMCO ……………………………………………………………….... 202 At least it’s a dry heat ……………………………………………………... 203 Water is Life ……………………………………………………………… 204 Recognizing the hired help ……………………………………….………. 206 Servant Leadership ……………………………………………………….. 207

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The Long Wait …………………………………………………………….. 209 Oilfield Chess ……………………………………………………………... 210 Eyes in the Sky …………………………………………………………..... 216 Dealing with the tangible ……………………………………………...... 220 Getting ready to dance ………………………………………………...... 223 Considering the costs ……………………………………………………… 225 Coming Home ……………………………………………………………... 227 Oxymoron defined: Marine Corps Intelligence …………………………… 229 What is What? ……………………………………………………………... 231 OSINT …………………………………………………………………….. 233 Cui bono …………………………………………………………………... 235 For the Good of the Service ……………………………………………….. 243 Straight Outta Compton ……………………………………………...... 245 Different scales of conflict ………………………………………………... 249 Recognizing Uncle Tom …………………………………………………... 255 Stage 2: Identity Schizophrenia …………………………………………………… 257 Searching for a fishpond …………………………………………………... 264 Post-Soviet collapse ………………………………………………………. 266 Money Talks …………………………………………………………….… 267 The heart’s compass ………………………………………………………. 274 Not my fight ………………………………………………………………. 279 邯郸学步 “Learning to walk beautifully” ………………………………… 281 The China Miracle ………………………………………………………… 283 Understanding historical context ………………………………………….. 288 Justification to rule ………………………………………………………… 290 Seeing words ………………………………………………………………. 296 Language versus Communication ………………………………………… 298 Gumdrop wisdom …………………………………………………………. 300 Choosing different ………………………………………………………… 301 Philosophical War …………………………………………………………. 302 Following the Wandering Path ……………………………………………. 315 Ground truth ……………………………………………………………… 317 The Straightened Road ……………………………………………………. 320 The King’s Story…………………………………………………………… 323 Ibn Lenin Khomeini ………………………………………………………. 325 Faces of Jihad ……………………………………………………………… 328 Chogha Zanbil …………………………………………………………….. 330 The struggle to heal ……………………………………………………….. 332 Submitting to reality …………………………………………………...... 335 Stage 3: Moratorium on Achievement ……………………………………………. 337 Coming home, again ………………………………………………………. 347 The Anointing Vessel ……………………………………………………. 348 Mary’s Room ……………………………………………………………… 351 But is it real? ………………………………………………………………. 353 Valediction ………………………………………………………………… 356 Alice in Wonderland ………………………………………………………. 360

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CENTCOM ………………………………………………………………... 372 Mr. Bairdain ……………………………………………………………….. 384 Mujahideen Math ………………………………………………………….. 395 M16A2 Math ……………………………………………………………… 401 Castle of War ……………………………………………………………… 403 But for the grace of God …………………………………………………... 405 What to think? …………………………………………………………….. 412 Seeds of destruction ……………………………………………………...... 413 Prodigal Son ………………………………………………………………. 416 They hate us because we’re “free” ……………………………………….. 419 Deliberate omissions? ……………………………………………………... 422 Separation of Church and State …………………………………………… 425 The Military Industrial Racket ……………………………………………. 427 Which “American Way of Life?” …………………………………………. 430 What are we calling you to do? …………………………………………… 431 AUMF …………………………………………………………………….. 439 What did we know when? ………………………………………………… 442 9/11 forensics …………………………………………………………….... 445 Shifting curtains……………………………………………………………. 452 Jenin ……………………………………………………………………….. 453 Bureaucracy aka Information Pyramid Scheme …………………………... 463 Going behind the Curtain …………………………………………………. 466 Drumbeats of War …………………………………………………………. 467 Drinking the Kool Aid …………………………………………………….. 469 Prestidigitation ……………………………………………………………. 470 Avoiding the Draft ………………………………………………………… 470 Indulgences ………………………………………………………………... 471 One team, one fight ……………………………………………………….. 473 Osama bin Luther …………………………………………………………. 479 Selling indulgences ………………………………………………………... 479 Expendability ……………………………………………………………… 480 Upstairs-Downstairs ………………………………………………………. 485 Enriching Baby Killers ……………………………………………………. 488 “It may work in practice… but how does it work in theory?” ……………. 489 Knowing how to think …………………………………………………….. 496 Joint Humanitarian Operations Course (JHOC) …………………………... 504 Mustering out ……………………………………………………………… 505 Sherman Teichman ………………………………………………………... 513 Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot …………………………………………………... 516 Haiti earthquake …………………………………………………………… 519 Murphy’s Laws for Overseas Disaster Response …………………………. 522 Doppelganger ……………………………………………………………... 531 Private security contractor ………………………………………………… 535 Universal Declaration of Human Rights ………………………………….. 540 Seven Samurai ……………………………………………………………. 542 Divine message ………………………………………………………….... 543

Making virtues of realities ……………………………………………...… 545 Stage 4: Being someone …………………………………………………………... 547 Non sibi sed patriae redux ………………………………………………… 548 Marcia’s Maslow’s ……………………………………………………….... 549

Chapter 5: Conclusions …………………………………………………………………… 553 Pacific ALLIES Year 1 …………………………………. ………………………... 561 Pacific ALLIES Year 2 ……………………………………………………………. 563 Pacific ALLIES Year 3 ……………………………………………………………. 565 What I learned …………………………………………………………………...... 570 So what next? ……………………………………………………………………... 576 Failing to survive …………………………………………………………………. 577

References ………………………………………………………………………………… 581

List of Figures

Figure 1 Marcia Identity Development Stage 1 …………………………………….. 110

Figure 2 Marcia Identity Development Stage 2 ……………………………………. 257

Figure 3 Marcia Identity Development Stage 3 …………………………………….. 338

Figure 4 Map of Geographic Combatant Commands (GCC) ………………………. 373

Figure 5 Average annual per capita GDP - Afghanistan ……………………………. 399

Figure 6 Marcia Identity Development Stage 4 …………………………………….. 547

Chapter 1

Introduction

Anticipated Significance of the Study

I imagine the importance of any research dissertation is to increase self-awareness and influence the next generation by sharing best practices and lessons learned. If so, my aim in sharing my life journey and the observations I’ve made along the way is the same.

If there is a difference between my reflections and those of a doctoral candidate who might desire a more prescriptive academic outcome, then it is that I don’t expect anyone to follow the path I’ve taken to gain the knowledge I’ve accumulated. In fact, I’d warn against it.

Rather, my aim in sharing my missteps and faulty previous assumptions is to provide a cautionary tale to others not to make the same mistakes.

This is because I don't believe everyone will see the same thing or find the same value in my offering. My observations and conclusions are different from those who have lived similar experiences because we have different origins and destinations in life. If the autoethnographic journey has taught me anything, it is that if we believe that truth is constructive in nature and built from a common understanding distilled from everyone’s input, then the diversity in perspectives and differences opinions are to be acknowledged and embraced in their variety, rather than compared, contrasted and amputated to fit a Procrustean positivist norm.

On a more personal note, the self-reflective nature of my research has hopefully begun the process of accomplishing three things:

1. Help me become a better person and live a more authentic life.

2. Help me understand the journey others are on and appreciate their presence.

3. Help everyone learn from each other in a more complete and complementary

manner to make the world a little better.

And if my sharing my temporary lower case “t” truths inspires others to reflect on their own past journeys and share their own personal truths with the world around them to build a more inclusive harmony of voices, then my efforts will have been well justified.

At the end of the process, I believe there are universal and timeless capital “T,” TRUTHs that all people can agree on, even if we are still wrestling to understand the full meaning of the symbolism and meaning of the words used to express them. For me, those TRUTH’s include:

Life is short; Life is precious; and all Life is interconnected. In that, the belief in a separation of

“Self” from “Other” (whether that is other people, other species, or other dynamic energy exchanges) is an artificial intellectual construct.

Perhaps my belief in our interconnected unity reflects my deepest hopes in sharing these findings. I hope the great minds of the Academy, who designed the high towers of learning that created the world we live in today, can return the fields and break bread with the ignorant and unwashed who labor to feed, clothe and shelter them. And by living the unschooled wisdom that constitutes the uneducated populations’ reality, our intellectual elite can begin to appreciate the truism that in order for any “TRUTH” to be universal and timeless, it must be freely accessible to everyone, everywhere at every stage in their life. And when the great scholars of our time reconnect their minds with the heart and soul of humanity, we might return to the aim of education being the development of theories, policies and societies that support the greatest good for all.

Background Setting

This autoethnography is an intentional self-reflection to explore my life’s lessons learned that resulted in creating Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education to prepare next

generation leaders for the climate change challenges humanity will face in the 21st Century. I would like to start the introduction by “coming clean” as an autoethnographic researcher and by first sharing my background values and inherent assumptions (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

My Value of Existential Education

What is the existential purpose of education? This may be an unusual way to begin a dissertation. But my reason for asking the question is to share my own assumptions about why we bother with the subject in the first place. For me, the existential purpose of education is to enhance the survival of the individual receiving knowledge and to promote the continuation of the community sharing it. To distill the concept further, existential education is the transmission of knowledge for the joint preservation of the individual and the group.

To clarify the use of the term, I do not believe “that existential education is about existing in relation to some subjective truth” (Saeverot, 2013, px). Nor am I talking about existentialism in education, a “teaching and learning philosophy that focuses on the student’s freedom and agency to choose their future” (Drew, 2020, p. x). Rather when I use the term, my goal is to return to Sartre’s 1945 comment, “existence precedes essence” (Lowith, 1949) and focus on the communicative instruction an adult human shares with immature youths to grow and survive that simultaneously contributes to the long term continuation of the community and human species writ large.

I view this as self-evident based on my observations as a parent that a newborn child is completely helpless at birth. Unlike other species that can run or swim within hours of delivery, human babies usually wobble even after a year of development and remain incapable of feeding, cleaning or defending themselves until several years later. Adult members of the community are required to provide an infant food, water, and shelter and must educate the undeveloped youth

how to acquire these things for themselves to reach adulthood. The unspoken expectation is that after learning lifesaving skills from their elders, the now mature humans will share their knowledge with the next generation to ensure the continuation of the species. In caveman terms, those who weren’t eaten by the cave bear or survived starvation during a drought had learned knowledge that was useful to share.

If one accepts this definition/assumption of existential education, then my proposition is that education is the key to the survival of humanity as a species. While this statement may seem obvious, it is not intuitive considering the number of species that do not require an existential education to survive. Baby turtles are not taught to head to the ocean. Adult spiders do not teach baby spiders how to weave webs. Bacteria do not need instructions on how to divide. These species' knowledge is largely instinctual and pre-programmed before birth.

This is not to mean that humans are the only species that nurture their young. Fledglings remain in the nest until fully feathered. Kangaroo joeys are carried by their mothers until they are weaned (McPherson, n.d.). However, few species require as much and as extended a period of education to survive as the human species does because our species, homo sapiens sapiens , is the result of an evolutionary investment in knowledge over weapons, armor, speed or strength.

Unlike the jaguar or grizzly bear, humans lack sharp claws and pointy fangs. Unlike the turtle and rhinoceros, a human’s skin is delicate and bleeds when scratched. Humans also lack the springbok’s speed, the gorilla’s strength and the hummingbird’s endurance; yet our species thrives.

Despite having few physical attributes that provide any comparative advantage in the animal kingdom, humans have an enhanced ability to think and reason. This “ability to think and reason is the result of investing in a brain that accounts for only 2% of the body’s weight but

consumes 20% of its total caloric intake” (Raichle & Gusnard, 2002: p. 10237). While one might argue that humans are handicapped because of the brain’s enormous caloric consumption as a proportion of body mass, I proffer that humans have come to dominate the planet through their brains’ ability for complex thinking and our species’ creation of an existential education. This may not always be the case.

Over the past six-million years there have been over 20 other species of hominids who might have been the ones to develop the internet and build spaceships that go to the moon but instead became extinct (Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, 2018). And fossils show at least one, homo neanderthalensis, had an average brain size larger than modern humans, indicating that brain capacity alone may not be the determining factor for survival (Ponce de

León et al., 2008). So, what should an existential education look like for tomorrow? One that prepares the next generation for the environmental conditions they will be expected to survive in.

Preparing Next Generation Leaders for Climate Change Challenges

Enter climate change. On 10 September 2018, the United Nations (UN) Secretary

General António Guterres (2018, speech transcript) noted that “Climate change is the defining issue of our time – and we are at a defining moment”. Secretary General Guterres (2018) described climate change as a “direct existential threat” to human survival and emphasized,

“Every day we fail to act is a day that we step a little closer towards a fate that none of us wants -

- a fate that will resonate through generations in the damage done to humankind and life on earth” (p. x)

The following month, the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC) released IPCC Special Report “Global Warming of 1.5°C,” outlining how reliance on carbon based fuels has increased average global temperatures by 1°C from pre-

industrial levels and will likely reach 1.5°C between the year 2030 and 2052 (IPCC, 2018). In

May 2019, the UN released the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and

Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report. The IPBES (2019) summary of the Global Assessment

Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, described how climate change, in combination with human geo-engineering; over-exploitation of plant and animal species; degradation of arable land and productive waters through pollution; and introduction of invasive alien species are reducing the ecosystem carrying capacity of the planet. As the Governor of Washington, Jay

Inslee succinctly puts it, “We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation that can do something about it” (The Years Project, 2014: title page).

And while I have had professors tell me that the use of the word “existential” has been objected to when describing climate change, the term is accurate when discussing all of Earth’s species over time. Since the creation of our planet and emergence of life roughly four billion years ago, there have been at least five mass extinction events that have erased 99% of all previously existing species over time (Elewa, 2008; Hodgskiss et al., 2019). In each of these events, bio-geo-chemical changes in ecosystem homeostasis caused a reordering of biota primacy where the unique characteristics that made one species dominant in a previous age often became an identifying marker for elimination in the next.

So with evidence mounting that we have entered a Sixth Mass Extinction Event caused largely by human activities (Naggs, 2017); where does that leave homo sapiens sapiens or “wise wise man” and existential education at the beginning of the Anthropocene era, the geologic epoch humans have named for themselves?

We see the threat and do not act. We know the climate is changing on a global scale. We see the environment changing as a result. We note that plants and animals are going extinct at an

increasing rate (Ceballos et al., 2015; McCallum, 2009). And if there remain any lingering questions if human beings are capable of being the cause, we have geological evidence that global climate changes have come from some of the smallest of organisms we know.

Proterozoic biologists have evidence that the first organism induced global climate change happened over 2.3 billion years ago (Kopp et al., 2005) when cyanobacteria, photosynthetic microorganisms or “pond scum,” produced much of the oxygen that we breathe today. Research findings suggest the microbial driven changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere reduced the greenhouse effect on the entire planet, eventually resulting in

“Snowball Earth.” More importantly for us, this organism driven climate change not only altered

Earth’s environment but made the evolution of humans possible.

Because the new oxygen rich, aerobic atmosphere was toxic for anaerobic organisms, they were faced with the choices of finding an anoxic refuge, evolving or going extinct.

Anaerobic prokaryotes that remained in the oxygenated environment survived through endosymbiotic speciation (Sagan, 1967); a process by which anaerobic microorganisms became hosts for even smaller aerobic and photosynthetic bacterium allowing the combined complex organism to create energy from oxygen and light.

The absorbed aerobic and photosynthetic bacterium became “organelles,” like mitochondria and chloroplasts, and formed a symbiotic relationship that allowed the combined organism, whose individual members might have died independently, survive as one

(Understanding Evolution, n.d.). These new hybrid cells became the building blocks for advanced eukaryotic multicellular plants and animals. This evolution includes the emergence of proto-primates over 60 million years ago (Goodman, 1999; Tavaré et al., 2002) and eventually modern man some 315,000 years ago (Hublin et al., 2017).

In answer to the “So what?” question that might result from someone reading the information above, “Humans are more technologically advanced than pond scum.” The potential for man-made use of fossil fuels to produce greenhouse gases and change Earth’s climate was theorized by Svante Arrhenius (1896) over a century ago. But Arrhenius himself dismissed any immediate cause for concern, as the amount of coal, oil and gas being burned by humans at that time would take millennia to have a visible impact. Yet here we are, only a century later with over seven billion people burning twenty times the amount of fossil fuels producing planetary changes unimaginable then.

Over the past 30 years, thousands of scientists from around the world have produced hundreds of studies modeling the potential future impacts of climate change with ever increasing confidence and specificity (IPCC, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c, 1990d, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1994a,

1994b, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1995d, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2001a,

2001b, 2001c, 2001d, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2007d, 2011, 2012, 2013,

2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c). Aided by super computers and transdisciplinary teams, researchers have developed historical examples - from the Akkadian empire 5000 years ago (Carolin et al., 2019; Weiss et al., 1993) to the success of the Mongol armies (Pederson et al., 2014) and the end of the Mayan Empire (Haug et al., 2003; Hodell,

Curtis & Brenner, 1995) of how climate change has both contributed to and been caused by the rise and fall of empires. Yet, despite the growing clangor and alarm over the melting glaciers and dying reefs, as witnessed by the climate strikes sparked by youth activists like Greta Thunberg

(2018), our current generation of educators are failing to incorporate the emerging climate change data into an existential education curriculum that improves the survival of the next generation and continuation of our species in our scientifically projected future of the world.

Autobiography Informs Autoethnography

So how did I come to worry about these issues? My own K-12 education was similar to any other American child and I imagine I would have turned out like my local cousins if I had grown up in Hawai`i. My performance at the United States Naval Academy was unexceptional and I probably would be enjoying a comfortable military retirement had I followed the example of my classmates. Instead, my life journey has been a continual series of critical turning points initiated by realizations that, “Hmmmm. That doesn’t seem right…”, followed almost immediately by the question, “I wonder why that is?” That cycle of questioning started with digging into unmarked Iraqi graves during the first Gulf War and continues to this day.

Unanswered questions led me to leave the Marine Corps to study Mandarin at Fudan

University in Shanghai, China. After discovering China was not very communist, I went to study

Farsi at the University of Tehran in Iran to test the proposition that the country was populated by radical Islamic terrorists. After discovering that America’s accepted truths about the “Others” were cartoonish reflections of the realities I experienced; I returned to gain an academic understanding of what I had learned overseas at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at

Tufts University.

Becoming an Accidental Educator

After graduation, I worked for the United States Agency for International Development’s

Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA) and helped coordinate humanitarian responses like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, 2004 Indonesian tsunami and 2005 Hurricane Stan in

Guatemala. And for the first time, I started to become an educator. I helped establish the USAID

Safety and Security Training that prepared civilian humanitarian workers to work in war zones and created USAID/OFDA’s Joint Humanitarian Operations Course (JHOC), designed to help

the United States military improve their support to overseas disaster responses.

After leaving USAID, I found myself once again in an education role by helping Tufts

University’s Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) develop the Alliance Linking Leaders in

Education and the Services or ALLIES. There we helped students, cadets and midshipmen learn interagency collaboration through the overseas experiential Joint Research Projects (JRP). One year later, I was recruited to the International Health Division, an experimental office under the

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs (ASD-HA) established to develop military health policy for stability operations.

Once again I was thrown into an educator role helping develop the Medical Stability

Operations Course (MSOC), designed to teach military medical and health professionals their role in stabilizing counter-insurgencies, pandemics, complex humanitarian operations, and failed states. Those experiences led to an invitation to help the Organization for Security and

Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) create a Afghan Border Police training course in Tajikistan.

Upon returning to the United States I was asked to help develop a curriculum for the language and cross-cultural challenges of executing medical stability operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After leaving Washington D.C. and returning to Hawaii, I ended up working for the

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funded National Disaster Preparedness

Training Center (NDPTC) for a year before returning to school full time to study climate change impacts on national security. In 2016, I decided to establish Pacific ALLIES as my contribution to help prepare the next generation to overcome the climate change challenges our generation will leave behind. This past summer 2019, Pacific ALLIES completed our third session and was provided funding by Kwajalein Atoll Government (KALGOV) to continue our efforts.

How did all this happen? I have no idea. I do not consider myself an educator and am

more comfortable responding to a disaster than teaching in the classroom. My hope is that autoethnography’s qualitative design will draft a roadmap that helps others chart similar journeys.

Statement of the Research Problem

The general problem is how to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century (Anderson, 2012; IPBES, 2019; Johnson, 2019;

UNFCCC, 2014; UNFCCC, 2015; Thunberg, 2019; Wu, 2019). The specific research problem is to use autoethnography to identify and describe critical turning points in my own life that led me to develop Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century.

Statement of the Research Purpose

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to utilize autoethnography to explore my life’s lessons learned that resulted in creating Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century in a way that helps others develop their own existential education initiatives.

Statement of the Research Question

From an autoethnographic perspective, what were the critical turning points in my life that led me to develop Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st

Century?

Shortcomings, Liabilities, and Limitations

Obviously to take an autoethnographic approach to global climate change research in the

United States seems preposterous in 2021. The most basic challenge of developing an existential

education curriculum is that the science behind man-made global climate change is contested by the Trump Administration (Meade, 2018). This is not to say that previous administrations have not recognized the threat climate change poses to America.

In 2000, the Clinton Administration introduced the Clean Air Partnership Fund (White

House) to bring together private, local and state efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and the

Climate Change Technology Initiative to support the development of renewable energy technology. In 2014, the Obama Administration worked with the Department of Education to develop a Climate Change Adaptation Plan to reverse the impacts of climate change and ensure our generation didn’t leave our grandchildren a planet that was polluted and damaged. But like just pandemic preparedness plans that might have been useful for the COVID-19 outbreak in

2020, transformational efforts started by previous administrations must be read and funded in order to work.

But funding challenges aside, making the argument for a national climate change curriculum becomes epistemologically challenging when 40% of Americans believe that the world is only 10,000 years old (Gallup News, 2019) and school superintendents in states like

Arizona appoint science curriculum advisors who promote the idea that “dinosaurs were present on Noah's Ark” ...but only adolescent ones, “because adult dinosaurs would have been too big”

(Flaherty, 2018). Intellectually, there are at least four other challenges which makes a research question involving climate change education unwieldy: time scale; planetary scope; interdisciplinary complexity, and shared values.

Time Scale

The first challenge is climate change manifests itself as a slow onset disaster. This “flash- to-bang” delay makes climate change difficult to study or learn from. The longer the time period

between cause and effect, the more difficult for the researcher, let alone the casual observer, to understand the correlation and causality between interdependent components. This is why educators consider it essential to administer positive and negative reinforcement during instruction as quickly as possible to ensure causality is understood (Dunn & Fantino, 1982).

From what we know about global climate change, the sources of imbalance may be mitigated by the internal system feedback loops that buffer negative consequences for millennia until a tipping point is reached; after which the entire system finds a new equilibrium in a matter of centuries (Steffen et al., 2018). A micro example at the individual level might be a youth who drinks, smokes, does drugs, has a poor diet, and doesn’t get enough sleep but somehow remains healthy for decades. Over time, their detrimental habits erode the individual’s natural defense mechanisms until a simple cold or infection opens the door for more serious diseases that become fatal in a matter of weeks. What exactly killed them? Hard to say. It all depends if you are looking for the proximate or ultimate cause of death.

As the full impacts of man-made climate change are not expected to hit for another 30 to

80 years (2050 to 2100), humans are only at the beginning stage of watching for emerging consequences of two centuries of fossil fuel use metastasize and saying, “this probably won’t end well.” But unlike the high school or college wild child we can watch with amusement or compassion as they accelerate their own demise, human lifestyle choices that rely on fossil fuels will negatively impact our entire species ability to survive. Thus, limiting ourselves to the traditional research method of requiring past human experience to validate a given hypothesis about Earth’s future livability, may reduce any satisfaction in understanding this ahistorical problem to the last climate change believer telling the last climate change denier, “See, I told you so…” before both die on a planet no longer able to sustain human life.

Planetary Scope

In studying our species’ impact on global climate change, we have to remember that the

“n” or unit of study is the entire planet. This means that the national or even regionally bounded cause and effects are not representative of the whole. For example, the actions of Icelanders on the climate change impacts on Iceland are only a miniscule factor of why the local ecosystem carrying capacity might be changing for communities in Akureyri or Reykjavik. This also means that local short-term cost risk benefit analyses cannot be used as a determining logic for global climate change decisions. The burning of the rainforests in Brazil may improve the national economy and quality of life of the local community even as the reduction in photosynthetic carbon fixation through deforestation accelerates Greenland’s ice melt and reduces the habitability of low elevation Pacific atolls.

In planetary research, it is meaningless to present artificially bounded cause and effect relationships of one location without losing its relevance to the whole. As Patton (2011, p.130) describes participatory action research, “the whole is the whole, even as it changes and evolves” and thus cannot be separated from the parts without destroying its intrinsic meaning within the context. This effectively eliminates the traditional “Us” and “Them” positionality of objective research as we are all interdependent variables in a single planetary equation. As Buckminster

Fuller explained, “We are all astronauts,” ultimately responsible for the livability of our little spaceship called Earth (Fuller, 1969).

Perhaps most frustrating for climate change scholars desiring a replicable research design is that the evolution of the planet is unidirectional and unique. This means that we can’t hit “Ctrl-

Alt-Del,” reboot the process and try again. Not only because, as Heraclitus (Plato. 360 BCEa) pointed out, both the researcher and the planet are constantly changing over time, but because

each solar system and galaxy are unique in how they were formed and are evolving. This makes it statistically unlikely for an extra-terrestrial group of researchers to copy the same processes of our climate change experiments and look for the same results on another Earth-like planet.

This proposition is bolstered by the fact that while astronomers estimate that there are

1024 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe orbited by an average of 10 planets apiece, our species has yet to confirm the existence of another Earth-like planet that can support human life (NASA, 2019). And because the future of Earth’s ecosystem carrying capacity and thus our species survival is the result of the co-evolutionary processes of homeostasis, homo sapiens sapiens are engaged in a planetary participatory action research project where the outcome is not merely an intellectual finding, but one that will determine our species expiration date on Earth. And given we are unlikely to build a spacecraft able to facilitate our escape to another habitable planet before our destruction of this one (Mayor, 2019), we collectively have only one option, figure out how to live sustainably at home before replicating our environment destroying practices somewhere else.

Most challengingly for educators designing an existential education for climate change is that in order to appreciate all these facts and understand the asynchronous, asymmetrical

“butterfly effects” of human fossil fuel use requires not only a positionality of planetary indigeneity, but an education reminiscent of the Renaissance (Burroughs, 2007; Dantas-Torres,

2015).

Interdisciplinary Complexity

The interdependent cause and effect of man-made global climate change are the combined result of every energy exchange on the planet. This means that any algorithm designed to model Earth’s processes would have to start with the energy from our Sun, the largest

extraplanetary input of energy, and then correctly reflect the interactions between every type of energy (magnetic, kinetic, chemical, physiological, electrical, light, sound,...) that drive change within Earth’s atmosphere. And while researchers with supercomputers are currently working on gross models to generalize such interchanges, no existing algorithms can model man’s fossil fuel use on global climate change beyond proximate cause.

This is partly because a comprehensive understanding of global climate change requires a basic grounding in an extremely broad range of sciences (astronomy, botany, geochemistry, meteorology, microbiology, oceanography, paleoclimatology, physics, statistics, zoology...)

(NRC, 2010; Selby, 2008). And because researchers can never understand more than they can recognize, any individual not familiar with all relevant disciplines will be incapable of fully comprehending the whole.

These factors point towards rethinking of our current prioritization of academic expertise within one narrow field of study in isolation from all others when developing an existential education for climate change. But more immediately, in order to adequately cover all the scientific disciplines involved, we need to form interdisciplinary teams composed of many experts from different fields of study to ensure all the relevant data can be incorporated into a comprehensive existential education curriculum (Berger et al., 2019; Diop & Lo, 2013; Ye,

2015). However, assembling these heterogeneous teams with researchers from around the world creates challenges of its own.

Shared Values

Harari argues in Sapiens (2015) that one of the primary reasons that we humans, homo sapiens sapiens, survived while contemporaneous hominins like homo floresiensis, homo naledi, homo heidelbergensis, homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, and homo denisova went extinct, is

our ability to work together as a single communal unit. Physiological evidence of our ability to sense other humans’ feelings has been found in human brains (Decety & Chaminade, 2003). But the limit of our abilities to work together for the purpose of group survival unaided seems to be around 150 other people, called Dunbar’s number, after the researcher who proposed the theory.

(Dunbar, 1993, 2014; Hill & Dunbar, 2003).

This numerical coordination limitation was not a problem for the first 310,000 years that humans lived in small nomadic hunter gatherer groups. But things changed with the cultivation of crops and establishment of permanent residences. As the number of people needed to complete the increasingly complicated processes needed to keep a village, city, then state and finally empire running, communities introduced myths, symbols and social structures to replace the personal knowing that was once possible within a familial tribe. Whereas everyone in your

Dunbar circle was literally a blood relative during prehistoric hunter gatherer life, communities had to invent symbolic social relationships to tie us to others in city and national life. These relationships then evolved into the imagined relationships of insider-outsider, upper class-lower class structures that define our place in our cultures, companies, religions and nations today.

Rather than personally judging an individual on the history of their personal interactions with you, social hierarchy measurements like wealth, job title, race, religion and education have become proxies for determining interpersonal dominance and privilege in a public environment.

As the planetary scope and interdisciplinary complexity of developing an existential education for climate change requires input from, analysis by and dissemination through everyone to everyone, it’s likely to stretch the capacity of existing social frameworks for interpersonal relationships beyond its breaking point. With 7.7 billion individuals speaking over

7,000 different languages (Eberhard, et al., 2020) representing at least as many philosophies,

religions, and cultures, misunderstandings are virtually assured even when discussing the shared goal of species survival. These disputes will likely extend beyond an existential education’s curriculum content questions of whether to use metric or imperial units of measurements or if more microbiology or group psychology should be included at what grade of study. Instead, more value-laden arguments over whether to prioritize teaching the preservation of this culture over the protection of that animal habitat or if young indigenous girls should get more education opportunities than old white men will emotionally charge discussions.

So, while the reduction of an existential education’s definition to the transmission information for the survival of our species is a hopeful attempt to achieve Pinchot’s (1947) conservation goals of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest period of time; it’s uncertain if our own individual id’s (Freud, 1923) can look beyond our personal advantage to the benefit of the whole. If America’s media is any guide, social efforts to promote human survival will be overshadowed by a desire for self-glorification, promotion of the conflict narrative, and pursuit of immediate gratification, making any belief in short-term individual sacrifice for long-term community benefit unsubstantiated (Habermas, 1989; Lunt & Stenner,

2005). And if we pause to reflect on America’s current educational system, we may have to reconsider what is possible at all.

Existential Education’s Philosophical Challenge

In most community traditions, education is the transfer of the accumulated knowledge distilled through past generations to help the next generation enjoy prosperous lives in the future.

This process placed a value on precedence where things that were good and true in the past were assumed to be good and true in the future and thus worthy of passing down. And as long as external conditions remain stable, the validity of past knowledge remains intact. But when social,

political, financial, economic, or environmental conditions change, the inherent value of the precedential knowledge and previous methods of instruction must be reassessed.

Our current international, political, economic and financial infrastructures are the culmination of successive Industrial Revolutions from roughly 1780 to today (Schwab, 2016) and are still ~80% dependent upon fossil fuels (Energy Information Administration, 2016; Raval

& Hook, 2019; Showstack, 2017). The industrial education system in America was designed to prepare its youth for success in this “world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock” (Toffler, 1970, p. 400)

And while America’s education system was successful for making the United States economy increasingly prosperous for over a century (1860 Morrill Act -1990 end of the Cold War), the education system did so by teaching successive generations that environmental degradation was an economic externality with acceptable human costs. We now know that is false (Carson, 1962;

Gore, 1992; Khan, 2009).

The philosophical challenge facing academia today is that the public education system designed to promote success within the international industrial capitalist system of the 19th and

20th centuries is destroying Earth’s ecosystem carrying capacity in the 21st. In almost direct opposition to the definition of an existential education, today’s schools are preparing students to succeed in a system that enriches their parents’ today to the detriment of their own tomorrow.

Teaching students how to become rich and prosperous in our current socioeconomic system without helping them understand the climate change consequence of fossil fuel dependence or how to re-evaluate “success” in life, becomes the driving school equivalent of training students to accelerate towards the Grand Canyon without helping them learn how to steer or brake.

This lack of questioning past assumptions is further complicated by academia’s general unwillingness to address the future employment implications of robots and artificial intelligence.

Not only are today’s youth being taught to replicate their parents’ environment destroying lifestyle, but they are being prepared for jobs that will not exist. So even as futurists and tech watchers project that 40% of today’s jobs will be replaced by automated systems in the next 15 years (60 Minutes, 2019), the American education system continues preparing them for employment that will disappear by the time they graduate. All combined, these trends represent a fundamental betrayal of the trust students place in their elders to provide an existential education that prepares them to survive the future.

On the one hand, this is nothing new. Novitiates were inducted into monasteries producing illuminated manuscripts at the same time printing presses were arriving in the village square. Southern landowners were still instructing their sons how to discipline slaves as the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. And Native Americans were teaching their youth how to hunt buffalo on horseback at the same time the Transcontinental Railroad tracks were being laid. The biggest difference between the evolution of existential educational content then and now is climate change’s planetary pervasiveness where everything is changing everywhere for everyone simultaneously.

Our generation’s failure to create a climate change curriculum that empowers the next generation’s existential education represents the greatest challenge to a long-standing social assumption about education, that adults know best. In the past, when knowledge was held in elders’ memories or written down in books, access to knowledge was through the individual or institution holding accumulated wisdom. The utility of the elder’s wisdom was validated by their ability to advance to old age.

Today, unlike the caveman days of the past, survival and longevity have less to do with an individual's knowledge or wisdom and more to do with their ability to afford the scientific advances in agriculture, engineering, physics and medicine that keep them alive despite their ignorance or risky behavior. But this shift in information access and how people survive creates educational relationships that didn’t exist before students with an Internet connection had immediate access to more information about any topic than any one teacher can ever remember, or school can hold in their libraries. As access to information becomes universal and our educational systems continue teaching self-destructive environmental and workforce development practices, the logic for humanity’s youth to defer to their elders and academic institutions for future life guidance evaporates.

All of these factors point towards the need for an inter-generational experiential co- creation of knowledge (Wisner, 2006). Past generations created the cataclysmic problems emerging today and have a responsibility to fix them. But as the scope and scale of climate change exceeds any one individual, nation, or generation to rectify, we must learn to learn from each other. Not only to study what happened in the past but to prepare for what we can begin to imagine for the future.

Of course, after just laying out why it’s impossible to answer the question, “How do we develop an existential education for the climate change challenges that our generation will leave unsolved?” any reader would be justified in asking, “Exactly how do you intend to do that?” In order to do something manageable within my lifetime, I have focused on my autoethnographic research on understanding: What are the critical turning points in my life that led me to develop

Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century?

Chapter 2

Review of the Literature

“It may work in practice...but how does it work in theory?” (Bissell, 1959, p.12).

So how does an infantry Marine or disaster responder become an educator? As the working title notes, pretty much by accident. But then this leads us to a bigger challenge of where does a review of literature come in with an autoethnography methodology where the source of data and lens for analysis is the Self? This might lead a researcher to ask if they even need a review of literature if they are using this qualitative approach. Despite any potential hopes to the contrary, the Academy’s answer is, “Of course.”

Introduction

The University of Hawaii’s Education Doctorate in Professional Educational Practice

(EdD) was established in 2011 under the principles that the “preparation of quality educators in professional practice should take place:

● In the context of thinking and acting as a leader in the profession;

● Be conducted in ways that provide opportunities for individuals to work

collaboratively in solving problems and implementing appropriate plans of

action

● Include opportunities for the development and application of inquiry skills so

that practitioners can apply their research skills to bring about improvements

in practice

● Provide opportunities in critical and ethical reflection on matters of

educational importance. (University of Hawaii, n.d.)

The essential education points being the EdD candidate will not only strive to act as a leader in

the profession upon graduation, but that they will work collaboratively to bring about improvements in education by focusing on matters of critical and ethical importance.

The University of Hawaii’s EdD program was developed under the philosophical framework of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), which believes, “The professional doctorate in education prepares educators for the application of appropriate and specific practices, the generation of new knowledge, and for the stewardship of the profession”

(CPED, n.d.). The goal being to ensure that the CPED Professional Doctorate in education:

● Is framed around questions of equity, ethics, and social justice to bring about

solutions to complex problems of practice.

● Prepares leaders who can construct and apply knowledge to make a positive

difference in the lives of individuals, families, organizations, and communities.

● Provides opportunities for candidates to develop and demonstrate

collaboration and communication skills to work with diverse communities and

to build partnerships.

● Provides field-based opportunities to analyze problems of practice and use

multiple frames to develop meaningful solutions.

● Is grounded in and develops a professional knowledge base that integrates both

practical and research knowledge, that links theory with systemic and

systematic inquiry.

● Emphasizes the generation, transformation, and use of professional knowledge

and practice. (CPED, n.d.)

All of these principles point to the need to first understand what the existing standards of the field are before attempting to collaborate with other practitioners or contribute something imagined as

previously undiscovered. This starts with sharing established scientific facts and considered opinions of established leaders in the field of practice.

So while my dissertation will focus on the themes and critical turning points in my life that led me to develop Pacific ALLIES as a means of essential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century; my

Chapter Two will provide a review of the literature connected to three foundational questions that

I will refer to throughout my autoethnographic narrative:

● What is the theoretical framework?

● Why do we need to study climate change as place-based and problem-based

education?

● Why do we need a national security education for climate change?

Theoretical Framework

Given that a primary purpose of the EdD is to develop a framework for educating educators, one component of the dissertation should probably be focused on what is the essential purpose of education and the content of that curriculum. At the beginning of the dissertation, I assert that the existential purpose of education is to enhance the survival of the individual receiving knowledge and continuation of the community sharing it. In this formulation,

“existential education” is knowledge shared between society and the individual and that facilitates their joint preservation.

I realize that usage of the term “existential” may cause protests from followers of

Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartres, de Beauvoir, Nietzsche and other philosophers, who might use the term to mean the freedom to define one’s being and purpose according to one’s own individual interpretation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020). In this understanding, an individual’s

value and purpose are not defined by society’s measure, but by the individual’s ability to live completely, passionately, and authentically beyond society’s norms.

While the philosophical interpretation of the term existential education is probably useful for educators trying to develop a curriculum and instructional approach for a student who does not respond to a standard school setting; my own use of the phrases “existential purpose of education” and “existential education” are much less philosophical and more descriptive. I frame the usage of “existential education” around the twin assumptions that (1) we humans are physically weak and vulnerable compared to other animal species, and that (2) it is our ability to learn from past experiences and share best practices with each other that has allowed homo sapiens to thrive. In this, utilization of the term “existential” is less a debate over one’s state of mind and more a question of being: What educational processes and content will keep humans from going extinct?

I rely heavily on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) for my theoretical framework. The overarching logic being that if the “essential purpose of education is to enhance the survival of the individual receiving knowledge and continuation of the community sharing it” then we must start by clarifying what is essential and what is not. This is not to say that the study of other subjects is unimportant, but rather my attempt to convince you why the study of climate change is essential for education.

Marcia

I also use Marcia’s (1980) framework for identity in adolescents as a chronological roadmap to identify the metamorphic “phase changes” my sense of personal identity went through in understanding existential education as it relates to climate change and national security and the final development of Pacific ALLIES. Marcia (1980) was adopted at the suggestion of

my dissertation committee as a way to differentiate one stage of life thinking from another. And in ways that parallel Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs, Marcia’s (Stephen et al., 1992) completion of one stage is necessary to facilitate tackling the next.

Marcia (1980) identifies four different stages of adolescent development where children become aware of their autonomy in the stages of: identity foreclosure, identity diffusion, identity moratorium and identity achievement. Identify foreclosure is typically defined as the stage where children accept the identity and roles assigned to them by their parents and society without question. Identity diffusion resembles foreclosure in that the individual seems to conform to external expectations with the difference that in this stage the individual is just going through the motions and is not committed to the role they have been assigned. These first two stages are contrasted by the last two stages of identity moratorium and identity achievement, which are defined by exploration on the part of the individual to find their own identity (Marcia, 1980).

In identity moratorium (Stephen et al., 1992), the individual’s equilibrium within identity diffusion or identity foreclosure is unbalanced by unanswerable challenges to previously accepted assumptions of being that require exploration of new possible definitions of self. The ongoing struggle of rectifying observed realities and internal beliefs evolves into the final stage of identity achievement (Marcia, 1980). It is in this stage that the individual embraces a world view of their own making and determines their own life path moving forward.

Of course, the reader might immediately raise three concerns with using Marcia (1966,

1980) in framing the dissertation. First, Marcia’s (Marcia, 1966, 1980; Stephen et al., 1992) identity development theory is normally used by adults to examine adolescents' psychological evolution as individuals, not as a template for self-reflective development. Second, identity in adolescence is focused on the period of life where children become aware of their independent

autonomy and normally corresponds to the teenage or young adult years. Third, focus on identity achievement where, after a period or crisis and exploration, the individual commits to an identity of self that aligns with their personal needs, beliefs and values smacks of the Kierkegaardian

(2009) definition of “existential education.” To each of those complaints, I can only respond,

“You’re right.”

The liberties that I have taken with Marcia’s (1966, 1980) concepts are based on his own observations on the subject. While Marcia respects Erickson’s concept of placing “identity within the context of ego-psychoanalytic theory, viewing it (identity) as the epigenetically based psychosocial task distinctive but not exclusive to adolescence” ( Marcia, 1980, p. 159); Marcia recognizes that “(i)f the termination of adolescence were to depend on the attainment of a certain psychosocial position, the formation of an identity, then, for some, it would never end.” All of which would seem to be the case with me.

Luckily, in a subsequent article on lifespan identity development, Marcia and his colleagues (Stephen et al., 1992) highlighted their findings that while the initial post-adolescent identity may be the final one for some persons, internal awakenings and external forces such as loss of a job or spouse could force individuals to know who they are forcing a re-search for oneself. As a result, “(o)ne’s sense of identity would seem to necessarily shift and expand to accommodate the wider concerns exemplified by each psychosocial stage” (Stephen et al., 1992, p. 286). All this leading to the validation of Marcia’s observation that “studying identity in adolescence is not a task for the methodologically hypersensitive” (Marcia, 1980, p. 159).

This state of retarded adolescence or continually refighting battles of identity moratorium and identity achievement is one I found myself in over a period of three decades as the environment, societal rules of the game and goal posts for life priorities were moved or changed.

Marcia and his colleagues humorously named this process as “MAMA'' or (moratorium - achievement-moratorium-achievement) cycles (Stephen et al., 1992). The end goal being to leave

“MAMA'' and develop an identity that remains viable in all roles, situations and environments.

To use Marcia’s (1980, p.160) words:

A well-developed identity structure, like a well-developed superego is flexible. It is open

to changes in society and to changes in relationships. This openness assures numerous

reorganizations of identity contents throughout the “identity-achieved” person’s life,

although the essential identity process remains the same, growing stronger through each

crisis.

The end of all this exploration being movement from an infantile self-object differentiation to a

“self-mankind” integration at old age.

Thus, to address the three objections mentioned above: first, while Marcia’s (1966,1980) identity theories might be used by developmental psychologists to assess a youth, the autoethnographic methodology provides a way for an older me to analyze and reflect on the attitudes, decisions, and beliefs of my younger self. And through autoethnography’s analysis of past memories, I am able to reflect on whether my younger self was in a period of diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium or achievement. Second, as Marcia notes, this process of identity development continues throughout an individual’s life as long as there are crises that exceed previous understandings of self (Stephen et al., 1992). And third, while Marcia’s (1966,1980) identity formation process may have some elements of Kierkegaard’s view of existentialism; as I understand it, Marcia’s purpose is one of defining the different states of identity diffusion, identity foreclosure, identity moratorium and identity achievement, rather than develop curriculum content for an “existential education.” For that, I return to Maslow (1943).

Maslow

In 1943 Maslow wrote an article called, “A Theory of Human Motivation” that outlined the five levels of human needs that must be fulfilled in order to live a truly meaningful life. These needs (physiological, safety, love, esteem, self-actualization) are often visualized in pyramidal fashion with the fulfilment of the preceding need being a prerequisite before beginning to achieve the next. For example, physiological needs like food, water, sex and shelter, will need to be attained before addressing needs of personal safety, health, and employment. Once the physiological and safety needs are met, then the third need of love can be tackled. The final goal being to achieve “self-actualization” which might be phrased as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming” (Maslow, 1943, pg.

382).

But physiological needs start with having enough food to eat. I include Maslow’s complete ruminations on hunger as a starting point for our discussion on the future impacts of climate change (1943, pp. 373-374).

If all the needs are unsatisfied, and the organism is then dominated by the physiological

needs, all other needs may become simply non-existent or be pushed into the background.

It is then fair to characterize the whole organism by saying simply that it is hungry, for

consciousness is almost completely preempted by hunger. All capacities are put into the

service of hunger-satisfaction, and the organization of these capacities is almost entirely

determined by the one purpose of satisfying hunger. The receptors and effectors, the

intelligence, memory, habits, all may now be defined simply as hunger-gratifying tools.

Capacities that are not useful for this purpose lie dormant or are pushed into the

background. The urge to write poetry, the desire to acquire an automobile, the interest in

American history, the desire for a new pair of shoes are, in the extreme case, forgotten or

become of secondary importance. For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry,

no other interests exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, he thinks about

food, he emotes only about food, he perceives only food and he wants only food. The

more subtle determinants that ordinarily fuse with the physiological drives in organizing

even feeding, drinking or sexual behavior, may now be so completely overwhelmed as to

allow us to speak at this time (but only at this time) of pure hunger drive and behavior,

with the one unqualified aim of relief.

Most Americans alive today have never experienced the hunger that Maslow speaks of.

But writing to an audience who have lived through the Great Depression and were going through

World War II rationing of coffee, meat, and cheese, Maslow was talking to a different readership than Americans reading his work today. After wartime rationing of food ended in 1947, any reason for hunger in the United States virtually disappeared.

Between 1965 and 1982, Americans had access to >3,140 to 3,380 kCal/person/day respectively. (CIA, 1984; Gortner, 1975) and by 2017, Americans were consuming roughly 3,600 kCal/person/day. (Goldberg, S. & Flerberg, E., 2017) The Sphere Handbook (2018), which publishes the international standards for meeting Maslow’s physiological needs in wars, famines and disasters around the world estimates that an individual requires about 2100 kcal/person/day.

This means that the average American has access to 170% of the calories needed to meet the physiological need for food, allowing them to begin achieving higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. This is not true for everyone around the world.

Climate change as place-based and problem-based education

The World Food Program (2019) estimates that there are 821 million people around the

world whose physiological hunger needs are not met. This means that roughly 1 in 9 humans are unable to begin working on “safety” the next stage of their human development. The implications of Maslow’s hypothesis are even more worrisome when we consider the number of people living without clean water.

While you can survive three weeks without food, you can normally survive only three days without water. According to the UN Sustainable Development Goals report on water and sanitation (SDG, 2019) there are 785 million people or one in 10 humans, who lack a reliable potable water source. Of those people with shelter, roughly three billion people or two in five humans do not have handwashing facilities in their home. Finally, add to these challenges, four billion people suffer at least one month of severe water scarcity every year (Mekonnen &

Hoekstra, 2016). These statistics suggest that during the course of an average year, roughly 40% of humanity are living in some sort of food or water stress that makes it impossible for them to fulfil Maslow’s essential needs, let alone more esoteric ones like love, esteem and self- actualization.

From an educational perspective, Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that students need to be fed, clothed, and housed before they can begin to learn. It may even be necessary to ensure that students’ safety and love needs are met if they are to understand more philosophical lessons on individual morals and social ethics. Any number of there studies show the strong correlation between being sufficiently fed and mentally prepared for the classroom (Alaimo et al., 2002;

Hollings, 1970; Nyaradi et al., 2013; P.L. 1966, pp.89-642; Weinreb et al., 2002), while others show that students who feel safe and loved perform better than those who are not. (El Sheikh et al., 2007; Valiente et al., 2012; Wentzel & Feldman, 1993).

Of course, humanity’s inability to provide these basic Maslow’s physiological, safety and

love needs that allow for education may not seem completely inept when you consider that for the first ~4,000 years of recorded history, the total population of all humans on Earth remained under 350 million individuals or roughly the same population as the United States of American today (United States Census Bureau, 2018). It is only in the past two centuries that the human population has exploded from around 1 billion people in the world in 1800 to an estimated 7.7 billion people today (United Nations Population Fund, 2019). Yet despite massive improvements in science and technology, 800 million people remain chronically undernourished (FAO, 2018a).

The United Nations estimates that global food production will need to increase from between

25% to 100% depending on location farms and the type of diet humans choose in order to feed the 9.7 billion people who are anticipated to be alive in 2050 (FAO, 2009; Hunter et al., 2017).

At the same time that the population of humans is increasing, climate change impacts on rainfall patterns and growing seasons are projected to reduce the mean global crop yields of rice, maize and wheat by 6-20% (FAO, 2018b) leading some to begin remembering Malthus’ 1798

“Essay on the Principle of Population” (Sachs, 2008) More worrisome are studies which project that changing atmospheric composition associated with climate change will decrease the iron, zinc and protein content of crops, diminishing their nutritional value (Smith & Myers, 2018). And with climate change impacting planting seasons, growing ranges, and migration patterns, it’s forecast that even delicacies like coffee (Moat et al., 2017), wine (Zoecklein, 2018), chocolate

(Scott, 2016) and sashimi (Erauskin‐Extramiana et al., 2019) will become more rare.

In contrast to the world our ancestors left to us, which included such wonders as antibiotics, televisions, microwave ovens, intercontinental air travel and recreational drugs, we are leaving our progeny a darker future. By 2050, scientists predict that as many as five billion people will live in water stressed regions. (Schlosser et al., 2014). Other climate change

simulations predict that as increased air temperatures support higher air humidity, many equatorial regions will become uninhabitable for weeks on end. (Sherwood & Huber, 2010). The

International Organization of Migration (IOM, 2009) projects that loss of living space combined with increasing food and water insecurity will create between 25 million and one-billion climate refugees in the next thirty years. Thus, the need for an essential education to include these climate change forecasts in our educational curricula have enormous political implications for retaining our liberal democratic form of government.

Enlightened democracies require an educated electorate. In a letter to encourage his state legislator to institute a poll tax of 1 cent (~18 cents in 2019 dollars) to establish a public school system for Virginia, Thomas Jefferson (1816), principal author of the Declaration of

Independence and third president of the United States, noted, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.” Noting democracy’s critical need for literacy he continued, “The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe” (Jefferson, 1816).

Unfortunately, in the absence of adequate food, water, and shelter, voters don’t have the time, resources or luxury for education. Instead, parents will surrender their own liberty to strongmen utilizing a “might makes right” justification to rule (Weber, 1919) in order to secure the children’s access to food, water and safety. In situations like these, critical inquiry about concepts like rule of law, civil society, gender equality, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transvestite, queer (LGBTQ) rights become subordinate to putting food on the table and being able to sleep without fear at night. If climate change’s predicted impact further degrades the ability of our

current global system to provide for Maslow’s physiological needs for everyone, our entire global economic system is in danger of embracing Melian Dialogue rules where “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides, 431 BCE).

This is because dictatorships are effective. When a group is imperiled with a life or death decision, people don’t always turn to the most honest and kind person, let alone the wisest and most knowledgeable group. The historical default seems to be the submission of individual rights to a demagogue with the loudest voice who wields the most power over the basic necessities of life. And because dictators don’t need to consult with stakeholders to make a decision or work through a bureaucracy to take action, they become attractive in their responsiveness (Powell,

2013). As more and more people begin viewing climate change as an existential threat that democracies seem incapable of addressing, there are bubbling murmurs that enlightened dictatorships may be the only governmental system capable of addressing the problems (Banyan,

2019; Kurbjuweit, 2019; Oreskes & Conway, 2013; Runciman, 2019; Shearman & Smith, 2007).

These whispers become more worrisome when you consider the Economist Intelligence

Unit’s 2018 Democracy Index report (EIU, 2018). While the total number of individuals participating in the democratic process has increased over the past decade, there has been a downward trend in all other categories examined (civil liberties, political culture, functioning of government, and electoral pluralism). The net result is a decline in the total percentage of the world’s population living under some sort of democracy from 49.3% in 2017 to 47.7% (EIU,

2018, p.4).

Thus, the emerging complexities of climate change do not limit themselves to the mathematical logistics of putting 2100 kcal of food and three liters of water in everyone’s mouth each day, but also include the functioning of government and the choices about the political

system humanity will live under in the 21st century. So, what does an essential education for climate change look like?

John Adams, the second president of the newly established United States, predated

Maslow by over a century. Yet, he understood the relationship between an essential education and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In a letter to his wife from Paris in 1780 (National Archives, n.d.), Adams wrote:

The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art

of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude

in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks (sic) and War that my sons may have

liberty to study Mathematicks (sic) and Philosophy. My sons ought to study

Mathematicks (sic) and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture,

navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study

Painting, Poetry, Musick (sic), Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine (sic).

Adams knew that ensuring the integrity of the state through politics and war was essential before the study of other disciplines could begin. Only after establishing a stable civil society would the academic environment for studying philosophy, history, math, engineering and science emerge. Correspondingly, only after studies which addressed Maslow’s (1943) physiological and safety needs, could studies that addressed love, esteem and self-actualization needs, like theater, painting, music, and dance, flourish.

Thus, it seems Adams and Maslow had similar views about the priority of study for different academic disciplines in order to prevent civil society’s collapse. One only has reread

Book XIII of Plato’s Republic (360 BCEb) for examples and reasons why democracies fall to tyranny through the equalization of all and the undisciplined pursuit of individual freedom. But

while the concept of democracy is over 2,000 years old , the idea of utilizing a democratic form of government for all humanity through the United Nations is less than 75 years old.

The principal question that faces the United States as founder of the United Nations and undisputed leader of the current global social, political, economic system Americans enjoy in the

21st Century is, “What happens when democracy fails to provide the promised Maslowian ‘Life,

Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ to the rest of the world?” And both Jefferson and Madison would probably say, “We told you the answer in the founding of our country.”

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”(Jefferson et al., 1776). The“Constitution” or health of the United States is measured by its ability to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic

Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the

Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” (Madison et al., 1787). The United Nations

Universal Declaration of Human Rights echoed these goals (UN, 1948).

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of

himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and

necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment,

sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances

beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children,

whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary

and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and

professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be

equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to

the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote

understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and

shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their

children.

But when the system fails to provide those rights to global citizens, the Declaration of

Independence cautions, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness” (Jefferson et al., 1776). This means that if the liberal democratic world order the United States established at the end of the World War II is to survive the coming impacts of climate change, Americans must recommit themselves to meeting the

Maslowian needs around the world necessary for democracies to survive: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for all.

So how might climate change derail those efforts? Three words: infrastructure, disasters and pandemics.

Infrastructure

Currently, 500,000 Americans are homeless (White House, 2019) and are part of the 1.1 billion people who sleep without permanent shelter around the world (Speak, 2019). Being

homeless makes it difficult to get an education and prevents us from helping them address their next level needs of love, esteem and self-actualization. And climate change is projected to make more people homeless in the future.

A traditional wood and brick house may have a structural lifetime of over 100 years; while a modern steel and glass building lasts around 75 years (Statistica, 2019). “Big Box” structures like Walmart and Costco have a functional utility of less than 35 years (Cummins,

2018). As global climate changes increase average surface temperatures and atmospheric humidity around the world, it accelerates the deterioration process of structures requiring them to be repaired or rebuilt more frequently.

This creates a slight problem. Wooden beams, cladding and other lumber products are cut from trees which represent a global carbon sink or means of absorbing atmospheric CO2. Cutting down more trees to build new structures will reduce nature’s climate change safety net that forests in Brazil (DW, n.d.), Burma (Naing, 2008), and the Congo (Bergen, 2019) represent. On the other side of the equation, building more short term structures out of concrete is not a great solution, as each ton of concrete produced results in 1.25 tons of CO2 being released into the atmosphere (Rammed Earth Consulting, n.d.; Rogers, 2018) And of course, building iron and steel structures are challenged by the fact that over 70% of foundries in the world today still rely on fossil fuels to heat their furnaces (World Coal Association, n.d.).

This means that as building deterioration accelerates and the human population of the world increases from 7.7 billion today to 9.7 billion in 2050, governments and construction companies will have to decide how to build enough houses, condominiums and apartment complexes out of materials that accelerate global climate change either by increasing the production of greenhouse gases or decreasing the Earth’s natural ability to sequester carbon

through deforestation. Of course, all these essential education challenges can be pushed off onto curriculum developers thirty years in the future when the students sitting in classrooms today are finally leading the world as teachers, school administrators, elected officials and business executives. But that doesn’t help us to ignore the livability challenges of buildings that people occupy today.

Increasingly, climate change is being recognized as the cause behind the summer 2003 heatwave that left 35,000 to 70,000 dead (Robine et al., 2007). To put the 2003 heatwave death toll into an American national security context, lower limit of 35,000 is nearly a dozen times greater than the 9/11 terrorist attacks death toll of 3,000 people; while the upper limit of 70,000 exceeds the total combined battle deaths of American service members from the American

Revolutionary War (4,435), War of 1812 (2,260), Indian Wars (~1,000), Mexican War (1,733),

Spanish-American War (385), Korean War (33,739) and first Gulf War (148) (VA, 2017). With

15,000 heatwave attributable deaths in France alone and 11,731 killed over the age of 75, French families left for their annual summer vacation only to return and find grandmother dead and already decomposing (Fouillet et al., 2006).

Welcome to the new normal of climate change apartheid. Roughly 20% of the building energy use is from the use of fans or air conditioners (IEA, 2018). With increasing population and global climate temperatures, the use of air conditioners is expected to quadruple to 14 billion units by 2050, increasing the electricity needed to power them (Peters et al., 2018). If global energy production does not shift from its current 80% fossil fuel dependence, we create a positive feedback loop where the production of electricity for air conditioners and fans will produce more greenhouse gases increasing the rate of climate change, requiring more air conditioners, requiring more energy, burning more fossil fuel, accelerating the rate of climate change ad nauseum.

And as more and more money is spent on keeping the electricity going, more and more people will be faced with the choice of turning off the air conditioner or being left homeless for not being able to pay the rent. While not a life threatening scenario in most cases today, it is becoming one for our children.

The challenge in this scenario is one of atmospheric physics. As surface temperatures increase so does the air’s ability to hold water vapor, resulting in an increase in humidity. And at a certain point, the ability for the human body to self-regulate its core internal temperature will fail resulting in heat stroke and eventually death. That temperature is assessed to be a web bulb globe temperature (WBGT) of 35C(95F) (Sherwood & Huber, 2010) . This means that at over

90% humidity and 35C (95F), you will literally die just by standing still outside because your body will not receive any evaporative relief from sweating.

Using physics, you can calculate the WBGT equivalent of 35C in different humidities.

WBGT 35C is achieved when the air temperature is 37.7C (100F) with 85% humidity and 50C

(122F) with 50% humidity. Even the United States Marine Corps respects the WBGT raising the red flag at 31C (88F) and curtailing all strenuous activities for any personnel who have not been acclimatized to the heat for three months and raising the black flag at 32C(90F) restricting all personnel from any physical activities (USMC, 2019).

In a study done on the climate change impacts on the WBGT of India, Pakistan,

Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, researchers found that by 2100 under a representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario, a region covering 62 million people (~4%) will have sustained WBGT of 35C (Im et al., 2017). That means that if those people don’t have continuous access to an air conditioned room, they will get heat stroke and die just by trying to walk around outside. And while some people may pooh pooh 60 million people as a manageable number, the

team’s model projects that by 2100 roughly 75% of the South Asian population or 1.2 billion people will be subjected to 31C WBGT, considered red flag conditions by the United States

Marines.

One only needs to read articles like the Independent’s “In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change” (Hall, 2019) about the climate change apartheid created by heat waves in Iraq to see anecdotal evidence of the future we are creating today. Even temperate Hawaii is not immune to these effects. As the National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Center for Environmental Information notes the average temperature in Hawaii has increased 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950 meaning there is statistical evidence to granddad’s tales of it being cooler when he was younger. The immediate impact on education being the Hawaii State Representatives introducing House Bill 247 that states (State of Hawaii, 2019):

● The legislature finds that hot classroom temperatures in Hawaii's public schools can

adversely affect students by making them drowsy, irritable, and unmotivated.

Hawaii's overheated classrooms can also cause students to suffer headaches, nausea,

and heat rashes.

● The legislature further finds that classroom temperatures even over eighty degrees

can lead to students' decreased concentration and decreased performance on testing.

● The legislature finds that heat abatement in Hawaii's public schools is becoming a

necessity for students to learn and enjoy their time in school.

Now imagine how India will maintain an educated democracy if the government is unable to keep their classrooms cool when its population surpasses China in 2027 (The Economic Times,

2019). And yet, people struggling with these conditions may actually be considered lucky when you consider the impacts of sea level rise on human habitation.

Disasters

As noted in Murphy’s Laws for Overseas Disaster Response “Disasters are predictable”

(Nakano, 2010). It’s our job as community members to understand why. Murphy continues:

Disasters result when external conditions exceed the normal capacities of a

society’s response mechanisms. We know where the 10-, 50- and 100-year flood

levels are. We can calculate the building specifications necessary to withstand a

Category 5 hurricane or a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake. Individuals and societies

choose to build cheaper structures based on a cost-risk-benefit calculation. Think

“Three Little Pigs” times the size of the vulnerable population.

In the story of the Three Little Pigs, each pig has a choice of the type of materials needed to build their home. The cost-risk-benefit analysis being whether to spend a lot of money and time building a long lasting structure or spend the minimal amount of time and money on the structure so that the pig can go back to playing. And so, the lazy pig builds their house out of straw, the minimum standard pig builds their house out of sticks, while the most industrious pig builds their home out of bricks.

When the threat, in the form of a wolf appears, the straw and stick houses are blown down leaving only the brick house standing. In the children’s story the other pigs are let into the brick house so that everyone survives. But looking at humanity’s current responses to others in distress around the world today, we find reality much less innocent.

I only raise this point to note that all contemporary “disasters are predictable.” And without slipping too far into my own experiences as a disaster responder, in every event I

participated in the potential impacts of the hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, flood, famine or war had been previously predicted and ignored. In fact, if anyone digs into the history of recent disasters, I am confident they will find documentation by researchers and local leaders pointing out the growing risks of inaction to previously identified threats.

The growing disaster in the making is built on our current wealth inequality driven hunger, lack of water and homelessness combined with growing killer heat waves and multiplied by our global population increase of 7.7 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100. So, while climate change will not be the immediate cause for the disaster, like the Three Little Pigs, our failure to prepare for known growing threats will be.

As fossil fuel use increases greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which raise average global temperatures, it shrinks Earth’s polar ice caps and the planet’s average snow coverage during the year (Yumashev et al., 2019). The shift from white ice to blue ocean or brown soil means that the surface of the Earth absorbs more sunlight energy, accelerating atmospheric heating. This creates another positive feedback loop where decreasing snow cover increases average global temperatures, which exposes more sea and land, which then accelerates the rate of climate change, until all of Earth’s “permafrost” has melted. This ice all contributes to sea level rise.

In the best case scenario of RCP 2.6, which humanity will not achieve unless we were on track to meet all the Paris Agreement goals, average sea level rise will increase 0.43 m (1ft 5in) over the next 80 years (IPCC, 2019d). In the worst case scenario of RCP 8.5, which humanity is set to hit if we continue our “business as usual” reliance on fossil fuel energy resources, average sea level rise will be 0.84 m (2ft 9in) by 2100, which is essentially a death sentence for low lying island countries. And with 40% of humanity living within 100 km (60 miles) of a coast, we can

expect massive population displacements around the world.

Translating the new data from the UN Report on The Ocean and Cryosphere in Changing

Climate (2019c) into Maslowian impacts on humanity, researchers project that in a best case

2050 scenario (RCP 2.6) only 130 million people will be permanently displaced with about 270 million being subjected to annual flooding (Kulp & Strauss, 2019). And as RCP 2.6 projects a leveling off of total greenhouse gas levels, the best case 2100 scenario is only 150 million permanently displaced and 300 million affected by annual flooding.

However, if humanity continues on with our current use of fossil fuels and destruction of the environment (RCP 8.5) we can expect 180 million permanently displaced by 2050 and 340 million impacted by annual flooding. Without curbing fossil fuel use, the impacts increase to 520 million permanently displaced with 640 million affected by annual flooding by 2100. This means that any additional flood surge or hurricane/typhoons will break fragile and eroding infrastructure creating millions more homeless beyond an incremental sea level rise. All these factors put the

IOM’s projections (2009) of 25 million to 1 billion climate refugees by 2050 into perspective and make the higher end projections more plausible.

But this isn’t a “disaster” in the sense of something unexpected that has catastrophic impacts. Rather it is a “straw pig” choice not to invest the time, energy and resources to prepare for a growing wolf. Of course, national border patrols manning the walls can attempt to keep the

“Other” out telling the world, we don’t want your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free (Lazarus, 1883). But there’s another threat that comes from 1 billion people being displaced because of climate change.

Pandemics

Jared Diamond notes in Guns, Germs and Steel (2005) that the success of European

colonization was attributable to advances in military technology and advanced logistical capability as brought about by the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. But he also notes that the extensive depopulation of the native communities through European introduced plagues that eroded the indigenous governing systems that facilitated foreign conquest. New analysis of conquest, climate change and pandemics is pointing to the correlation between the colonization of the New World and the Little Ice Age which lasted from between 1550 to 1850 (NASA, n.d.).

Researchers studying the Little Ice Age have puzzled over the fact that variations in solar insolation, volcanic eruptions and other natural inputs could only account for ~1.3 ppm of the 6 to 9 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2 concentrations between 1525 and 1600. Wondering what the impact of the European arrival, they returned to areas depopulated after the arrival of Europeans.

By dating the charcoal and soil in previously cultivated slash and burn fields, they were able to determine the acreage reforested.

Cross referencing dates that agricultural lands were reforested with the estimated 90% decrease in population after European contact, they concluded: the depopulation of the region reduced both the need for cultivated fields as well as the people to provide the labor. This in turn led to trees overtaking the land which would have increased carbon sequestration by 17 to 38

Gigatons (Gt) (Nevle et al., 2011). So, while the genocide of native American populations was unlikely the sole cause of the Little Ice Age, it is now accepted as significant factor in its severity and duration (Power et al., 2013).

But while the story of the research is focused on the ability of reforestation to cause the

Little Ice Age, the story also highlights another relationship between global climate and human population. Recent research is showing correlations between the spread of the Black Death and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and climate change (Irfan, 2012; Schmida et al., 2015). Not only

did the Mongol invasions and World War I stress and often break the local water, food and health infrastructure, but the intercontinental nature of the wars meant that people with local immunity were able to spread the disease across thousands of miles to other populations with no immunity.

Thus, the same mechanism that facilitated Europeans conquest in the New World and helps explain how the West was won will become a threat to all humanity as hundreds of millions of people, without adequate food, water or shelter are forced to move or drown.

The real challenge between the last pandemic and today is that there is virtually no place on Earth where shipping companies like Fedex, DHL and UPS do not go today. A look at where your meat, fruit and vegetables in Safeway or Costco come from provide a hint as to the global interconnectedness of our food network. This means that sick migrant workers “there” have impacts on local health “here” leaving no one (unless they grow all their own food) unexposed.

Similarly, as more and more people move to the cities, global urban population density is placing increasing strains on public infrastructure abilities to provide clean water and sewage facilities for urban inhabitants. In 1918 the global urbanization rate was only 13%. Today, roughly 54% of humanity lives in cities with that percentage expected to increase to 66% by 2050

(UN, 2014). More worrisome is that the fastest ships during the 1918 pandemic had a top speed of 24 knots while modern jetliners have cruising speeds of 490 knots. This means that an outbreak will hit larger, more densely concentrated populations, much harder and faster than they did a century ago. Given that the 1918 pandemic claimed as many as 50 million people out of a total population of 1.8 billion, a pandemic of similar morbidity and mortality could result in 180 to 360 million dead of our 7.4 billion population today (Osterholm, 2005); with “the economic impact of a pandemic from lost work or disrupted trade could reach $3 trillion dollars” (Blair,

2009,p. 43).

Since 1997, the world has seen at least 8 different viral outbreaks starting with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in Guangdong and Hong Kong and followed by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) six years later. Counting the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS CoV) and Ebola outbreak in 2014, there have been a total of eight different outbreaks that might have gone global in the past 20 years.

1997 HPAI (H5N1) Hong Kong, Guangdong 2003 SARS Guangdong 2004 HPAI (H5N1) Vietnam, Thailand 2009 H1N1 California, Texas 2012 MERS CoV Saudi Arabia 2013 H7N9 China 2014 Ebola Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone 2015 HPAI (H1N1) United States

That is an average of one new outbreak every 2.5 years. And given the number of years between each new outbreak has been 6, 1, 5, 3, 1, 1, 1; it might seem to indicate that the rate of viral mutation is increasing. More worrisome is that 6 of the 8 or 75% have originated in Asia or the United States.

Case in point. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the novel coronavirus first identified after the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission began examining the cause of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Hubei Province, China (WHO, 2020a). With an Infection Fatality Rate

(IFR) or percentage of individuals who die after being infected by COVID-19 hovering between

0.5% and 1.0% (WHO, 2020b); COVID-19 is less deadly than the smallpox, which has an estimated IFR of 30% (WHO, 2014) and Ebola, which may have a mortality rate as high as 50%

(WHO, 2020c). And while COVID-19’s basic reproduction number (R0) or the average number one infected person would pass the disease on to in a population without any immunity (CDC,

2020) fluctuates between 1.4 and 4.0 (Viceconte & Petrosillo, 2020) depending on government responses, health infrastructure, and preexisting health conditions of the local population. 47

Climate change stressors that degrade freshwater availability, food production, and public infrastructure, combined with global population increase and updated projections on urbanization that forecast 68% of the world’s population living in cities by 2050 (UN, 2018) can be expected to increase the R0 as population density exceeds public health infrastructure capacities. When combined by misinformation or ineffective political response, the death toll from future pandemics will be significant even in modern, developed nations. The impact of COVID-19 on the United States is one contemporary example.

Despite Americans spending $10,246 per capita on healthcare in 2017 (World Bank, n.d.), over nine times the global average of $1,061, the United States has suffered over 575,000

COVID-19 related deaths, which is over one hundred ninety times the death toll of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 (~3,000) as of May 2021 and may exceed the 620,000 soldier death toll of all the Union and Confederate soldiers killed in combat during the American Civil War (American Battlefield

Trust, n.d.) before “herd immunity” is reached. And despite having one of the most advanced technological societies in the world with widespread radio, television, internet media resources, the United States Government was unable to develop and implement a national health strategy response that could keep its citizens safe or minimize the death toll once the virus began to spread.

From an educational perspective, teachers, faculty and students are being re-acquainted with the complexities of providing instruction face to face in a time of pandemic social distancing. In this case, communication technology can offer new ways to build interactive curriculum and classroom activities. But whether in terms of education, healthcare or quality of life, the pandemic is exposing and widening the socio-economic disparities suffered by marginalized minorities around the world (Khatana & Groeneveld, 2020; WHO, 2020d). As

climate change and human destruction of the natural environment accelerates the interspecies transmission of diseases, we can expect pandemics to increase in frequency and intensity in the future.

Over 70% of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic or transmitted from animals to humans (CDC, 2017). As rainforests are cut down previously isolated diseases like Ebola and

Zika virus are passed from wildlife to domestic livestock and finally humans. As climate change driven ecosystem collapses force mass migrations, the spread of multidrug resistant tuberculosis, antibiotic resistant gonorrhea, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and HIV/AIDS will increase across the globe. This will not only contribute to the direct transmission of disease, as is suspected to be the case with the Ebola, where the reservoir is thought to be gorillas and chimpanzees (Quammen, 2012; Muyembe-Tamfum et al., 2012); but impact the sustainability of a meat intense Western diet in a climate changed world (Gonzales et al., 2020). These are just some of the ways climate change will multiply the challenges of our attempts to provide for

Maslow’s basic physiological needs of food, water, shelter and health for humanity.

Maslow’s gap

Of course, the challenge being that if we take the popular understanding of Maslow’s

Hierarchy of Needs (1943), we are left with an atomized battle royale where each individual struggles against the other for “enough” food, water, shelter. And without a mature understanding of what is physiologically “enough” (2100 kcal of food, 15 liters of water, 3.5 square meters space/person/day) as compared to what might be psychologically desired, individuals might never get beyond the first levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. This can lead to counter-intuitive situations where there might be enough resources to provide the necessary food, water, and shelter for everyone, but through societal decisions about resource allocation, physiological

insufficiencies remain.

For example, each year the United States exports about $130 billion dollars’ worth of food, livestock feed and beverages to other countries around the world. In 2020, this was about

$9 billion dollars’ worth of corn, $20 billion dollars’ worth of meat (beef, chicken, and pork) and another $20 billion dollars’ worth of soybeans. Add to these data points, the documented facts that 78 million Americans are clinically obese (Hales et al., 2020; Ogden et al., 2012); and that over 132 billion pounds (66 million tons) of food worth $160 billion dollars are thrown away each year (Buzby et al., 2014; Conrad, 2020) one might be excused for thinking that it was impossible that anyone in the United States could not have their Maslowian physiological needs met. And yet 35 million Americans (>10% of the United States’ 328 million person population) struggle with food insecurity and hunger on a regular basis (Alaimo, 2005). Add to those numbers 38 million Americans living in poverty (Semega et al., 2019), over 26 million

Americans without healthcare insurance (Keisler-Starkey & Bunch, 2020; Tolbert et al., 2020),

1.4 million Americans living in jails (Carson, 2020), and 500,000 homeless (White House, 2019).

Of course, the quick retort might be that the populations of 35 million hungry, 38 million in poverty, 26 million without healthcare insurance, 1.4 million in jail and half a million homeless cannot be summed to a grand total of 100 million in need. More probably, one might argue, the 35 million unable to meet their physiological needs and strive for self-actualization are probably unable to get enough food because these are actually concentric circles of deficiencies starting with their inability to earn enough money to attain a decent standard of living. 35 million are hungry because they are poor and 26 million without healthcare are 38 million likely poor because they are sick and unable to receive the necessary treatments. Of the 1.4 million

Americans incarcerated, many could probably point to their inability to find a decent job that

allows them to escape hunger and sickness as the reason for engaging in illicit activities. And after being arrested, incarcerated, and released, individuals with criminal records find it doubly difficult to find adequate employment and end up homeless.

But if that argument is correct and the total number of hungry, poor, and destitute is closer to 38 million than 100 million, then it should make the problem simpler to solve for the United

States, a country of over 328 million people boasting a GDP of over $21 trillion dollars a year or

$65,281 per capita. Even if no monies were to be diverted from the Department of Defense’s

$740 billion dollar FY 2020 budget, it would seem that simply redistributing the 40 million tons of wasted food to the 35 million hungry American could simultaneously reduce the size of

America’s landfills and add about 6.26 lbs of food per hungry person per day [(40 million tons of food/35 million people) (2000 pounds/ton) (year/365 days)].

As a reference point, 6.26 lbs. of food would be equal in weight to either twelve

McDonald’s Big Macs; one and a half extra-large (16” diameter) Domino’s American Legends

“Honolulu Hawaiian'' pizzas, or two Costco roast chickens, and provide 6,800 kCal, 5,160kCal, and 6,500 kCal respectively. Each of those options are roughly three times the 2100 kCal/day recommended for refugee camp kitchens and certainly more than I eat each day. Finally, that food would be a supplement and in addition to whatever an indigent person might be able to purchase on their own; so the math would seem to indicate that there is absolutely no reason that the United States cannot physically ensure that everyone has their basic food needs met.

Of course, the response might be, “It’s not that easy.” And perhaps it’s not. Demographic analysis of the hungry, impoverished and sick seems to indicate that while the national poverty rate for Whites between 2007-2011 was around 11.6% while the poverty rate during the same time period for Blacks and Native Americans was 25.8% and 27% respectively (Census, 2013).

From a gender perspective, women still only earned 82 cents to each dollar their male coworker collected in 2018. This resulted in women enduring a higher average poverty rate of 12.9% than their male counterparts 10.6% (Census, 2019).

Individuals who doubt that the United States Government might be able to ensure the food, water and shelter basics might point to the complexities of equitable distribution of resources based on gender and racial need. But with the United States exporting $130 billion dollars’ worth of food each year and throwing another $160 billion dollars of food into the landfill, wouldn’t it seem like something worth trying? If nothing else, maybe we could help the

40% of American adults who are obese shift the $70 billion dollars they spend each year from weight loss plans and diet control supplements to share their extra food with those who don’t have enough to eat.

Me versus We

The challenge with an individualistic interpretation of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs is that it only looks at satisfying the physiological and psychological needs of a single person. The end goal of this individualized Maslowian (1943) self-actualization parallels a

Kierkegaardian existentialist belief (Kierkegaard, 2009; Stack, 1973) that an individual should

“strive to develop himself with the utmost exertion of his powers” or as Maslow’s self- actualization goal reformatted by the US Army “be all that you can be” (Praeger Handbook of

Education and Psychology, 2007, p.170). But what happens when the full potential of an individual is expressed as a narcissist, serial killer and/or sociopath?

History tells us when one individual is given absolute power to execute whatever they believe necessary to achieve their personal destiny, the negative impacts on society can be catastrophic. The most recent European example being Adolph Hitler’s vision of his role as

leader of resurgent Germany that would rule the world for a millennium. Demanding blind allegiance to whatever he decided, Hitler was able to convince the German people to kill six million Jews to fulfill that dream and enter into a world war that killed five million German soldiers, two million German civilians, and left Germany a divided nation for the following forty- five years.

Of course, examples of the absolute obedience of society to facilitate the self-actualization of an individual are not confined to Europe. China’s deification of Mao Zedong allowed the implementation of the Great Leap Forward, which created the conditions for a nationwide famine that killed between 18 and 45 million Chinese through violence, disease and starvation. And these are just recent examples of individual sociopathy visited on one’s own countrymen.

But as Aime Césaire (2000) eloquently pointed out in 1950, seventy years before Black

Lives Matter and the eight-minute “snuff film” of George Floyd broadcast on national media as the status quo punishment by white police against a black man for an unproved $20 dollar infraction, the self-actualized “Hitler” is more common than most people are comfortable admitting.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and

Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the "coolies" of India, and the "niggers" of

America.

And while some might object to Cesaire’s (2000) characterization of Christianity as being an accessory to the killing and enslavement of others for individual gain or spiritual salvation, they might remember the 1452 papal bull, Dum Diversas (Unam Sanctum Catholicam, 2011) which validated the next four centuries of genocide and colonization. In a single sentence that exceeds Ceasire’s in length, Pope Nicolas V proclaimed:

Therefore we consider, that those rising against the Catholic faith and struggling to

extinguish Christian Religion must be resisted by the faithful of Christ with courage and

firmness, so that the faithful themselves, inflamed by the ardor of faith and armed with

courage to be able to hate their intention, not only to go against the intention, if they

prevent unjust attempts of force, but with the help of God whose soldiers they are, they

stop the endeavors of the faithless, we, fortified with divine love, summoned by the

charity of Christians and bound by the duty of our pastoral office, which concerns the

integrity and spread of faith for which Christ our God shed his blood, wishing to

encourage the vigor of the faithful and Your Royal Majesty in the most sacred intention of

this kind, we grant to you full and free power, through the Apostolic authority by this

edict, to invade, conquer, fight, subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels and

other enemies of Christ, and wherever established their Kingdoms, Duchies, Royal

Palaces, Principalities and other dominions, lands, places, estates, camps and any other

possessions, mobile and immobile goods found in all these places and held in whatever

name, and held and possessed by the same Saracens, Pagans, infidels, and the enemies of

Christ, also realms, duchies, royal palaces, principalities and other dominions, lands,

places, estates, camps, possessions of the king or prince or of the kings or princes, and to

lead their persons in perpetual servitude, and to apply and appropriate realms, duchies,

royal palaces, principalities and other dominions, possessions and goods of this kind to

you and your use and your successors the Kings of Portugal.

With a papal benediction, Christians “fortified with divine love, summoned by the charity of Christians and bound by the duty of our pastoral office” were instructed “to invade, conquer, fight, subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels and other enemies of Christ,” “lead their persons in perpetual servitude” and turn over all the unbelievers’ possessions and lands to the Church and Kings of Portugal.

And while readers today might protest that no one seriously believed that they were gaining spiritual salvation through Christ by killing a non-believer, raping their women and stealing their land, Dum Diversas provided five centuries of intellectual and spiritual justification for Western racial-religious-cultural colonialism around the world resulting in individual spiritual salvation or “self-actualization” by killing 75 to 175 million indigenous people (Smith, 2017) in the Western Hemisphere alone. But Cesaire’s (2000) point is that the illogic of the personal salvation through imprisonment and murder of the “other” was rarely questioned when it was perpetrated against people who didn’t look like you, didn’t speak like you, or didn’t live like you.

The visible differences minimized the schizophrenia of a believer of such cognitively dissonant pronouncements allowing them to rip a brown or black infant from a native mother’s arms and smash the baby’s skull on a rock to prevent it from being raised a pagan, as witnessed by

Bartolome de las Casas (las Casas, 1992), in the name of Christianization the New World; and then go home to kiss their own pale skinned wife and pink baby without seeing any intellectual discontinuity or feeling spiritually disturbed. But as Cesaire points out, it was only when Hitler used the same logic against White people in Europe who intermarried with each other that

Western nations began to question the validity of the colonial practice of killing social

“undesirables” on a whim or working them to death.

In many ways, this then becomes the challenge of using Maslow’s (1943) self- actualization or Kierkegaard’s (2005) definition of existentialism of focusing solely on an individual’s passionate faith in one’s own belief in complete disregard for the community or anyone else. If one accepts the definition of an “existential education” as the sharing of knowledge that enhances the survival of the individual receiving knowledge and continuation of the community sharing it, then “what is the cost to the continuation of a society and survival of the individuals in it in order to fully manifest the full potential of one single individual?” And how do we answer Césaire's (2000) charges that: “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization” (p. 39); “A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization” and “A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization” in the face of the 35 million hungry, sick and homeless Americans barely surviving in a sea of wasteful prosperity?

Certainly one imagines that the designers of the CPED EdD degree, “being framed around questions of equity, ethics, and social justice to bring about solutions to complex problems of practice”, who created the curriculum to prepare “leaders who can construct and apply knowledge to make a positive difference in the lives of individuals, families, organizations, and communities” would not want to nurture the self-actualization of a narcissistic sociopath like a

Hitler or Mao to the detriment and/or destruction of the rest. And it seems that Maslow (1971) apparently wrestled with these sorts of questions at the end of his life.

In 1971, one year after his death, Maslow’s estate published, The Farther Reaches of

Human Nature, an unfinished manuscript that explored “transcendence” or the step after reaching

the summit of his iconic hierarchy of needs. The book draws its title from an article published in

1969 with the same name in which Maslow noted that behavioristic psychology which was objectivist and positivist was selling human potential short by focusing on examining self- centered subject-object questions like “Can I make use of it?”, “Is it good for me?”, “Can I profit from it?”, “Is it dangerous to me?” or “Can I eat it?” Instead, Maslow (Koltko-Rivera, 2006, p.306) posited that if people continued to grow after becoming self-actualized, the “I” and “Me” disappeared and their world view changed:

The fully developed (and very fortunate) human beings working under the best conditions

tends to be motivated by values which transcends self. They are not selfish anymore in the

old sense of that term. Beauty is not in one’s skin nor is justice or order. One can hardly

class these desires as selfish in the sense that my desire for food might be. My satisfaction

with achieving or allowing justice is not within my own skin; it does not lie along my

arteries. It is equally outside and inside; therefore, it has transcended the geographical

limitations of the self.

We = me

Maslow (1971) believed that humanity was on the cusp of re-incorporating a discussion of intrinsic values and ultimate truths like “truth, goodness, beauty, perfection, excellence, simplicity, elegance, and so on” which were not limited to, embodied by or even defined by one person, nation, race, religion, culture, gender, or sexual preference. Rather they were transcendent values that allowed those who had given up the “self” to enter “unitive consciousness.” In this state, there was no need to use, change, or control anything per se, but rather establish a “Being- love” relationship with one’s perception of the world and allow the thing or experiences “be itself.” And some thirty three years after refashioning the Blackfoot Indian concepts of cultural

perpetuity (Blackstock, 2007, 2011) into an individualistic business school appropriate “hierarchy of needs,” it seems Maslow (1971) began returning to the concept’s original purpose in the minds of its First Nations’ originators.

In 1938, five years before he had published his seminal “A Theory of Human

Motivation,” Maslow was a thirty year old psychologist conducting an anthropological study on the Blackfoot in Alberta, Canada. During his weeks that summer with them, Maslow wrote how he was struck that “to most Blackfoot members, wealth was not important in terms of accumulating property and possessions: giving it away was what brought one the true status of prestige and security in the tribe" (2019). Moreover, according to biographer Edward Hoffman

(1988) , Maslow was apparently surprised to find that in contrast to the way he had been taught to view Native Americans, all the members of the tribe viewed each other as equals and treated each other with generosity, decency and respect. These personal observations gained by living among the Blackfoot made the contrast with the way “more civilized” Westerners treated the indigenous peoples all the more confusing. In comparing the prevailing conduct and attitudes of white

Americans and Native Americans, Maslow noted that the supposedly more advanced European immigrants seemed less civilized than their indigenous counterparts (1971).

Perhaps one primary difference was that in contrast to the Western individualistic “dog eat dog”, “survival of the fittest” attitude, the Blackfoot believed that self-actualization of the community was dependent upon self-actualization of the individual, and that if individuals in the tribe were hungry, sick or mentally disturbed, the tribe as a unit would never reach its full potential (Blackstock, 2011). Thus, to care for another individual was not so much an act of generosity from one in power to another in need, but an act of self-care as one for oneself. To express it another way, the Blackfoot recognized “Me = We” and vice versa (2011).

Thus, the goal of “existential education” in the Blackfoot or First Nations setting might be seen not only as the transmission of knowledge for the joint preservation of the individual and the group, but the common acceptance of universal attitudes, values, and priorities that facilitated

“cultural perpetuity” (Bray, 2019). The litmus test for inclusion in their existential education lesson plan would be ideas, concepts and values that would simultaneously promote the wholeness and health of both the individual and the community. And ability of the culture to survive outside the homeland being the transferability of those attitudes, values, and priorities such that they would be recognized as valid no matter what culture and community an individual found themself in or what lifestyle and technology the people around them used.

And in Maslow’s (1971) posthumously published notes, he seemed to be reaching back to the original Blackfoot community values that promoted “cultural perpetuity.” Maslow called these transcendent “B-Values” or “Being Values” which included Taoist-like concepts of: wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, aliveness, richness, simplicity, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, effortlessness, playfulness, truthfulness, and self-sufficiency (Maslow, 1964, p.91-

94). In his twilight years, Maslow (1971) apparently believed that self-actualized individuals wanted more than just individual achievement and found their greatest satisfaction in seeing the success of the whole. By transcending their independent, separated from society, self-actualized selves, these individuals returned to the community as an integral part of the universal ecosystem to where their manifestation of being whole, perfect, complete, good and beautiful just as they were, helped maintain a complementary balance of everything everywhere by simply being themselves completely; even if they did not exactly match an external positivist metric for definitions of whole, perfect, beautiful, complete, or good.

And in many ways, the current “struggle for the soul of America” might be seen as this

tug of war between a younger and older Maslow. On the one hand is the younger Maslow (1943), promoting an individualistic Trumpian self-actualization for 74 million Americans voters who embrace an id weighted “Me” centered, atomistic business school understanding of self- actualization that allows an obese person to throw uneaten food in the trash can next to a homeless person or walk into a crowded room without a face mask. On the other hand is the older, wiser, “Blackfoot” Maslow (1971), promoting a type of self-actualization for 84 million

Americans voters who embrace a super-ego weighted “We” centered, “Justice for all or Peace for none,” B-Valued understanding of life.

And these understandings of self-actualization feed into the calculation of whether the

Americans will accept or deny the concept of climate change, because of its implicit implications with regard to individual responsibility for community survival. As long as the United States denies that climate change exists, it can continue to use fossil fuels and increase global warming as long as the negative impacts don’t affect Americans. This is because according to the international system of governments established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, individual sovereigns can govern however they like over the territory that defines their country as long as they maintain the monopoly over violence within it.

The acceptance of global climate change is a species-wide shift in understanding “cultural perpetuity” in that the artificial geographic divisions of nations no longer isolate any one person’s actions from impacting another. And with the fast approaching reality that an “America First” approach may come at the expense of millions of humans suffering and dying, educators must ask themselves which version of Maslow’s self-actualization they want to teach: the 1943 “be all that you can be” Trumpian win at any cost version or the 1971 version of transcending oneself and live to serve cultural perpetuity through manifesting the “breath of life.”

Why do we need a national security education for climate change?

The UN IPBES report (2019) estimates that there are already over 2,500 conflicts occurring worldwide because of conflicts over food, water, land and fossil fuels. And while recent studies report different degrees of correlation between climate change, conflict and forced migration (Popovski, 2017; Missirian & Schlenker, 2017; Abel et al, 2019), the contemporary violence in Rwanda (Richmond & Galgano, 2018), Syria (Kelley et al., 2015; Gleick, 2014),

Darfur (Chase, 2017) and even Yemen, (Mohamed et al., 2017) are believed to have their roots in climate change impacts on job, food and water insecurity. Thus, in many ways it’s not surprising that when asked what the greatest threat to national security was, ADM Samuel Locklear, then the Pacific Command (PACOM) Commander, answered “climate change” (Bender, 2013).

Extending from the West Coast of the United States to the border between India and

Pakistan and reaching from the North Pole to Antarctica, INDOPACOM, renamed

INDOPACOM in 2018 (Copp, 2018) is the largest Geographic Combatant Command

(INDOPACOM, 2019). As a result, INDOPACOM has responsibility for overseeing US national security interests with 36 different nations whose citizens speak 3,000 languages and represent

50% of the human population. By 2050, the countries in INDOPACOM’s Area of Responsibility

(AOR) will include four of the ten largest economies in the world (Price Waterhouse Cooper

PWC, 2017) and the region will collectively accounting for 50% of the global Gross Domestic

Product (GDP) (Asia Development Bank ADB, 2011). Given the Department of Defense’s

(DoD) mission is “provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country,” (DoD, 2019) minimizing the destabilizing impacts of climate change on the region’s food, water, energy and health security poses a challenge of near incomprehensible complexity.

The United States military began examining the potential implications of climate change on military operations about the same time that the IPCC was established, as evidenced by an unclassified Naval War College report in 1990 (Kelley). In 2007, the Center for Naval Analyses

(CNA) publicly expanded on those efforts and convened an unclassified Military Advisory Board

(MAB) that examined the impacts of climate change on national security. The Board’s eleven retired three and four star generals and admirals agreed that:

● Climate change poses a serious threat to US national security.

● Climate change is a threat multiplier, increasing conflict in unstable regions of the

world.

● Projected climate change futures will increase tensions in currently stable regions of

the world.

● Climate change, national security and fossil fuel energy dependence are interlinked.

The CNA MAB made five key recommendations:

1. The national security consequences of climate change should be fully

integrated into national security and national defense strategies.

2. The U.S. should commit to a stronger national and international role to help

stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to

global security and stability.

3. The U.S. should commit to global partnerships that help less developed

nations build the capacity and resiliency to better manage climate impacts.

4. The Department of Defense should enhance its operational capability by

accelerating the adoption of improved business processes and innovative

technologies that result in improved U.S. combat power through energy

efficiency.

5. The Department of Defense should conduct an assessment of the impact on

U.S. military installations worldwide of rising sea levels, extreme weather

events, and other possible climate change impacts over the next 30 to 40

years.

DoD efforts to “deter war and to protect the security of our country,” led military leaders to begin examining the scope and scale of climate change threats to national security. In 2014, the

United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report 14 446 “Climate Adaptation” noted the need for DoD to assess the risks climate change posed to military installations around the world. The Report noted that there are over 550,000 American military installations across the globe covering 28 million acres of land as a real estate replacement value of over $800 billion dollars. The GAO report recommended, among other things, that the DoD begin developing a plan or at least create milestones to assess the 704 coastal and 6,887 non-coastal installations the military had already identified as a high priority.

The DoD’s leadership concurred with the GAO recommendations and issued the DoD’s

2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap. In the foreword, then Secretary of Defense Chuck

Hagel wrote:

Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising

global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more

extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty,

and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes

over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the

globe…. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts....

Climate change is a global problem. Its impacts do not respect national borders.

No nation can deal with it alone. We must work together, building joint

capabilities to deal with these emerging threats.

Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning. Our armed forces

must prepare for a future with a wide spectrum of possible threats, weighing risks

and probabilities to ensure that we will continue to keep our country secure. By

taking a proactive, flexible approach to assessment, analysis, and adaptation, the

Defense Department will keep pace with a changing climate, minimize its impacts

on our missions, and continue to protect our national security.

Over the next two years, the DoD worked to develop a policy and framework to incorporate climate change into military strategy, plans and operations. On 14 January 2016, the military issued DoD Directive 4175.21 (p.3) Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience directing the military to “adapt current and future operations to address the impacts of climate change in order to maintain an effective and efficient U.S. military.” Three months later, 22 April 2016

Barack Obama, President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the American military, signed the UN Paris Accords, and agreeing, among other things, to “cooperate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information” (UNFCCC, 2014,p. 2).

And yet, despite forty UN IPCC reports of increasing specificity authored by hundreds of scientists from around the world citing tens of thousands of pages of peer reviewed articles over the course of nearly thirty years; despite recognition of the threat climate change poses to the global economy by the top business consulting companies in the world (PWC, 2019; Deloitte,

2017; KPMG, 2019; Ernst & Young, 2019; Bain & Company, 2019; McKinsey & Company,

2019); despite appeals by religious leaders of all faiths (Yale, 2019; Pope Francis, 2015; Dalai

Lama, 2015; Aga Khan Development Network, 2016) to address climate change; despite global reinsurance companies like Lloyds (2014), Munich Re (2019), and Swiss Re (2019) establishing dedicated efforts to manage climate change risks; despite Fortune 500 companies like Badische

Anilin und Soda Fabrik BASF, British Petroleum BP, Citi, Dow, DuPont, Ford, Pacific Gas &

Electric PG&E, Shell, and Unilever joining with conservation groups like Center for Climate and

Energy Solutions, Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Conservancy and World Resources

Institute to advance climate action and establish federal climate policy in the U.S. Congress

(CEO Climate Dialogue, 2019); despite a decade of DoD recognition of the threat that climate change poses to national security; less than half the population of the United States believes that climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress in 2019 (Pew, 2019). More worrisome for American national security is that former President Donald Trump, the previous

Commander in Chief of all American military forces, proclaimed climate change a hoax and that the science behind global warming was unverified (De la Garza, 2019; Caruso 2019; Trump

Twitter Archive, 2019) in some part because a significant population of the American electorate wanted to believe “alternative facts” (NPR, 2017) .Thus the broadest purpose of this research is to help identify locations that can show next generation leaders climate change impacts on national security that help them appreciate the global climate change and national security challenges our generation will leave for them to solve.

In terms of national security strategy, it takes roughly thirty years to develop a major military platform “from the drawing board to the battlefield” (Campbell & Parthemore,

2008).That means if any weapon system, technology or tool is going to be deployed in the climate change conflicts of 2050, it needs to be on the drawing board today. And even when

President Biden, the current Commander in Chief, believes climate change exists, unless the

National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) specifically earmarks climate change technologies and systems, the publication of military policies like DoD Directive 4715.21 will remain unfunded mandates that cannot be implemented.

Of course, any resistance to appreciating climate change as a serious national security threat is only logical when you consider the National Security Council is on average over 63 years of age. This means that most of America’s senior leaders received their K-12 education between 1962 and 1975, graduating high school roughly fifteen years before the first IPCC reports. This generation of leaders would have been impacted by the oil crises of the 1970’s and graduated college at the end of the Vietnam War. They would have spent the formative years of their careers within the framework of the Cold War viewing foreign policy in terms of avoiding nuclear holocaust, winning as defeating global communism and oil as “The Prize” (Yergin,

2008). Unless the generation currently leading the United States were reading the growing evidence of climate change impacts on national security presented by the UN, think tanks, international corporations, religious leaders, and environmental scientists; it would be easy for them to miss the signs that the world was changing.

But given that the United States won World War II and the Cold War by mastering industrial warfare, it is understandable how the current leadership thinks of national security in terms of looking for an enemy that can be beaten with fossil fuel powered weapon systems

(Englehardt, 2013). The problem is that the industrial military built to win wars during the 20th

Century will threaten the very existence of humanity in the 21st Century. This is because each time America’s fossil fuel military is deployed, it adds carbon to the atmosphere, accelerates the rate of global climate change, decreasing food security, water security, and our global ecosystem

carrying capacity. As we’re already witnessing in fragile states around the world, the resulting cultural, political, economic, and social instability caused by climate change eventually manifests itself as war, famine, disease and general system collapse.

This poses a problem for the DoD. As an organization, the United States military is the world’s largest consumer of petroleum in the world. Burning 87 million barrels of oil a year

(DoD, 2016), the US military pumps 37 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. To put that into context, the amount is greater than the carbon emissions of Haiti, Togo, Equatorial Guinea,

Niger, New Caledonia, Malawi, Mali, Djibouti, Fiji, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Chad, Sierra

Leone, Maldives, Belize, Liberia, French Polynesia, Central Africa Republic, Eritrea, Swaziland,

Montserrat, Solomon Islands, Gambia, Western Sahara, Tonga, Dominica, Comoros, Seychelles,

Grenada, Gibraltar, Timor-Leste, Guinea-Bissau, Aruba, Cape Verde, Kiribati, Falkland Islands,

Palau, Cook Islands, Anguilla, American Samoa, Saint Helena, Guam, Greenland, Faroe Islands,

Nauru, Tuvalu, Bermuda, Saint Lucia, Dominica, and Samoa, fifty nations and territories with a combined population of 170,440,000 people or roughly the equivalent of half the population of the United States (CIA, n.d.).

Thus, in much the same way that construction of new houses or shrinking polar ice caps create positive feedback loops; using fossil fuel powered tanks, ships and airplanes to respond to conflicts sparked by poor harvests, polluted fishing grounds and flooded homes will do the same, multiplying resistance to American leadership around the globe. As the anthropogenic climate change impacts on human existence forces more people to lose their homes, families and livelihoods, “the level of popular anger toward the United States, as the leading historical contributor to climate change, will be astronomical” (Burke, 2008); all resulting in “an increase in asymmetric attacks on the American homeland.” And given that the United States alone

accounts for roughly 27% of all the man-made global warming over the past hundred and fifty years (1850-2011), as compared to all of the EU (25%), China (11%), Russian Federation (8%) those eco-warriors’ ire would not be misplaced (Ge et al., 2014).

In this way, the current composition of the United States military and strategy for its deployment acts counter to the DoD’s stated mission to “deter war and to protect the security of our country.” And while the interconnected relationships between climate change and national security may seem obvious to UN Secretary General Guterres or former PACOM Commander

Admiral Locklear, the problems of teaching the impacts of climate change impacts on national security to next generation leaders may feel insurmountable.

Chapter 3

Methodology

My chapter on methodology will start with an introduction to and definition of qualitative evocative autoethnography methodology. These discussions will be followed by an examination of its advantages and limitations in answering the research question. This will include a deeper dive into the growing use of autoethnography to address social justice issues.

Research Design: Qualitative Evocative Autoethnography

An autoethnography is the intentional self-reflection of past learning to provide a personal perspective on a shared cultural experience (Ellis, 2004). Resting within the intersection of autobiography and ethnography, the autoethnography shares many similarities to both with two key differences. In addition to the autobiographical use of self-narrative to tell a story, autoethnography uses personal conflicts and perceptual turning points in the researcher’s life to examine and/or critique issues of larger social consequence (Jones et al., 2016). And in direct contrast to an ethnographer’s attempts to maintain impartial objective positionality from the

“Other”, the autoethnographer embraces the “Self” as both the examination lens and subject of the research question. In this way, autoethnography looks for an individual contribution that simultaneously offers critical commentary of both self and the society to expand the boundaries of reality and by extension normality. This means that autoethnography must contribute something uncommon, unknown, or at least unspoken amongst polite and educated company about oneself within the context of the researcher’s community in order to add to the existing body of knowledge. In other words, autoethnographers “research themselves in relation to others”

(Boylorn & Orbe, 2014, p. 17).

Introduction to the term autoethnography

Hayano (1979) credits the first use of “autoethnography” to Sir Raymond Firth who introduced the term in a seminar on structuralism. The specific context was a reported shouting match that erupted between Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Seymour Bazett (L.S.B) Leakey over the portrayal of Kikuyu culture. Under the tutelage of Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of

Economics (LSE), Jomo Kenyatta, who would become decolonized Kenya’s first president in

1964, had written Facing Mount Kenya (1938) an account of the Kikuyu people, their culture, customs and values as a member of their tribe. L.S.B. Leakey, a British archeologist who grew up in Kenya, spoke Kikuyu and would later lay the groundwork for the discovery of “Lucy,” then the oldest hominid bones discovered. And if Hayano’s account is accurate, then the first autoethnography was written by a colonized African attempting to regain control of a narrative within a discussion in which his own culture was subservient.

In the age of colonies, the tensions of identifying “Self” were existentially epistemological. Who, in a colonized world, could positively define what any state of being was?

Would the anthropological understanding of a tribe be defined by the colonizer, with their grand universities of higher learning lording over vast libraries of knowledge purporting to accurately capture other places and cultures? Or would the ultimate definition be self-defined, a self- reflection of individuals from the group about who and what they are.

With the contested dismantling of the colonial mercantile system after World War II, the number of decolonized narratives aiming to recreate a native sense of self that was self- empowering increased. If we apply Firth’s understanding of Facing Mount Kenya as autoethnography, then critical works on social justice like Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), an analysis of the impacts of colonialism on French Africans, and Friere’s Pedagogy of the

Oppressed (1970), an autobiographically sourced reimagining of Brazil’s education system, might well fit into the genre. And thus, the benefit of allowing or, better yet, encouraging autoethnography is to move our concept of knowledge from a colonial positivist (dominant, authoritarian, universal) perspective to a more indigenous constructivist (divergent, democratic, situated) world view. As a methodology, autoethnography provided a mechanism for colonized peoples and silenced minorities to share their voices with mainstream academia and has expanded the collective richness of humanity’s shared history.

As the dominant culture of the post-World War II era, America’s use of autoethnography had slightly different roots resulting in other forms of scholarship. Heider’s use of the term autoethnography in “What Do People Do? Dani Auto-ethnography” (1975) meant allowing the

Dani people to describe their own lives so that Heider, as the educated authority, could then interpret the true meaning of the results. Working in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, Heider asked 66 respondents the question “What do people do?” After receiving 3,330 responses, he coded the 106 different verbs identified to identify the frequency of each activity in the Dani people’s daily life.

But from what I have read, Heider’s use of the term is a different type of autoethnography than the one Hayano, Ellis, Adams, Chang and others talk about. For that, we need to move to

Goldschmidt.

Walter Goldschmidt (1977) used the term in his article, “Anthropology and the Coming

Crisis: An Autoethnographic Appraisal” to discuss the field of anthropology as an anthropologist to anthropologists wrestling with the direction the community should take the discipline. And to be honest, despite several readings, I still feel as if I was listening to the family elder talking to warring factions about a point of contention with which I am only vaguely familiar. But if I understood the core of the reasoning, Goldschmidt (1977) sought to address to the purists’

accusations that the community lost its way because anthropological research findings had been used to inform government efforts like the internment of Japanese citizens through the War

Relocation Authority and the inclusion of American subjects in counterinsurgency research through Project Camelot.

Goldschmidt (1977) noted that knowledge was never collected in a vacuum and that all scientific knowledge could be used to serve institutions of power. Rather than quit the game because someone is using something you have created in ways you never intended, Goldschmidt entreated the disaffected to redouble their efforts to conduct meaningful and ethical research with eyes wide open. And in this way, hopefully transfer some of anthropology’s ethos to contemporary social justice struggles. Goldschmidt believed this was reflected by:

● an abiding commitment to egalitarianism and the belief that all peoples are

equally good and equally competent;

● a strong identification with the peoples we study and by extension with all

underprivileged and powerless people of the world;

● a recognition that life is a seamless fabric and that all things are interrelated;

● an idealized view of native life: adherence to the Arcadian myth, the concept

of “noble savage,” the belief that man is existentially good.

And in this way, all anthropological work becomes in a way “auto”-ethnographic in that it deals with the larger issues of humanity as reported by humans.

The growing use of autoethnography as a research methodology for social justice purposes reflects the resonance of his call. Works like The Autobiography of Malcolm X (X & Haley,

1965), From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Trask, 1999), and Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (Cajete, 1994) enrich our understanding of

underrepresented minorities through the literary form. Autoethnography has continued to evolve since Kenyatta and Goldschmidt’s time to include any number of individualized forms and community appropriate structures allowing writers like Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962), Jane

Goodall (My Life with the Chimpanzees, 1996) and Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac,

1949) to become the voices of nature itself using the narrative of reflected life experiences.

Indeed, the rise of performed autoethnographic research (Denzin, 2006; Spry, 2001) reflects what preliterate man knew all along, verbalized thoughts have transformative power.

Research has proven that spoken self-reflection has the power to heal (Hodge et al., 2002) as well as the ability to improve problem-solving skills (Berry, 1983). Thus, as the Bible notes (Isaiah

55:11), “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” And like the spiritual seers of old, autoethnographic performers seek to engage their audiences in a way that shares the transformative insights they have uncovered in ways that uplift and improve the community they live in.

Of course, the primary differences between a written and performed autoethnography are the requirements each medium places on the researcher. While the performed autoethnography must convey intellectual transformation through oral and visual interaction with the audience, the written autoethnography is simultaneously blessed and cursed with the ability and, thus, need to show deep understanding of the academic research in the field through references. This is perhaps why works that clearly have autobiographical and ethnographic elements to them like Midstream:

My Later Life (Keller, 1929), The Diary of a Young Girl (Frank, 1996) or even Mein Kampf

(Hitler, 1925) have a contested existence within the category of autoethnography. Similarly, while works like “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” (Miner, 1956), “Sex and Death in the Rational

World of Defense Intellectuals” (Cohn, 1987) or “Shakespeare in the Bush” (Bohanan, 1966) are normally accepted by the academy as research; books like The Gulag Archipelago, (Solzhenitsyn,

2007) written about the Soviet prison camps and About Face: The Odyssey of an American

Warrior (Hackworth, 1990), an autobiographical accounting of the American military during the

Cold War, may not be. Perhaps even further afield on the spectrum of academic relevance and social acceptability are books like Pimp: The Story of My Life (Slim, 1967), where the author recounts his personal experiences in the unique culture of prostitution or convict studies by former prisoners like Dangerous Men (McCleary, 1978) and The Felon (Irwin, 1970).

I only make these observations to point out that unlike quantitative researcher’s nanoscopic production tolerances required to create the microchips that power our computers and smartphones, what defines qualitative research can be somewhat subjective and dependent upon the tastes of the reader. The tipping points being, can the reader stomach the contents and, if so, does the autoethnography resonate in some way with the reader's own understanding of the world in ways that enrich it. Thus, my goal is to write an evocative autoethnography that has

“verisimilitude.”

Verisimilitude means crafting a work that “evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable, and possible, a feeling that what has been represented could be true. The story is coherent. It connects readers to writers and provides continuity in their lives.”

(Ellis et al., 2010, p. 34) And just like the traveling storytellers of old, validation comes when the reader thinks about how and why their own lives are similar or different to the researcher’s and puts down the dissertation “feeling that the stories have informed them about unfamiliar people or lives” (Ellis, 2011, p.283).

Alignment of Autoethnography to the Research Question

My autoethnography will research my life’s turning points and epiphanies that resulted in creating Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century.

Advantages of Autoethnography

The twelve advantages for selecting autoethnography (Patton 2002) as my qualitative research methodology are outlined as follows:

1) Naturalistic inquiry - Autoethnography allows the research to follow life events as they

occurred and examine the findings as they emerge, without prescriptive timing or priority;

2) Emergent design flexibility - Autoethnography allows the research to reflect the messiness

of an individual’s life and follow emerging themes derived through personal reflection

without constraints;

3) Purposeful sampling - Because autoethnography makes the researcher both the lens and

subject of study, the findings can provide personalized insights into research questions

rather than the generalized view population surveys provide;

4) Qualitative data - Autoethnographies by definition, include the ethnographers “thick

description” Geertz (1973) that characterize qualitative research interwoven with the

researcher’s own autobiographical insights;

5) Personal experience and engagement - Because autoethnography is autobiographical in

nature, the researcher’s “self-observation and reflexive investigation” (Maréchal, 2010)

become the narrative used to answer the research questions;

6) Empathic neutrality and mindfulness - Autoethnography challenges the researcher to

conduct mindful self-examination of hidden prejudices or predispositions in order to gain

a greater understanding of the studied phenomenon;

7) Dynamic systems - Autoethnography embraces life as a continuous process of change

allowing different perspectives and findings to be presented as the researcher’s life

evolved;

8) Unique case orientation - Autoethnography celebrates the fact that each case is special and

unique while inviting the sharing of other related autoethnographies to develop a

constructed understanding of phenomenon;

9) Inductive analysis and creative synthesis - Autoethnography relies on immersion in the

data and examination of the details to tease out emergent themes, patterns and

interrelationships. Through this process, the researcher can use analytical principles to

code old journals and mull over remembered conversations to piece together a coherent

understanding of the whole;

10) Holistic perspective - Autoethnography believes a life is an interdependent whole where

everything affects everything which cannot be disassembled into a collection of discrete

linear cause and effect events;

11) Context sensitivity - Autoethnography values the importance of time and place in shaping

the perceptions of the researcher as well as the challenges and options faced. And while

the methodology strives to identify the potential transferability of research findings, the

autoethnography approach recognizes what will be valuable will vary from person to

person; and

12) Voice, perspective, and reflexivity - Autoethnography allows the researcher to become the

tool for as well as subject of examination.

Autoethnography requires the researcher to “own” and be reflective of the voice they use,

providing the potential for “depicting the world authentically in all its complexity while being self-analytical, politically aware, and reflexive in consciousness” (Patton, 2002, pp. 494-495).

Autoethnography recognizes that while physiological development from infant to youth and adult is one shared by everyone, the individual experiences and perspectives gained along the way are not. Thus, autoethnography’s origins within the intersection between autobiography and ethnography can be useful in mapping personal metamorphosis as related to the environment around the individual. And as an existential education for climate change seems to require a constructivist epistemology, autoethnography’s personal perceptions and individual understandings that run counter or orthogonal to the prevailing norm can create critical insights that expand humanity’s shared realities.

Thus, as Jomo Kenyatta (1961) attempted and Goldschmidt (1977) encouraged, the autoethnographer’s value comes from distilling critical knowledge and sharing it in a way that addresses social injustices and improves humanity’s condition (Denzin, 2017). An autoethnographer’s critical assessment of the current state of affairs should motivate cultural rebirth. Not through the Maoist reinvention of culture through a “Great Leap Forward” that denies one’s own philosophical roots and historical achievements or through Lorde’s (1984) desire to use the Master’s tools to dismantle the Master’s house; but a thoughtful Hegelian syncretist reassessment of what is, is not and could be to fulfill more of Maslow’s (1943) existential needs for everyone. And it through this expansion of possible perceptions that we can take change our perception of a person like Trevor Noah, from an abomination of miscegenation in apartheid

South Africa to the award winning host of the Daily Show and success story in multi-cultural

United States. In this way, Clough encourages us to use “our experimental writing to be a vehicle for thinking in new sociological subjects, new parameters of the social'' (Clough, 2000, p. 290).

But more than that, autoethnography’s freedom from the traditional restrictions of structure and media creates a correspondingly greater responsibility to touch not only the intellect, as most classical Western scholarship does, but to also surge through the reader’s imagination, heart and soul, which at least for me most academic research does not. And it is through that emotional pull that autoethnography achieves its greatest purpose, not one of simply identifying a previously hidden injustice or identifying its philosophical roots, but igniting the inspiration to act

(Bochner, 2000; Chang, 2008).

Limitations of Autoethnography

Qualitative autoethnographies are highly context sensitive, which means that the emergent themes and findings from this dissertation may not be generalizable to other contexts or time periods, no matter how much that outcome may be desired. Additionally, because autoethnographies are written as an interpretation of facts through imperfect memories, there exists the temptation for selective editing to increase correlation between events or retouch old pictures to make oneself more attractive. The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of Knowledge

(Casteneda, 1989) may represent an extreme example of a reimagining of oneself until the remembered truth becomes lost in “interpretive drift” (Luhrmann, 1986). And because Casteneda

(1989) was the sole source of verification, it is unlikely anyone will ever know if his tales of shaman training ever happened or not (Hughes, 1973; Brown, 1998; Hardman, 2007; Fleming,

2018) Thus to remain in the realm of qualitative research, autoethnography needs to be based on reality and anchored within social structures accessible to others.

In "Ethnography as the Excavation of Personal Narrative", Krizek (2003) debates how much autobiographical detail/personal information should be included and how does that sharing relate to our “star groups” (Turner, 1981) the people “to which we owe our deepest loyalty and

whose fate is for us of the greatest concern” (p.145). In terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy, this is the middle ground of discovered truth, where the seeker brings back their discovery to share with their community to fulfil their reciprocal needs for love and esteem. And if done correctly, an autoethnographer can create a roadmap from the profane to eternal for the people they hope might follow

Role of the Autoethnographic Researcher

Accordingly, my roles in the autoethnography will be to serve as both the interrogator of and witness to the turning points and epiphanies in my life that resulted in creating Pacific

ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century. Life seldom provides you the time and space to look back on past decisions and question oneself about the reasons behind the choices made and paths not taken without the systemic intentionality of autoethnography.

By making the researcher the subject and lens of study, autoethnography’s naturalistic inquiry, personal experience and unique case orientation invites the researcher’s voice, perspective and reflexivity. And by inductively analyzing the various fragments of memories, artifacts and journals, autoethnography can link the unique case, holistic perspective and context sensitivity of the methodology to “extend existing knowledge and research while recognizing that knowledge is both situated and contested” (Adams, et al., 2014, p. 103)

All that said, the specific content of my personal journey is immaterial. In a world of 7.7 billion people, it would be epistemological hubris to think otherwise. What may be of potential use are the processes I have used to reflect upon my epiphanies, critical incidents and teachable moments that catalyzed new ways for seeing our world and living my life. Hopefully by sharing my developing algorithm for interacting with my world as I see it, the next generation of climate

change leaders might find empowering ways to interact with and sustain theirs.

Thus, the simplest answer to the question “Why autoethnography?” is to respond with the writer’s classic advice, “Write what you know.” But the selection of an autoethnographic methodology goes beyond a desire to remain within the known familiar to the essence of what education implies. Education is not only the acquisition of new information, but the reflection on where the new knowledge and skills came from, how it was imparted and what it all means to one’s future life (Zeichner & Liston, 1987; Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1991). As my research focuses on the critical turning points in my life that led me to develop Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century; autoethnography may be the only methodology that will allow me to reflect deeply and document new understandings of epiphanies and lessons learned.

The autoethnographic approach was selected, not only for the methodology’s ability to identify different perspectives, redress social injustice and inspire transformative change but respect for the power an individual’s shared perspective can have on the world, as seen by the public’s response to the climate change messages from: Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (YouTube, 2014)

325,000 views to Greta Thunberg (2019) 799,000 and finally Severn Suzuki (YouTube, 2012)

847,000 views. And while I do not anticipate 80 people will read my dissertation, let alone

800,000, by sharing personal insights on how and why I interact with the world, my autoethnography may become my personal contribution to a constructivist epistemology that expands and enriches our shared understanding of how we collectively survive the coming changes.

In sum, I hope this autoethnographic attempt will serve three distinct purposes. First, help

me understand my own subconscious values and decision-making processes. Second, help identify how past lessons learned have evolved my understanding and interaction with the world around me. And third, by sharing the challenges, failures and successes that brought me to create

Pacific ALLIES, help other educators develop their own roadmap for building an existential education for next generation climate change leaders in the 21st Century.

Participant

As autoethnography, I am the primary investigator and participant of the study. My life journey provides the narrative for the story and remembered epiphanies become the milestones along the way. The goal is for the research process and findings to be credible, transferable, dependable and confirmable (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) in a way that others may use discovered insights to expand the reader’s own understanding of the world and their interaction with it.

Time and Space

The specific phenomenon I hope to share is the fifty five-year long journey taken to create

Pacific ALLIES, an experiential service learning program that helps students, cadets and midshipmen understand the climate change impacts on national security utilizing Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands as a living sustainability laboratory. These reflections are facilitated by the microcosm that Kwajalein Atoll and the Pacific ALLIES program’s ethnographic contrast provide of indigenous and Western approaches to national security and climate change. And while the history, environment, and culture of living in Ebeye City on

Kwajalein may be unique, the environmental, political, economic, and social challenges associated with a close-knit coastal community abutted against a military-industrial outpost are not. So, just as I hope an autoethnographic approach will provide readers a narrative to spark new ways to think about their life, I hope Pacific ALLIES’ work in the Marshall Islands will provide

other communities new ways to see their situation and explore new ways to solve their emergent climate change challenges within their unique contexts.

Place-based

The unique characteristics of Kwajalein Atoll provide a “Tale of Two Cities” which highlight the contrasting perspectives of what an existential education in the face of climate change might look like. On the one hand, we have the United States Army Garrison-Kwajalein

Atoll (USAG-KA) which is home to roughly 1,000 American military service members and government contractors living on a 750-acre island living with housing and infrastructure equivalent to any average middle-class neighborhood in the United States. On the other hand, we have an estimated 12,000 Marshallese living on an 80-acre island living with housing and infrastructure equivalent to some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in Middle

America. Each morning, roughly 1,000 Marshallese on Ebeye take the five-mile ferry ride to cut the grass, cook the food and clean the toilets of the Americans living on Kwajalein, before returning again around nightfall.

The shared climate change challenge Americans and Marshallese both will face is sea level rise. The Department of Defense’s recent environmental study (SERDP 2334) that projects climate change driven sea level rise will destroy the freshwater lens of the Kwajalein Atoll rendering the islands functionally uninhabitable within the next 15 to 45 years (2035 to 2065), depending on how much fossil fuel we burn. And as the rest of the Marshall Islands is roughly the same elevation to Kwajalein Atoll, any child in school today will live to see this nation disappear in their lifetime.

Data Collection Procedures

Data will be collected through artifact analysis of field journals, work notes, photographs,

videos, and emails with friends and colleagues to inform my narrative writing about the critical turning points in my life that led me to develop Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st Century. These tactile artifacts will reconnect me to the past and refresh my recollection of what was happening at the time during critical turning points in my life. The distance of time and space combined with collected physical evidence will hopefully allow me to gain a more objective understanding of once impassioned decisions that changed my trajectory in life. Artifact analysis will be complemented by member checking with readers of my narrative autoethnography. As Ellis notes (2004, p. 195),

A story's generalizability is always being tested – not in the traditional way through

random samples of respondents, but by readers as they determine if a story speaks to them

about their experience or about the lives of others they know. Readers provide theoretical

validation by comparing their lives to ours, by thinking about how our lives are similar

and different and the reasons why.

Thus, an autoethnographer’s challenge is to revive the ancient storyteller’s craft of providing existential truths about “Others” we do not know and may never meet in a way that strengthens humanity and makes us and the society around us “better.”

Data Analysis

I will start by grouping the collected data along an autobiographical timeline that follows the trajectory of my educational journey. Data will be analyzed by reviewing “proverbs, virtues and values, rituals, mentors and artifacts” (Chang, 2008, p.76) while sketching mind maps to identify connection points and recurrent themes.

Because autoethnography is by definition an ethnography, the final goal must relate

research findings back to the larger social or cultural context. As the autoethnographic findings begin to emerge, I intend to focus on contextualizing my own personal revelations that fit within the dominant cultural norms and how those differences led me to deviate from my otherwise predestined future.

This integration of my story within the communities I have lived in supports the constructivist epistemology that our understanding of reality is created through shared knowledge.

Autoethnography’s self-revelatory insights can become the sound of one hand clapping if not balanced by the communal norms surrounding the researcher. Thus, the methodology’s continual push and pull between self and society is not a positivist’s battle for authority over truth, but rather the desire to expand the range of realities both the individual and group can embrace.

Of course, the process of digging into one’s past and excavating old relationships requires a willingness to face old demons and share vulnerabilities with strangers. While I cannot remember any personal traumas that resemble autoethnographers Carol Rambo’s “Twitch”

(2013), any self-inflicted harm from overexposure can be minimized as the exploration of self will be controlled by me. What is more difficult to determine is the way in which revisiting past relationships can open old wounds.

At the end of the day, “(a)utoethnography, whether solo or collaborative, is a research genre that is dependent on relationships. As we attempt to tell our stories, we inevitably find that these incidents involve others” (Hernandez & Ngunjiri, p. 263). So even as I may be “ok” with the outcome of a specific decision or relationship, the “other” in the story may not. How we implicate or protect others in the research is dependent upon our critical reflexivity and ability to

“hold relational concerns as high as research” (Ellis, 2007). My hope is that by respecting the privacy and feelings of past partners in my life journey, the exploratory process can result in new

understandings of old memories that enhance our collective futures. What our society prioritizes and thus what our education system teaches the next generation must explicitly address the assumed value judgments we make regarding how to build an existential education for global climate change and thus demand a qualitative approach.

Theoretical Framework

By definition, an existential education requires individual and community co-survival.

Thus, I propose to use Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs as my theoretical framework for understanding the critical incidents in my life that led me to study the climate change impacts on human survival and create Pacific ALLIES with Marshallese partners in Ebeye City on Kwajalein

Atoll. In order to address the primary research question, I plan to follow Marcia’s identity framework of adolescent development to bracket the turning points and lessons learned of my life through the contrasting lens of a) national security (positivist, post-Westphalian, Christian, industrial, hierarchical, linear, static …) and b) human security (constructivist, global, multicultural, communal, circular, dynamic,…). The end goal is to help readers to go beyond the

“thesis-antithesis” positionality of critical studies and synthesize their own Hegelian blueprint for species survival in the coming century. My intent is to utilize a classic five-chapter dissertation outline modified to accommodate non-traditional content.

Chapter 4

Research Findings

The “butterfly effect” (Lorenz, 1993) is a shorthand way to describe chaos theory, which states that things that have tiny differences in starting points or initial inputs can result in massive world changing outcomes. The metaphor often used is one of a butterfly flapping its wings in the

forest contributing to the formation of a hurricane that destroys a city halfway around the world.

The ability to see the connections that drive seemingly disconnected outcomes and predict the

patterns chaotic systems form is the combined endpoint of knowledge and wisdom.

Tongue of Fire

February 1991 in Al Burqan oilfields, three weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday, I was nowhere near that understanding. Under oily black smoke that dripped unburnt oil on us from above there were no signs of butterflies or any other forms of life. Even the dung beetles had disappeared, leaving only our tanks and mechanized armored vehicles to crawl across the blackened sand.

Having blown through Iraqi enemy forces on the first day of the fighting, our unit had maneuvered 25 miles outside of Kuwait International Airport for the final assault to retake the capital. In the middle of the night in the middle of the desert, my message came to me appropriately in the form of fire.

“Ok, spread out and set up a defensive perimeter,” I briefed my squad leaders.

“We’ve parked up on this berm, so we have some protection from incoming fire. This is where we’ll rest for the night. You know the drill...I want you to dig in on the reverse slope. Make sure you have a clear line of sight for at least 600 meters and intersecting fields of fire. Set up watch with the NVG’s one on, one off. Otherwise eat, sleep, clean weapons and be ready to move

by 0400. Any questions?...”

“Hooah”

“Roger that.”

“Ooorah, Sir.”

Three squad leaders, three confirmations, and the men trundled off.

Staff Sergeant Wiley and I didn’t bother to dig in. We pissed on the side of the AMTRAC that had brought us here and then fumbled around our packs for something to eat. 12, 18, 24 hours? I couldn’t remember the last time I ate or shit. Ever since crossing the line of departure it was hydrate, hydrate, hydrate and stay wired using Copenhagen tobacco snuff mixed with MRE instant coffee.

Ah. Dinty Moore stew. Someone had gotten a can on their last care package and had thrown it into the communal kitty where everyone shared everything they didn’t want with everyone else. I got out my P-38 folding can opener and started rocking my way around the rim to get inside.

“Hey, Sir.”

“What’s up, Brown?” I said, putting down the can, grabbing my rifle and standing up.

“Uh, can we move our position?”

“Why? Where you at?”

“We’re down there on the left hand side of the slope.”

“Ok, what’s the problem?”

“We started digging in and hit some Iraqi soldiers. Looks like a bunch of them were just bulldozed over.”

“Ok. But I’d rather you push the line out than fold it in. Just tie in left and right with

Thomas and Jones and make sure you got overlapping fields of fire.” A silent head nod, and he disappeared back into the darkness.

I finished opening the can and pried the lid back so I could get to dinner. Strangely, the top of the stew was covered with a waxy layer of orange fat that covered most of the opening.

Undeterred, I jammed my MRE spoon into the semi-solid mess and pulled out a glob of congealed stew. Singularly focused on eating, I jammed the mess into my mouth before realizing my mistake.

The layer of fat had ended up coating the inside of my mouth blanketing my palate and taste buds. I then spent the next two minutes that it took me to scarf down the rest of the can looking like a dog trying to eat peanut butter. And then, I took a look around.

Ever since entering the Naval Academy, seven years ago, I’d been preparing for this event. War. Fighting. And here I was. Leading a platoon of forty three Marines into battle.

Swimming in it.

But unlike the previous six months, we couldn’t see the stars that night. In attempting a scorched earth policy, Saddam had blown the oil wells and the resulting smoke was so dense it hung like a thick blanket above our heads seemingly close enough to touch. Clouds of oily smoke mixed with the unburnt oil mist that condensed into a slow black rain coating our faces, clothes and weapons. Even the sand was black after weeks of fossil fuel precipitation.

Years later, veterans of the first Gulf War would claim disabilities due to the battery of injections and pills used to deliver prophylactic vaccines and chemicals like pyridostigmine bromide to allow us to continue fighting through anticipated nerve gas attacks. I’m sure living in a continual petroleum fog containing acidic aerosols, sulfur dioxide and heavy metals for days on end didn’t help. But back then that wasn’t my now.

At zero dark thirty, in the suspended animation of an all-enveloping darkness, I could only sense one thing. Fire. An enormous flaming tongue shooting 30 feet out of the ground forming a quivering pillar of light surrounded by a pulsing roar that sounded like the back end of a jet engine or, to others, perhaps the voice of God.

I don’t remember how long I looked at the burning oil well or even what I thought of at the time. I can’t even tell you for sure what it looked like or where I was when I saw it. But it’s fixed there in my memory, burning, roaring, endlessly.

A more imaginative person could have written something eloquent about the event. I reflexively compartmentalized the data, swished my mouth out with water from my canteen and put in another dip of Copenhagen.

“You want to sleep first?”

“Why don’t you go first, Sir.”

“Roger that. Wake me when you’re ready… we’ve got a long day ahead.”

I took the Copenhagen out of my lip and put it back carefully in the can. Never know when you might get another resupply. Time to sleep.

Beginning the Journey

Autoethnography is a disciplined self-reflection of past learning, where much of the data collection and data analysis consists of sifting through old pictures, journals, and email communication to find common themes around critical incidents in my life. The deeper I dive into the self-reflection process, the more I question myself and my own recollection of things. I’ve changed, the physical environment has changed, the socio-political values have changed. And so physical fragments that spark memories of times and places that no longer exist cannot accurately reflect who I am now.

It’s hard for a baby to talk about their existence when they’re still in the womb and their senses are not fully developed. It’s the chasm of experience between being unaware and awoke.

The task is thus remembering those turning points in my life journey and retroactively recounting how they turned into lessons learned for survival. Being spoken to in the desert was one of those instants. But it took me years before I understood the instant’s significance.

So, the question remains, “Where should an autoethnography start?” I imagine with one’s earliest memories of self. But when I try to recall my early childhood, I’m usually at a loss.

Unlike my wife who can recall vivid scenes from the age of three, I’m left with a blank for my first five years.

My mother tells me about how I had a permanent “katonk” or knot on my forehead because I’d continually crawl out of the crib and fall headfirst on the floor. My aunty recounts how I left my house at one and toddled over to her house unsupervised nearly a quarter mile away. I’ve seen pictures from our time in Thailand with the gardener, Khum Kham and heard stories about how he taught me to smoke banana leaves and I served as my parents’ translator from Thai to English. But for all their stories of me, I remember nothing. Memoryless, I’m like a replicant from the movie Blade Runner (Scott, 1982).

Shooting Stars

My first fragments of memories don’t start until after five, when our family returned to the

United States. My father was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as a Staff

Judge Advocate or legal officer for the military. Stretching out along 35 miles of pristine southern

California coastline and covering over 100,000 acres of land, Vandenberg rests about an hour north up the coast from Santa Barbara and almost an equal distance south from San Luis Obispo. I didn’t know those facts then. All I remember was a two story 8 foot high plywood fort my father

made for me in our backyard, that was painted blue and had 2x4 planked floors that rattled when you stomped on them.

We lived in base housing built in the uniform social sameness of the 1950’s. Our house was built next to another house that had the exact same floor plan occupied by another military family with the exact same occupants: a military officer father, a stay at home housewife mother, and, just like our family, three children consisting of an oldest daughter followed by two younger sons. The only difference was that our backyard opened to a sloping field dotted with pampas grass clusters that grew higher than I could see over.

My first memories of that time are of climbing up and down the stairs of the fort with the neighbors’ kids, playing tag in the field and hitting each other with pampas grass stalks, which exploded like a giant dandelion ball with every hit. I don’t have memories of interactions with my father. I don’t remember my mother and have no mental images of playing with my sister or teasing my brother.

The only other fragment I have from that time is the roar at night when the house shook, and I saw a star shoot into space.

Of course, I knew nothing of the Cold War at the time and was ignorant of the fact that

Vandenberg Air Force Base was launching Minuteman II missiles every month to flex the land based leg of America’s nuclear triad. Lofting a W56 nuclear warhead at 23 times the speed of sound, three rocket boosters thrust its load 700 miles above Earth before releasing 80 Hiroshima’s of nuclear devastation upon any city in a 12,000 kilometer (7,800 mile) radius. In about the same time it takes to brew and drink a cup of coffee, cities as far away from Los Angeles as London,

Paris, Moscow, Istanbul, Beijing, Manila, Seoul, Tokyo, Sydney, Lima, Rio de Janeiro could be illuminated by a radioactive mushroom clouds originating from Vandenburg with a simultaneous

twist of two keys. But as launches were conducted in the middle of the night, I only saw the light once in the three years we lived in California.

The point of discussion being that despite living in the epicenter of a Soviet nuclear missile strike, should the Cold War go hot; I was oblivious to how my daily life was intertwined with the launch of a ballistic missile counter strike that might lead to a nuclear winter that would change the planet for those not killed in the fight. Instead, I only heard the roar from the missile silos, saw the white light streaking into heaven and thought, “Ooooooooh. So pretty…”

My parents never disabused us of our ignorance. Our job as children was to ensure our father succeeded at his job and we were silently reminded that excelling at assimilation was our primary objective. I remember my father telling me, “If you ever get into trouble, I’ll make sure you receive the maximum punishment allowed.” And as a JAG (Judge Advocate General) or military legal officer, he would know exactly what that was. So, I toed the line, got good grades, and generally became invisible.

Military Gypsies

Being forced to move at least every three years facilitated the process of anonymity. And after moving from Hawaii to Thailand, Thailand to California, California to Arizona, Arizona to

Alabama, Alabama to England and finally England to Japan; I developed a timetable for social adaptation:

● Year 1: Be invisible. Shut up. Watch. Listen.

● Year 2: Shake the tree. Test the relationship theories. Assess correlations within feedback

loops.

● Year 3: Relax. Reap the investments of learning during Year 1 and 2. And prepare to

move again.

And like a pawn advancing to the far end of the chess board, as long as I could survive the first two years, I’d succeed in the third.

Looking back, I think our family’s constant moving taught me something extremely simple about human nature. The basics are common. Food, water, shelter. As long as everyone has enough, justified conflict is minimized and the social stratification of the haves and have nots remains fluid.

But it also taught me that perceived needs could be as compelling as real physiological needs. If you had already eaten your lunch, you didn’t “need” to take the Twinkie from someone else. If there was a little space left on the field, you didn’t “have to” force another group so you could mark off a full sized football field. But sometimes the entitled took it upon themselves to exercise their imagined privileges and demanded others comply.

For the most part, when dealing with other “military brats,” children of service members who’d also had to move continually, emotionally fixed positions and immobile attitudes were rarely encountered. They too had squirmed at the bottom of the dogpile and had gone through the wash, rinse, repeat cycle enough times to realize what goes around comes around...eventually.

With them, quiet leadership, someone standing up and calmly pointing out the unspoken injustice of a situation could often change the trajectory of a potential clash if done early and clearly enough.

For military brats, watching the same situation play out with different groups of people in different environments and from different cultures helped identify the Venn diagram of shared culture norms and values. And the basics of play fair, tell the truth, and give everyone a chance

(sometimes two or three) seemed to work with most people in most places most of the time. In fact, if there were any exceptions to the rule, it was usually the locally empowered, isolated

ignorant who lorded their social position in one tiny corner of the world over the “outsider” as a way to show local sub-strata members of their tribe universal dominance.

While different people developed different adaptation strategies that usually meant joining one of the dominant social groups; in retrospect, my default became conflict avoidance with a focus on spotting trouble early and then not being there when it erupted. If I think of where that came from, I think it would have to credit the largely unspoken values my parents instilled in us as children. Of course, sometimes the lessons were loud and clear.

Operating Instructions

You stupid or what? My father was a perfectionist and ended up being a workaholic in his job. He would be gone by the time we got up to go to school and I don’t remember having dinner with him - although I’m sure we did. The question I remember him asking me every time that I did something he didn’t like was, “You stupid or what?” A repeated infraction would turn into

“You Stupid or WHAT?!” And finally, when I did it again, “YOUSTUPIDORWHAT?!?!”

Seeing my father today and watching how gently he treats my wife and our children, his grandchildren, I think it must be some error in recollection, because it’s hard to imagine him saying that today. But as a child I knew that having any interaction with dad meant that I’d exceeded the level of corrective punishment generally administered by mom. We were never praised for doing well, for that was to be expected. Rather, seeing dad meant that I was failing my duty as a son and my dishonorable actions were threatening the downfall of our entire family legacy.

But dad’s questions about my intelligence led me to take his other guidance “Think!” and

“Did you look it up?” more seriously. The first piece of guidance may seem pretty simple. But

“Think!” became instrumental in slowing me down and keeping me from following every whim

or crazy idea immediately. Instead, just by yelling the word at myself in my head gave me three seconds to consider the implications before leaping.

Of course, pulling snakes out of their holes in Arizona; getting the wire from my braces headgear jammed into my cheek while playing basketball in Japan; or being caught drunk and puking in my neighbor’s driveway, the Base Air Wing Commander, after our high school wrestling team won our local championship in England may belie my claim. But I can only offer in my defense, the worse things that never happened had I not had that guidance.

I suspect the second piece of guidance was borne out of parental laziness. But “Did you look it up?” eventually became a guiding principle in my life. I don’t even remember when my father said it to me, but I think I was asking him a question about my homework and probably wanted to get the easy answer. Instead of answering me, he simply asked, “Did you look it up?”

I hadn’t, so I did. I began to read. I began to wonder. Finally, I began to always ask questions.

The last two pieces of advice my father imparted are radically different in that one is still repeated to this day and the other may be a figment of my imagination. Whatever the situation, my father admonishes me to, “Leave it better than you found it.” It means that washing the dishes after I eat is the bare minimum. I need to take my dishes out of the dish rack, dry them, put them back in the cupboard... and then wipe the counter and stove, even though I didn’t use them.

“Leave it better than you found it” applies doubly when it comes to other people. You can mistreat family because they are stuck with you for life, but never mistreat the less well known others. Strangers deserved the facade that we were the perfect family, completely responsible, reliable and worthy of their full respect.

That meant refilling the gas tank and getting the car washed and waxed, if you borrowed it

for an afternoon. And if improving the condition of an item borrowed was impossible, then including a gift or special thank you so that the lender knows how much you appreciated their sacrifice. It also meant trying to avoid borrowing anything from anyone as much as possible so eliminate any reliance on others.

The last piece of advice was more in the form of a question. One time, he asked me, “If everyone is jumping off a bridge into a river of fire would you do it just because everyone else is?” For some reason that memory doesn’t ring true. My father is normally monosyllabic when talking to me and I can’t hear him saying something like this. But like the flaming tongue in the desert and star shooting upward towards the heavens, I can’t tell you when or where it was, but in my memory it happened somewhere. And like the four other pieces of fatherly advice, it’s become a tenet of my standard operating procedures for life.

That’s not to say that I was a particularly compliant child or that my actions reflected any wisdom my father imparted. Although I’d like to think I was a calm kid growing up, something in my memory tells me I used to have a horrific temper and could spin into a blinding rage. Whether to burn off energy or just to get me out of the house, I started judo at 6 years old and then learned

Tae Kwon Do, Tang Su Do and Aikido according to whatever fighting style being taught near my father’s newest assignment.

One thing my mother said that stuck with me through that period was an observation she made of other fighting arts practitioners. “You know,” she said offhandedly one day, “the really tough ones are the gentlest people in the world.” It took me decades to discover why, but her comment stuck with me through childhood.

Being strong and having skills to fight didn’t mean beating people up and lording over them. The ability to fight was considered a responsibility and capacity only to be used in

defending those weaker than yourself. Perhaps the only incident my father recounts with pride about my childhood is when I stopped one classmate from bullying another by using a judo throw.

I have zero recollection of the incident, but using our strength to stand up for others was another silent expectation we were indoctrinated with.

I imagine part of that came from our family history, which dovetailed with the exhortation my mother kept repeating, “Never give up.” And the sacrifices and triumphs of my grandparents were exemplary of the life we were expected to live.

Origin Myths

Both sides of my family came from Hiroshima and emigrated to Hawaii at the turn of the last century. The 1873 Land Tax Reform and deflationary fiscal policies between 1881-1885 in

Japan had led to depressed rice prices which increased farmer bankruptcies and loss of land ownership. By the beginning of the 1900’s an estimated two-thirds of all peasant families were tenant farmers; and as taxes increased and farm productivity stagnated, wives and daughters were sent to the cities to find work in the city as factory workers or prostitutes. It’s in this historical context that my mother’s family, the Tanabe’s (田辺 meaning next to the rice paddy) and my father’s family, the Nakano’s( 中野 meaning middle of the subsistence farm) came to Hawaii.

My mother’s father found work as a worker in a greengrocer in Honolulu. After marrying my maternal grandmother and having six children, he scrimped and saved, eventually building the old Tanabe Superette on the corner of Ke’eamoku Street and King and the 8-story Banyan Ala

Moana Hotel on Sheridan. Our grandpa Tanabe who used to love to pin us as grandchildren and tickle us represented our Japanese model of the American dream.

My father’s father had been studying to become a doctor in Japan when his father, my great-grandfather died. My great grandmother never learned how to speak English and was having

difficulty earning a living while raising children; so she sent for her second oldest son, my paternal grandfather to give up his dreams and help out. Instead of using his hands to make surgical incisions and mastering the differences between vertical mattress and subcuticular sutures, his hands grew rough and calloused working as a stevedore on the Honolulu docks, before cutting sugar cane on the Big Island. After thirty years of hard labor, he slowly rose through the ranks to become the President of the Independent Cane Growers Association. Another

American dream achieved.

In both families, going to college and receiving an education was considered the pinnacle of culture and social achievement. And my grandparents sacrificed everything to make an education possible. Much like John Adam’s concept of three generations of transformation through education, my marginally literate Tanabe grandparents pushed all five children to graduate high school with three going on to graduate from college. My cane worker Nakano grandparents were able to do the same with all four children graduating from both high school and college. My own parents surpassed their siblings with my father earning his law degree from the University of Michigan and my mother earning her Master’s in Education from the University of Wisconsin.

Family Matters

As my father was transferred from base to base, we were reminded that just as our grandparents had sacrificed for our parents’ future, and our parents were making sacrifices for our future, so must we make sacrifices for our children. To continue the family line, we must live,

“Kodomo no tame ni” meaning in Japanese, “for the sake of the children” (Ogawa & Grant,

1978). In that, our existence was not for individual benefit, but for the survival of the family and the continued honor of our Japanese heritage.

My mother would say, “We feed you, we clothe you, we provide you a place to sleep and opportunity to study… what are you bringing to the family?” Doing our chores, getting good grades and being recognized as model citizens in the community were the bare minimum, we could do to repay our parents for all their sacrifices. So, we did our best to conform for the good of our family and make a positive impression on others.

For their part, my parents always supported our education, never questioning any request made for school or our studies. It didn’t matter if it was books, pencils, notepads, or money for field trips, all we had to do was say it was school related and the request would be approved.

“Things” were another matter.

Both my parents had grown up in first generation immigrant families in Hawaii at a time when being Japanese meant being the enemy. And while my family had three relatives who served in the famed Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Regiment, we also had other relatives who were in the Japanese internment camp on the mainland at the same time others serving as conscripts in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Having lived through the rationing and social stigma of being a member of a defeated people, my parents silently taught us to make do so we’d never have to rely on others or ask a favor.

Instead of buying something new, repair the old. If you need to buy something, don’t purchase on credit, but save until you could afford it. After you bought something, keep it well maintained, to extend its utility. All good advice except when it crashed headlong into our nomadic military lifestyle.

Every three years we’d end up moving house to a different community, climate and culture. Instead of being able to pass on clothes to younger relatives or bring a still serviceable lawnmower to a backyard full of cacti, we were forced to jettison clothes and household goods

with every move.

While my recollections are likely flawed, I remember being given one large moving box of 18” x 18” x 16” to transfer all my personal items to the next location. That size is quite sufficient for the teddy bear or favorite blankie of a child of six or nine years of age, but somewhat less adequate for an adolescent of fifteen. The end result being the recognition that while you may not be able to hold onto anything material in the long run, the amount of knowledge that you could bring with you from one location to another was limited only by your memory.

The last lessons about life from my mother that stick out in my mind were sometimes spoken, but more remembered by the way she lived. Buck the system and have fun doing it.

In seemingly deliberate opposition to my father’s adherence to self-discipline, the rule of law and obeying social conventions, my mother made it a point of not doing what was expected, perhaps just to show her disregard for convention and maybe just to prove that she knew better.

I think part of it was that she was an educated, smart and capable woman who could see the shortcomings and limitations of the status quo. Born in 1936 and maturing as a woman in the

1960’s and 1970’s, she too wanted the social, economic and political freedoms promised by the women’s liberation movement. And so, while she was ostensibly a military spouse, a mother and housewife, she wanted to have her own identity outside of Mrs. George Nakano. As a result, she sought to work at every new base my father was stationed at.

While my father had the constant framework of career advancement through the military, my mother had to find new work every time we moved. Looking back, I imagine it must have been frustrating for someone who wanted to be respected in their own right for their own career achievements. The expectation at the time was that military officer’s wives would be part of the

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Officers’ Wives Club, “den mothers” to the junior officers and enlisted families in the unit. The

Officers’ Wives Club was a mirror of the military command structure with the Commander’s wife leading the other wives in maintaining unit cohesion and morale. And my mother wanted nothing to do with it.

Even though it provided status and structure that complemented the existing military officer hierarchy, which was largely white, male, educated and middle classed, my mother wanted something more than the JAG’s wife, even if it meant not meaning anything to the other officers’ wives. So, she used her master’s degree in education to teach English in Thai schools and foreign officers’ wives at Air War College, subjects that she was pretty overqualified to do. She also volunteered at the Chamber of Commerce, took on product marketing at Army Air Forces

Exchange Services (AAFES), the base exchange and other odd jobs requiring skills she was completely unqualified to do.

The greatest asset to her succeeding independent of the traditional structures of military spousal expectations was her manic approach to everything she attempted. Called “Dizzy” in high school and university, mom worked to infuse everything she did with an infectious enthusiasm.

And through her life choices and example, she taught that all you need to succeed is just to bring an endless amount of positive enthusiasm and then fake it till you make it to your destination.

And our job was to make the family successful by contributing whatever we could to the group. In contrast to our mother’s liberated status, we weren’t Janis, Gregg, or Jason - enlightened little bundles of joy that had the ability or right to express our individuality. We were the Nakano kids, Helen’s daughter, George’s son; and as such had external standards of conduct to achieve.

Earning Worth

“What are you doing?” was less a question about what activity was occupying our time

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and more a reminder that we had better be doing something constructive to help the family in one way or another. If the grass was cut, the clothes were washed and all our other chores were completed, then we should be focused on self-improvement by reading or studying something.

From a Maslow’s hierarchy’s perspective, we always had our physiological needs of food, water and shelter provided. From a character development standpoint, these spoken and implied lessons lay out the moral values and social framework for how we interacted with each other and with the world outside our family. Luckily, growing up on military bases provided us a sense of safety and security reserved for prisons and gated communities.

We called our parents “Sir” and “Ma’am” and answered the house telephone like any trained receptionist might, “Nakano’s residence. Gregg Nakano speaking. Whom do you wish to speak to?”

We were reminded at every turn that these basics were provided for us - first by our parents' hard work and sacrifice and second by the military, which by extension meant the United

States of America. On base, all traffic stopped when “Reveille” was played, and everyone turned to salute the flag being raised at the beginning of the workday. The process was reversed at the end of the day when the loudspeakers broadcast “Retreat” and the flag was lowered and then put away. Thus, our loyalty was expected to both our family and the military for providing our needs, without questioning the moral calculus of either in how our food, water and shelter were provided.

I think the all-encompassing structure of base life provided Maslow’s sense of belonging and the understanding that as long as we obeyed the rules, we would be allowed to remain a part of it. But I don’t remember any particular sense of love or friendship beyond what was a conditional relationship of obey and be rewarded. We all knew that if you broke the rules or

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stepped outside the lines, your base privileges would be revoked. Service members who failed to comply were given a dishonorable or less than honorable discharge, while disobedient dependents were sent back to CONUS (Continental United States) when living overseas. And those relationships were not only accepted, but expected as the price to pay for a cohesive social structure.

Even within our own family structure, an ephemeral term like “love” was never used growing up. It was understood that parental love was providing us Maslow’s basics of water, food and shelter and when possible, the academic opportunities and life experiences for us to grow into healthy, honest, productive adults. And our way of showing gratitude for being sheltered, fed and clothed was to perform and make our parents proud. And so, I did, at least academically.

I skipped a grade in middle school and continued to get straight A’s until entering high school. I remember my mother telling me in 8th grade when we moved to England that there was more to school than getting straight A’s. So, I focused on other things.

I made the varsity wrestling team twice and won regionals among all the American military schools in Japan. I continued taking martial arts and got my “red belt” in Tang Soo Do in

England before switching to Aikido in Japan. I got my lifeguard certification and watched pools during summers when the weather was nice and still managed to graduate with honors as senior class president and was voted, “Most Likely to Succeed.”

But if I reflect on Nolte’s Children Learn What They Live (1972), I would have to say that out of all the things I lived with, the pervasive emotion I learned was one of shame. No matter how much I did or how hard I worked, I can’t remember a single time that my parents said,

“Wow, that was fantastic! We’re so proud of you for all your hard work…” I’m sure they must have said it once or twice, but in the fallibility of my selective memory, I have no recollection of

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the event. And so, I learned to feel guilty that nothing I did was ever good enough.

That’s not to say I didn’t live with other positive emotions growing up. I grew up knowing that if I needed something educational and my parents could provide it, they would. I lived with sharing in our family, not only between family members but watching my parents help friends and neighbors and thus learned generosity.

I grew up living with honesty and learned that truthfulness was the bedrock of trusting relationships. The military system reinforced our familial environment of fairness and so I grew up believing in a sense of universal justice where designations of race, religion and color were subordinate to working hard and being honest. And through all the moves from base to base and school to school, I grew up with a sense of security, and learned to have faith in myself, as long as it was framed within the structure of being a military dependent. So, after graduating from high school, it’s not as if I joined the military, so much as I was unable to leave it.

Looking back, I think the trajectory of my life has been defined as much by opportunities not taken as much as being denied things I thought I wanted. In this case, it was failing to take the chance with the greatest opportunity for personal transformation and doing what was safe.

Throughout high school, I’d practiced aikido religiously and become taken by the idea of 大和魂

“Yamato damashi” or the Japanese warrior spirit.

Warrior’s Spirit

Hearkening back to my mother’s belief that all the real killers were gentle people in times of peace, yamato-damashi reflects a single minded clarity of purpose that prevails against all opposition, real or imagined. But in contrast to the destructive accomplishment of one’s objective by violence, the true samurai spirit was considered to be in 大 (great) 和 (harmony) with the universe and thus able to accomplish the objective by being an instrument of the divine.

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One example of this spirit is reflected in a legendary competition between two celebrated

Japanese swordsmiths, Masamune and Muramasa. In the story, Masamune, well known throughout the land as a master swordsmith, takes on Muramasa, a talented but cocky individual, as his apprentice. After the apprentice believes he knows all that can be learned, Muramasa becomes haughty and challenges his master to a competition to see who can forge the better sword.

Both swordsmiths worked day and night for weeks putting their heart and soul into their creations. When they finished, they decided to compare the swords by placing them in a stream with their cutting edge against the current. Even though the stream is flowing slowly, the apprentice Muramasa’s sword splits everything its edge touches. In fact, seemed as if leaves, twigs, fish, and even the air itself were drawn towards its edge to be cut into two.

After seeing this display, the master, Masamune placed his sword into the stream. Unlike his apprentice’s sword, Masamune’s sword cut nothing. Fallen leaves floated past the blade unharmed, while river fish avoided its edge and continued swimming downstream.

A monk watching the contest was asked to decide who the winner is and chose the master

Masamune, rather than his apprentice, Muramasa.

“The first of the swords was by all accounts a fine sword, however it is a bloodthirsty, evil

blade, as it does not discriminate as to who or what it will cut. It may just as well be

cutting down butterflies as severing heads. The second was by far the finer of the two, as it

does not needlessly cut that which is innocent and undeserving.”

The monk’s judgement reflects the ultimate object of Bushido (武士道,), the warrior’s path, which is not to kill, but to protect peace. And thus, the sword, as the warrior’s primary tool, needed to be infused with a peaceful spirit in harmony with nature.

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The difference between Masamune’s sword and Muramasa’s sword was the difference between martial arts like karate (空手) “empty hand” or tae kwon do (跆拳道) “path of kicking punching” styles and aikido (合気道) “path of unifying energies.” Muramasa’s sword, like karate and taekwondo, was based on a Manichean, winner-loser, black-white, top-bottom dichotomy.

Masamune’s sword, like aikido, was about finding a common center point and unifying the energies between seemingly oppositional forces. Thus, mastering karate and taekwondo were about being stronger than your opponent, while mastering aikido was about mastering yourself to be in harmony with the universe.

During our aikido practices I followed my teachers’ instructions unquestioningly. I ended up being poked (gently) in the eye with a wooden practice sword and later required stitches between my thumb and forefinger when the same sword tip pierced the webbing of my hand. I was thrown repeatedly in practices until I passed out and, after I regained consciousness, came back for more. I would open doors for my teachers and pour them beer when we would eat together after practice. And for my obedience and stubbornness, probably more than my technique, I was the object of increased attention.

After graduating high school, the head sensei (先生) “one born before” offered me a letter of recommendation to study at the aikido home dojo (道場) “place of the path.” There, I would live, sleep, and eat “aikido” 24/7, until I was deemed ready to leave. It was an honor not lightly offered; but without anyone to consult on my decision, I decided not to go.

Decades later, my American sensei contacted me out of the blue and told me that our

Japanese sensei, a Japanese vice cop, had ties to the yakuza or Japanese mafia. “You ever wonder why no one ever fucked with Nage-sensei?” he asked rhetorically. My American sensei related his experiences as a black enlisted man during the Vietnam War and his own background with

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military intelligence, chemical warfare and the Japanese underworld. My conversations with him about my Japanese aikido sensei were as surreal as when I heard the rumors that our high school principal, who supposedly could read lips, perform magic tricks and never seemed to be around was actually an American counterintelligence officer using his position as a cover for his real work. But it also reminded me that nothing is ever what it seems, and everyone lives within the reality of their own awareness.

Looking back 37 years at my 18-year-old self, I think it was a lack of self-confidence that caused me to step back from going to the home dojo and source of aikido. The fear of failure and potential for embarrassing myself, my family and my sensei were greater than my desire to learn.

And without an emotional support structure to fully calculate my options, I drifted.

No Place to Call Home

Instead of doing anything bold or daring, I stayed close to home. My father had one year left before rotating out of Japan and I decided to enroll as a Japanese language student at

International Christian University (ICU). Instead of attending college in the United States some five thousand miles and eight time zones away, I ended up at ICU located near Musashi-Sakai train station about a one hour ride away from Yokota Air Force Base where my father was stationed. It was the easiest non-choice I could pick.

But I think the biggest challenge in focusing on doing something during that year was that for the first time in my life I had no external expectations. Food was cheap, beer was plentiful, and classes were based on self-motivation. Without a threat to escape or goal to achieve, I could survive by doing nothing.

That’s not to say others didn’t do more with the same opportunity. One of my classmates continued on to Georgetown Law School after mastering Japanese and ended up a Special Agent

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with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But while I was supposed to be studying Japanese language, I was instead learning something about myself and my misfittedness in the world.

I was of Japanese ancestry and had been taught to embrace the character and values of a culture, whose language I could neither speak nor read. Moreover, the Japan that my parents had held out for emulation was an idealized version of what their parents, uneducated farmers born around the turn of the 1900’s, believed was Japanese. As my parents’ families struggled to make a life in Hawaii, those ideals and values had been folded into the opportunities provided by the

American dream and then tempered by the realities of living as alien residents and suspected potential enemies of the State.

But in the eighty odd years between when my grandparents left Japan and I returned, the

Japanese people’s thinking and values had evolved. The country had gone from an agricultural economy dominated by a feudal society of daimyo or hereditary landlords and samurai who enforced their rule to a modern industrial national economy that had struggled and lost against the

West in World War II. Now, nearly forty years later, with the resurrection of Germany and

Japan’s economy through subordination to the United States’ international system complete, the people of the once defeated nations could enjoy a standard of living that was the envy of the rest of the world.

Thus, in the 1980’s, most of my Japanese classmates could look at university as a four year reprieve from cram school memorization before returning to their workaholic futures as an automaton Japanese salary-man. And so, despite looking like the rest of my Japanese classmates,

I did not move, think or act like them. Perhaps most importantly for a language student, I could not communicate fluently with them. I still remember the mixed expression of disgust, confusion and suspicion when a Japanese salaryman asked me for directions at the train station.

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I knew enough Japanese to realize he was asking for some sort of directions but didn’t understand enough to determine if it was the platform, train line or individual stop he wanted. For his part, he looked at me as if trying to decide if I was just playing stupid or truly had some intellectual disability. As I pursed my lips and tried to formulate an intelligible response, he snorted, !"#$$%& “That’s ok...don’t bother” and walked past me to find his own way. In that instant, I realized I was officially a Twinkie or banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside, and a stranger in my supposed homeland.

STAGE 1: Identity Foreclosed

In many ways, Stage 1 from my birth to around age 18 is the simplest and most boring when viewed through Marcia’s concepts of identity formation (1993b). Like most children, I started with foreclosure - meaning that I was committed to the ideals, values, and structures of my parents, peers and surroundings. As a blank slate, I blindly accepted the assumptions and givens of those around me because they adequately explained every physical, intellectual and emotional interaction I had within the scope of my limited life experiences. And because there were no glaring disparities between what I was taught and what I observed, I committed to following my elders and the authority figures in my life.

That’s not to say there were no challenges or discontinuities. I was raised to be proud of my Japanese heritage and encouraged to embody the attitudes and characteristics of Yamato- damashi, the warrior’s fighting spirit. Yet as a military dependent, we were told to subordinate our cultural identity for the sake of community uniformity. And to complicate matters, every three years we would move to a new base that required relearning the implicit and explicit understandings, narratives, and perspectives of the local population that surrounded the military base.

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Figure 1

Marcia Identity Development Stage 1

Note. The figure reflects my Stage 1 development of Low Exploration and High Commitment of

“Foreclosure” where I wholeheartedly accept the identity provided to me by my parents and community. Figure adapted from Socio-Emotional Development website describing James

Marcia’s ” Ego Identity Statuses.” Retrieved from https://socioemotional.weebly.com/james- marcia.html.

Thus, the conditions that dictated who I was, what I could be and how I should act repeatedly changed. And each time we moved, I started at the bottom of the social dogpile, having to master new rules to gain status in the pack. From a Maslowian perspective, my desire to be loved and accepted, combined with my parents’ demand that we obey the rules and excel within them encouraged the creation of different personas to be adopted depending on the location and situation. The final result was an identity “defense in depth” where continuous situational code switching became the means of making it through the day.

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At the outer reaches of my identity circles, I was an American military dependent off base, visiting the local economy. The civilians, whether they were American or foreign, were a different animal “Other.” Their ways were to be treated with diffident respect, if only to avoid being charged with a crime and bring dishonor to the military and the family. And this was the easiest to accomplish in that my exposure times off base were minimal; and as all it took was to blend in and avoid standing out by mimicking the actions of the rest of the crowd.

Inside the gates of the base, was a higher level of responsibility. As an officer’s dependent, I was expected to set the example for the enlisted dependents. While I don’t remember words expressing their desires in this way, I somehow knew my parents expected that our personal standards for individual conduct should always exceed those around us. Outside the house, we were onstage, and our character and actions should bring honor to and respect for the family even if we were not truly that way at home.

In fact, my parents generally seemed to have a low opinion of who I was in reality. When bringing home straight A’s or being recognized for outstanding conduct, my mother would say, “I guess you have them fooled,” as if to say, “You’re really not that good; but good job making the outsiders think you are.” As a result, excellence became the baseline and earning love and respect from my parents was more about the chores we did for the family: mowing the lawn, scrubbing the toilets, washing the dishes.

Inside our house was my final circle of identity. “Did you…” was the echo that led my decision-making process for how to act day to day. And those familial expectations were framed within the myth of what it meant to live in a way that honored our Japanese ancestry. I picked 18 years old as the turning point in that it wasn’t until I understood that my being “Japanese” was a lie, that my inner identity was shattered. I had learned to disdain the civilians living off base as

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fat, dumb and undisciplined; so, who cared what they thought of me. And while I did care about what military service members and their dependents thought of me, I had always been able to excel according to the given standards regardless of where we ended up.

But living in Japan forced me to question what it meant to be “Japanese.” I dishonored myself when I didn’t have the courage to go study Aikido at the home dojo as a Japanese. Away from all my American familiarities and struggling with the language, I didn’t fit in as a student at a Japanese university. And then the final straw was the look of disgust by the Japanese salaryman at the train station when I couldn’t answer a simple question for directions.

In that instant I realized that the image my parents crafted for me of what it meant to be

Japanese was a myth and I was striving to be something that never was, except in the imperfect memories of my immigrant grandparents. Thus, even if I achieve “Japanese” perfection according to the specifications of my parents, I would remain an individual without a community to match.

And from a Marcia perspective, this shock to awareness began to push me from foreclosure’s commitment to something else

From a Maslow's physiological needs perspective, I had every requirement of food, water and shelter provided for me in the first 18 years of life. My father’s job as a military officer and the community respect he earned as a legal officer ensured my siblings and I grew up in solid middle-class comfort. And living immersed in the prescribed interactions of military bases, community acceptance was a given as long as we obeyed the rules; and this lack of want lulled me into a comfort of never questioning how those basics were provided.

All these things led me to view the military as my secondary parent, whose rules and guidelines were to be obeyed when my parents were unavailable. The military also provided a sort of constant as we moved from base to base in that although the local weather, accent, people

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might change the structure, components and rules of base life remained largely the same. This meant that even as I might be pushed to the bottom of the social heap each time we moved, I could be confident that as long as I kept my mouth shut, worked hard, and played by the rules, I would eventually climb back to the top. Thus, when I lost my internal center point of discovering

I wasn’t really Japanese, it was seemingly natural that I would grasp at my identity in the military as the next option

Searching for a Tribe

I had enrolled at ICU for Summer School after graduating from high school and by the

Fall of 1984, about the same time that KAL flight 007 was being shot down over Russia, I was trying to find a way out. With my father in the military, I had the opportunity to apply to the various Service Academies. And after many fits and starts, I was selected as first alternate for the

United States Naval Academy. Luckily the primary candidate declined his offer of an appointment, and I was allowed to take his place.

So, on 6 July 1984, I joined 1,365 other new “plebes” or freshmen for our six week indoctrination period designed to scrub any lingering civilian attitudes from our character. For the next six weeks there were only five appropriate responses: were: 'Yes sir,' 'No sir,' 'Aye aye, sir,'

'No excuse, sir,' and 'I'll find out, sir'; and we treated our student instructors, 2nd Class midshipmen or rising juniors only two years ahead of us, as the voice of God.

According to the newspaper (Frece, 1984), our class was selected from 14,698 applicants, which was the largest number of applicants since 1971. It was expected that 5% or 68 inductees of the 1,365 standing in formation with me would drop out before the end of the summer and as many as 20% or 270 of us wouldn’t make it to graduation four years later. I don’t remember thinking about anything that far in advance. My goal was just to make it to the next day.

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In many ways, the Naval Academy was a return to the familiar world of orders, walls, schedules and bells. While the orders were clearer, walls higher, schedules tighter and bells louder, there was a comforting familiarity in the structured rigidity of life. Plebe Summer’s message was simple, “This is how we do things here...conform or leave.” There was no leeway for square pegs in round holes. And so, we were hammered into submission or rejected as defective.

For me, I think there was some comfort in knowing what the standard was and then being given an opportunity to disappear into the norm. But everyone's comfort with the environment varied from individual to individual, depending on how they’d been raised. Many former enlisted found Plebe Summer one big joke. Especially the Marines. They’d already been through Marine

Corps Boot Camp, thirteen weeks of being given copious verbal and physical incentives to improve their performance by Marine Drill Instructors who’d survived the Vietnam War. Being yelled at by an upperclassmen yet untested in battle was laughable, although the former enlisted understood the game well enough not to snicker or roll their eyes.

Other enlisted who’d not had the academic background to enter the Academy directly had spent the previous year at Naval Academy Prep School or “NAPS” and had practiced going through this routine until they could do Plebe Summer in their sleep. They too viewed the time as an over enthusiastic summer camp. The ones who had the worst time of things were inductees who weren’t physically or emotionally prepared.

Our days started at 5:30 with calisthenics led by Coach Lenz, telling us to leap, squat, and do sit ups in the beginning of morning nautical twilight. “Are you out there ‘88?”, the year of our anticipated graduation, he’d ask, before telling us to get on the ground to do some more pushups or jump up and run another lap. Every incoming class between 1968 and 1992 would be subjected

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to Coach Lenz’s Richard Simmon’s enthusiasm and unmistakable German accent leading some to whisper that he was actually one of the Operation Paperclip Nazi’s, recruited by the United States to exploit German technical and scientific expertise, now used to torture unsuspecting American youths. And the fun continued from there.

After morning exercises were done, we’d sprint back to the 4.8 miles of corridors of

Bancroft Hall or “Mother B” as the midshipmen called the largest university dormitory in the

United States. A quick shower was followed by the race to get into an inspection ready uniform and recite our “rates” , the bits of information we were expected to memorize and recite on command. The names of the Officer of the Watch and Assistant Officer of the Watch, the complete menu of our next meal, the content of three newspaper articles we’d read that morning to include an additional piece of news from the sports page, the names and hometowns of all of our classmates in our company were among the general knowledge that was fair game for any upperclassman who wanted to stop you in the hall or just harass you as you ate your meal. Then came the specific professional knowledge you needed to master for that particular day of the week.

Knowledge to be memorized ranged from the general to very specific. Questions like:

What is the mission of the Department of Defense?; What is the Mission of the Naval Academy?;

What is the chain of command from the President of the United States all the way down to

Midshipman Fourth Class (Midn 4/C) Nakano?; and What are the articles of the Code of

Conduct? could be interspersed with questions like “How many nuclear reactors are on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier?” and nonsensical memorization tasks like reciting, “How’s the cow?” when asked for milk.

The information itself was immaterial. The Mission of the Naval Academy is:

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"To develop Midshipmen morally, mentally and physically and to imbue them with the

highest ideals of duty, honor and loyalty in order to graduate leaders who are dedicated to

a career of naval service and have potential for future development in mind and character

to assume the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government."

In that, there was never any suggestion that you were in school to gain information, knowledge or a degree. The purpose of your presence was to become a leader who could do the right thing when everything around you was going wrong. The endless belittling, berating, questioning, and inspecting were designed to help everyone answer one question, “Are you going to be able to perform a critical life-saving task when the world around you is collapsing?” And without being able to place young men and women in the life threatening situations that simulated actual combat, Plebe Summer was the best we got.

Know Your Rates Today?

“Positive pressure with a purpose" was the idea that by continually demanding the impossible in the midst of extraneous conflicting stimuli, the Plebe Summer cadre were helping us access previously untapped potential as well as improve our ability to discern what was most important here and now. Explaining the role of “rates” in Plebe Summer to a distressed parent of a midshipman struggling through the process, a graduate explained (Captain, 2016):

I got yelled at because I had condensation on the outside of my window during a

room inspection and was asked to explain it. At the top of my voice. With

underlying scientific principles. While being constantly interrupted with

comments about other things in the room. Yelling and criticism is part of the

process, requiring the yellee to suck it up, clear the brain, shut out the static, deal

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with the anticipatory tension, focus on the required action and execute without

hesitation.

Your son is learning a skill that may save his life and that of others one day, that of calm,

flawless performance under pressure and relying on memorized sequences to survive.

You cannot help him, except to express confidence he will succeed. Avionics fire in his

plane, cockpit filling with smoke, one shot at landing on the carrier or punching out,

voices in his earpiece, alarms going off - knowing what to do because of memorized drills

and confidence gained. Fire at sea in an engineering compartment, everyone working as a

team, laser focus, noise/heat/smoke/fear - knowing what to do because of memorized

drills and confidence gained. And these aren't even combat situations.

And when the process worked, another graduate described the outcome (LongAgoPlebe, 2016):

Plebe rates helped me to organize incoming information while it was incoming, rather

than wasting time afterward that could delay or paralyze a decision. I still do this in ways

that I do not see most of my otherwise very-smart adult friends and colleagues able to do.

It also allows me to deliberately focus on individual stimuli in the midst of what people

would call "noise."

But individual performance was secondary to the success of your group. By pounding everyone until they failed as individuals was to promote the realization that the military only survived as cohesive units. There is no “me” only “we.” And if by some miracle you had memorized all your rates perfectly and found time to relax, you were expected to dive back in and help your classmates still struggling with theirs. This sense of team effort applied to everything we did, from taping off each other’s uniforms for lint before every formation to helping make each other’s beds and accepting responsibility and punishment for the mistakes of someone else.

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In direct contrast to America’s promotion of self-aggrandizing uniqueness, anyone who embraced the attitude of “Well, I’m special” quickly learned that you could receive “special treatment” and wish you’d just gotten the “average” attention instead. Thus, the people who had the most difficulty with Plebe Summer were generally individuals who had lived privileged lives, who had never been yelled at, who had never been pushed to their physical limits and failed or who had never had to work as a team to succeed.

I suppose at this point, the question an education specialist or curriculum researcher might ask is, “Well, how did your K-12 schooling help you succeed in that environment?” Without trying to be contentious, I’d have to respond, “Not at all.” Everyone who had made it there met the basic threshold for intelligence. None of the questions required any literacy beyond what was printed in the Washington Post or computational skills past percentages and proportional relationships taught in 6th grade math.

In fact, one cardinal sin in responding to a rate was inserting the words, “Well, I think” into any response. And our upperclassman would scream, “I’m not interested in what you think.

You need to tell me what you know. What are you going to bet your life on? Or more importantly, because I don’t care if you kill yourself making a stupid mistake, what are you going to risk your men’s lives on?”

What was existential, tested and nurtured with every interaction was the development of character and sense of personal responsibility for the whole. No one knew everything. Everyone made mistakes.

The rates were a way to assess your character. Our upperclass wanted to know if we were going to make lame excuses for why we weren’t prepared. They wanted to see if we would try to make-up some half-baked answer to avoid getting yelled at or take responsibility head on and

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commit to fixing our mistake.

So, our options were simple. “Yes sir.” “No Sir.” “Aye aye Sir.” “No excuse Sir.” And, I fucked up so “I’ll find out Sir.” In the midst of all the shouting, the plebes who gained the respect of their peers and assessors alike were the ones who never cracked under pressure and took everything in stride. Everyone had good days and bad days. But the innate leaders were able to move forward lightly. More than just being always prepared with the right answer and inspection ready room or uniform, these individuals were able to “be” in a way that lifted others up and helped everyone reach a higher potential.

Compared to the rest of my classmates, I was spectacularly average. I didn’t have the photographic or echoic memory enjoyed by a lucky few. My character hadn’t been previously tested by growing up in a single parent family in South Philly or been previously enlisted before going to the Academy. So, if there was any advantage I did have in getting through Plebe

Summer, it was a reasonable familiarity with military life and the spoken and intrinsic values taught to me by my parents.

“Yes, Sir,” and “No, Sir” were already my default responses. I understood the concept of respecting hierarchy and rank. And I’d been raised from birth to think in terms of what was best for the greater good.

From a more personal perspective, my father’s questioning if I was “stupid or what” had vaccinated me against any belief that personal criticism was fatal. I accepted that I was. So, I’d try harder. Our family’s constant moving around had prepared me for the “blend into the background” strategy of not bringing attention to myself by exceptional performance, good or bad. My goal was to survive Year 1. Be invisible. Shut up. Watch. Listen. Learn.

Finally, my mother’s example of trying to make everything fun helped me, like the child

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who receives a pile of manure for Christmas and keeps looking for the pony out there, somewhere. I don’t think I found anything vaguely equine in our six weeks of Plebe Summer. My only consolation was that unlike classmates who were unable to defecate for three days because of stress… and then began to stress because of their inability to defecate; I was able to eat, shit, sleep, and get up to do it all again until the indoctrination period ended.

I think to reflect a little deeper on the value of classroom lessons for this sort of experience, I can honestly say I personally had never encountered any courses on the skills required to excel in all my years of desk bound schooling. The pedagogical studies that showed that students respond better in a relaxing learning environment where instructors show respect to the student and their unique cultural, religious or ethnic differences weren’t really applicable here.

In fact, if a team of educators were to visit Mother B when a “party” was being conducted, they might think they’d stumbled on a re-creation of the Stanford Prison Experiment where young men and women were stumbling to respond to commands given by only slightly older young men and women who were only differentiated by uniform and demeanor.

But the idea that it is impossible to teach intellectual content and physical skills unless you have a soothing environment and acknowledge the individual student’s unique differences would be met by survivors of the process with “Bullshit” by those who cared to respond and silence by the rest. Everyone who’d survived the indoctrination process, whether that was Plebe Summer,

Marine Corps Boot Camp or SEAL school, knew that anyone who made such a statement wouldn’t understand their response because they obviously had no reference to know it wasn’t true. We all learned beautifully under screaming pressure.

From a bunch of unique individuals with different goals, perspectives and capabilities, we were hammered into a coordinated unit that while unique in our composition, interactions and

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character looked exactly the same as any other unit and was able to come together to perform the same movements and answer the same questions to the same standard.

Tasks. Conditions. Standards. What were we expected to do? What were the resources and environments that we would perform our task in? What were the metrics we needed to achieve to claim success? And much like the Stockholm syndrome where hostages might develop a psychological alliance with the political aims of their captors, plebes often admired their tormentors despite the emotional and psychological stress endured. This is probably because while the Plebe Summer Cadre said things that were uncomfortable to hear and told us to do things that were sometimes difficult to perform; we understood that deep down that they were preparing us to accomplish something greater than our individual selves and we always had the option to quit.

And like an intellectual version of gang initiation beatings, we willingly embraced the procrustean process of discarding non-essential parts of our identity to be accepted as a member of the whole. Black or white, who cares? Male or female, who cares? Gay or straight, who cares?

Christian or Muslim, who cares? Did you get the answer right? Did you help the team? Or are we all going to be punished because you just can’t keep up?

The process was one of “hugs and kicks,” as one Marine Corps special operations instructor succinctly described it to me long after I’d left the military. Instructors had to lay out the tasks, conditions and standards, and then hug and kick their subordinates across the finish line.

And unlike any formula published in a peer reviewed journal on the ratio of hugs to kicks necessary to achieve a 70% compliance rate, there was no set solution. Each individual cadre member had a different relationship with each individual plebe that differed every day according to the particular task at hand. Perhaps the most unexpected outcome was that the more the cadre

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hugged, the less we respected them.

Of course, everyone enjoyed it when there was a break in the action and we could relax.

But most of my classmates were highly intelligent, competent, and competitive individuals who’d been the top of their class or captain of their sports team. The idea that we could just do “Ok” and pass diminished the value of accomplishing the task. Much like Makarenko’s observation in the

Road to Life (2014), we respected anyone of excellence and strove to meet the highest standards of the toughest cadre’s measure. After the bewilderment subsided and we finally understood the purpose and love behind the berating and physical punishments we began to say, “Thank you, Sir.

Can I have another?”

What’s the next task? What’s the next level? What’s the next wrinkle, twist and complication you can throw at us that we can work to overcome? In contrast to Friere’s (1970) banking model pedagogy, where an all knowing adult provides information to be swallowed and regurgitated on command, we were beginning to touch andragogy (Knowles, 1980) and becoming responsible for our own learning. The key to willingly accepting the process was knowing that we had begged to enter this community and could quit at any time we decided we couldn’t keep up.

Plebe Summer embraced Knowles' four assumptions about andragogy. We were adults and thus fully responsible for using whatever free time and resources we had to master the material and movements we’d be tested on. We’d be provided ample experiences full of positive and negative reinforcement that would help us understand the tasks, conditions and standards of performance. We were shown the immediate relevance and impact of achieving or failing to achieve the expected standard. It didn’t matter what information was being memorized or physical tasks were being performed, our personal problem to solve was doing well enough to make it to the next task and the next day.

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As we started quizzing each other on our rates and sharing mnemonic devices we’d discovered to recall content, we were starting to take more and more responsibility for our own learning. Of course, the primary objectives of Plebe Summer (United States Naval Academy, n.d.) were:

● Be indoctrinated in the traditions of the Naval Service and the Naval Academy;

● Understand basic military skills and the meaning behind them;

● Appreciate the high standards and obligations inherent in service as a

Midshipmen and Naval Officer;

● Be dedicated to excellence in a competitive atmosphere that fosters leadership,

teamwork, character, and a passion for "winning;"

● Appreciate the importance of mental, moral, and physical toughness in all aspects

of duty and service; and

● Be prepared to execute the rigorous academic year routine.

But there was one more component to our training so ubiquitous it seemed unnecessary to discuss in all our interactions, yet so sacrosanct it meant expulsion if crossed. Simply, a midshipman does not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate anyone who does. The Honor Code.

The Honor Code

When I was writing this dissertation about the Academy’s honor code in 2019 and 2020,

Donald Trump was still the President of the United States and widely recognized to have difficulty telling the truth. According to journalists at the Washington Post, who tracked the military’s Commander in Chief fibs (Kessler et al., 2020), Trump uttered at least 20,000 falsities by 9 July 2020, roughly 23 falsehoods a day or one per hour each day in office. And even one of the primary roles the President is supposed to fulfil is representing the United States and

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American people, the sheer volume of lies from the President made it challenging for foreign leaders to believe anything he says (Landler, 2017).

But for plebes entering the Naval Academy in 1984, there was no leniency in the interpretation. You do not lie, meaning you do not tell someone something you know is not true.

You do not lie also meaning you do not tell someone something you know may not be true. It’s the existential purpose of the phrase, “I’ll find out, Sir.”

You don’t cheat, meaning you play straight and by the rules. You don’t look for loopholes or attempt to gain an unfair advantage. The Code said you don’t steal, meaning you don’t take anything that isn’t yours, whether that something is material (like food, money or an unattended item that you’ve always wanted but couldn’t find) or immaterial (like credit for an idea conceived or task completed).

Given that Sun Tzu bases his martial classic on the assumption that “All warfare is based on deception,” the Code would run counter to preparing us to win future wars. And with failure to succeed in battle being fatal, we’d later say to each other, “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying” in the Marines. As for stealing, as early as 7th century BCE the Spartans were encouraged to “forage” for food to feed themselves during training, and we “requisitioned” every weapon, carton of ammo and usable piece of gear not nailed to the floor during the first Gulf War.

But the Honor Code wasn’t about how we would interact with the enemy, who we could lie to or cheat and steal from with impunity. The Honor Code demanded the need to view adherence to the rules and transfer of information between one as a sacred act of trust, because in the future, lives would be saved or lost based on the integrity of our interaction. It wasn’t until years later when we were calling artillery fire on enemy troops close by or coordinating the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the wake of a tsunami that I appreciated the value of the

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ethic.

While the learning of “rates” had developed in us the ability to absorb masses of different data and distill it into a single “Go”/“No Go” decision to kill the enemy or save lives, the process was completely dependent upon the accuracy and validity of the information analyzed. Just like the classic computer acronym, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), if you weren’t receiving reliable information, your final decisions would be flawed. And as much of your information was based on someone else’s assessment of a situation (“We’ve got this under control,” “The enemy is putting up strong resistance,” “We’re being overrun and need help now”) the ability to unquestioningly trust other people to accurately portray their own capacities and needs was existential and every second spent second guessing or trying to confirm your partner’s assessment of the situation was allowing the changing environment to potentially destroy the opportunities for attack or retreat you’d identified just a second before.

All these exercises and lessons were focused on the two primary directives we would be held to throughout our military career was to complete the mission and protect our men’s lives in that order. Given that violence has been used to win wars throughout history, it was unreasonable for us to expect to be able to complete our mission without bloodshed or loss of life unless you prevented conflict from ever reaching the threshold of violence. But it was also recognized that unless we had trained, armed and emotionally prepared our men to fight the dirty hand-to-hand fights that required biting noses, crushing trachea and thrusting bayonets into eye sockets, we would waver when the final tests came.

What Are We Really Teaching?

Maslow’s self-actualization in our Plebe Summer and Honor Code context was less about us developing our sense of love, esteem and self-actualization as an individual and more about

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finding how our love, esteem and self-actualization was defined within the success and continued existence of our group. In that sacrificing one’s life to achieve the unit mission or save our subordinates’ lives was not seen as an act of suicide or self-abnegation. On the contrary, the thoughtful trading of one’s personal existence on earth for battlefield success was considered the benchmark for martial discipline and the greatest act of love one person could show for another.

But those that depended on the trust and faith, that everyone else in the unit had the same value system that placed mission accomplishment and protecting our men’s lives at a higher value than our own.

This viewpoint of “self-actualization” as a means for the community to survive and thrive had apparently been the original understanding of the concept that Maslow learned from observing the practices of the Blackfoot Indians when he lived with the tribe in the summer of

1938. Maslow noted that the Blackfoot had deep respect for all humanity and disregarded the accumulation of wealth as a measure of any individual greatness except for the ability of the wealthy to provide for those who were poor. In fact, as more indigenous scholars research their cultural traditions, the intellectual contribution of Blackfoot and other native American tribes regarding egalitarianism, generosity and sexual equality are becoming more fully appreciated.

While this understanding of community “self-actualization” might be considered new to

Americans taught the civilizing force of the White Man’s Burden and America’s Manifest

Destiny in school; the idea was nothing new to Founding Fathers, like Benjamin Franklin.

Contrasting the cultural habits and traditions of White’s and Native Americans in 1784, Franklin recounted the words of Conrad Weiser, a Native American interpreter, who described how the colonists valued monetary profit over any sense of common civility or humanity.

If a white Man in travelling thro’ our Country, enters one of our Cabins, we all treat him

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as I treat you; we dry him if he is wet, we warm him if he is cold, and give him Meat &

Drink that he may allay his Thirst and Hunger, & we spread soft Furs for him to rest &

sleep on: We demand nothing in return. But if I go into a white Man’s House at Albany,

and ask for Victuals & Drink, they say, where is your Money? and if I have none, they

say, Get out, you Indian Dog. You see they have not yet learnt those little good things, that

we need no Meetings to be instructed in, because our Mothers taught them to us when we

were Children.

The value Native American’s placed on one’s spoken word and the trust that the other person was not attempting to lie, cheat or steal from you. And these values of being hospitable to anyone not your enemy and your enemy when in your care, deeply impressed other American anthropologists and social theorists like Lewis Morgan (Morgan & Lloyd, 1901), who wrote, The

League of the Iroquois in 1851, attempting to present the nuanced authorities and obligations of relationships in Iroquois society. Between 1859 and 1862, Morgan conducted field research that resulted in the illumination of 51 kinship systems and Blackfoot, Crow, Kaw, Omaha, and

Yankton tribes, among others.

Perhaps most substantively, the Indian community relationships and value system, as expressed by writers like Benjamin Franklin and Lewis Morgan, are thought to have influenced

Communist thinkers who were looking for an economic and social alternative to the inequality created by the Industrial Revolution. Whether it was anarchists like Prince Kropotkin or communist architects like Marx and Engels, the Native American interpretation of community self-actualization was recognized as a more humane model than the exploitative system set up around the individual possession of land and means of production.

The goal of course, not being to return to a state of anarcho-primitivism, but rather create

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an anarcho-communist society, “where productive activities and all social functions, would be organised through voluntary cooperation and mutual aid the wealth produced being shared equally with all” (Morris, B. 2014, p233). None of this was new. The values of the Honor Code and individual sacrifice for the greater good had been instilled in me from birth. My goal in excelling within the system had little to do with personal rewards and more to do with becoming more valuable to my compatriots, military and country through the accumulation of knowledge, skills and abilities.

Through the nine years of military service in the Naval Academy and the United States

Marine Corps, my superiors, peers or subordinates never gave me any reason to question the

Blackfoot or Communist interpretation of “self-actualization.” We were always reminded that we’re in this together and we’d live or die by how well our individual efforts contribute to the mission and wellbeing of the tribe. The biggest question that weighed on my every decision was, when the bullets are incoming and we need to go “Now,” will I be worth all the time, effort and resources my instructors, the military and country had invested in me, or would I end up killing myself and my men by my cowardice and ineptitude.

So, what about academic achievement? I can honestly say I did little to focus on my grades. The two sayings that stick out in my mind about my time at the Academy are, “Your purpose in life is to get from Point A (Plebe Summer) to Point B (Graduation), while maintaining a C (2.0 GPA). The other saying was, “If you’re able to sleep 12 hours a day, you’re only at the

Academy for two years.” I worked to achieve both.

Unlike our civilian counterparts, Naval Academy midshipmen would all graduate with a

Bachelor of Science, no matter what their selected Major was. The seal of the Naval Academy proclaimed, “Ex scientia tridens,” or “Out of science, sea power” and everyone had to take

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physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, trigonometry, differential equations, electrical engineering and statistics; even people like me who’d selected Political Science to avoid an even heavier quantitative scientific course load.

As the Navy had transitioned from a time of “wooden ships and iron men” to steel hulled destroyers, jet aircraft and nuclear powered submarines, there was a corresponding move to increase the number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects every midshipman would take. This would be challenging for people like me who, like my mother, liked to deal in broad concepts rather than the detail oriented studies of my military lawyer father.

The result being my being able to tutor my classmates on the theory of how transistors, resistors and capacitors worked within an electronic circuit, and then getting the test answer wrong because

I couldn’t calculate the actual voltage or amperage accurately.

For that reason, along with not enjoying the time I spent on board a ship, I set my sights on becoming an officer of Marines and joining the infantry. The infantry was considered the most hands-on of all the military combat specializations. Unlike sailors, who saw the enemy as a blinking light on a screen and pilots, who might see their enemy fly by them at Mach 2, most infantry fighting was up close and personal, well within the M-16A2 rifle’s effective range of

500m. And realizing that my marginal ability to solve for “x” or properly diagram an electrical circuit, I focused most of my efforts on becoming physically fit and technically proficient for battle.

Our “world” Versus the WORLD

In 1981, former Secretary of the Navy, James Webb wrote a “Sense of Honor” where he describes the process of Plebe Summer and the moral challenges of preparing incoming midshipmen to lead their men in battle. And while his novel was written about preparing Naval

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Academy graduates for Vietnam, it was considered required reading to think through the challenges of implementing a “politically correct” process to correct what had traditionally been the most gender discriminatory and racist service in the Department of Defense. Until 1971,

Blacks and Filipinos were only allowed to serve as cooks and stewards; while the challenges of bunking female sailors in close quarters with their male counterparts for long deployments at sea were considered reason enough to restrict their presence aboard ships and submarines. Women had been excluded from attending the Naval Academy until 1975 allowing the graduating class of

1979 to adopt the motto, Omnes Viri or “all males.”

As civilian values and mores changed, efforts increased to expand beyond the traditional white, male middle-class inductees. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) the policy designed to protect lesbian, gay and bisexual service members from being asked about their sexual orientation and thus being dismissed from active service was enacted by President Clinton in 1993. The order stood until the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, when lesbian, gay and bisexual service members could openly express their sexual orientation without fear of expulsion.

I don’t remember knowing much about the struggle for gender equality or sexual preference at the time or caring about the possible implications for individual self-actualization of others. My sole focus was making sure that I was worthy of my place within the system and that everything I was doing would make me valuable to the Marines. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t the butterfly wings of chaos flapping outside my consciousness.

During my four years of studies within the 338 acres campus that constituted “the Yard,” the world continued to evolve. 1984, the summer of my induction and Orwell’s date for a dystopian world, saw the AIDS virus identified; the discovery of DNA fingerprinting; the Union

Carbide disaster in Bhopal; the UK agreeing to return Hong Kong to China; the introduction of

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Apple’s Macintosh and the “Band Aid” concert to help respond to the famine in Ethiopia. 1985 saw the introduction of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes; the scientific discovery of a hole in the ozone layer; Mikhail Gobachev become the premier of the Soviet Union; the Unabomber claim his first victim; and Greenpeace’s ship, the Rainbow Warrior being sunk by French intelligence operatives. 1986 opened with the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle; was followed by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster; Mad Cow disease being discovered; smoking being banned on all public transportation in the United States; Micronesia gaining independence; and ended with the Rutan Voyager completing the first continuous round the world flight. In 1987, the

AIDS drug AZT was approved; the Single Europe Act was passed setting in motion the establishment of the European Union (EU); Michael Jackson released his album Bad and the publication of “Spycatcher” was banned in Great Britain.

I knew none of these facts or perhaps most accurately, since we read the paper every day to keep ourselves apprised of current events, none of these facts had an impact on my thinking of the world, who I was or what the future would be. Even more military relevant facts like the

Soviet Union conducting 29 nuclear tests, the Iran-Iraq’s Battle of the Marshes resulting in over

45,000 killed in three weeks, the Afghan-Soviet War creating 5 million Afghan refugees in

Pakistan and Iran and the CIA mining of Nicaraguan harbors (1984); the increase of hostage taking activity and the Israeli withdrawal from the Lebanese Civil War (1985); the US supplying the Afghan Mujahideen with Stinger missiles and beginning of the Somalian Revolution (1986); the Iraqi use of mustard gas on Iranian civilians in Sardasht and Iraqi attack on the USS Stark

(1987) were all noted but not pondered, researched or discussed in depth.

The closest that world news came to home was when three Naval Academy alumni on

President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council (NSC) LtCol Oliver North, Robert

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MacFarlane and VADM Poindexter became central cast of the Iran-Contra affair. I never watched the testimony of LtCol North, who’d fought in Vietnam and was a classmate of James

Webb, but his response to Mr. Nields, the civilian lawyer leading the Congressional inquiry, was instructive of the types of missions and judgement calls we’d be asked to make as future military officers.

Taking the stand to talk about his role in the transactions, LtCol North said (Brown

University, n.d.):

...we talked about the need for this nation, which is a country at risk in a dangerous world,

having the need to conduct covert operations and secret diplomacy and carry out secret

programs. I mean, we talked at some length about that, and that can certainly be the

subject of great debate, and this great institution can pass laws that say no such activities

can ever be conducted again. But that would be wrong, and you and I know that. The fact

is that this country does need to be able to conduct those kinds of activities, and the

President ought not to be in a position, in my humble opinion, of having to go out and

explain to the American people on a bi-weekly basis or any other kind that I, the

President, am carrying out the following secret operations. It just can't be done.

The questioning of Vice Admiral (VADM) John Pointdexter, classmate to astronaut Bruce

McCandless and Senator John McCain was even more pointed. Senator Trimble found the Naval

Academy’s Honor Code and asked Pointdexter point blank (The Testimony, 1987):

My question is this— at the Academy, the young men and women that we train to be our

future officers are told the truth is absolute. If the conduct, evasion, that you have talked

about as mentioned in these regulations is wrong for Midshipmen, isn't it also wrong for

officers?

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VADM Pointdexter responded,

Senator, I think that is a very unfair thing to say and I object to it. I have always lived by

the honor concept. I still live that way today.

One of the things you also learn at the Naval Academy is the ability to exercise

independent judgments that are in the best interest of the United States. My whole time as

a National Security Adviser I worked very hard to do the best that I could to protect the

national security of the United States. I don't have any regrets for anything that I did. I

think the actions that I took were in the long-term interests of the country, and I am not

going to change my mind, and I am not going to be apologetic about it.

Trimble’s question, along with Poindexter’s response, could have formed the groundwork for an entire semester of a philosophy, ethics, or military leadership class, for it was the essence of how we would make decisions to fulfil our oath to “protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” But it also brought into contrast the ways in which the civilian and military sectors of America viewed each other.

The military baseline was mission accomplishment and protecting your men in that order.

When life and limb were at stake, absolute trust, truthful communications, and reliable actions within the tribe were paramount. But those requirements disappeared when dealing with anyone seen as opposing the mission. Those individuals could be regarded as the enemy and could be lied to, cheated, stolen from and killed without incurring any moral turpitude.

The military’s perspective we were subconsciously immersed in was that the civilian outlook on life was in some ways one similar to the one expressed by Ben Franklin’s quoted

Conrad Weiser. Civilians not in the military would do anything for money and their own individual advantage. And because they were incapable of doing anything purely for the greater

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good, let alone sacrifice their lives; civilians were unable to serve as peers to judge military service members who did.

Although it’s doubtful that North, MacFarlane or Poindexter spoke enough Spanish to have meaningful conversations about democracy, truth or self-actualization, let alone military tactics, with the men they were supporting, members of the Nicaraguan contrarrevolución or

“Contras” for short. But those men were fighters just like them. And given that the Commander in

Chief had called the Contras “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” (Boyd, 1985) there was a philosophical imperative to do everything necessary to help them as they would military men under their own command.

It’s not as if the officers raised in the Code of Honor didn’t respect it. It was just, as

Poindexter had noted, that after swearing an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States, individuals were expected to exercise independent judgement on means of implementation. As

LtCol North reflected, lying was considered the lesser of two evils in the Iran-Contra mission.

Please. It was not right. It does not leave me with a good taste in my mouth. I want you to

know lying does not come easy to me. I want you to know that it doesn't come easy to

anybody, but I think we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lives and

lies. I had to do that on a number of occasions in both these operations, and it is not an

easy thing to do.

Iran-Contra became more personal when Robert MacFarlane was rushed to the hospital for swallowing 25 to 30 Valium pills in what was speculated to be an attempted suicide several hours before his testimony in front of Congress. His son, a year ahead of me at the Academy, looked shaken when the news broke. But to respect his composure, we continued formations, classes and daily activities as if nothing had changed. Thirty-three years later, I wonder if that was

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the right response.

Perhaps we should have been more empathetic. Perhaps we should have reached out and asked, “Are you doing ok?” and “How do you feel?” Instead, we internalized our feelings and compartmentalized our responses.

I don’t know if it was a case of Maslow’s “love and belonging” or “esteem” being manifested. I think we all assumed that life sucked for him at that moment and were trying to offer him the dignity of silence to deal with his issues in peace. We respected him as a leader who was in control of himself. He’d talk to who he wanted, when he wanted to, about what he wanted to whenever that would happen. And so, we closed ranks and marched on.

The sun came up the next morning. Reveille, morning physical training (PT), shower, change, morning formation, and then off again to classes. And everything was running again.

We were being taught that in the days to come, we should be ready to face similar losses of friends, family and loved ones in the midst of accomplishing a mission greater than any of us individually. And when that happened, we could only hope our training, discipline and self- sacrifice would allow us to maintain our composure to be worthy of leading men who’d trusted us with their lives. It was a challenge I doubted I was up to.

Despite having our days programmed from sunrise to late after sunset, I still wondered if the training I was getting would prepare me for what was to come. When we had free time, instead of taking time out to watch television or just enjoy the chance to do nothing for a change,

I’d get changed and head off to the gym or pool. When summer came and we were allowed some real “liberty,” full days and weeks away from the Academy’s scheduled routine, I opted for more military training.

Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE)

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And although I haven’t remembered everything the courses were designed to teach, I was excited to be preparing for the rite of passage that combat on the battlefield promised. While others took their first summer after Plebe Year to visit family or forget there was somewhere called Mother B, I decided to apply for SERE School, which stands for Survival, Evasion,

Resistance, Escape. In retrospect, the training was a pale comparison for what would actually happen in time of war, especially after the United States tortured their captured enemy during the

Global War on Terror. But SERE was deemed effective for the Cold War standards of captivity where combatants still honored the Geneva Conventions.

Hosted by the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), SERE was part of the USAFA cadets preparation to be leaders in America’s air service. Taught by officer and enlisted instructors and assisted by upper class cadets who played a variety of enemy roles, the three weeks of SERE felt like a mix of regular Academy classes, an equipmentless Boy Scout Jamboree and a shorter, but more intense version of Plebe Summer.

The first week covered the history of SERE, its purpose and the skills we’d be expected to master: tasks, conditions, and standards. The second week was field work where we learned and then practiced making a sleeping bag out of parachute silk, finding water sources, evading capture and killing a rabbit by hand, which we discovered becomes both noisy and messy if you don’t get it right on the first try. Week Two blended into Week Three where we revisited the Stanford

Prison Experiment USAFA style.

In this version, the captors were able to put a hood on your head, strip you naked, and spray you down with a water hose. Then, you were loudly encouraged to quickly get dressed, whereafter they locked you up in a wooden box that seemed strangely reminiscent to me of the tiny plywood fort my father had constructed for me as a child. The evening was supposed to be

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spent squatting on a wooden “T” that served as an unsteady stool. Throughout the night we were serenaded with recordings of crying babies and what I can only imagine were horror movie soundtracks. Our jailors would come by from time to time to ensure that we were still awake, squatting on our stool, before throwing us a piece of stale bread at us or forcing us to drink a cup of water.

The purpose of course being to “break us.” Have us admit that we were war criminals.

Have us give up more information than name, rank and serial number. And I remember what our instructor told us about those most successful at resisting any assault on their beliefs.

“Everyone is susceptible to brainwashing and torture. And in most cases, you will end up giving more information than name, rank and serial number.” The key, the instructors told us, was to recognize that we had a breaking point and that we bounce back after each defeat a little smarter than before. Compartmentalize our defeats and link the lessons learned along the way to add another grain of sand in the gears of our captors’ system of incarceration.

“Doubt in yourself and the United States is your enemy. And your beliefs will be tested by what your captors show you.” The challenge was being able to maintain our beliefs in an environment without the surrounding environment that sustained those ideas in the United States or in our military units. “Again, most of you will come back changed from your experiences and have a different perception of life.” The instructors then closed with the observation that there were two groups of people who seemed impervious to brainwashing and seemed to get through the prisoner of war experience relatively untouched spiritually and referred to the two archetypes as the “village idiot” and the “university professor.”

The village idiot was who it sounds like. Someone of below average intelligence and limited education. They identified themselves as red blooded Americans and only knew that the

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United States was the best country in the world and could do no wrong. Any attempt by the captors to introduce new information that might change their perspective was as effective as

Galileo attempting to convince the Catholic Church that the solar system was heliocentric and was met with, “Nope. The United States would never do that.” End of discussion.

The other end of the spectrum was the university professor. This was someone of above average intelligence and range of experiences greater than the captors themselves. They understood themselves and the United States within the larger course of human history and appreciated the philosophical underpinnings of the political decisions that resulted in their being a captive in the war. Any attempt by the captors to introduce new information that might change their perspective was met with, “Well, that’s true. But you’re forgetting the historical causes behind those outcomes. And you’ve also left out the role of (pick a nation, race, religion, or culture) in shaping those decisions. In fact, if you want to make that point, you should include …” until the captors would leave the “professor” alone if only to escape being subjected to another lecture.

But as the village idiot and university professor were second standard deviation (2σ) populations, they only constituted 5% of the whole. Thus, the captors tended to leave those two groups along and concentrate their reeducation efforts on the remaining 95%. The unspoken challenge for us once we left the academy, no longer village idiots, was to get to the “university professor” level in understanding the conflicts we participated in.

Although it seemed endless, our incarceration probably only lasted only a day and two.

Our “prisoner of war” experience was concluded when the Camp Commandant called all of us to assemble into formation and began listing all our weaknesses and failings throughout captivity.

He told us how many of us had cracked and how weak we’d been throughout the experience. He

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then called the prisoners to attention and said, “...And now you will turn around and salute MY flag.”

We turned as a unit to see the stars and stripes of the American flag flying proudly in the wind and were immediately surrounded by swelling notes of Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA” (1984) flowing from the camp speakers. And to this day, the psychological imprinting of the experience triggers emotional recall every time I hear the song.

While it was a unique and memorable experience, I somehow felt as if I’d been cheated out of the full experience when I heard stories that the “real” SERE included waterboarding, open handed strikes and extended periods of “stress positions.” All in all, the experience had whetted my appetite for more and SERE became my starting point for increasing proficiency in my chosen profession of war. But the most surprising thing I took away probably had nothing to do with the tactics, techniques and procedures we’d been taught. In fact, if anything, the SERE School revelation almost negated their encouragement to get trained and be prepared for the worst.

The instructors told us that after all the debriefings of successful rescues and after action reports of survival in prison camps, they said that the ratio of importance of equipment, training and spirit was 10-20-70. In that, 10% of your survival was going to depend on the gear you had on you; and 20% of your survival was dependent upon the training and knowledge you had accumulated up to that point. But the most important factor in surviving in the wilderness and making it through years of captivity in a prisoner of war camp, the 70%, was your will to live and strength of purpose.

The instructors told us there have been cases where the pilot did everything wrong. I mean everything. Didn’t bring their radio. Forgot to drink water. Wandered away from their aircraft.

And somehow, survived.

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Then there have been cases where the pilot did everything right. Had recovered some rations. Had built a shelter. Had found a good source of water. Was in no immediate danger and didn’t make it.

The difference was, when we talked to the survivors, they told us, all they could think about was their family and loved ones. And how they decided at some point after the crash, they were going to make it back alive. It’s a thought that’s stayed to me to this day.

Jump School

The next summer after my Youngster or sophomore year at the Academy, I tried out for one of the billets to attend Army Airborne School or parachute training. Conducted at Ft Benning

Georgia, Army Airborne also known as Jump School has been called some a one week course jammed into three weeks.

Made famous by the assault troops that supported the invasion of Normandy during World

War II, airborne parachutists were considered light infantry shock troops. Eliminating the logistical challenges of traveling overland or by sea, airborne troops can be deployed deep behind enemy lines and create vulnerabilities in otherwise static defenses.

But from the perspective of the 1st Battalion, 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which trains most of the airborne qualified troops in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, forging the “Paratrooper spirit” in junior leadership is as important as the technical skills of strapping on gear, getting into an airplane and jumping out. The purpose was to be a “gut check” and self-select a certain type of individual willing to jump into a situation where the odds are against survival, let alone winning.

"In theory, you’re committing suicide every time you jump out of a plane” one of the officers from an Airborne support unit noted to a reporter (Special Forces Association Chapter IX,

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2016,). “….We’re all here, because we’re not all here," pointing at his head. This also makes airborne training a mental exercise in philosophically embracing the community concept of

Maslow’s self-actualization.

There are over a dozen different people completing hundreds of individual steps involved in getting you from here to there and back again. The answers aren’t always shared, but the questions are always there. From the operational questions of: Is the mission one that can be accomplished by airborne troops?; Is the landing zone free of obstacles?; Is the weather going to allow us a clean drop? to the individual questions of: Did the rigger do a good job packing my chute?; Will my reserve deploy if I need it?; and Did I take care of my personal affairs in case I burn into the drop zone today? This makes just getting on the plane a matter of trust in the professionalism of everyone around you.

It was for these reasons, probably more than anything else, that individuals from every service flocked to airborne school each year, rather than the technical training skills gained. As our Airborne instructors would remind us, “We airdrop pallets and dogs, so your intelligence isn’t that important. What we need is your ability to listen, follow instructions and not freak out when the time comes to jump to make this an enjoyable experience for everyone.” And every time we failed to properly follow the Airborne Instructors commands, we were politely asked at maximum volume something equivalent to my father’s “You stupid or what?” and then invited us to do push-ups to find out if the answer to their question was on the ground.

Still, the instructors maintained their dark sense of humor when telling us of the consequences of not following their instructions to the letter. “You’ll find yourself falling at something approaching terminal velocity and have the rest of your life to figure a solution out…”

“Oh, and don’t forget, that before you hit, raise your watch hand directly into the air.”

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“Why, Instructor Airborne? Is that so you know what time we hit?”

“No. Of course not… Some of you have those really fancy dive watches and we want to make they’re in working order when we give them to someone less stupid than you…”

But aside from the harassment and physical training, which I’d become familiar with after two years at the Academy, there was one tale that an Airborne Instructor told us that ended up getting lodged into my brain. Standing above us as we lay in the supine position, hands under our buttocks or “Fourth point of contact” in Airborne translation, our instructor slowly began to drawl his story, as we did flutter kicks with boots for some unspeakable infraction.

“Once upon a time, there was a contest between all the different organs in the body,” he said. “The first to get uppity was the Eyes, and they said to everyone else, ‘The Eyes are the most important part of the body. Without us, you can’t see light or colors. You’d bump into things and not know how to get around.’”

“That’s not true!” said the Ears. “We’re the most important organ in the body. Without us you wouldn’t be able to hear anything. You wouldn’t be able to enjoy music, hear the call to dinner or the warning horn of the oncoming car.”

“Well, don’t forget about us,” said the Nose. “We smell everything. How much would your life be worth without us?” Think of the scent of flowers and fresh bread. If we weren’t here, you wouldn’t have any of that…”

Now just to put things into context, our footwear were parachute boots, mid-calf leather boots designed to give our ankles maximum protection. Weighing almost a pound apiece, we were starting to wonder if there was a point to his story and when all the different organs would stop bickering, so we could get back on our feet. After a couple more organs spoke up, he slowed down and said, “And then the aaasssshole, who’d gotten fed up with listening, decided to shut

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himself down.”

“He squeezed himself tight until all the shit backed up in the stomach. And the Eyes watered and couldn’t see. The Ears started ringing and couldn’t hear. And the nose started watering and couldn’t smell...” “And the moral of the story, ladies?” he asked.

“Sometimes you have to be an asshole to get things done.” “Recover.” And we stopped doing flutter kicks and bounded back to our feet in the position of attention.

While perhaps not as elegant as a Zen koan, the little tale had at least three levels of instruction that were relevant to us as military officers. To the “hugs and kicks” methodology of preparing our troops for combat, sometimes being nice wouldn’t work. Literally, “being an asshole” would be the only way we’d be able to get the entire body doing what it needed to do - working together for the benefit of the whole.

On another level, the lesson could have been that talk is cheap and actions which show your point are more effective in the long run. Only after listening to all the other organs spouting off about what made them so special did the asshole show them who they all depended on to function flawlessly, silently, and invisibly throughout the day.

And at the final level, the scatological tale was about how we honor and value what is truly important in life, whether on an individual or community level. We can still survive without eyes to see, ears to hear or a nose to smell. But we cannot survive without our guts.

When that thought is taken to a societal perspective, a city’s waste management and sewer system can be seen as analogous to an individual’s gastrointestinal tract. If we accept this comparison, then the tale would seem to question the amount of money, resources and fame we give to athletes, actors or even stock traders when compared to garbage collectors or sewage treatment operators, who are an invisible building block of our public health infrastructure and

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existential to ensuring our cities remain habitable. Instead, we ignore those who are truly responsible for making our lives livable and look up to those who entertain or speculate with other people’s money.

Of course, the Airborne Instructor’s scatological tale probably wouldn’t be considered polite enough to be included in a peer reviewed academic journal. But the story wasn’t designed to be read and dissected by intellectuals who might never have to jump out of a plane, dig a trench or shit in somewhere other than a toilet. It was the truth of the world as our instructor had pieced it together over his decade or so living in the Army.

After our five qualifying jumps, I got my parachute wings and headed back to the

Academy. It was Second Class or junior year of school, where we were responsible for training the incoming Plebe or freshman class. I hated Plebe Year and took a very low key approach to getting my Plebes to learn their “rates.”

Loving Education

“Good morning Mr. Sanderson. So, tell me, what’d you read in the morning paper today?...” My attitude was that everyone was smart enough to learn the material and either you cared enough about your obligations to do your best or you didn’t. Having me yell at you to artificially incentivize more effort would only mean that you would slack off more once the external stimuli was gone. I wanted the Plebes to learn to love learning their “rates,” not as an obligatory recitation of a subordinate to a higher ranked authority, but as a measure of their commitment to the excellence of the tribe.

I didn’t care what the Plebes thought of me. I didn’t think it mattered. As long as they did their duty.

The second semester I was given Midn 4/c Ricks, who probably was a certified genius.

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He’d come into the Academy having validated something over 18 credit hours of coursework, which for a marginal student like me was amazing. The challenge was that all the book learning seemed to have come at the expense of his physical fitness. Tall and gangly, he reminded me of a tipsy Ichabod Crane when he “chopped” or ran down the halls to formation.

“Good morning Mr. Ricks. So tell me, what’d you read in the morning paper today?...”

And we’d have a nice conversation about the paper before diving into the technical specifications of the LM 2500 gas turbine engines on the Spruance class destroyers. Everything went well for a month or so and then one day, he simply didn’t show to “come around” or his appointment to review his rates.

“Hey, anyone seen Ricks? Do you know if he got hurt or something?” I asked some other upperclassmen. I searched the company area and then went back to my room, where I hoped he would eventually show up.

Then 10 or 15 minutes later, Midn 4/c Ricks came rolling down the hall and took the position of attention outside my door. The significance of his tardiness is that at the Naval

Academy there are clocks everywhere and you are constantly aware of the time. More importantly, with timing of military operations sometimes dependent on being accurate to the second, we are taught that if you’re not 5 minutes early, you’re already 5 minutes late.

I looked at Ricks catching his breath and asked, “Why are you late?”

“No excuse, Sir.” One of the five perfectly acceptable responses taught during Plebe

Summer.

“No seriously, I want to know. Why are you late?”

“No excuse, Sir.”

And we played the game three or four times until I asked, “What was it? Did you think I

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wouldn’t mind?”

“...Yes, Sir.”

My mind and voice exploded. “You WHAT? YOU THOUGHT I WOULDN’T MIND?!”

And all the other “come arounds,” the interrogation of plebe rates, went silent as my classmates started drifting towards us. I think the novelty of the situation was that Nakano never raised his voice and now I was acting like one of the worst Second Class (2/c) screamers in the

Company.

In the background I could hear the scattered voices, “What happened?”, “What’s going on?”, “What did Ricks do?”, “Ooooh. You’re in trouble now…” as the other 2/c clustered around behind me.

And in one minute I went from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde with Midshipman Fourth Class

Ricks. “WHAT? DO YOU THINK I DO THIS FOR MY ENTERTAINMENT?” referring to our come arounds. And I began rapid firing every question I could think of in his rates. What are the days until graduation? Who is the Officer of the Watch? What is his chain of command from the

Commander in Chief to Midn 4/c Ricks? What is the menu for evening meal?

And every time he faltered or got something wrong, I yelled, “Go run a lap” Requiring him to run the loop around the courtyard that our Company area enclosed. In the ten or fifteen minutes between come around and evening meal formation, Ricks was sweaty, shaken and shellshocked.

In recounting the tale, I think how I could have handled things differently. I’m not proud of what I did, because I was complicit in creating an expectation in him that “I wouldn’t care.”

Ricks had taken my low key nature as meaning he didn’t have to give his best. Quite to the contrary, I was giving him the respect that he was a professional and would constantly work to

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give his best, without needing to be a screamer.

But I think my own shortcoming was a lack of understanding of basic human psychology and practical leadership skills of breaking people down and then building them back up. I didn't consciously appreciate that Ricks didn’t come from the same background as me and as a result, didn’t have the same motivations or goals in attending the Academy as me. And given that my own strategy to survive in the Academy had been to over-achieve in military training, I failed to understand how to convince someone with extraordinary academic skills to respond in the way I wanted. Instead, my attitude became “Get with the program or get out.”

I think that in my first accidental foray as an educator, I committed the unpardonable sin of shutting myself off emotionally. Although training Ricks was my responsibility, he was no longer “my” Plebe and thus open to more attention from the other 2/c who made it their mission to make all the company plebes’ lives miserable.

I don’t remember much about the rest of our semester. We still had come arounds. Ricks was never late. And to the best of my memory, we went through the required information as expected. But when they moved the plebes to other companies at the end of their freshman year to give them a fresh start, I never checked to see if he decided to come back.

What in America’s K-12 curriculum prepares college undergraduates to conduct life shaping training on students just two grade years below them? What component of our public school education and training prepares us to think deeply and empathically about the wellbeing of others in the indigenous interpretation of community self-actualization? My personal experiences tell me the answer to those questions is “nothing” and that it’s our family values, social norms, and religious ethics that guide how we make those snap decisions that can become a turning point in someone else's life. And I hope that whatever Ricks decided, he found a place where he is able

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to live his full potential.

Academics continued as always. Get from A to B while maintaining a C. It was the summer training I lived for.

First Class Summer

My last summer while still at the Academy would be our First Class (1/C) cruise, between our Junior and Senior school years. Wanting to do something exotic, I signed up for an exchange cruise with the Pakistan Navy, which was interesting just because I knew nothing about it.

The recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance for their support of the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Pakistan military was engaged in active combat on its northern border in the summer of 1987. Many of those efforts were focused on the CIA led efforts to transfer weapons through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI)

Agency to mujahideen and, at least indirectly, to individuals like Osama bin Laden, fighting the

Soviets in Afghanistan at the time. A chance to go on a summer internship to Pakistan, regardless how distant the fighting would be a chance to get near the action. Of course, for other reasons, that was not to be.

Despite going through the selection process to be an international exchange cadet to a foreign military, I was told that my country had been changed from Pakistan to the United

Kingdom only a couple months before the beginning of our summer programs. The reason?

Apparently, a member of the Naval Academy’s football team had been selected for the UK exchange tour but wouldn’t be able to attend because he had to be back early for summer practice.

Apparently, the needs of the Naval Service and Academy’s football team determined it was more important that we send a midshipman to the UK than Pakistan and it should make no difference where I went, as long as it was overseas.

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While I was obviously disappointed with the decision, it made me wonder why an academy focused on producing military officers was so fixated on privileging individuals who played sports. Of course, there was Wellington’s apocryphal quote that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, intimating that the teamwork and leadership of warfare could be learned through sports. But my personal dislike for the sports teams came from the preferential treatment they received through all four years of schooling.

Unlike the rest of the non-collegiate sports midshipmen, varsity team members followed their own rules. They did not have to be at all the formations everyone else had to attend. They sat at sports team tables and did not have to adhere to the same rules of discipline as non-varsity midshipmen. And perhaps most annoying to me was that we were required to support the teams, specifically the football team at all home games, marching in uniform in company formation to shout loudly for a game whose rules and outcomes I cared little about.

Of course, as someone had determined that moving me from Pakistan to England was for the good of the team, I complied. And that summer, instead of working with Pakistani forces in

Karachi, I was sent to Portsmouth, where I met my ship, the HMS Intrepid, an amphibious assault ship that had taken part in the Falklands War only five years before. And over the summer, I learned that being a midshipman on a Royal Navy vessel was quite different than being on an

American warship.

The first difference was one of tradition. As the most important military arm in the development of England’s history, the Royal Navy has been in continuous existence since the

1540’s after its under King Henry VIII. The Royal Navy was key to Queen Elizabeth’s defeating the three successive Spanish Armadas launched against England between 1588-1597. Over the next century, the Royal Navy would continually improve the quality of its ships and crews until

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by the beginning of the 1700’s it would be considered the preeminent naval force around the world.

The Royal Navy I would be visiting was a shadow of its 18th and 19th century glory. With only 319,000 service members in the entire United Kingdom military in 1987, the UK military was less than 10% of its World War II peak of 4.9 million. And in comparison to the United

States, the 58,000 personnel in the Royal Navy personnel was about less than 10% of the 586,000 personnel in the United States Navy, and only 30% of the 199,000 service members in the United

States Marine Corps. If anything, the exchange cruise helped illustrate for me the absolutely massive size of the United States military compared to other nations.

But the four centuries of continual operations had built into the Royal Navy certain attitudes and traditions that were implicitly understood. The first attitude that came across immediately was the division of class between officers and enlisted. Unlike the American attitude of everyone being ultimately equal and the defining difference between commissioned officers and enlisted merely being one of educational background, officers in the Royal Navy were expected to be a different class of individuals and carry themselves with a certain reserve and dignity at all times. This bled over into the way the Royal Navy enlisted treated me and the other

American midshipman on board.

Instead of treating us like unhousebroken puppies that needed to be kept from making mistakes, as was the case during our Third Class (3/C) midshipman cruise between freshman and sophomore years, the RN enlisted and officers treated us as junior officers who would be able to assume command should everyone above us be killed or incapacitated. We were added to the watch list and expected to plot the course, speed and fate of the ship and its 580 sailor crew, while obeying all the international rules of the road and inland waterways. And perhaps it was a mark of

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respect to the education and training we’d been given at the Naval Academy, but I never sensed any double checking or questioning of our answers. The end result being a simultaneous sense of terror at being wrong and a giddy sense of wanting to be right for the survival of the ship.

On the flip side, every privilege and convenience was provided to us to ensure we were rested, relaxed and ready when needed on duty or on the bridge. Mornings started with a soft knock on our metal cabin doors and the question, “Tea sir?” followed by a Royal Navy Able

Seaman (AS) carrying a pot of fresh tea with milk and sugar to taste. Evening meals were eaten in the officers' mess with white tablecloths, heavy flatware, and cloth napkins in napkin rings and were often preceded or followed by a pint of Guinness or gin and tonic at the bar, after we quickly discovered that Royal Navy ships were still wet. But the biggest difference I noticed was the perspective the Royal Navy had of what a military profession meant to its members and society, a lesson I learned from the Intrepid’s armorer.

Generally Proficient versus Artisanal Expertise

Interested in going into the Marine Corps, I searched for any opportunity to learn how to operate and maintain the small arms we’d see in combat around the world. As an amphibious ship, the Intrepid had a large arms locker to hold weapons when Royal Marines were embarked and stored a variety of pistols, assault rifles and machine guns not in the United States inventory. I imagine the Intrepid armorer, an older gentleman with probably over 20 years in the service, was amused to have the American midshipman interested in getting his hands dirty and helping clean the weapons with him. But in working with him, I discovered something about the way that the

Royal Navy and the UK military in general approached the military profession.

In the United States Navy, it takes about seven to ten years for an enlisted service member to be promoted to Petty Officer First Class or E-6 paygrade. It then takes an additional seven

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years, nearly the same amount of time to go from Seaman Recruit, Seaman Apprentice, Seaman,

Petty Officer Third Class, Petty Officer Second Class and Petty Officer First Class (E-1 to E-6) as it does to advance from E6 to E7 or Chief Petty Officer, the first Senior Non-Commissioned rank in the Navy. Assuming that someone of the Intrepid armorer’s age and time in service would be over twenty years, I guessed that he was the equivalent of a Chief Petty Officer and accordingly addressed him as “Chief.”

What I later discovered through our conversations was that he was in fact only a Leading

Seaman in the Royal Navy or Petty Officer Third Class (E-4) United States Navy terms. He’d come into the Royal Navy as a teenager and had been in the service his entire life. But he had gotten into trouble in his early years and had been busted down in rank so many times that even after 20 years, he was still below where most US Navy enlisted would be in rank after only five years of service. So why was he still in the Royal Navy?

In the US Navy and in fact throughout all the American military services, there was a policy of “up or out” where anyone who failed to get promoted would be discharged from military service. As I understood his explanation, it meant that a ship’s armorer could theoretically remain the ship’s armorer on the same ship for ten, fifteen or twenty years as long as he was competent at his job. And it seemed that through all the British services at the time, a service member could remain in the position they occupied as long as they were competent in completing the tasks required.

The point in examining this difference in personnel management between the Royal Navy and United States Navy is that it speaks to the concept of expertise and self-actualization in work.

In the Royal Navy, you were expected to master a particular skill set and continue to gain expertise in that particular task over time. From working with the Intrepid’s armorer I learned

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about the intricacies of the Browning Hi-Power pistol, the Sterling submachine gun, the FN FAL assault rifle and FN MAG general purpose machine gun. Literally having forgotten more than I would ever learn about these weapon systems, the “Chief” would change in demeanor, almost becoming one with the weapon as he’d explain the physics of the bolt carrier mechanism or gas blowback assembly.

In the US Navy, you were expected to become proficient in a range of different skills and continue to expand your knowledge and understanding of other disciplines: task, condition, standard. But the system never desired or allowed any service member to spend the time and effort necessary to “love” the object of their study and become an expert in the same sense as their

Royal Navy counterpart. Unlike the case of the HMS Intrepid’s armorer, for an American sailor, learning the physics of the weapon were just subjects to be mastered on the test to the next step of career progression.

The Home Stretch

At the end of my summer cruise, I had two more semesters of academics to complete before finally being allowed to begin practicing my trade in the field. With three quarters of our time at the Academy complete, I remember a sense of relief returning for our final year of school.

With statistics, differential equations, and electrical engineering behind me, I was finally getting into the elective courses that dealt with Political Science, my supposed major focus of study.

It was at the end of my First Class year as a senior at the Naval Academy that I finally began ending the first phase of my educational evolution. After twenty two years of indoctrination, I had been molded and forged into a highly capable tool. And upon graduation, I would put everything I had learned up to this point to the test.

And while I had mentally checked out once I confirmed that I would graduate, I still

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remember a conversation that I had with one of my classmates from the same company. We were talking about life once we graduated and began actually going to do what we had been training to do for the past four years. Dan was going to fly jets. I was going to kill bad guys. And he said, “... at the end of the day, if it comes down to it...I will choose my family over the country.”

The world stopped. I didn’t know what to say because the logic didn’t resonate.

Everything I had been raised to believe was about selfless sacrifice for the benefit of the whole. E pluribus unum; out of many, one. Non sibi sed patrie; not for self but for country. Hadn’t he been paying attention to where we were? Hadn’t he learned his rates?

I don’t know if there was a pause in the conversation or if he even noticed my stunned confusion. But then other questions started to bubble in my mind. What happens on the battlefield? What happens when we need him to push through, make the ultimate sacrifice, and his family is calling him back? What happens to the mission then? His comment raised questions of loyalty, trust and patriotism that would wait for me to solve for the next thirty years.

As everyone else got ready for graduation, I was getting ready for Ranger School. Instead of taking the normal extra month of vacation or “basket leave” newly commissioned Service

Academy officers were allowed before reporting to their next duty station, I would be headed to one of the Army’s toughest training courses, along with three other newly commissioned classmates. Over a period of 61-days, we would be trained and tested in small unit leadership while being pushed to our physical limits to execute our tasks in mountain, jungle and desert terrain.

Ranger School

It took me three months of dedicated procrastination to write this portion on Ranger

School. The long delay was less in the complexities of what the training consisted of and more in

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the implications of what the experience meant. From an emotional standpoint, getting my Ranger tab was probably akin to losing one’s virginity in a society where that still mattered. If SERE school was an advanced version of Plebe Summer discomfort and Airborne School was a gut check for how crazy you were to trust everyone involved in packing your parachute, Ranger

School was the first time that I’d be pushed to the limit of my physical capabilities and fail.

To put things into perspective, Army Rangers are one of the military units considered elite troops within the DoD’s Special Operations Command or SOCOM. As such, they are grouped with the Army’s Special Forces or “Green Berets,” Navy Sea Air and Land or SEALs, Air Force

Pararescue or “PJ’s” as well as other smaller sub-groups like Delta Force, Task Force 160, and the Special Warfare Combat Crewman (SWCC). And like every other exclusive group, they have an admissions process to weed out those who will endanger other members of the team when lives are at stake.

The selection process for each of the different units is slightly different depending on the missions that the service members are expected to perform. Navy SEALs are expected to be completely at home in waters of all temperatures and roughness. Green Berets are expected to be able to understand the psychology of local insurgents to either support or defeat their actions against the current government. Air Force PJ’s are expected to calmly stop arterial bleeding and tourniquet lost limbs under effective enemy fire. Rangers are just expected to be tough.

Claiming a heritage stretching back to the American Revolutionary War, Rangers claim a heritage with hardy frontiersmen like Francis Marion, who used guerrilla warfare to fight the

British Army in the swamps of South Carolina. Ranger units were raised during the War of 1812 and by the Confederates and Union during the American Civil War. But it was during World War

II that Rangers would become the force that they are today. Modelled along the lines of the

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British Commandos, the American Rangers were used as “shock troops” to begin the engagement with enemy forces before the arrival of follow-on conventional units. While the missions and roles of Rangers have evolved since storming the beaches of Normandy during World War II or parachuting into Panama during Operation Just Cause, they are always among the first to fight; resulting in an admission process that set higher standards for courage, endurance and toughness than those expected of a normal Army recruit. And in that lay my opportunity.

The emotional challenge of Ranger School getting my Ranger tab would be one mark of becoming part of the elite and show that I was special. My first choice would have been to go into the SEALS or Green Berets. The problem with the SEALs was that you needed to be physically qualified as a combat diver, which required 20/50 eyesight while mine was probably north of

20/200 at the time. The problem with the Green Berets was that they were part of the army and it was not an option open to me.

I suppose I could have tried to LASIK eye surgery in order to improve my eyesight, as many people have done. But in the year 1987, the procedure was much more costly, less available and not approved by the military. So to my thinking the SEALs were out.

And I could have applied for an inter-service transfer upon graduation, and then go through the process of becoming an Army infantry officer and then trying out for Special Forces.

But at the time, I didn’t know that was a possibility or how to go about starting the administrative process. So the opportunity to go to Ranger School, the accession point for the military's elite units, was both an unexpected and unimaginable gift. And desperately wanting to prove how special I was to others probably contributed to my failure.

Major Edwards, Officer of Marines

That doesn’t take anything away from the people who tried to help me along. First among

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those was Major Mike Edwards, who was the second highest ranking Marine Corps officer at the

Naval Academy. As part of the Department of the Navy, the midshipmen interested in joining the

Marine Corps must wait until service selection night when we are each called up according to our class rank to pick the open billets in aviation, submarines, surface ships, SEALs, or Marines.

Major Edwards' job was to help any midshipmen interested in joining the Marine Corps understand what being an officer of Marines meant and what you could expect in a Marine Corps career.

Major Edwards was the epitome of what I imagine a Marine officer to be. He was mostly the strong silent type and regarded the midshipmen the same way a food inspector regards rotting fruit - looking for edible pieces to cut out and salvage from the mess. In typical Marine recruiting fashion, he never sold joining the Marines because of the benefits you’d enjoy or the attention you’d receive. Rather he ignored everyone who wasn’t interested and challenged those who were with questions like, “What makes you think you’re good enough to be an officer of Marines?”

The dual implication of the question being that first you didn’t have the stuff it took to lead men into combat and second, you weren’t a Marine - the men who fought and died under your command were. You were just the officer, whose job it was to make sure Marines would be able to fight, kill and win battles. And if you were successful, they would all come home.

When he deigned to speak to us, he could be loud, brash, and opinionated. He enjoyed good cigars, strong spirits and beautiful women. But most importantly, he was 100% committed to his job of preparing Marines for combat. And it was Major Edwards who made the opportunity to go to Ranger School possible at all.

Major Edwards had served as an infantry platoon commander during the Vietnam War and knew that once you pushed “Go” there was no time or value in regretting missed training

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opportunities or chances not taken. He was the living embodiment of the unofficial rule that “it’s better to get forgiveness than beg for permission.”

He’d tell us, “You do it and it’s done. The system can either forgive you and live with it or punish you for your mistake. But if you save lives as a result of your action, who cares how much punishment you have to take?”

“You don’t know shit. So, start learning. Your job is to push the boundaries. Make all your mistakes in peacetime so that you don’t pay for mistakes in wartime with blood.”

He’d been an officer of Marines during the race riot years where officers that the troops didn’t like would be “fragged,” blown up with fragmentation grenades in their sleep. He'd been given enlistees from McNamara’s 100,000, the intellectually challenged recruits, and told to have them fight alongside combat hardened Marines. And he obeyed military regulations when he thought they would help accomplish the mission and did everything he could to protect his men from illogical orders that would decrease the odds of them coming home alive . I don’t ever remember him saying it, but his attitude was reflected in the phrase, “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six” knowing that laws were determined by the victors and you had to come back alive before you could face a jury trial.

Somewhere along the way, Major Edwards had been going through the Naval Academy archives and discovered an old administrative agreement from the Vietnam War that allowed

Naval Academy midshipmen to attend Ranger School before attending Marine Officer Basic

School. Apparently, the number of Naval Academy midshipmen going into the Marine Corps and intensity of fighting in Vietnam was so high that the Army decided to open up Ranger School to prospective Marine officers to increase everyone’s odds of surviving overseas. And while Ranger

School remained a normal summer school option open to West Point cadets, Annapolis

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midshipmen hadn’t attended since the end of the Vietnam War over a dozen years ago.

That’s not to say that there weren’t challenges to making the opportunity real. There were administrative agreements that needed to be confirmed and reactivated. There were waivers that needed to be reviewed, funding lines that needed to be found, and perhaps most importantly, skepticism to be overcome. Because unlike our West Point counterparts, as Annapolis midshipmen, we were focused on naval warfare and learned nothing about leading troops in combat on the ground.

Any of us could tell you the “Rules of the Road” where “even red nuns and have odd black cans” (referring to the numbering sequence of buoys heading up a river) or that sailboats under sail typically have the right of way except in the law of gross tonnage when facing a super tanker coming the other way. But few, except perhaps for former enlisted, could bang out a Five

Paragraph Order of “Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration, and Command & Control” to plan and execute the attack of an objective. And even though we’d all received extensive classroom and practical exercises on how to read a map and compass, the differences between land and sea navigation are divergent enough to require their own attention.

Of course, that didn’t seem to bother Major Edwards or “Hitman,” “Hawk,” “TD” or

“Charlie,” the other midshipmen who’d signed up for the Ranger School challenge. I suppose in

Major Edward’s calculations, if he’d been able to take McNamara’s intellectually challenged and turn them into fighting warriors; he could take us, supposedly the nation's best and brightest, and throw us in the deep end. And for our part, we were all “young, dumb and full of cum,” too self- confident of our abilities and ignorant of the challenges to be dissuaded from the endeavor. So even though we knew that there was a good chance someone would find out about what we were trying to do and stop us; we all jumped in and started swimming in whatever way we thought was

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going to work. But we’d be splashing in the dark.

At this point of intergenerational difference on availability of information in 1987 and

2020. Today, if we were preparing for Ranger School, we could go online and Google “ranger school preparation program” and receive 10,600,000 results in 0.63 seconds. And these wouldn’t just be packing lists or quick tips on what type of exercises you should use. YouTube instructions carry full descriptions of what to expect, how long each phase is, and how you’ll be assessed for passing to the next stage.

But without access to anyone who’d been to Ranger School before, we were limited to relying on rumors and hearsay, much like learning about Moby Dick from Ishmael. Eventually, one of us found an old copy of a Ranger Handbook (United States Department of the Army, 2017, p. xx), and we started memorizing the Ranger Creed.

Recognizing that I volunteered as a Ranger, fully knowing the hazards of my

chosen profession, I will always endeavor to uphold the prestige, honor, and high esprit de

corps of the Rangers.

Acknowledging the fact that a Ranger is a more elite Soldier who arrives at the

cutting edge of battle by land, sea, or air, I accept the fact that as a Ranger my country

expects me to move further, faster, and fight harder than any other soldier.

Never shall I fail my comrades. I will always keep myself mentally alert,

physically strong, and morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task

whatever it may be, one hundred percent and then some.

Gallantly will I show the world that I am a specially selected and well trained

Soldier. My courtesy to superior officers, neatness of dress, and care of equipment shall

set the example for others to follow.

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Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country. I shall defeat them on the

field of battle for I am better trained and will fight with all my might. Surrender is not a

Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and

under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.

Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger

objective and complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor.

Oorah. Rangers lead the way.

And I supposed, things might have turned out different if we’d had someone to train us on what to expect. But with a full load of classes and all our other obligations that we had to fulfill before graduation, learning what we'd to know took second place to getting out of school first.

But while we didn't have help to determine what or how we should study for Ranger

School, there was one thing that we did have control over which was our physical fitness and how we prepared physically for the challenges of Ranger School. And so, we focused on that and worked out a lot.

With different academic majors, different military obligations and different body types, we each developed individual pathways forward on how to get ready. But one thing we shared in common was our early morning exercises before the daily morning formation and to warm up for the rest of the day. We would usually start with a three mile run in “boots and utes” or leather jump boots and military utility trousers that ended with a sprint on the seawall surrounding

Farragut Field. We’d pair off to carry each other piggyback or fireman’s carry to the pull up bars on Dewey Field about half a mile away. There we’d do our pushups, pull ups and pull ups to exhaustion before jogging back to “Mother B” for a shower and morning meal formation.

In the afternoon I skip lunch every other day to swim laps or lift weights in one of the

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many pools and gyms at the Naval Academy. After classes, it was company sports which usually was fieldball, a sort of lacrosse played without sticks or helmets and a ¾ sized soccer ball. After finishing our game, it was back to the gym, pool or pull up bars for another workout, before heading back for evening meal formation. As graduation and our notional start of Ranger School approached, the intensity and frequency of our training increased.

It wasn't enough that you could do 70 or 80 pushups in a row without stopping. We’d pair off with one person counting until you couldn’t straighten your arms out, at which time your buddy would straddle you and lift you up by your chest until your arms were straight and then press down upon your shoulders as you tried to keep yourself from collapsing. 20 dead hang pull- ups were great; but when you couldn’t pull yourself up on your own, your partner would stand behind you and grab your ankles and allow you to stand on his thighs to assist yourself up, until your hands gave out.

As the weeks rolled into months pull-ups, push-ups, setups and flutter kicks became almost akin to breathing. All of us could easily crank out 100 pushups in under 2 minutes and combining all our workout sessions, we might complete between 2000 and 3000 pushups in a day.

Pull ups were the same. While I was never able to do 30 good dead hang pull-ups at one time, I could get back up on the bar again and again and again until I had 350 done for the day.

Each of us could run 3 miles in under 20 minutes in “boots and utes” with me being the slowest of the group. Charlie, TD and Hawk could all clear 3 miles in under 18 minutes even after a punishing workout on a wet field wearing soaked pants and clomping on the pavement in unsupported leather jump boots.

At the end of my 2nd class or junior year I weighed about 155 pounds with a 27 inch waist and less than 6 percent body fat leaving me to sink like a rock even after taking the largest breath

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I could hold. And while lean muscles may be great to look at, I knew I’d be nowhere near a beach the next summer. We’d be doing river crossings at night and patrolling in ankle, knee and chest deep swamp water. In these situations, fat is your friend. Fat keeps you warm; fat lifts you up; and when you didn’t eat that day, fat could keep your body from eating away at muscle.

Luckily, food was not in short supply at the Academy. All our meals were eaten family style with long tables of twelve with enough servings for half the table to get seconds. And even if all the food was gone from our table, we could easily walk over to any one of the 390 other tables in King Hall to scrounge for more. Needing to put on bulk, I piled up my plate and packed on the pounds, blowing up from 155 to over 180 in the course of senior year.

Over Spring Break, we decided to go hiking out in the woods to test out our land NAV skills and patrolling skills. Although without anyone to teach us it turned into a big boy review of

Boy Scouts camping skills rather than any preparation for the land navigation and patrolling skills needed to assault an enemy position. The reality check of what we were embarking upon came in the last weeks before graduation.

Major Edwards had managed to move all the administrative pieces through the bureaucracy. But in a fashion typical of any invertebrates, each manager deferred the unusual request up the chain of command until, as we heard it, our package made it up to the desk of the

Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Al Gray. His response, as recounted to us, was, “They can go, but if they don’t graduate it’s the end of their career.”

The reason was simple. Once we graduated from the Naval Academy, we would no longer be snotty nosed midshipmen but seen as United States Marines. And as such, whatever we did outside the Marine Corps family would be viewed by the Air Force, Army and Navy as representative of who and what a United States Marine was. And no Marine was going to fail

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from any interservice school, no matter how supposedly elite.

Each year the Marine Corps sends only between 20 to 30 Marines to Ranger school each year. These Marines who are sent have all been through boot camp, infantry school, and distinguished themselves amongst their peers within a field unit that required the additional skills and knowledge that Ranger School promised to provide. Out of the roughly 198,000 Marines the

Corps is authorized to maintain on its personnel rosters, these 20 to 30 “real” Marines represented the 99.98 percentile of an already elite group and almost always graduated at the top of their

Ranger class. We were yet untrained and untested.

While I didn’t consider it at the time, today I scratch my head at how Major Edwards convinced the powers that be a ragtag gaggle of self-taught midshipmen would be able to compete on this level. And at some level I wonder if the Marine Corps leadership didn’t want to tweak the nose of their Army brethren to say, “Even our untrained baby Marines can make it through your toughest courses.” But whether by chutzpah, back door connections or sleight of hand, he was able to get the green light and sent us off with a Spartan mother’s farewell of “Come back with your shield or on it.”

None of this dissuaded us. As any cursory search of young male impulsivity, sensation seeking, and risky behavior will find more research than necessary to complete a doctorate. And whether it was cortisol, testosterone or a search for peer acceptance, we could only see the prize that lay at the end of our efforts rather than all the obstacles and pitfalls that might defeat us along the way. So, we redoubled our efforts of eating, sleeping, training and repeating. And it would be the first 2 components of that mantra that would defeat me in the end.

As I discovered early in my four years at the Naval Academy, I loved to sleep. In many ways sleep was my refuge, my sanctuary against being physically entrapped at the Naval

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Academy, hence the saying if you can sleep 12 hours a day, you're only at the Naval Academy for two years. And while the Naval Academy did have strict physical requirements for height and weight, it did nothing to limit your consumption of calories as long as you were burning them.

And as an upperclassman, I was allowed to leave our company area or even order food to be delivered after evening meal formation. This meant that if I didn’t get enough chicken cordon bleu or roast loin of beef au jus for dinner in King Hall, I could always pick up the phone, order a large Dominos’ supreme and be patting my belly quite contentedly 45 minutes later. Ranger

School was about to hit me about the head and shoulders with the impact of Maslow’s essentials.

It wasn’t that we didn’t know that Ranger School was a slog. We’d heard about the starvation and in order to prepare myself for the hunger, I’d taken to doing a 24 hour fast each

Thursday. Despite maintaining my three times a day workout routine, I’d stop eating at

Wednesday midnight and restrict myself to yoghurt, water, fruit and salad until 12:01AM Friday morning, hence the Domino’s pizza. But that wasn’t Ranger School.

I get exhausted just reading about what we went through, but the public versions available on Wikipedia or any Google search goes something like: “Ranger School is one of the toughest training courses for which a Soldier can volunteer. Army Rangers are experts in leading Soldiers on difficult missions” (Army, n.d.). Wikipedia (n.d.) takes a more clinical explanation of the process, noting “Ranger School is designed to physically stress students to a point short of death.”

The operant distinction being that the course wasn’t designed to kill you. There were much easier ways to do that than marching prospective candidates through the hills of Georgia, swamps of

Florida and deserts of Utah. The question Ranger School was trying to answer was, “Do you have grit?”

Grit, guts, drive, passion. Whatever the operant word you used to express that extra

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something that reflected that you could mentally force your body to continue moving forward when everything was in pain and screaming, “NO!” And so, the instructors had designed a course that could, within the bounds of a manageable time frame, available geography and safety considerations, could answer that question.

This wasn’t China’s Long March. In 1934, Chinese Communist forces under the command of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong undertook a strategic military retreat from Chinese

Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek. Over the course of 370 days, the Chinese Communist covered roughly 5,600 miles, fighting and marching an average of 15 miles a day. When the

Communist troops finally reached their stronghold in Yanan, Shanxi province, nearly 90% of the initial number had been lost to death, disease and desertion until only 7,000 remained.

Ranger School didn’t have a year to answer the question nor want to debilitate 90% of the candidates. Of course, accidents can happen and in 1985, three years before our attempt, a Ranger student had drowned. But that sort of thing was frowned upon. What the course really wanted to do was to get inside your head to see if they could find any heart.

Over the next two months, we’d be in a state of continuous training where we’d be assessed for skills competency, leadership ability and peer evaluations in a mountain, jungle and desert environment. While the complexity of the tasks was accessible to anyone of average intelligence, Ranger School used physical discomfort to assess whether a candidate could block out the noise and get the job done in the face of ever increasing difficulties. And once the first couple days of basic skills assessment were completed, the fun began.

We started off with basic mountaineering and patrolling. How to read a map, how to tie knots, how to cross a stream, how to plan a patrol. And everything was done in a see one, do one, now’s the test approach.

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While we’d theoretically been exposed to the information in the Ranger Handbook we’d found, we’d never really practiced the skills we were being taught. But being used to absorbing huge amounts of knowledge and regurgitating it on command, there was nothing that posed an intellectual impossibility. The challenge came when we loaded up our packs and took the lessons out into the field.

While Rangers are considered lightly armored “shock troops,” that doesn’t mean their packs are light. While in the field, we’d have to carry all our ammunition, food and water with us making the average Ranger School load between 50 and 70 lbs. And while we’d work as a team to try and distribute any extra weight as evenly as possible, woe to the radio operator or machine gunner who would be hauling another 13 to 23 pounds for the PRC-77 radio and M-60 machine gun respectively.

Of course, for the first couple days, all the calisthenics and weight training helped. The loads were manageable and though balancing the pack was unfamiliar, I could finish each day tired but otherwise untested. The challenge was that Ranger School wasn’t testing if you could do a difficult task once or a moderately difficult task one thousand times. Rangers School wanted to know if you could do the simplest task of patrolling in the face of increasingly difficult conditions.

If you liked to be clean, dry, well rested, or full, you probably wouldn’t like Ranger

School. As soon as we went on patrol, it was game on. After tightening up our laces and pack straps, we’d lift the loads onto our backs, pick up our rifles and then move into position to leave camp.

Stop, look, listen and smell for the sights, sounds and scents of the immediate battlefield area. At the edge of the camp as delineated by barbed wire, we’d move hump our loads silently

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into the woods and then spread out in a defensive position just beyond the minefields and machine guns intersecting fields of fire. Like a diver’s lockout chamber, we’d begin melting into the environment of battle that we were moving into.

Take a knee. Weapons at the ready. Begin soaking it all in.

No quick movements. Let your pupils dilate to gather more light. Breathe the air deeply, quietly, fully, searching for smells that should be there and not. Head on a swivel. Look forward, left and right. Where’s your Ranger buddy? Where’s the Patrol Leader? Where’s the most likely avenue of attack? Where’s the best point of cover? Feel the texture of the pistol grip of your M-16 and rub your thumb on the selector switch to double check that your weapon was still on “Safe.”

Did you remember to pack everything you needed? Did you tape everything down so nothing rattles or makes a sound?

Bring it back. Focus on now. You’ve left the camp. It’s too late now. There’s only one direction from here. No end until the objective is complete.

A nod in the shadows and a slow levitating forward. Check rear. Check flanks. And with the wind masking stray sounds, a silent shifting of weight onto your feet. And then a standing crouch as you delicately glide through the forest to avoid stepping on dry branches and avoid bumping trees with your pack.

The feel of dry socks and clean clothes disappearing as sweat begins to soak through. First your shoulders at the harness straps and underneath your backpack. Then dampening the rustle of dry trousers with more sweat.

Rain was nice because it masked the sounds of our movements. Rain was delicious for the first fifteen minutes as it cooled our overheated bodies. Rain made tiny fairy music as it tap danced on our headgear and packs.

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Rain was scary in that it masked the sound of the enemy movements. The wet curtains of precipitation shortened the distance of “Contact Left” or “Contact Right” from yards to feet. Rain could become heavy and cold, adding invisible layers of discomfort with each passing hour. Rain sucked happiness dry when it finally streamed down your butt crack filling the last untouched dry spot on your body, the delicately powdered spaces between the toes of your feet.

Head on a swivel. Look forward, left and right. Where’s your Ranger buddy? Where’s the

Patrol Leader? Where’s the most likely avenue of attack? Where’s the best point of cover? Feel the texture of the pistol grip of your M-16 and rub your thumb on the selector switch to double check that your weapon was still on “Safe.” Take a knee. Weapons pointed out. And movement was just the steady state for getting out the door.

Each mission we’d rotate our roles from radio operator, medic, and platoon sergeant with accompanying duties and responsibilities throughout the operation. And while the simplest responsibility everyone shared was staying alert for the enemy, keeping track of each other and not losing any of our equipment, those actions became more difficult as miles and hours dragged on. Ranger School supposedly allocates four hours of sleep a day, but that might be shortened if you happened to pull watch duty that night. And after the third day of rationed meals humping a

50 pound pack up and down the Georgia countryside, the brain began to do weird things to you.

The first was the micro naps that you’d inadvertently take as soon as you took a knee.

Halting to take a compass bearing or cross a danger area you’d turn and face out, ready to counterattack should the enemy be watching you. And in the minute it took for the Patrol Leaders to confirm our course, my head would be swinging like a bobblehead on a dashboard.

Longer stops were more dangerous in that you could easily fall into a deeper sleep. One time, lying down in the ambush site, I was awakened to the sound of machine gun fire and the

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other members firing into the kill zone. Immediately awake I struggled to fire my M-16 only to find my arms had gone to sleep underneath leaving me unable to move my fingers; all leaving the

Ranger Instructor standing above me shouting, “Oh, that’s good. That’s really good…” before flipping my rifle muzzle with the toe of his boot.

And of course, losing anything was potentially a fatal mistake. Not only would you alert the enemy of our presence, but we’d lose the use of the canteen, compass or knife that we’d need to complete the mission. Knowing loss of gear was potentially punishable by failure, we’d

“dummy cord” everything to our “deuce gear” that made up our military issue 782 shoulder harness and web belt. More than once I lurched forward as the team began to move only to realize the canteen I’d taken a drink from had dropped out of my hand after I dozed off mid sip.

As I learned to overcome the comforting embrace of sleep, there were other challenges to navigate. While living outdoors heightened our senses making it possible to smell water and feel approaching changes in the weather. However, the constant movement and starvation diet played tricks on our processing of stimuli.

One night I saw a witch cackling silently at me from the boughs of a pine tree as we moved around a clearing. I intellectually knew that there were no such things as witches and in any case, she’d be too heavy to sit that high on such thin branches. But just in case, I kept my rifle trained on her until we were safely out of sight. The key was maintaining focus on what was important and that meant knowing what did and didn’t matter. Which leads me to my failure.

For our last objective of Mountain Phase, I was assigned the role of Platoon Sergeant

(PSG) or second in succession of command. From a macro perspective, my job was to help and advise the patrol leader and lead the patrol in the leader's absence. As PSG, I should supervise the patrol's administration, logistics, maintenance, as well as prepare and issue paragraph 4 of the

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patrol’s Operation Order. But there was more to it than that.

Before leaving I needed to make sure all the team members had their necessary equipment, water, rations and ammunition. Along the way, I needed to make sure everyone in the platoon was healthy, accounted for and prepared to execute their mission on the objective. I should be double checking the pace count (the way we estimated distance traveled) and ensure that we were following the course laid out in the OpPlan. In all, there were over thirty separate tasks associated with the position.

Wanting to ensure that I was “on it” for this position, I decided to carry the radio, the 13 lb. PRC 77, so that I could receive and relay messages directly to headquarters. And after counting everyone out of the wire, I walked slowly up and down the length of our modified wedge formation to ensure everyone was accounted for and on task. As we approached our

Objective Rally Point (ORP), I ensured everyone was accounted for and knew their role in the upcoming assault.

As the team did final mission prep, I was called by the Ranger Instructor for some final questions. The exact details are fuzzy and I don’t even remember the question. All I do remember is being huddled under a poncho with a red lens flashlight, map and compass trying to focus on what to do with these tools I think I remember seeing before. And quickly as that, I was done.

The next morning, I was watching the rest of my class move on from the Mountain Phase to the swamps of Florida while I stayed behind. I had failed. And my career in the Marine Corps was over before I had begun.

Recycled

There was no autopsy of why I’d failed, just the realization that I failed to make the cut as my teammates packed up and left me behind. I imagined that getting gigged for falling asleep in

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the ambush site and failing to read the map on the last exercise were enough. My only consolation is that I hadn’t been peered out, meaning at least 60% of my colleagues thought that I was someone they wanted to fight alongside and I hadn’t committed an honor violation, like stealing food from other candidates, which apparently happened from time to time.

As an education dissertation, I supposed the biggest question is why I should waste twenty pages of writing on something that happened outside of a classroom and had little to do with mental absorption of information. My point is, I suppose that Ranger School was the ultimate in education, in that it was not assessing your ability to intellectually comprehend a series of instructions, but was assessing your character in executing that task as a team under challenging physical and environmental circumstances. And given that the metrics for success or failure was the life and death on the battlefield, Ranger School was attempting to create a mechanism to allow for catastrophic failure with non-fatal results. And luckily, I would be given another shot.

“I kinda like you,” the Ranger Instructor noted. “I’m going to recommend you be recycled.” And I would join the next class starting in a couple weeks. Until then, I’d eat, sleep, clean my gear, paint rocks, mow grass and do all the mindless things the Army is famous for.

I don’t think I understood what was going on. But with thirty years of distance from the events, I think I understand what was going on. Perhaps the biggest problem was that I had approached Ranger School as a “something,” a hurdle, an objective, a bauble to possess rather than a possible reality that I’d have to commit to completely and sacrifice everything to achieve.

Thus, instead of surrendering to the “here and now” totality of the Ranger School experience, I was still thinking in terms of what had come before and what was to follow once I was done.

My second mistake was not understanding the phrase “good enough… is.” My previous indoctrination of always doing things better to distinguish my performance was self-defeating

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here. That’s not to say that taking care of the little things wasn’t necessary. It’s just to say that you had to balance fixating on the details against losing the big picture.

My third mistake was thinking I was superman. Up until this point, I had never been exposed to any challenge or test that I couldn’t overcome by simply applying more effort and gutting it out. But Ranger School was sort of like swimming against undertow. You might be a strong swimmer and the current might only slow; but after a week, you’d be tired and the current would still flow.

And my last mistake was not understanding that Ranger School may have been structured as an individual test, we were evaluated on how capably we led our team to success. In that, carrying the radio may have been a nice thing to do, but reflected poor judgement on at least three levels. First, the decision showed how I overestimated my own physical ability to handle the load.

Second, it didn’t utilize the full capabilities of the available manpower. And third, the most relevant, it didn’t work because I was incapacitated in the end.

In retrospect, I now realize that Ranger School helped me recognize how our modern schools that promote personal excellence were ineffective in preparing us to succeed in systems where you cannot survive as an individual. Throughout my time growing up and the Naval

Academy, I was a racehorse competing on the raked track against other pampered racehorses. Of course we’d physically exert ourselves during the day. But each night we’d return to a warm dry stall, get a rub down and have all the hay and vegetables we could eat.

At Ranger School, I was being introduced to what it meant to be a horse on a cattle drive where individual excellence was secondary to team success of accomplishing a larger mission against endless unknowns. And once you left the ranch, there was no comfort along the way until the whole experience was over. And when I think of the increasingly pampered virtual lives

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Americans live, I wonder how we’ll fare when we fight against people raised in the comfortless caloric deficit environment of an un-industrialized world.

After nearly two weeks of recovering, I joined the next month’s Ranger class and passed all four phases. That’s not to say I sailed through easily. Rather, I had absorbed the lessons from my previous failure enough to successfully complete each challenge to standard. And while I can’t tell you exactly what I did or how it felt, I have memories of instants like the tongue of fire roaring from the oil well in the desert of Kuwait.

Slogging through the swamps of Eglin Air Force Base one night, I remember hearing the practice run of “Spooky” the AC-130 gunship and hearing the “brrrrrrrrrrrt,” of two 20mm gatling guns throwing 6,000 rounds per minute towards the ground, followed by the “thmp, thmp, thmp” of the 105mm howitzer shooting artillery rounds from the sky. Another memory is parachuting into the drop zone with a full combat load and hitting the ground like a bag of bricks. Instead of immediately jumping up and gathering my chute, I just lay on the ground looking up at the perfectly blue Utah sky moving my neck and wiggling my fingers and toes to determine if I'd broken anything; and after determining my back and ankles weren’t broken, deciding I was going to graduate. Another imprinted picture is on our final live fire assault of the objective, watching the machine gun team lay down suppressive fire and watch the barrel begin to glow red as the tracers flew downrange.

But my favorite memory was on a long patrol where my teammate was humping the extra

23 pounds of the M-60 machine gun, mile after endless mile. It was pure guts time and at 3 in the morning, it was almost as if I could see his energy aura dying in the darkness. I took the chocolate covered brownie I’d been saving as a treat for myself after we assaulted the objective, unwrapped it and gave it to him to eat.

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The effect was like replacing old Christmas toys with new batteries and made my lost sugar surge almost enjoyable. One team, one fight. And we all graduated together.

By the end, I went from roughly 185 to about 140 pounds in two months of training. I don’t know what the clinical representation of a dissociative fugue state looks like, but in the days and weeks after graduation, things moved in a sort of underwater slow motion. Of course, eating, sleeping and repeating were priorities. But there was a fatalistic finality of everything we did.

I remember driving back from Ranger School with a fellow graduate and taking turns driving. At one point we had both dozed off and I awoke to find the car hurtling towards the back end of an 18 wheeler at over 80 miles per hour. No drama. No excitement. The interaction went something like this.

“Uhn, hey” and nudge with the elbow.

Eyes open. Recognition of the situation and “Uhn,” followed by slow deceleration from nearly rear-ending the trailer to the three second separation mandated by the driving exam.

Decompression

We got home but were different. Back at Annapolis we all lived together and spent the

Fall months doing administrative tasks until we could begin our Marine Officer basic training.

But the urgency of modern life seemed infantile.

“Did you eat today? Did you sleep today? Ok, what’s the problem?” we’d remind each other as we sneered at the out-of-shape civilian population living like the headless chickens making a hullabaloo about nothing. And after having gone beyond our previously conceived notion of mortality, we engaged in senseless risky behavior, like throwing a hollow point into my

Smith and Wesson 686 and giving it a whirl. Click. Whirl. Click.

Ok. Let’s get on with it. Eat, sleep, wash, rinse, repeat.

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I recovered the weight I lost quickly. I went from 140 to over 190 in a couple months. No paleo, Mediterranean or keto diet. It was a “see -food” diet and essentially anything edible within grabbing distance was in danger of being consumed. And with the new skills gained from our excursion, we could walk to our destination if food was not in reach.

I remember landing at Honolulu International Airport for Christmas break and having a craving for ahi poke with ogo, SPAM musubi and POG (passion, orange, guava) juice from my grandpa’s old store, Tanabe Superette on Ke’eamoku Street. After picking up my lumpy duffle back at the baggage carousel, I threw the 40 pound bag on my back, and started walking.

Two hours later, I was sitting outside the back of the store, peeling the Saranwrap, eating my musubi and staring at the street. Look left, look right, head on a swivel for the threat. But I was back in La La Land and nothing that surrounded me here could kill me.

Since we’d all graduated from Ranger School, we’d be allowed back into the fold. The

Marine Corps didn’t give us any special treatment, as it was expected that we should succeed.

And in fact, any put on airs would have been cause for scorn from our peers and censure by our instructors. And none of us cared anyways. Unless it involved food or sleep, we’d happily sit in the back and be invisible.

TBS - The Basic School

The six months of “The Basic School” or TBS as the Marine Corps basic officer course was called, held no surprises. The three month long Infantry Officer Course was a familiar refresher of what we’d learned in Ranger School, with the primary difference being that there were no parachute jumps, no dietary restrictions and we enjoyed most weekends off.

One mistake I vividly remember was getting too cocky about newfound toughness. Our mission was to spring an ambush on an opposing force and the return to base. Getting lazy, I

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decided that I didn't want to wear a heavy jacket or bring a poncho because I figured it would just get me all sweaty or caught in the trees.

Unfortunately, it was winter, and I began to regret my decision as my elbows began to melt divots in the snow. And although I managed a decent plank for about ten minutes, pretty soon I dropped, and the front of my uniform started getting wet as well. The enemy took their time finding our position as I was transported back to the discomfort of Ranger School. The only benefit of the cold being that I didn’t fall asleep this time.

The lesson being that life is hard and it really sucks if you are stupid. Moreover, the worst way of (re)learning lessons was through pain. And as officers of Marines, we’d be responsible for teaching our wards how to survive in uncomfortable chaos while killing people trying to return the favor. So, maximizing educational tools was key.

As part of our officer candidate evaluation, we needed to demonstrate our ability to effectively communicate information. For my test, I was told to teach the difference between cover, a barrier placed between you and a threat that will prevent your injury, and concealment, an obstruction to the enemy being able to identify your location. And I discovered that I wasn’t very adept at the process.

After knocking on the door and being told to enter, I opened the door to our examination room, announced my name to our officer instructor and my topic of instruction.

“Proceed...”

And I did. In illustrating the difference between being able to see a target and being safe from an attack I used the entire room as my prop. I talked about visibility from the windows, hid in the corners of the room, jumped on top of the table and crawled underneath the classroom desks. After completing the lesson and brushing the chalk and dust off my inspection ready

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uniform, I stood at attention waiting for his response. My assessor diligently scribbled notes and checked some boxes before inviting me to leave.

My grade. “C”

It turns out that I was expected to utilize the military cake mix method of instruction based on the rule of threes. First, I’ll tell you what I’m going to tell you. Second, I’ll tell you what I want to tell you. Third, I’ll tell you what I told you. Each teaching component should be in three parts (but in no case more than 5) and reinforced by audio-visual aids.

The only reason he passed me was that I managed to get the message across. His final assessment was that I would be, at best, a marginal instructor.

3rd Platoon, India Company, 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines

Staff Sergeant Chambers was a Vietnam era Marine who as I remember him was black,

6’2” and 220 lbs. I realize that’s not possible and those are outside the height and weight standards for the Marine Corps. But he had been forged in the crucible of the “old school” of the race riots of the 70’s where fragging, the practice of sending disliked officers love letters in the shape of fragmentation grenades was not unheard of. He’d dealt with the racial discrimination of the war where black participation in Vietnam was greater than their percentage of the national population and assignment to combat units even higher (Chow & Bates, 2020). He’d dealt with the decision of McNamara’s 100,000 where young men with below average IQ scores were sent to the military to be used as virtual cannon fodder.

And despite being the best of the best who had been selected to be trained as a drill instructor on Parris Island, he had left. Now almost a decade later, he was back inside the Marine

Corps, because its world made more sense to him.

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The Marine Corps was his home. I was the newbie. And he was not my platoon sergeant so much as I was his lieutenant. If he liked me, I would thrive. If not, I would be treated with the utmost professional respect. But he’d allowed me to kill myself in the no man’s land ahead.

And even though there was an officer - enlisted distance between you, in the infantry that distinction can become paper thin. Everyone is in the same boat together. As my former boss used to tell me, “A 2nd Lt’s lifespan on the battlefield is measured in minutes. If you haven’t prepared your squad leaders to step up after you’re dead … and your team leaders to step up after they’re dead, then the mission will fail, and everyone will be killed.”

The key was a completely open and honest feedback loop because if we didn’t get it right as a team, the mission would fail and, perhaps more importantly, everyone would die. They were doing the mission. But I was calling the shots. So, we needed to know what each other was thinking and doing to ensure we got the mission done with maximum destruction of the enemy and minimum injury to ourselves.

That meant I needed to know exactly what the Marines were thinking and feeling as we moved across the land. How heavy were their packs? Did we carry enough water? Would we have enough ammunition? Should we have packed claymores? Would the repairs on the radio hold?

And the only way to know the answers was to continually ask them.

Communicate. Coordinate. Cooperate. Collaborate. Then training, training, training and more training. Task-condition-standard. And then hammer on the subordinate leaders to double check, triple check the results so we could move forward as a single organic unit.

And that meant pushing down the decision making authority to the lowest level possible.

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I still remember the first time one of the squad leaders asked me to solve a problem he had. “Lt

Nakano… we didn’t get the gear because the supply sergeant said … and then he… so we… but still can’t and…”

“Improvise, adapt, overcome. Figure it out. You’re the squad leader. But if I have to come down and solve every single problem you have, what are you there for?” And he did. He just needed to hear that he had the authority to take action.

As we got to know each other, the men began to tell their stories. Why they joined the

Marine Corps. LCPL Vame was someone you’d call a clean cut young man. Straw colored hair with a loopy grin and easy manner about him, He hailed from “God’s country” up in Montana where the air was pure, the water clean, and the horizon clear of skyscrapers.

Then I found out that he’d been caught stealing a car while in high school and was going to be charged with grand theft auto. At the hearing he was given the choice of going to jail for a felony crime that would have consequences for future employment or the Marine Corps. I suppose this was the better choice.

LCPL Menendez was shorter, fatter, darker than Vame and used to sweat like a pig when hauling the M-60 machine gun. I don’t think I would blink if I saw him doing gardening work in

Hollywood or selling burritos out of a food truck. But as with everyone, looks were deceiving.

“Why did I join? Shit, Sir. You need a gang to survive in life, and I didn’t want to be in no fucking gang. So, if I’m going to be in a gang, I’m going to be in the biggest baddest mothafucking gang there is. United States Marine Corps, Sir.” And then he gave me that same happy “everything’s ok, because I’m here, and we’re a team” shit eating grin.

Starting out at Annapolis five years ago, I hadn’t really thought about the men I’d be leading. And despite having had to move every three years and having lived in England and

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Japan, I was beginning to appreciate exactly how unworldly my life had been growing up. I had nothing in common with these men. And yet we were training ourselves to protect people probably less like ourselves to kill other people supposedly least like ourselves.

The more I got to know my Marines, the more I began to understand the other definition for USMC, Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. We were the castoffs of society who had bumped up against the walls of propriety or fallen off the wagon more than once. The Marine Corps Boot

Camp was a rehabilitation school for the unwanted and we were being given a chance to redeem ourselves by standing guard on the wall.

That doesn’t mean that all the men were from broken backgrounds or scarred pasts. Some were there for the giggles. Or in the case of Hausen to piss off their dad.

Blond haired, blue eyed, surfer boy from California, he had no economic, legal or social need to be in the Marine Corps. The military was just something that his father hated and so as long as that remained the case, we served a useful purpose. He would abide by the rules as he liked and push his rebellion to the edge of disobedience, but never cross it knowing the consequences with the Marine Corps were more predictable than in his family. Hausen’s approach can best be described through our first platoon barracks inspection.

After cleaning out the rooms, scrubbing the floors, and arranging their closets for several days, the platoon stood in front of their locker in their inspection ready uniform for my review. A return to the comearounds of my Academy days, I’d greet each one of them, ask them a few questions and then move on, with SSGT Chambers by my side.

When we got to Hausen, his gear was in perfect order. His uniform impeccable. His hair, close shaven on the sides, was within millimeters of regulation length on the top. And as always, the same loopy grin as Vame and Menendez.

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Uniform, check. Haircut to reg, check. Locker in order, check. Correct answer for 5th general order of the sentry, check.

“Good job. Anything I need to know about Hausen?”

“Uh yes Sir! I have this,” he said, before pulling down his pants and underwear to present his penis to me.

Looking down at his crotch I could see a nice chancre sore where nothing additional was needed.

“Ok. Did you go to the infirmary to get that checked out?”

“No Sir. Not yet, Sir.”

“Ok. Go take care of that and let me know what they say.”

“Yes, Sir.”

It was as if I could feel SSGT Chambers simultaneously balling up his fists and emotionally rolling his eyes beside me before saying, “I got this, Sir.” And then we moved on to inspect the next Marine.

It wasn’t that they were bad or mean. They were all kids, eighteen to twenty four years old. We all were.

They’d just never had any discipline or structure they respected push them to achieve something they couldn’t already do in their sleep. They were for the most part bored because they were too smart for the half stepping mediocrity that society desired for stability in its middle and lower classes. The Marines Corps was their way out.

Textbook Solutions

I remember being asked by a fellow platoon commander to teach the Marines a class on the Law of Armed Conflict on short notice. A top of his class graduate from USC, 1st Lt

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Michaels was being pulled away to attend another meeting. He passed the beautiful training aids he’d prepared, brightly colored poster boards with the development of the jus ad bellum (legal justification for going to war ), jus in bello (rules of conduct in warfare) and how the Department of Defense expected United States Marines to conduct themselves on the battlefield. On the back were key points to highlight and the things that the Marines should be expected to remember once the class was over. Task, condition, standard.

As I walked out to the group sitting in the grass, I could almost sense them tensing up when they saw the poster boards.

“Ok, come in closer. I’m not going to shout. Alright, today’s class is on the Law of Armed

Conflict. What we can and cannot do in war. So, what’s the purpose of war?”

Never shy, the Marines started shouting out answers. Kill the enemy. Blow them up.

Defend America. Someone who memorized their lessons would shout, “Locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and maneuver, and repel the enemy's assault with fire and close combat.” And then after things settled down, one of them would say, “Protect and defend the

Constitution”; and then others would poke fun saying, “Oooooooh” while others who agreed said,

“Shut up.”

“So, what about the rules of war, the law of armed combat? What do we need those for?”

Sensing a trick question, they all got silent. Waiting for me to follow the traditional methodology of three step process of “This is what I’m going to tell you”; telling them; and then reviewing, “This is what I told you,” the energy ebbed and they waited for me to begin reading off the beautifully made cards. So, I ripped them up.

“What do we need these for?” I asked again, tearing them into half and then quarters and then eighths and then throwing them into the air behind me. “What are they good for?”

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“Yeah!” “Exactly.” What are they good for?” “Who needs rules in warfare?” “Kill them all, let God sort them out.” And after a minute or two of excitement that we wouldn’t have to have the class, they ran out of things to say about why rules were stupid or asking how could you have laws in war. And I asked again, “So why do we need rules in war?”

And the older Marines began to speak up, “Well sir, it’s about fighting fair.” “Whatever we do to them, they’ll do to us.” “We need limits on the damage we do.” And the conversation began from there.

Surprisingly, there were some in the group who knew the terms jus ad bellum and jus in bello, as well as the difference between them. Some knew that the Geneva Conventions were a relatively new thing and had only been agreed to between the European nations after seeing the destructive power of industrial weapons. Of course, they didn’t know that - Article 50 of the

Fourth Geneva Conventions covered the humanitarian requirements for the protection of children by the occupying power. They didn’t know that Henri Dunant was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in establishing the Conventions in 1901. But neither did I without the note cards.

What was important was getting them to begin thinking about the concepts why we kill and knowing where to find out more about exactly when and how from each other. They needed to know that Marines they respected had studied the laws and respected them. And finally, I wanted them to know that there was no shame in not knowing the answers, but that they had to begin putting themselves mentally in combat and begin asking their questions now.

Moreover, I wanted them to realize that the time to prepare for war was now, when the skies were clear, breezes fresh and the sun still shining. Because it was too late to check the safety record of the rollercoaster after you got strapped in, when there would be no stopping the surprises until you got off the end of the ride. For them, everything would be distilled down to

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continuous set of “Go” - ”No go” decisions to apply 6 pounds of pressure to the trigger of their

M-16A2 and deliver 5.56 millimeters of high velocity transcortical lead therapy to their target, the

Marines’ euphemism for shooting their enemy in the head.

Looking back now after thirty years have passed, I think that most of them didn’t have fathers. Not that they were all illegitimate children, although I imagine some were. But rather that they never had someone who gave them an example of what it was to be a man. No one taught them discipline, held them accountable for their actions, or made them see that honor is serving something greater than oneself. And though I was almost the same age as most of them, the theoretical divide between officer and enlisted required that I lived up to a higher set of standards in everything I did.

It wasn’t that you had to be faster or stronger in everything you did, although that helped. I was never going to be as strong as Snerd who could bench press over 300 pounds or as fast as

Koch who ran 3 miles in 17’30”. But I could work harder to know and care more. And because I think that’s mostly what they wanted, someone with more commitment, more knowledge, more caring to teach by modeling.

And that’s what I worked to do every day. I would get in before they were getting up and stay until everyone was done for the day. But it wasn’t the time or presence. It was knowing the business. And because failure meant someone dying, being technically and tactically proficient was the only thing that mattered.

So, they’d push you, emotionally, physically, intellectually every day to see if you were worthy of their respect. The civilian world had let them down so many times before, they needed to know they could give you their trust. And if you could meet their standards, they’d willingly give their lives to you. And that started with training longer and harder than everyone else.

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After the battalion finished its 20 mile road march with full kit and forty pound packs and went back to the barracks, our platoon marched out to the obstacle course. When they failed to execute their midnight hostage snatch with precision, we did bounding overwatch drills in the wet grass at two in the morning until they remembered the definition of teamwork. Instead of doing the canned livefire drills of attacking on line into a valley, we scaled the back of the mountains and then attacked the target from the flank so we could hit the target with both enfilade and defilade crossfire.

We didn’t always get it right. Far from it. In fact, we always found another thing that we had gotten wrong. There was always something we didn’t know before or something that we thought we’d mastered that we obviously had missed. As Major Edwards had told me, “The time to make mistakes and try new things is in training. If you haven’t failed in some way during a field exercise, you haven’t bothered pushing the limits.”

The whole concept was to tap into every skill and piece of knowledge each man had and ensure it was shared with every Marine in the platoon to increase our ability to kill and probability of surviving. Nothing was out of bounds as the enemy would use every means at their disposal to try to kill us when the time to fight came. Whether that was sharing hand-to-hand techniques on how to kill more silently or making jellied gasoline with the Anarchist’s Cookbook, we worked to learn it all. And throughout the process, the only recognition of my commission was being told

“Sir” before and after they described how we had screwed up and what we needed to do better.

Over time we began to find a kind of harmony in our movements and there was a flow you’d feel during the operations. From loud voices and frantic arm gestures the volume and movement decreased until a click of the tongue or nod of the head could get an operation moving.

We began to recognize each other in the distance or in the moonlight by the way an individual

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walked, held their rifle or wore their pack. And while the knowledge was meant to save our lives while taking the enemy’s on the battlefield, things didn’t always work out that way.

It’s the kind of phone call you never like to get at one in the morning.

“Lt Nakano

“Speaking”

“Is PFC Abel a member of 3rd Platoon?”

And just because we worked hard didn’t mean they weren’t still knuckleheads. PFC Abel had managed to go off base, steal a motorcycle and lead the police on a high speed chase before crashing. He was in the hospital under guard and I was his ticket to get out. Being that this hadn’t been part of any lesson plan while at the Naval Academy, I was stumped for a minute before improvisational thinking kicked in. After making sure that he was alive, the Marine Corps could take custody of him and the local authorities would work with us through his prosecution, I jotted down some notes for the next day and went to sleep.

When I was finally able to visit him in the hospital the next day, he was lying in bed with his foot in a cast and the same shit eating grin that the other members in the platoon always seemed to have. After he had stolen the motorcycle, he’d eluded the police for almost an hour.

When he crashed, the police estimate he was traveling at almost 80 mph based on how far the bike slid.

His only comment to me was, “It worked.”

“Excuse me?”

“You remember how you taught us to do that judo roll, Sir?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it worked.”

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Apparently as he was being thrown over the handlebars of the motorcycle, the last thing that he remembered was tuck your chin into your chest and roll over on your shoulder. And the only thing he broke that day was his ankle.

But no matter how exasperated I was by how stupid my Marines were, I was their leader and was committed to doing everything better than they could. And that meant leading from the front, even in the idiotic.

Seeing the light

In preparation for combat our battalion would be going through our Marine Corps Combat

Readiness Evaluation System (MCCRES) or final exams before being sent out on float as part of an amphibious task force. Our testing ground was called 29 Palms Marine Corps Air Ground

Combat Center and Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command 930 square miles or roughly double the size of the island of Oahu.

Situated a three hour drive from Camp Pendleton and on the northern border of Joshua

Tree National Monument, it was a relief from all the days and weeks training we’d done before.

Instead of blanks and training grenades that had no consequences, this would all be live fire. 5.56 full metal jacket rounds would be shot out of the rifles at 52,000 pounds per square inch (psi).

Propelled at 3,250 feet per second they’d require only half a second before reaching the M16-

A2’s maximum effective range of 550 yards. At a maximum platoon strength of forty-three

Marines, our job was to work in harmony with the other three platoons of the company and other three companies of the battalion to prove our ability to maneuver against a dug in enemy and orchestrate combined fires to their destruction.

More exciting were the night fire exercises where tracers, bullets filled with a strontium and magnesium filling that burned when ignited, would create temporary threads of light that

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would illuminate the trajectory of your round. The crackling of our M16’s would be joined by the chatter of the M-60 machine guns shooting 7.62 rounds, roughly the same size as an AA battery, in stuttering bursts of three to five rounds per burst. The bass beat of our attack was provided by the heavy thumping of the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, which though designed in 1918, was still hurling bullets that weighed almost as much as a C sized battery with over 10,000 foot-pounds of energy, stopping passenger cars in their tracks and literally blowing people in half. With the episodic thump of the 60mm mortars launching high explosive or white phosphorous rounds to cover our advance, the feeling is what I imagine dancers on MDMA experience during a rave.

The primary difference in combat is you never touch the light. Every zip, bang and whump is something that could have killed you, because you never hear the bullet that actually does. And the exhilaration comes from knowing you are dancing through death as you work as a team to lay down suppressive fires and continue to advance on the target. This was our existential education and the results for failure were terminal.

As we advanced on the final objective, the mortars and machine guns slowed and then stopped. Scrambling to get within hand grenade range, a third of the Marines would throw their hand grenades while another third would lay down suppressive fire and the last third would prepare to clear the trenches. Watching to avoid shooting each other in the close quarters’ darkness, the teams of two and three would hit the bunkers.

Pop pop. Pop pop. And then the brrrrrrrrt of a three round burst. The boys were mopping up and the tension was going down.

“What do we get?”

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“Team 1 all clear.”

“Team 2 all clear.”

“Team 3 all clear.”

“Ok, give me a sitrep on your men” and we prepared to simulate destroying the enemy bunker.

It should have been a simple operation except for wanting to push the envelope each time we did anything. Instead of simply putting the electric detonator in the ½ lb. of TNT and using a standard issue detonator and be done with it; I had told the men to figure out how to blow the charge without it. Find something they would use on the battlefield. So, they used their right- angle flashlight and, unscrewing the face and bulb from the assembly, attached the wires to the now exposed electrical copper leads. Turning on the flashlight would detonate the charge.

“Ok, get behind that end” I said, pointing at the turn in the trenchline and let me know when you blow.” The Marines spooled out the line, yelled, “Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole” and then the lights came on.

It was as if everything stopped and every single nerve in my body was filled with light. It wasn’t as if I was surrounded by light. For an eternity, I was the light. And then everything faded back to black.

“Whooeee.” “God damn!” The men shouted as they came out dancing from behind their covered position.

It took me a couple of seconds to catch my breath and stand up, before I managed to ask,

“Are you ok?”

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“Yes Sir.”

“Ok, police up the area and pick up any unspent rounds or equipment. Then head down to our starting point.”

As per range standard operating procedures (SOP) we did a headcount to make sure everyone had all ten fingers and ten toes. Then we went through a gear check to make sure we weren’t leaving night vision goggles or any other issue gear on the training ground. Finally, a check to make sure any “alibi rounds” or unspent ammunition that might have fallen into the magazine pouches or people’s pockets by mistake. And then we marched back the mile or so back to our bivouac site.

It was a night fire, and I had no idea what the back of my uniform looked like. But Doc

Mateo, the Navy Corpsman assigned to our platoon kept bugging me like a paparazzi saying,

“Uh, hey Sir. We should stop and you should let me look at you.” And I kept swatting him away saying, “I’m good Doc. Let’s get everyone squared away and we can talk about it then.”

After we arrived at camp, the squad leaders all reported in, and I reported we’d returned safely to the Company Commander. Then I went back into my hooch and curled up into the fetal position to deal with the pain. When Doc came by to check on me a little while later, I didn’t argue.

Fifteen minutes later I began to spit blood and go into shock. The rest is an incoherent blur. I remember shivering uncontrollably while the HMMWV heater was turned full blast.

Somehow, I was on a gurney, and I remember the words Percocet and Demerol accompanying the neon lights flashing overhead before the pain started to go away. And then a day or so later, I remember waking up in a civilian hospital, surprisingly clean, with no one in uniform around me.

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Know the rules before breaking them

Four years later, Philip Gibson from the Survivability Directorate in the Natick Research,

Development, and Engineering Center would write, “Blast Overpressure and Survivability

Calculations for Various Sizes of Explosive Charges” (1994) and say:

When the blast calculations for explosive charge sizes from 1 to 32 ounces, at ranges of

one to three feet, were compared to human blast tolerance limits, it was found that the

blast exposures mostly fell in between the 1% survival limit and the threshold of lung

damage. This probably means that a heavily protected explosive ordnance disposal

technician, supplied with a rigid enclosed thoraco-abdominal protector, might survive a

blast of this magnitude. Those individuals who only have soft body armor, although they

may be adequately protected against fragments, may be vulnerable to lung damage from

the air shock wave. Again, note that these calculations only pertain to direct air blast

effects and ignore fragments entirely.

Of course, his research was conducted after my own experiments and only confirmed my previously discovered results.

I had been sitting down with my back towards the explosion when it detonated. I had minor lacerations on my arms from flying rocks. The blast overpressure had slammed a wall of air into my back imprinting the pattern of the flak vest into my skin. But the real damage was internal. I was told later that I was lucky to escape with only one partially collapsed lung and myocardial contusion or bruised heart. Had I not been wearing the flak jacket or sitting another foot closer, the outcome could have been very different.

Of course, it was a stupid way to get injured. And thinking back, there are a number of ways I could have prevented it, starting with reading more. But like my old academy days, I

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understood the concepts even if I sometimes got the actual numbers wrong. My preferred way was to learn by doing.

As I lay in bed, I wondered what had gone wrong with my calculations. Earlier that same day, I had detonated a similar amount of TNT at a closer distance behind my head. In fact, it had been so close that the explosion’s flash had burned the hair on my high and tight haircut and made me worry that my eyes were going to pop out.

As I recreated the scenario, I figured it out. I was sitting in the trench below the first explosion, which was at ground level. This allowed the rapid expansion of air to dissipate evenly so that I caught only a small fraction of the blast energy.

In the second blast I had placed the charge inside the trench with me. This had the effect of canalizing the energy up out of the trench and laterally down each side. Final analysis, I would have been fine if I’d put the charge anywhere outside the trench.

But the most surprising thing was how lenient the Marine Corps was towards my mistake.

Whereas PFC Abel was sent to jail for stealing the motorcycle and probably ended up with a dishonorable discharge; I escaped with nothing worse than having to answer some questions for the investigation and being given the nickname, “Boom Boom” by the other lieutenants. There were no other repercussions. The single sentence in my fitness report that hinted at my incompetence was, “Sometimes is unable to fully anticipate all problems that may come up in training evolutions.”

When my platoon continued to go through the MCCRES evaluations without me there and the battalion received its final evaluation, the next fitness report from my Company Commander read:

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Is demonstrating considerable mastery of professional skills. Has made sound decisions in

the absence of detailed instructions. Continues to make excellent suggestions to improve

training and standard of life for Marines. Demonstrated outstanding technical expertise

during MCCRES evaluation. Has courage to support his convictions, faces problems with

confidence and assurance. Excels in communicating with individuals and small groups. Is

very concerned with the development of junior leaders. Shows every capability to handle

any increase in responsibility and grade.

The Battalion Commander concurred writing:

Has appetite for challenges and native intelligence to handle any challenge. A student of

the military art. Did exceptionally well on the MCCRES at Twentynine Palms. Has

exceptional level of loyalty from his Marines.

To be honest, I never even read my fitrep comments until I came back to Hawaii in 2013, twenty three years after I received them. My only concern at the time was my battalion commander’s last sentence, “Has exceptional level of loyalty from his Marines” and making sure

I was worthy of it. Of course, blowing yourself up in training has other repercussions other than being called “Boom Boom.”

On the one hand, the other lieutenants always considered me a little odd. I hardly drank, didn’t smoke, didn’t party, and continually worked out and read. And focused on only one thing, killing the enemy and bringing all my men home. I had time for little else.

On the other side of things, the Marines probably looked at the 3rd Platoon as a little crazy. We would be there first and leave last. We’d push everything to the limit and if we couldn’t get things the right way, we’d beg and borrow to get what we needed to make things

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work. Most of the time we did things the right way, but when we couldn’t we’d “improvise, adapt and overcome” natural challenges of the bureaucracy’s status quo.

Ominously called “drug deals,” there was nothing associated with narcotics or ill-gotten finances, but rather exchanges done off the books within the grey area of theoretically allowable and probably not outright punishable. The Marine saying was “better to beg for forgiveness than ask for approval.” In that, bending the rules was fine as long as we never physically broke anything.

And trusting my men would know how to get things done, I gave them my support. That’s not to say there weren’t things that were off limits. Drugs, women, alcohol, civilians, weapons, ammunition, … the list of things we couldn’t touch was endless. But as long as there was a logical probability that we were tackling a problem that we might face in combat; we could entertain crazy ideas if nothing else.

Everything by the Book

Things changed of course when my old company commander, Capt. Weigand, a mustang or former enlisted Marine and Naval Academy graduate moved on to take command of the

Weapons Company, where the heavy machine guns, mortars and rockets. And as a former Marine enlisted, Capt. Weigand knew the kind of training the Marines liked, wanted and needed. And despite my bending rules and pushing limits to the breaking point, he understood that the purpose was to prepare them for the uncertainties of combat.

In his place Captain Books took his place. Coming from Headquarters Company, Capt.

Books needed to have command of an infantry company to be competitive for promotion. India

Company was there to serve that purpose.

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Always busy with other things, I didn’t notice the change much the first couple weeks after Capt. Weigand left. There were still weapons to be cleaned, gear to be issued and uniforms to be inspected. We would be deploying soon, and we had to ensure the Marines joining the unit would be able to integrate themselves effectively.

After several weeks of working in his office, Capt. Books was ready to have his first meetings with the four platoon commanders. First was 1st Platoon Commander. After the 1st

Platoon Commander, Lt Pete returned, we all crowded around him like excited schoolgirls wanting gossip on what a movie star they’d met had said. What’s he like? What did he say? Any questions we should be ready to answer?

Nice guy. Everything normal. Asked how the platoon was doing. Just wants to get to know you. Then 2nd Platoon Commander, Lt Bill went to talk with the Company Commander.

When Lt Bill got back, the same questions. What’s he like? What did he say? Any questions we should be ready to answer? Like Lt Pete said, Nice guy. Everything normal. Asked how the platoon was doing. Just wants to get to know you.

But instead of calling for 3rd Platoon Commander, me; the 2nd Platoon Commander, said,

“The Captain wants to see Jim,” the Weapons Platoon Commander. Ok, not strange, I guess. But something should have clued me in what was coming.

After the Weapons Platoon Commander returned, I was summoned to meet the new company commander. After some perfunctory greetings, he began to read me the riot act. You will not…, you will adhere to…, I will not allow... , You must… and my mind stopped processing after his first couple sentences.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes sir.”

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“Dismissed.”

But to be honest, I didn’t understand. My first reaction was, “What had I done wrong?” I’d never met the new Captain before. I’d seen him once or twice at battalion functions, but I’d never said two words to him. And after I rejoined the other platoon commanders who acted as if nothing had happened, because nothing had happened to them; I sat quietly thinking about what would come next.

Now thirty years later, I think I get it. Capt. Books had been sitting in the Headquarters

Company listening to the comments of the Company Commanders comparing their different platoon commanders against each other. He didn’t know me but had certainly seen my performance after our first battalion exercise. And he knew all the administrative problems I caused when I blew myself up.

When he found out that he was going to be assigned to be India Company Commander, he probably decided he had the choice of using a hammer or his ears. He could smash the outlier to force compliance or ask me to explain myself, my rationale and outlook. And he decided to use force.

Looking back at the situation after some life experience, I think there was something else at play. It seemed that Capt. B had adopted a “zero defect mentality” and didn’t want to make a single mistake. Having come from the Headquarters Company and in charge of ensuring all the documents and forms were in order, there was no room for sending the wrong forms, misspelling words or ordering 10 times the number of boots you needed because you had misplaced a zero.

Things had to be perfect.

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Yet here in the field was Murphy’s Rules, where anything that can go wrong will go wrong triumphed. We lived in participatory action research. He was bench lab quantitative research.

As the imperfection and chaos of reality challenged Capt. Books’ sense of what should happen and should be, he and I would end up looking at the same scenario and come up with completely different assessments of the situation. Capt. Books might see an error in the textbook solution that needed to be fixed. I might see a flaw in the baseline assumptions that created an opportunity for us to exploit a loophole or try something new.

Transforming Stage of Grief

I know I didn’t see it that way at the time. My surprise and shock turned to hurt. After hurt came anger. And finally, from anger came productive focus. 3rd Platoon is going to be perfect.

There’s a saying in the military that no combat ready unit ever passed a field inspection.

The meaning being that there were deeds and there were words. The most capable units didn’t have the time to focus on getting their uniforms pressed and shoes shined.

That doesn’t mean that their weapons weren’t spotless or their bayonets dull. It just meant that what was considered as important in garrison were visible quantifiable “things” that could be counted, measured and compared. What counted in the field and the heat of battle was something different, it was a spirit and essence that cannot be seen or touched. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to play the game.

Unlike the midnight phone call with PFC Abel, I did know what this was about. As a former head restrictee, the midshipman at the Naval Academy with the highest number of demerits, I understood what could be inspected and what could not. And having been raised on a

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television diet of MASH and Hogan’s Heroes as a military brat, I had some sense of how to maneuver around martinets.

We still attempted to push the limits of our training. But we recalibrated our assessment of what would be permissible and which actions might be punishable. We shifted more attention to polishing brass and “looking good.” And I brought my subordinate leaders in to guide the strategy.

“Ok, here’s the situation. The Commander is concerned about us going off the reservation.

So, we need to toe the line. Whatever we do needs to be documented and backed up with chapter and verse as per Marine Corps Manual dot dot dot. Everything looks pretty and clean. But don’t back off the training where it’s needed. Keep pushing them to the limit.”

And they performed perfectly. Our next major evolution was going to be a “dog and pony show” at the end of the summer. As part of the Navy and Marine Corps’ recruitment drive, we’d be performing at the Seattle Seafair, where 3rd Platoon had been selected to showcase what a

Marine infantry unit looked like and did on the battlefield. On an open field, we shot blanks, screamed commands, and performed our little tricks like bounding overwatch for hundreds of onlookers.

Ugh. But the crowds ate it up. And most importantly, it made the Company Commander look good.

Walking to the batter’s box

After our performance, the Marines were allowed to get changed and go out to enjoy the sights and local wildlife. “Remember gents, Cinderella liberty. After midnight, you turn into a pumpkin. Don’t fuck it up. Buddy system. Everyone in twos. Ok. Be safe and get back on time.”

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And then like clockwork, everyone home by midnight. The lines were cast off and the ship began to pull out from Seattle harbor.

The next morning, probably somewhere off the coast of Oregon, all the Marine officers were called into the operations briefing room. The lights went down, a map was thrown onto the screen with an overhead projector. “This, gentlemen, is Kuwait. At 2 am on 2 August, Iraqi forces invaded the country of Kuwait occupying the capital with an estimated …” And the next two weeks were a blur.

First of course was making sure that the men had everything they needed. It’s counterintuitive when you’re sending people to kill and die, but the first thing we needed to check was that their health and dental records were up to date. There would be no opportunity to go to the hospital and anyone needing serious dental work would stay behind.

Next was the equipment and weapons. Were they all serviceable? Did everyone have all their gear? How soon could it be replaced and could we still deploy without it.

Then there were personal issues. Did everyone have their will done? Had they assigned a power of attorney to someone they trusted? What were they doing about spouses and girlfriends?

Car? Personal weapons? And as the USS Belleau Wood, the amphibious ship we were on, was sailing at 20 knots and would cover the 1,329 miles back to San Diego in just under two days, we had one day left to figure everything out.

While SSgt Chambers and the other platoon sergeants worked with their squad leaders and team leaders to check on all the administrative details, unassigned team leaders decided to begin holding hip pocket classes to get the men up to speed on classes they hadn’t taught yet or needed to review. Are you sure you can read that map correctly? How do you call for fire if the lieutenant

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gets hit? How to vector in an aircraft if you don’t have grid coordinates? All punctuated by,

“White, where’s White? Come here. Are your dental records up to date?”

If memory serves, we arrived at San Diego at night and then scattered to the winds. Our next formation was noon the next day, and we all had lots of things to take care of. I’d lose SSgt

Chambers that week.

After twenty plus years of “the suck” he’d decided it was time to switch. After my explosion in the desert, he asked if he could get off from duty early so he could take evening classes in nursing. While I felt sorry for anyone who didn’t eat all the food on their tray or resisted getting an IV from him, I celebrated. After everything he had done for me, the platoon and the Marine Corps, he deserved to get a break. And while it was tough timing, better to change now while things are changing than later after we arrive on station.

The squad leaders stepped up and just like they would have to if the platoon sergeant was killed, they organized themselves to fill the gap. The team was starting to work when I would ask them, “Is this done… Have you thought about that?” and the answers would all be affirmative.

The platoon was ready when the squad leaders were briefing me saying, this is what we’ve done and I was left thinking, “Hmmmm, I didn’t think about that.”

One final week of livefire and weapons maintenance at Twenty Nine Palms. And then we all got on a United Airlines flight to Saudi Arabia. Some 8,300 miles and 16 hours later, we were nearing the end of the beginning.

The only thing I remember stepping off the plane in Dhahran was the heat. As we walked down the mobile ramp it felt like we were standing behind the exhaust of the plane’s engines. I somehow kept on believing that was somehow the case, until we dragged our backpacks and duffle bags another 100 meters towards the hangars and the heat was there too.

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ARAMCO

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised that we were landing in Dhahran. The city had developed around the location of Standard Oil’s first viable oil wells in the kingdom.

Aramco, the Arab-American Oil Company, was established in 1944 and headquarters in Dhahran had established a gated community for about 10,000 expatriates, mostly Americans, to live in. As we were the hired help, our job was not to be seen or heard, but rather shuttled away to do what needed to be done.

We were moved off the runway and loaded onto buses and minivans for our trip up

Highway 5, the coastal road to Kuwait along the Persian Gulf. We were driven past Al Jubail port, where Aramco’s oil refinery filled 150,000 ton oil tankers to deliver sweet light crude, considered the most desirable by petroleum connoisseurs, to Tokyo, London, New York and beyond. Our final destination was still another 59 miles on to a place now occupied by Abu

Hadryiah Gas Station, which conveniently offers 24/7 service.

When we arrived, there was nothing. Only sand to our left, sand to our right, sand to the front and sand from behind. With no reference points but the road, we positioned ourselves to be able to observe anything coming south on Highway 5 from al Khafji city, 95 miles north on the

Saudi Arabia-Kuwait border. And that was our job, to sit at the intersection of Highway 85, which paralleled the northern Saudi Arabia-Kuwait border to the west, and Highway 5, which paralleled the Persian Gulf Coast on the east, watch, and wait.

As we learned that the forces occupying Kuwait numbered over 200,000 and we began to imagine the role of our 800 Marine battalion a bit differently. Iraq had the fourth largest military in the world with over 800,000 men under arms and a popular gendarmerie similar to the United

States National Guard number half a million. While we could maybe cause an Iraqi unit some

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annoyance if they chose to invade in force, without the channeling effect of the coastal cliffs in the Battle of Thermopylae, there would be no final stand of the Spartans.

As use of the road was the only reason to attack us, we began to call ourselves the “speed bump.” As Iraqis had modern artillery, tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters and aircraft, we’d have enough time to spot them, engage them, and delay them for an hour at most, before the enemy rolled over, around and through our dead bodies. Perversely, this is exactly the scenario most of the Marines relished. Raised on stories of jumping on hand grenades to save their teammates and heroic last stands against unwinnable odds, their sole interest was figuring out how to cause as much harm and damage to the enemy before they died. Besides, the men reasoned, with the enemy surrounding us in every direction, the enemy would be harder to miss.

At least it’s a dry heat...

But while we waited for our future based on someone else's initiative, we had our own problems to deal with. The daily temperatures in August could hit 130 deg F and we were completely exposed and without shade. And while humidity in the interior of Saudi Arabia could go down to 5%, along the coast it could increase to over 50%. Between trying to dig in, keeping watch for an imminent attack and rationing our food and water until a continuous source could be developed, I was kept awake worrying about supplying Maslow’s basic needs.

My prime concern was reducing the men’s workload and ensuring they were able to sleep, which was near impossible at night given the temperatures could still be 90 deg F at night. And then of course once we had the food and water figured out, we’d need to manage where it went next. As I remembered our Airborne Instructor telling us, “When your main parachute and reserve fail, you have the rest of your life to figure it out.” Time to utilize the Marine Corps standards of

“improvise, adapt, overcome” and FIDO (fuck it, drive on).

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The Marines were fascinated when our bus driver, in the traditional dishdasha or thwab, the full length robe men wore in Saudi Arabia, got out of the bus to defecate. Given the lack of trees or buildings and relatively flat terrain, at least one side of the bus provided a nearly unobstructed view of his process. And their assessment was that the technique was culturally inappropriate.

“Did you see that?” “No way man.” “Dude.” “Gross, no toilet paper?”

As the driver came back, everyone gave him a wide berth and decided they wouldn't be touching the steering wheel, gear shift or any other operating surfaces. But after two days in the desert, we had to figure out our own solution.

The rationing of water and MRE meals made most of the men constipated or at least condensed their feces to something between an Almond Roca and Snickers candy bar. But that was only until the medical personnel who inspected the ROWPU (reverse osmosis water purification unit) got scared about fecal coliform and overdosed our water with a chlorine level equal to pool water resulting in most of us getting diarrhea. So, without knowing how long we would be there and trying to ensure each man or fire team didn’t come up with their own solution, we set up a little slit trench with an empty MRE case above it with camouflage netting on top.

Water is Life

But what we didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that in the desert, water is life. And any source of liquid, no matter where it came from, was valued more than gold. Those lessons were first taught to us by the flies, which seemed to spontaneously show up just before first light and then disappear after sunset.

The most obvious sources for them to tap was the wet yellow mess of scrambled eggs we got for breakfast after the food system was sorted out. With dozens of flies for each Marine, a

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plate of eggs looked like it was covered by peppercorns until you waved your hand to reveal the edible yellow beneath. Then it was a dance: wave away flies, scoop a spoonful, shovel in your mouth, gulp and repeat.

Of course, the flies understood maneuver warfare and then would go for the liquid on your eyeballs while you were concentrating on your eggs. They’d crawl along the side of your face until they could use their labella to gently dab your corners of your eyelids for moisture. The most suicidal flies would just hang onto your eggs as you thrust them into your mouth, leaving you the option of spitting out your meal or adding to the protein mix.

The tipping point for that decision would come an hour later or maybe in the afternoon when you had a chance to hit the head. As you squatted over the slit trench, you’d be greeted by a swarm of flies that predictably went to your mouth and eyes for moisture. But then as you continued your daily business, you’d feel the tiny pairs of little legs crawling on your exposed nether parts trying to find that last bit of moisture down below.

By the end of the first week, most people figured out how to time their daily routine to defecate at night. It was quieter, cooler and less stressful. But there were other creatures that wanted what we were bringing to their land.

I remember the first time I finally got a break and was able to go to the bathroom at night.

Armed with some real toilet paper, I made my way to the little cardboard box and began to relax, before hearing a crunching sort of chittering below me. Slightly alarmed, I turned on my red lens flashlight to see a writhing mound of dung beetles fighting over our platoon’s combined contributions three feet below. And after assessing that they couldn’t jump and were too far below to reach me, I completed the mission and beat a hasty retreat.

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But the encounter reminded me that there was life everywhere. And that no matter how disgusting or disturbing its form, it somehow served a purpose. Which was I suppose how some people saw the Marines.

Recognizing the hired help

After we finally had gotten settled in, I was notified by higher command that we would have visitors the next day. Looking forward to meeting some of the locals, I made sure I looked as clean and presentable as was possible after sweating in the same clothes for a week in 120 degree heat. And around 10 in the morning, a white Toyota Landcruiser pulled up to our platoon’s position.

A tall distinguished Arab gentleman dressed in a dishdash stepped out. After I introduced myself, he explained that we were positioned at the intersection of several oil pipelines that paralleled the highway. His job that morning was to visit our camp, assess the situation and check that no damage was being done to reduce the safety of the pipelines.

Wanting to make small talk, I offered, “Oh, so you have to go out and check all the pipelines. You must have a tough life.” as we walked along the pipeline.

And then he stopped, turned to me and smiled in what felt like a slightly patronizing manner. “Oh no my friend,” he said, “YOU have a tough life.”

And then just as a professor might enlighten an intellectually challenged child, he explained. “No, no, I don’t have a hard life. Once I’m done here, I will get inside my car and return home to my wife, children and air conditioned house. You on the other hand are stuck here, out in the desert, far from your home and family protecting all this,” waving at the empty desert and his oil pipelines.

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I imagine in his mind, the Marines were like so many flies and dung beetles clamoring after the oil. But for those of us who went in 1990, I don’t think any of us saw it that way. None of the Marines I talked to wondered what we were doing out there in the middle of nowhere and how did that contribute to my oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic?

None of us imagined that the government of Saudi Arabia was a hereditary religious monarchy that persecuted non-Muslims, opposed gender equality, restricted free speech and considered homosexuality an executable crime or that Kuwait was not much better. Not that it mattered at this point. We were on the roller coaster ride and our job was to finish the mission and bring everyone home alive. That meant first, Maslow’s food, water, shelter and sleep.

After the first days on the ground, I went into Ranger School mode trying to cover every single contingency plan and make sure everyone was personally briefed. That continued for probably a week until our Navy Corpsman started bugging me about going to sleep. It went from

“Do you ever sleep, Sir?” to “Are you getting any sleep, Sir?” to finally a couple days later, “Sir, you really need to get some sleep.” But believing my goal was to ensure we were prepared to support our higher headquarters’ mission and ensure the men had everything they needed to succeed, I needed to make sure I covered all the gaps that opened up throughout each day.

Servant Leadership

That attitude of self-sacrifice had been programmed into me from birth, repeated in the non sibi sed patriae (not for self but for country) at the Naval Academy, and then hammered into my skull in the Marine Corps. The Marines don’t work for you, you work for them. You need to make sure they have everything they need to survive. And as an officer of Marines, you serve yourself last.

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This concept was practiced every day where platoon commanders would eat only after all their Marines had eaten. Putting the men first applied to getting new equipment, taking liberty and any other benefit that might be allocated to the unit. And the logic behind the concept was simple.

How would you know how well the system was working unless you always got the short end of the stick?

Each day we’d line up for meals from lowest ranking Marine private to highest ranking officer eating last. If the Gunnery Sergeant or “Gunny” had messed up the count, then the

Lieutenants or Captain didn’t get dessert, ate only vegetables or ended up going hungry. And that was ok. If the leaders couldn’t put up with being hungry a day or two, then they weren’t very useful as leaders.

What was more important is that the Gunny would receive feedback from someone he had to listen to, namely the company commander or platoon commander, instead of an enlisted

Marine he outranked. Providing Maslow’s physiological needs to the youngest and most junior

Marines first meant that our weakest link in the chain remained unbreakable. And as a result, the system self-corrected quickly.

The question was when do you step back and rest? Being young, in shape and focused, I could easily push past the haze. But I knew from my experiences from Ranger School, the drop off point from effectiveness to incoherency was a slippery slope. And realizing that just like physical training or any other exercise, if I wanted the men to adhere to our rest plan, I had to do the same.

Luckily for the platoon, we received SSgt Wiley had arrived to replace SSgt Chambers and we began bringing him into the fold. A cook by military specialty, he’d wanted to switch to the infantry, which was not the normal way careers evolve. More than that, SSgt Wiley was an

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avid reader of military tactics and strategy, giving me a conversation companion when times were dull. And finally, as a former mess hall sergeant, he was a natural scrounger and knew where and how the resupply system worked, so we would always be fed, and I could finally begin to get some sleep.

The Long Wait

As the weeks dragged onto months, it became apparent that we wouldn’t be heading north any time soon… at least not today. Life under an impending attack became routine. Eat, hydrate, train. Weapons maintenance in the afternoon. If we weren’t doing night training or didn’t have to pull guard duty, read, write letters, relax.

Being the platoon commander, it was unseemly to be terrified of what was to come. I don’t know that I was. But the separation between officer and enlisted realities was such that we didn’t share too intimately.

Of course, I’d ask about their family. Listen to what they were thinking. Find out what they worried about. Get a sense of how they felt about going forward. But to be honest, sometimes you didn't want to know too much as it could derail everything. Instead, like when my company mate’s father attempted suicide at the Naval Academy, our job was to provide some sense of normalcy that they could hold onto as things around them changed. Still, there were always problems.

LCPL Vame had brought his under-18 girlfriend from Nebraska out to Oceanside so they could get married. I’d done what I could to help him get her into high school so she could graduate before we were called away to the Gulf. But as the stress of separation and temptations of Southern California nibbled away at any faithfulness she might have had; I was left figuring out what to do with his meltdown when she demanded a divorce.

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As many of the Marines came from complicated backgrounds, things could go sideways quickly. And given that everyone was armed with automatic weapons and knew how to use them, mental health was a premium that could not be ignored. When SSgt Wiley came to tell me that

Brulard had taken his M203 rifle/grenade launcher and slammed it into the ground like a sledgehammer breaking the stock from the receiver group, it was time for him to go.

Without the ability to decompress by sharing with our men, most of the time we just had to bottle things up and learn to compartmentalize. The only respite the officers had was to talk to each other or wander off to be alone in the desert. For the first couple weeks, all the company lieutenants would gather up on the highest point we could find, maybe a five or ten meter high hill to watch the sunset before dinner. But that got old quickly as everyone was dealing with their own issues and wasn't going to gossip about their Marines’ problems. Even when we had actual free time where there was nothing pressing for an hour, silence was the greatest pleasure.

So how does all of this fit into existential education, climate change and next generation education? At the time, none of these experiences were connected or made coherent sense. Years after we returned home to the United States, the pieces began to fall slowly into place.

Oilfield Chess

I think at some level all of us understood the war was about oil, although it was never laid out in terms of the United States maintaining market control of petroleum resources in the Middle

East. When Iranians had thrown out the United States sponsored Shah of Iran, 10% of the world’s oil reserves and 15% of the world’s natural gas reserves were now under the control of a religiously controlled democratic government antagonistic to the United States. When Saddam

Hussein ordered Iraqi troops to invade Iran in an attempt to take over Iranian oil fields while the

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country was in a state of turmoil; primary benefit was control of more petroleum reserves, the lifeblood of the international economy. and much of this had to do with Iran, not Iraq.

The United States has controlled Iran since World War II after the Allies deposed the

Iranian leader, Reza Shah Pahlavi, and put his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the throne at the age of 22 to act as a puppet king. From 1941 until the end of the war, Iranian oil fueled Allied planes, tanks and jeeps free of charge while the country itself served as a doormat to shuttle Lend

Lease vehicles, equipment and weapons to the Soviet Union.

When the Iranians wanted to move from rule under a hereditary monarch to a parliamentary system with an elected prime minister in 1951, the Americans, British and other

Western nations saw it as a sign of political evolution. But when the newly democratized Iranian government wanted more benefits from the oil wealth to go to expanding Iranian transportation, education and health infrastructure and raise the standard of living of the average Iranian, the

Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the original name of BP) disagreed.

By convincing the United States that the Iranian Tudeh or “People’s” Party had communist sympathies and was going to turn control of Iranian oil over to the Soviets, the British government encouraged the United States to intervene. The CIA organized the overthrow of the

Tudeh Party with Americans like Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s son, and Norman

Schwarzkopf Sr. helping lead operations. The Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddeq was overthrown, and the Americans reinstated their World War II pick in 1953.

That’s not to say Iraq was not immune to the same treatment as Iran. Iraq was occupied by the Allies during World War II and ruled by a British backed monarchy in much the same way that Iran was. The oil from Iraq flowed to the Allies efforts and through Western oil companies.

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But there was little or no benefit to the Iraqi people and their access to food, potable water, sanitation facilities, better housing, schools or hospitals didn’t increase.

After World War II, the Iraqis also demanded concessions from the oil companies and pressed for more political involvement. But after seeing what happened to Iran in 1953, the nationalist pushing for governmental reform slowed. Of course, that didn’t stop everyone.

In 1958, Iraqi General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the British backed monarchy and began a move towards constitutional nationalist reform. After Qasim made a political alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), members of the Ba’ath Party attempted to assassinate him.

One of the members of the 1959 hit team was Saddam Hussein.

After the failed assassination attempt, Prime Minister Qasim accelerated his democratic reforms. Realizing that oil was the primary source of funding, he invited the top five oil exporting nations to Baghdad (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela) and established what would become known as OPEC, the Oil Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, in 1960.

While this was cause for concern by the Western countries that had maintained colonial control over oil resources through maintaining expatriates as the leaders and managers of the oil companies in the Middle East, it was Prime Minister Qasim’s plan to redistribute the lands of the

British owned Iraqi Petroleum Company to create farms and build housing for the Iraqi people, portrayed as a communist strategy of nationalizing personal property, that led to his fall.

As early as 1961, the following year, the CIA would begin planning on how to remove

Iraqi Prime Minister, as they had done with Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddeq in 1953. But in

1963, the Ba’ath Party implemented a military coup that subsequently executed Qasim and displayed his bloody body on television to disabuse any followers that he would lead a counter- revolution. For the next thirty years, there would be news articles, books and whispers of the

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United States’ support of Saddam Hussein’s rise to power. But none that were read by me or any of my men.

What in my K-12 education provided a context for understanding these facts? What were the different narrative frames that would allow me to make more self-actualizing decisions with my life? And how had my time at the Naval Academy prepared me to protect and defend the

Constitution of the United States of America by sitting here in the desert?

In many ways my upbringing had been the intellectual equivalent of “the boy in the plastic bubble” where the knowledge we were receiving was not preparing us for the conditions of the outside world. And yet it’s not as if we didn’t have the opportunity to dive into those lessons everywhere we went. Our elementary school location near Vandenberg Air Force Base, the launching pad for America’s ICBM force or ground zero, depending on which came first, provided a great opportunity to discuss everything from the physics that determined the CEP

(Circular Error Probability) of nuclear warheads reentering the atmosphere to the moral calculations of nuclear war. Our deployments to bases in Thailand, England and Japan were opportunities to teach world history and the changing role of America and the United States military in the Cold War.

The questions of sharing information, knowledge and truth was more about the dilemma faced by LtCol Oliver North and RADM John Pointdexter during the Iran-Contra trials. Who was

“Us” and who was “Them”? And within the hierarchy of command, who needed what information to execute the mission according to the tasks, conditions, and standards they were given. And if you weren’t at the appropriate rank or pay-grade, you didn’t have a “need to know.”

So, someone determined it wasn’t in the system’s best interests to tell us that the United

States, Brazil, Japan, India and EU had all supported the development of Iraq’s chemical warfare

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program during the Iran-Iraq war and had questioned the validity of Iranian claims that Saddam

Hussein’s troops were using mustard and nerve gas against them. Of course, there was a reason we were all Mission Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP) gear against a possible Iraqi chemical attack. Americans had helped Iraqis develop the capability and then watched silently as they used it on Iranians and Kurds.

Marines in the field apparently didn’t need to know that the US Ambassador to Iraq had met the Iraqi President face to face on 25 July 1990. She had listened patiently to Saddam

Hussein’s complaints that Kuwait, Iraq’s ally during the Iran-Iraq War, was stealing Iraqi oil through slant oil drilling, the “I drink your milkshake” process made famous in the movie, “There

Will Be Blood.” As the plenipotentiary representative to the President of the United States, she told him that the United States had no interest in getting involved in Arab against Arab conflicts.

One week later, 2 August 1990 Iraqi military forces crossed the border and occupied Kuwait.

Maybe someone didn’t think I or my Marines needed to know how the United States

Government’s support had built up Iraq into the military power it was or Saddam Hussein into the leader he became. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to give us the proximal causes for Iraq’s invasion of

Kuwait. Maybe there was no need to consider that Iraq’s possession of Kuwait’s oil reserves meant that 20% of the world’s oil was now under Iraqi control, as compared to Saudi Arabia and

ARAMCO’s 18%.

But what happens when the government begins deceiving its own people and pushing false information so that the general population cannot make an informed decision about the choices they are going to make? What happens when the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United

States is allowed to place his daughter in front of the Congress under the pseudonym “Nayirah”

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and lie about atrocities that Iraqis didn’t commit? Was that covered in the Honor Code? Was that part of protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States?

In many ways, my Marine LCPL Menendez, my “almost would have been a gangbanger” was more worldly and sophisticated than I. He understood the game in its stripped down simplicity and our role within it. Instead of being a tattooed dropout providing muscle to enforce turf battles over the distribution and sale of cocaine on street corners, I was a university educated lieutenant leading a platoon of highly trained Marines to enforce turf battles over distribution and sale of oil around the world.

Those realizations were still years away. Instead, for the previous list of reasons we

Marines referred to ourselves as “mushrooms,” we were kept in the dark and fed on horseshit. But to be truthful, most of us didn’t want to know about the politics, the history, the implications, the numbers. We wanted a simple mission that was based on a simple good and evil story where

“We” lived, and “They” died.

Of course, we wanted to survive and did our best to take care of each other because that was the key to survival. But that was secondary to accomplishing the mission. And I think most

Marines secretly harbored dreams of being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor after diving on a hand grenade to save their team members or fighting off a company of enemy soldiers to allow the battalion attack to succeed.

Marines thrived on the adversity and challenge and simply focused on taking care of each other because that was the best way to survive. “Improvise, adapt, overcome”, “FIDO” and even

“Hooah” were just compressed versions of “It’s not enough that you do your very best, you must do what is necessary to get the job done.” After five months in the desert with Capt. Books, I’d

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managed to erase his doubts about my commitment. While written in the hyperbole of Fitness

Reports, he seemed to approve.

BOLD. LEARNED. IMAGINATIVE: eager to improve individual/unit’s performance.

Keen leadership and unquestionable influence on Marines was recognized when platoon

redeployed on short notice from USS Belleau Wood to hostile fire situations in Persian

Gulf (Desert Shield). Fruits of sound leadership further evident as platoon during

deployment showed exceptional enthusiasm and attention to detail/orders while executing

defensive missions as well as conducting nightly security operations (patrols/perimeter

security) while simultaneously training for future operations. Hallmark quality that

permeated through platoon was his UNFAILING ZEAL. Is willing to make

difficult/unpopular decisions. Demonstrates original/independent thinking: adaptable,

versatile, has ability to perform a wide range of assignments. Seeks/accepts responsibility

for own actions. Has exceptional persuasive ability. Great potential for future growth.

But I was beginning to have my doubts about him, the Marine Corps and even our purpose in the coming war.

Eyes in the Sky

At night we’d look up at the evening sky and see what must have been common before streetlights drowned out the stars. The Milky Way was literally a bridge of speckled lights holding up the sky stretching from horizon to horizon. Sitting in the darkness of the desert watching for enemy troops sneaking up on your position, you begin to see things that you never notice in the hustle and bustle of city life.

You could feel the changes in the wind’s temperature and humidity the same way you’d feel the water temperature in the shower. Your sense of smell seemed sharper, especially where it

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came to food. And sometimes, when you listened carefully, it was as if you could hear the Earth breathing. And overhead mechanical eyes were watching.

It took a while to notice them, and I didn’t know what I was looking at the first couple times I saw them. But if you stared at the stars long enough, you'd see what had the brightness between a star and planet and drifted across the horizon slower than a comet but faster than an airplane. After asking a couple people, I found out that satellites were visible to the naked eye.

Satellites had been launched into orbit to vacuum up anything of interest to the intelligence community. The satellites had an array of different sensors and picked up everything from radio communications from enemy headquarters (Communications Intelligence or

COMINT), the electronic energy emanating from radar, navigation beacons or jammers

(Electronics Intelligence or ELINT) and pictures of enemy encampments or vehicles on the move

(Imagery Intelligence or IMINT). Other satellites were placed in orbit to provide Global

Positioning System (GPS) and still others to ensure the battlefield commanders know if the weather would support air operations or whether rain would hamper ground movements that night.

After sitting in the desert since August like a mushroom, I was fascinated to learn about the technology up in the sky keeping a constant view of the changes in our theater sometimes hour by hour and certainly day by day. Now, during one of the “Scrub and Grub” days where we’d be pulled off the line every ten days and allowed 48 hours in one of the ARAMCO trailer park camps to eat cooked food, wash our salt starched clothes and do a real weapons cleaning; I was learning what the view looking like from up on high. But as my drive-by instructor continued, my understanding of the role of the intelligence assets changed.

“Yeah. Well, that’s not really for you. You know the Scud missiles?”

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Of course, I did. Scuds were the Soviet Union’s refinement of the Nazi German V-2 rocket that had terrorized London during the blitz. The Iraqis had purchased hundreds of Scuds and used them against civilians in Iranian cities like Tehran, Esfahan and Qods during the Iran-

Iraq war.

“Well, the Iraqis have got Scuds lined up to shoot at us and the satellites are tracking where they’re at to destroy them after launch.”

While larger intercontinental ballistic missiles like the Minuteman II at Vandenberg AFB stood about 57 feet in height, 5 feet in diameter had a range of about 7,000 miles needed to be launched from fixed underground concrete structures; the shorter, slimmer, shorter ranged “Al

Hussein” Iraqi Scuds could be launched from a transporter erector launcher or TEL for short. Of course, the tradeoff in mobility was that instead of the 7,000 mile range of the Minuteman II, Iraqi

Scud only had an operational range of about 400 miles.

But this gave Iraqi Scud forces the ability to “shoot and scoot.” The TEL and launch crew could be hiding under a bridge or underground garage, drive out to an open area, launch, and then drive away to escape. And while it was possible to pick up on the radio traffic and powering up of the telemetry systems used to guide the missile, after a decade of fighting, Iraqi troops had reduced the normal 90 minute launch sequence to about half an hour.

This meant that the best time to figure out where the Scud was being launched from was after the missile had launched and exceeded at 50,000’ (15 km) altitude where the Defense

Support Program (DSP) satellites could pick up the infrared heat signature from the Scud missiles and calculate a probable launch location based on current trajectory. If there were aircraft loitering on station, it might be possible to vector them to the launch location and fire missiles or

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drop bombs on the escaping TEL vehicle and its crew. If not, chances were the Scud TEL would escape.

Of course, that was great news to hear that there were multiple DSP satellites keeping watch for the Scuds and aircrew working to destroy them after they had launched. But I was more concerned with the 1,000 lb. warhead the Al Hussein Scud carried and the potential effect that it would have on our troops.

“Oh, that? Well, sure they’re worried about notifying the troops out in the field. But that’s almost as hard as finding the Scud TELs after they’ve launched.”

Traveling at six times the speed of sound or Mach 6 (4,600 mph), the missile would still take over 7 seconds to reach an altitude where the DSP satellites could pick up its heat signature.

And while it would be a relatively easier process to reverse engineer the probable location of the

Scud TEL, it would be difficult to determine its intended target without knowing the angle of launch. While you could identify the missile azimuth in the first minute, that would mean any unit along the 400 mile flight path would be vulnerable to attack. Thus, in order to improve predictive accuracy, you would need to wait until all the fuel had been expended and then make a calculation based on the full track of the heat signature.

This meant that the Scud’s missile engines would be visible for only about 16 seconds.

The DSP satellites would be relayed to Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. After the data was analyzed by Space Command (SPACECOM), a confirmation of a Scud launch would be sent to

Central Command (CENTCOM) Headquarters in Saudi Arabia along with possible launch site and probable point of impact. CENTCOM watch officers would then direct aircraft to destroy the launcher and warn units in the impact zone of a possible chemical attack.

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The detection, collection, analysis, and dissemination process was amazingly fast considering that it only took about 5 minutes from the time of satellite detection until the information was sent and analyzed by Space Command and a final warning was sent to

CENTCOM. But as the Al Hussein Scud had a maximum flight time of around 8 minutes at full range, as Congressional Research Services (1991) estimated in their report “Military and Civilian

Satellites In Support of Allied Forces in the Persian Gulf War,” under the best conditions, troops on the ground had between 90 to 120 second to prepare. That was all contingent on “If.”

If the satellites picked up the Scud immediately. If the verification of the Scud was immediate and the projected point of impact was accurate. If the watch team at CENTCOM was on the ball and were able to simultaneously direct the Scud hunter airplanes to their targets while remembering to notify all the units in the probable area of impact. And finally, if the Scud was actually firing from 400 miles away, as Scud launch from less than 300 miles meant we’d receive the warning after missile impact.

Given our foxholes in the sand were less than 90 miles from the border, I began to do a different mental calculation when the radio alert came from company headquarters. Instead of running around like chickens with our heads cut off, clanging metal on metal and screaming “Gas,

Gas, Gas!” our platoon would do a different dance. Remove gas mask from carrier; place on head; check for proper seal and calmly go back to whatever we were doing.

Dealing with the tangible

It wasn’t that we didn’t see the threat. But with the new information, we could properly assess the threat within the context of our environment. Chances were that any notification coming from SPACECOM in Colorado was too late to help us anyway. If the Scud was inbound, it probably would have detonated by now.

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Even if the Scud was still inbound, the circular area of probability (CEP) was thought to be as wide as 1 kilometer. This meant we would have as much chance of being hit by accident as by design. And with an impact fuse, the 500 kg high explosive warhead would have to hit the ground before detonating, meaning that much of the power would be directed into the sand. And using what from what we’d learned about explosions at Twenty Nine Palms, as long as the men were inside their foxholes, they’d avoid much of the blast overpressure. Odds were, to die would just be a case of having a really, really bad day.

Of course, chemical weapons were a concern. We knew that the Iraqi’s had at least mustard gas and might use tabun and sarin nerve agents, as they had against the Iranians. But we were all in MOPP gear, thick overgarments lined with activated charcoal, and gas masks. And as long as the missile failed to make a direct hit while we were unmasked, it would probably not be fatal for all of us. Only thing I worried about was dealing with our casualties.

All the Marines were fit young men in excellent health. Chances are that they would survive dosages that might incapacitate the sick, elderly or children. But it was the dosages that incapacitated them that I worried about.

Nerve agent was designed to short circuit muscle coordination with the central nervous system. Instead of the brain being able to control muscle movements, breathing and heart rate would become irregular. In high enough doses, respiratory seizures and cardiac arrest.

Of course, we’d been given atropine and pralidoxime (2-pam) chloride as a nerve agent antidote, but the chemical officer told us that if we were hit with a large enough dose, it wouldn’t matter. The atropine and 2-pam chloride were designed to restore nerve functioning so that you could breathe and hopefully fire your weapon. But if you were out on the front lines, your chances of surviving weren’t great unless you could get back to a hospital.

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So, we lived with these uncertainties and tried to minimize stress about the things we couldn't control and focus the most on the things we could. FIDO. I suppose from an existential education perspective, these experiences were all lessons in managing stress. When in an environment where everything could kill you, you first had to decide what you could and couldn’t control. And then make decisions about what to worry about and what to ignore. But you couldn’t have the men on high alert all the time. It would wear them down and erode their fighting capability when the shooting started.

That didn’t mean ignoring the threats or pretending they weren’t there. Rather it means learning every single thing you could about the threat so that you could find a place for it within your risk and vulnerability table. That meant trying to quantify qualitative states. And as the decision wasn’t about you, but the entire platoon or tribe, you had to instill the same kind of thought processes in the men.

By December, India Company had been assigned to be the infantry unit that would “ride shotgun” with 1st Tanks. When the tanks engaged the enemy, our job was to ensure that any enemy troops on the ground weren’t able to engage them with rocket propelled grenades (RPG) or anti-tank missiles. We’d sort of be like ants to clear the ground around the armored dung beetles.

As days melted into each other we could only mark the passage of time by significant events; the day we moved from our position on the coast to some unknown location inland; the first day of the air campaign; and the day that the Iraqi’s blew the oil wells. Like dogs going out for the hunt, we could sense things were getting closer even if no one was telling us any specifics.

And for the first time, I think some of us began to feel some sympathy for the other side.

We could tell the general direction of our advance as the black smoke from the oil wells began to form to the northeast. But the sight was more impressive just around sunset when you

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could see light from burning oil wells dotting the horizon with the black clouds overhead the fire and the still blue sky above.

As the evening sky dimmed, we’d watch the green and red lights of the B-52

Stratofortress bomber pass slowly overhead. With a fighter jet escort on either side, the blinking colored lights would get smaller and then the lights would turn off as they crossed into Kuwait.

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, … I’d silently count in my head before seeing the pure white flashes of high explosive bombs hitting Iraqi positions temporarily overpowering the red light from the oil fires.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Man, that sucks to be you.” I could hear my men say. And although that probably wouldn’t qualify as sympathy for the devil, the Marines could at least put themselves in the Iraqi’s soldiers’ position and imagine what it was like to have 70,000 pounds of high explosives landing around you in less than ten seconds. If the blast didn’t kill you, rip off a limb or damage your internal organs, you’d likely be deaf for the next two days.

Getting ready to dance

The closer we got to crossing the line of departure, the more serious house cleaning became. We began to jettison everything that we wouldn’t absolutely need and try to scrounge extras of everything we thought we would. Duffle bags filled with extra gear were sent back to the rear and final “open in case of death” letters home were drafted, if not sent. The Marine Corps began cleaning out its leadership ranks as well.

Our battalion commander was an early casualty. Given a vote of no confidence by his subordinate officers, he was replaced around the beginning of the New Year. The incoming battalion commander did a clean sweep upon taking command by requesting all of the platoon

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commanders to review their company commander. Our company commander was relieved one week before we crossed into Kuwait.

While the decision was based on the input from all four platoon commanders, for years I felt personally responsible for his relief. We had not gotten along from the beginning and while I toed the line on every interaction we had, I had emotionally disconnected myself from him, much the same way I’d spiritually abandoned Midshipman Ricks at the Naval Academy. And as I kept a

CYA (cover your ass) journal on every action we took to make sure that anything we did could not be used against me or my platoon, I also started to document every decision he took that showed lack of knowledge or was tactically unsound.

When the new battalion commander visited our company for the first time, he had the executive officer (XO) gather the platoon commanders together for our review. When asked whether we thought our company commander could lead us to victory in battle, everyone looked down at their hands and then over to me. It felt like a repeat of the very first battalion exercise after action review.

Being young, cocky and self-righteous, I took the bait. “No sir.” And when the incoming battalion commander asked me why, I opened my green notebook and began listing date, time, location for every action we’d disagreed on and how it had been resolved. After about the sixth or seventh point, he stopped me saying, “We’re not into character assassination,” and asked the other platoon commanders their input.

Of course, my input would not have mattered if the other platoon commanders hadn’t concurred. But looking back, I think that I had made the protection of my Marines such a high priority that I didn’t care who I hurt in the process. We were going to accomplish our mission and

I was going to bring every single one of them home. And we did.

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There wasn’t much to be said about our little “war.” Anything that lasts 100 hours isn’t really a war, even if it involves expelling the fourth largest army from occupying its neighbor.

While Third Platoon isn’t in the history books, you can still find references to Task Force Papa

Bear, India Company 3/9 and our tank battles in the oil fields.

I’d say the Marines performed spectacularly, but that’s the prejudice of a proud parent watching their children go through their first blooding and rebound from the shock of killing for the first time. And while clear lines of sight mean that deaths in the desert are normally at maximum effective range, there were instances in our advance to Kuwait Airport that we had a chance to get up close.

Considering the costs

The T55 Main Battle Tank was pressed into the ground like a decapitated dung beetle. The tank turret that was normally fixed on the top had been blown off like a giant bottle cap and lay upside down like a soup ladle with the long gun barrel forming the handle.

I grabbed a hold of one side of the body and used the tank treads to climb onto the now inert metal. There, in the middle of the opening, where a tank hull should have been attached, was a perfectly preserved human spine curving in the blackened interior like a little white question mark.

I looked around at the horizon to make sure there were no approaching dangers and then back to wonder at my fallen adversary. The insides of the tank were completely charred. It was as if a giant hand had reached into the metal casing and broke off all the equipment mounted on the armored walls.

There should have been other body parts from the standard T55 crew of four. But there was nothing. Just a single human spine.

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I stood fixed on the spot wondering how the spine remained intact when the skull, fingers, hands, arms and legs disappeared. And how had it gotten so clean and white? It was as if someone had taken a wire brush and cleaned out all the nerves, meat and sinews to expose only the pure white bone. And why only one? Who was he? The gunner? The driver? The commander?

I tried to imagine the last things going through his mind before he died. The growling rumble of the 500 hp diesel V-12 engine pushing his 36 ton steel insect around as the grinding whine of the smaller turret engine pierced through the commands coming through the earphones,

“Move forward now. Target left at 10 o’clock. 2,500 meters…”

Did he even see what hit him? Would he have had time to move? I’d seen the entry point that had poked a 1 inch diameter hole through 5 inches of hardened turret steel. That probably meant one thing, TOW missile.

Tube launched, Optically tracked, Wire guided missile, the TOW would probably have been fired from 2 to 3 kilometers away and covered that distance in 6 to 9 seconds. With an engine burn time of only 2 seconds the TOW then silently glided in at 300 meters per second.

Without seeing the missile being fired, there would be virtually no way they could spot the rapidly approaching dot of destruction before it brought its message of destruction.

The TOW’s extended 15” probe would have touched the surface of the tank turret first, sending an electrical signal to the detonator at the back of the warhead. Designed like an open double dunce cap, the shaped charge warhead utilized all the wonders of modern physics to create a 20,000 C degree jet stream of metal plasma that spurted through the turret’s thick steel armor like it was toilet paper.

Everything inside the T55 would have burned. Of course, first to go would be the soft flesh and consciousness of the soldiers within. The explosion’s blast overpressure would

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instantaneously rip the flesh off bones and cause skulls to pop like dropped watermelons. Then would come the secondary detonation up to forty five 100 mm high explosive fragmentation and anti-tank rounds going off within the interior of an SUV. Of course, the tank turret had been blown off. I was just amazed that the shell of the tank itself was intact

And what about Mr. “My spine is all that’s left”? Did he have a family? Wife...kids? How many? Did they miss him being gone? Did they get the knock on the door and know he was already dead?

I stopped my internal line of questioning, closed my notepad and looked for other enemies on the horizon. Time to get back to the men and reposition for our next mission.

It wasn’t until excavating old notes that I’m remembering the questions never answered. I had no beef with him. I didn’t know him. He had never done anything to me, and I would pass him on the street without flinching. Why was he there? Did he believe in what he was doing?

What happened to his family? How did they manage to move on? And if he had killed me instead of us killing him, would anything in the world have changed? And if not, what was the purpose of all this destruction? Thus ended my first examination of existential education.

Coming Home

We got back to Camp Pendleton California a couple weeks later. When we had flown out to the Gulf for the fight on the government requisitioned flight, the Delta Airlines air crew had bent over backwards to give us everything we wanted, from extra meals to endless coffee. Now coming back, the aircrew of the government requisitioned flight viewed us as budget travelers they had to accommodate until they could get back to real paying customers. I thought, “How quickly the shine fades when the wolf is chased from the door.”

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After we returned, it was weapons cleaning, return all our gear, and get ready for new assignments. The new second lieutenants just graduated from Infantry Officer Course were ready to take over our platoons and our job as the old platoon commander was to move on. As we had our little change of command ceremony in the company parking lot, I remember calling the platoon to attention, saluting 2nd Lt Arthur McArthur, and then in 5 seconds, it was all gone. I have never shed tears over losing another job since.

I think the challenge of the Marine Corps is that it gives you the best job you’ll ever have first. What other organization in the world entrusts twenty three year olds with life or death responsibility to meld forty three individuals into a single fighting organism able to crawl through minefields, kill people trying to kill them, and come back home alive? The finality of our missions and immersive complexity of preparing Marines for them is something I’ve never experienced since. And while I wish I could have stayed a platoon commander for at least another couple years, like the ship’s armorer on the HMS Intrepid, the American system was one of up or out. So, I jumped ship.

Having had to find my own maps during the campaign and being underwhelmed with the utility of the intelligence we received, I decided to do a lateral move from infantry to intelligence.

If nothing else, I thought, I could prevent someone else from being a mushroom in the middle of the desert. And given the Soviet Union was in the process of collapse, the Marine Corps agreed we’d need more intel officers.

But I had a very specific goal in my request. I was now an Airborne Ranger Marine infantry officer who had been in combat. Thus, I wanted to go to a unit that would utilize all those capabilities and give me more. The only unit in the Marine Corps that fit the bill was Force

Reconnaissance, the Marine Corps equivalent to the Army’s Special Forces or the Navy’s SEALs.

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After passing the indoctrination tests and being interviewed by the Executive Officer, the

1st Reconnaissance Battalion at Camp Pendleton sent a letter to the Marine Corps monitor, requesting that I be assigned as their intelligence officer upon graduation from Marine Corps

Intelligence School. Realizing that a primary source of intelligence would be from our snipers, I worked to find both a billet and funding to go to Marine Corps Scout Sniper School before rejoining the force reconnaissance company.

Contrary to what most people think about snipers, their primary mission is not necessarily to shoot people in the head. Rather, their primary mission is to be a scout and get in close enough to an enemy position so that they can report the size, structure and disposition of the unit. Thus stealth, patience and observation skills are considered as important as being able to hit a target under adverse environmental conditions.

After working through every channel I could think of, I finally found an open billet for the

3-month long school. And after another couple weeks of administrative detective work, I was able to find a budget source that would cover my attendance. Considered one of, if not the most elite sniper school in the world, Marine Scout Sniper School was now in my sights. As long as I graduated from Marine Corps Intelligence School on time, I would be one of the few officers allowed to take the course. I started intelligence school believing that things were finally falling into place.

Oxymoron defined: Marine Corps Intelligence

With the ongoing implosion of the Soviet Union, the traditional curriculum of memorizing the composition of a motorized Soviet rifle brigade became less relevant. And with the end of the

Cold War, the United States began looking for the next threats they would encounter. The two that we began to focus on were failed or failing states and the drug wars.

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Our instructors were jaded and irreverent. I remember one of them always singing the Lee

Greenwood song we’d ended SERE school with and using the revised lyrics, “And I’m proud to be a merkin, where at least I know I’m free,” and then giggle hysterically before stopping when they saw us watching. Another would always remind us, “No man is a complete loss. At the very least they provide a good example of what not to do.” And then he’d project some picture cadged from the Darwin Awards, the annual competition for the most idiotic thing a person did to result in their own dismemberment or death. But despite their flip attitudes toward decorum, they were deadly serious about our instruction.

“What’s the mission of the Department of Defense?”

“Win wars?” “Protect the Constitution?”

Exasperated look from the instructor. “Are you really Marine Corps officers? No. The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country. That’s why it’s the Department of Defense. Ergo, every time you go to war, you are failing at your mission.”

“When was the last time we had a Department of War?” And the questions kept on coming. Instead of giving us the information to remember for the test, they mostly asked us what we thought we knew and then asked us how and what that meant. I felt like I was back with my father’s “YOUSTUPIDORWHAT?”, “Did you look it up?” and “Think!”

They rarely delivered the course in the traditional sandwich format of: First, introduction,

“This is what I’m going to teach you in the class: 1,2,3”; Second, detailed explanation of 1,2, 3; and Third, “In the following class we covered 1,2,3” and a review of key testable points. Instead of teaching us anything, they just asked us questions. Endlessly.

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And in their expansion of the education phrase “We don’t teach you what to think, but how to think” they wanted us to begin wondering “So what?”

“Your job as an intelligence officer isn’t to know information. Your job is to understand the underlying intent of the mission, how it fits into the war and long term objectives of the nation.” And to do that, we would have to have a mental framework that was able to create a logic chain that linked the entire chain of command.

Of course, we learned about the different types of intelligence. There was IMINT, the imagery intelligence gained by satellites, planes or scout snipers; SIGINT, the intelligence gained by collecting and analyzing the electronic signals emanating from ships, planes or military bases like Vandenberg; there was COMINT, the communications intelligence of listening and deciphering phone, radio or teletype communications; MASINT, the collection of electronic signals emanating from weapon systems like the Scud TEL; and of course HUMINT or human intelligence of James Bond fame. But the various intelligence systems were only one part of the five steps in the intelligence cycle of direction, collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination. And the greatest challenge started with “direction,” which meant knowing what was the right question to ask.

What is What?

That started by knowing your enemy and knowing yourself. And then knowing what you were really fighting over and what constituted victory. While never couched in terms of game theory, we were being pushed to think about why we thought the way we did, what we thought the enemy’s thinking was, why, and how that influenced what we were supposed to be doing on the battlefield. For the first time in my education, I was being told to link up the individual events that were happening in front of me with the massive political movements above me.

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Ever since joining the Naval Academy, I had been focused on leading troops in the field and becoming technically and tactically proficient in killing. But according to our teachers, tactics are for fools and a shooting war was an idiot’s response to the game of wits. “Captains think tactics, generals think logistics.”

In direct reference to why the Allies needed to take control of Iraq and Iran during World

War II and why the United States couldn’t allow Iraq to take over Kuwait, it was about ensuring that the West controlled the access to fuel the ships, planes and tanks that moved its armies around the world. And at the higher level, the game was about economies and controlling the means of production. Without the ability to provide for the food, water and shelter of a nation’s population, Maslow’s basics, the capacity to raise an army disappeared.

Don’t get caught in mirror imaging, they warned us. The United States almost started a nuclear war because it thought the leadership in the Soviet Union were using the same mental calculus the Americans were. “They’re the enemy, right? Why? What about them makes them different?”

In complete contrast to everything I’d been trained to believe up to that point, winning a war was never about muscle or skill at arms, nor about beating the enemy on the battlefield.

Rather to win a lasting peace, you need to establish a new political reality that provides a comparative marginal advantage for all. The goal was like 4th grade soccer league, everyone had to get a prize at the end. “If you don’t believe us, go get married and have an argument with your wife. Everyone has to win.”

“I hope none of you joined intelligence to be popular. Because you are going to be the chess club manager in the football team locker room.” We would be outranked by our

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commander, executive officer, and operations officer. And even though we would be on the headquarters staff, we would not be unit commanders, leading men into the fight.

“The only way you’re going to get any play with your leadership is to know better than they do what’s going on in the field, what the commander’s commander wants and a way to get the intel that supports them all.” Not only would we have to bring the different perspectives of

IMINT, COMINT, MASINT, HUMINT, SIGINT, and ELINT together to paint a compelling picture that everyone understood, but we would have to do it in a way that was able to answer the questions, “So what?” and “What next?”

For that, we needed to begin thinking of “branches and stems” or the different contingency plans that we could execute to exploit a tactical advantage or fall back on if we suffered a local setback. And each time, as we developed our intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) outlining the operational limits, environmental impacts, threats to the mission and courses of action (COA), they’d say, “Great. Ok. And then?”

Like our notification of Scud launches in the desert, the direction, collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination processes of the intelligence cycle took time. If we weren’t thinking three steps in advance, we wouldn't be able to get intelligence on a future enemy objective in time for it to be useful. And as all types of intelligence weren’t useful for every situation, we’d need to know which “-INT” was appropriate for which situation and the time lag before actionable intelligence could be produced.

OSINT

“And then?” became code for both thinking through the next linear steps that our immediate commanding officer wanted, as well as the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary rippling impacts our successes or defeats would have on adjacent units and the higher command. As we

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continued through our course, I began to appreciate the value of history in a way that I never had before.

I’d read the classic military works of Tacitus, Jomini, du Picq, Rommel, Sun Tzu, Mao

Tze-Tung, and Frederick the Great. But what the intel course was helping me remember was

Clausewitz’s dictum that “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means." That meant understanding exactly what we were fighting for and the history behind the conflict. Instead of seeing past events as a lifeless snapshot of something that happened in the past, I could begin to understand it as a single frame in an ongoing film reel.

This led to their other lessons they taught us about intelligence. The most valuable intelligence source isn’t any of those technical means. Your best source, aside from being there yourself, is open source intelligence or OSINT. They said, most of the things that are secret can actually be found in open source media if you know what you’re searching for and take the time to look.

As intelligence officers, we had been upgraded from a “Secret” clearance, which included information that could reasonably be expected to cause “serious damage to the national security” to Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS-SCI), which reasonably could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” But the intelligence school instructors encouraged us not to get too enamored with all the “secret squirrel” code word protected intel. The best way to serve our commanders and their staff was to get unclassified information that provided accurate, timely, and relevant intelligence on decisions they would have to make.

The reasons were pretty simple. First was that most of the intelligence sources were not designed to directly support you or your unit. While you might get something useful from a

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HUMINT report from inside Saddam Hussein’s inner circle or COMINT satellite over Dubai, supporting your battalion or regiment was probably not its primary mission. Second, if you were able to find some TS-SCI intel that might be useful, you would be violating security clearance protocols to pass it to a field commander who might only have a Top Secret or Secret clearance level. Third, the more TS-SCI information you held in your head, the more at risk you were if captured and more guarded you needed to be when talking to people without any security clearances.

As they explained it, much of the classification of intelligence comes from how it was collected and when the information was passed. The sensitivity was revealing the source and means of transmitting the information which would “burn” or eliminate the effectiveness of the source for future operations. An example of this might be the release of communication tapes in the downing of KAL 007 flight, that showed the full capabilities of United States COMINT collection sites located in northern Japan. The Soviets might have guessed what the United States and Japanese were able to do, but now there was conclusive proof.

Cui bono

The intel school instructors encouraged us to look at the secrets hiding in the open. Ask yourself interesting questions about ongoing and future operations and then find multiple streams of unclassified information that lead you to unusual places. Once there, backtrack and triangulate other unclassified sources. Look for historical precedences. Project future outcomes and think through “Cui bono” or “who profits.” And then build your alternative future scenarios from there.

While probably most used in determining motive in crimes, “cui bono” was useful in identifying what decisions might be made by a political leader or military commander in the field.

Understanding how a dictator might profit from war or why a military commander might benefit

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from losing a battle helped understand the probable options leaders would be considering. In that,

MICE or money, ideology, coercion, and ego, the four basic human motivators could provide a template for assessing which decisions principals might make.

But the greatest benefit of working in the OSINT or unclassified domain was that you could talk to anyone about anything anywhere. You wouldn’t be constrained to asking what level of security classification a person had and then ensuring that you were in a Sensitive

Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), secured against someone listening in. The only thing that you had to worry about is if you were too accurate and were able to piece together high level intelligence using unclassified sources.

In those cases where you had put together a working theory that was verified by open source material that you found out was Secret, you would have to cite your source, just like an academic research paper, so that there was no attribution to classified sources. “Is that the case?

Really? I understand last week Chris Chivers wrote in the New York Times that…” But mostly, we were taught that the best policy was to keep our mouths shut and thoughts to ourselves.

The intelligence collection problem that everyone recognized was that while the Cold War had created an adversary that was big, complicated, industrialized and easy to spy on, those days were over. The production of tanks needed large scale foundries, the development of new aircraft engines needed titanium ore, the production of nuclear weapons needed uranium centrifuges; all of which were national scale enterprises that relied on an infrastructure that could be spied on and bureaucracy that could be infiltrated. We had spent forty five years getting to know the enemy and building the technical SIGINT, ELINT, MASINT, COMINT systems to understand what it wanted, how it thought, and how it would probably react. Now that our enemy’s house was collapsing and its occupants leaving, we were left trying to create an intelligence collection that

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made sense of the potential threats of leaky pipes, overloaded fuse boxes, cockroaches, termites and rats.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, American intelligence officers would need to scramble to learn the cultural quirks and priorities of each newly independent state and how it might be a threat to the United States. More complex if not less worrisome was the collapse of the post-Soviet Union client state relationship of Third World countries. Without support from the

Soviet Union, Estonia, Armenia, Lithuania, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,

Turkmenistan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Romania, Poland, Hungary,

Albania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Syria, Iraq,

Yemen, Yugoslavia, and Ethiopia would all undergo significant changes in their economic, political and social structures.

And with many of the changes being made locally on the ground, the technical collection capabilities of computer run systems from comfortable air conditioned SCIFs were blunted. Post-

Cold War intelligence gathering era required having people on the ground who knew the local language, local history, local culture and local people or HUMINT. But that required an investment of time, energy, resources and personnel that the United States was not ready to make.

In 1991, the next important challenge we turned our attention to was the drug war and stopping illegal money laundering. We learned how drug cartels planted and harvested the coca before shipping it to the United States using land, sea and air routes. They explained the MICE

(money, ideology, coercion, ego) temptations for military personnel who were supposed to be stopping the flow. For example, a Coast Guard Seaman (E3) making $962.10 a month could receive $10,000 for making a phone call, let it ring three times and hang up each time the Coast

Guard cutter left the harbor. The cartel would know what it meant.

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We learned how video rental stores like Blockbuster and other service based franchises were prime pathways for drug lords to bring illegal money into the country. While the daily turnover might only be several dozen movie videos, the records could show hundreds of videos were rented or bought each day. And when we wondered why we were focusing so much on money, the answer was “cui bono.” This was the game at the highest level.

If captains thought battlefield tactics and generals worried about fuel and logistics, then politicians and businessmen were focused on economics. And apparently, so was the CIA. I don’t remember the source, but the conversation was something like, “You know who hires the most

PhD economists in the world?” “No idea. McKinsey, Deloitte?” “No, the CIA…” And then the conversation why.

It all went back to Maslow’s and the ability of a nation’s economy to provide the food, water, and shelter necessary for its people. So, while military force might be useful for protecting against outside invaders, keeping the people fed and happy was critical for retaining political power inside the country. And thus, the two part challenge was ensuring that the dollar remained the central currency that everyone traded against, and that America retained majority control over the oil reserves that every industrial nation needed to progress.

And it wasn’t only economists. The CIA hired and contracted PhDs in social science, geography, science, technology, psychology, anthropology, and any field that dealt with humans, society and life on Earth.

“Ok. So that’s why the United States needs to align itself with Saudi Arabia, despite the country being against everything Americans stand for…” I said, proud of myself for putting the pieces together.

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An eye roll from my colleague, as if to say, “Try to keep up.” They explained that the game is not about communism, capitalism, democracy, or anything else. Those labels are false flags used to move the population in the direction they need to. It’s all about the ability to stay in power and accumulate wealth. The supposed divisions of tactical, operational, strategic, were all artificial. The system was in effect a mechanism for keeping people in place; so that those who ran the system could operate outside it. Cui bono.

I started to go back and reread history with a different perspective. For the first time I sat down and read the Constitution of the United States of America, the document I had sworn to protect, and found there was nothing about the establishment of a permanent Army. In fact, any budget for military forces was not supposed to extend longer than two years, making the

Quadrennial Defense Review potentially unconstitutional in intent.

I went back and began looking at what I had been taught in my history classes growing up.

How William Randolph Hearst had used the sinking of the USS Maine battleship in Havana harbor to create the Spanish American War saying, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” And then how the Spanish American war was not fought in Spain or America, but in colonies that the United States wanted to possess: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.

I reread the story about the RMS Lusitania and learned it was nothing like the simplistic story taught in high school. The passenger ship was in fact carrying ammunition to the British, making it a legitimate target of war. I read how Wilson had been nervous about entering World

War I because a large percentage of Americans were of Germans ancestry and used the sinking to galvanize support against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary; an artful telling of the enemy’s inhuman atrocities, like Hearst using the USS Maine against the Spanish or

Bush using “Nayirah,” the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States’ daughter, against the Iraqis.

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I learned how there was no law permitting federal income tax until 1913. And then how the debts created by World War I emboldened the federal government to begin collecting them. I read how the Nye Committee found that the United States' entrance into World War I was influenced by American weapons companies who would not be paid unless their customers, the

Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia won.

And in the context of those old facts learned anew, like the invasion of the newly formed

Soviet Union by British, French, Canadian and American troops in 1918, Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket” comments made more sense (p. 23).

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority

of people. Only a small number of an “inside” group know what it is about. It is conducted

for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people

make huge fortunes.

Not some far left antifa or communist agitator, Smedley Darlington Butler had joined the

Marine Corps at the age of 16 in 1898 and served continuously for over thirty years until 1

October 1931, the beginning of new Fiscal Year (FY). During that time Butler fought in the

Spanish-American War, the Philippine insurrection, the Boxer Rebellion, the Banana Wars of

Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Mexico, and Haiti, ending his combat career with World War I.

During his career he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the United States highest award for heroism, twice. Butler would go on to establish Quantico as the Marine Corps primary officer training base and spent nearly two years as Philadelphia's Director of Public Safety closing down Prohibition speakeasies and the crime and corruption associated with them.

Butler explained that the racket of war was simple in that during peace a business might make 6%, 8% or even 12% profit. But once a war started, the company could overcharge the

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government and make 20%, 100% even 1,800% profits on items that might not even be needed in battle. Cui bono.

He went on to name names and explain how the public and the soldiers doing the fighting were the ones who paid the costs in the end. In an often quoted speech Butler (FAS, n.d.) noted:

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to.

It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies,

its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-

Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison.

Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active

military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine

Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-

General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class

muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was

a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like

all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I

left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I

obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military

service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests

in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank

boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American

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republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I

helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in

1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the

Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see

to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell

racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints.

The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three

continents.

And then how did that fit with modern history? The United States had developed the atom bomb and then dropped it on Japan in 1945. Was it wrong for other nations to attempt to have one too, knowing that America would use the power against an adversary? NATO was formed in

1949 while the Warsaw Pact had been established in 1955; which was the defensive alliance?

As I began reading the current events in the newspaper and watching the unfolding events on television, I began to understand how the past determined the future as well as how individuals who controlled the economic, political and social structures determined which reality we would embrace. In that, the desired uniformity of public ignorance was to create a micro to macro continuity where individual needs, motives, and values were replicated on a national level to produce profits through economies of scale.

It didn’t even cross my mind to blame the teachers, principals or curriculum developers for not making educational changes. How could they? Most individuals were living so deep inside the bubble that they couldn’t imagine let alone have the desire to know how the world outside

America’s borders impacted their daily lives and vice versa.

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But I remember getting incensed when I read that a bill requiring commercial pickup trucks to achieve 25 miles per gallon of gasoline had been voted down by Congress. I had just gone out and helped kill between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqis so that the oil would flow. Was there no sense of respect for the lives that oil cost?

And yet I realized except for daily hammering at intel school to ask ourselves “Why?” or as my dad would say, “Think!”; I would not have seen any connection between the Congressional bill being voted down, the Gulf War and GM stock prices. It was then that I understood what our instructors were laughing and singing about. I was a “merkin” and the Marine Corps’ mission was to be an artificial hair covering for the nation’s pudendum. I just hadn't realized it until then.

For the Good of the Service

A couple of weeks before I graduated from intel school, we got our next assignments.

Some of my classmates would be headed back to the infantry or a desk job at higher headquarters.

I was relaxed knowing that I was going back to the field as First Reconnaissance Battalion’s intelligence officer. After graduation, I’d go to Marine Corps Scout Sniper School and then report sometime in the fall to the unit.

“Nakano.”

“Yes sir.”

“Here you go. 1st MAW. Looks like they need an Air Combat Intel Officer.”

And the needs of the Marine Corps took precedence. It felt like pulling the Monopoly card, “Go Directly to Jail. Do not pass Go, Do not collect $200 dollars…” and it took me some time to process how I’d adjust.

I was an Airborne Ranger infantry officer who had just come back from a combat command. I was already cleared to go to a reconnaissance unit after scout sniper school. Once in

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the unit, I’d go to combat dive school and after getting forty or fifty static line parachute jumps, go back to HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) parachute school. What did I know about the Air

Wing? Absolutely nothing. Why would the Marine Corps send me somewhere I had no background in?

Years later I had it explained to me three different ways. The first reason was professional jealousy. I wasn’t a “Bush,” “Kerry,” or “McCain.” I was an upstart from nowhere and didn’t have a father who was an admiral, general or congressman running top cover. When the assignment officers looked at my fitreps, they’d probably ask, “How was this nobody able to go to Airborne School, Ranger School and get a slot to go to Scout Sniper School and then a billet to be the intel officer at First Force? Give that choice slot to someone else.”

The second explanation was that I was dropped because of poor officer rankings. Despite the outstanding rating I’d gotten from my company commander Capt. Books, the battalion XO who was his senior reporting officer, had written about me:

“Extremely intelligent, well read, innovative, tactically strong; at times marches to

the beat of a different drum. Rated in the middle of the pack of the first lieutenants

in the battalion. With more experience has the potential to do well in the Marine

Corps.”

Code for “serviceable, but not preferred.” And as I was requesting to go to the cutting edge of

Marine Corps special operations, getting a lukewarm rating from a senior officer would have been enough to disqualify me. I’d also been told that I was rated below my peers because I was a Naval

Academy graduate, and I had a regular commission. By ranking my ROTC peers above me, it would make them competitive against other reserve officers attempting to make a career out of the Corps.

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The last explanation, which probably made the most sense, was the simple, “Sucks to be you.” The Marine Corps didn’t need an intel officer for a recon battalion of 400 hundred Marines; but did need an Air Combat Intel officer for the 7,500 Marine unit in Okinawa. And being that I didn’t know I had the option to negotiate my assignment, I decided I’d salute smartly and give it my best shot. But I also promised myself if I didn’t love it, I would leave the Corps.

Straight Outta Compton

Of course, I didn’t have much time to sulk about not getting to go to scout sniper school.

We graduated from Marine Corps Intelligence School in Dam Neck Virginia on 17 April 1992. I drove cross country over the weekend with three other graduates being assigned to units at Camp

Pendleton. After checking in to my old unit, I began to prepare for shipping out to Okinawa to join the 1st Marine Air Wing.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the news reports Wednesday morning 29 April. But by early afternoon, there were reports of demonstrations starting in East Los Angeles after a mainly white jury acquitted four white policemen charged with using excessive force in the arrest of a black man. By the end of the day, the demonstrators began to block the streets and had beaten several drivers bloody.

Protests continued to increase the next day and demonstrators began burning buildings and looting stores. I began to pay a little more attention as reports of gun battles in Koreatown increased and word that the California National Guard was being activated. But the Posse

Comitatus Act prohibited the military from conducting surveillance, searches, seizures or pursuit of Americans in the United States meaning the Marines had no local law enforcement authority.

Friday afternoon my mother reminded me to call up my sister who was living in Los

Angeles at the time. “Hey, what’s up?”

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“How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know…” and we chit chatted about what we’d been doing the past couple months, as we didn’t often bother to call each other. Then after our perfunctory fifteen minutes to know each of us was ok, she abruptly said, “Hey, I gotta go. I think they’re burning down my

Safeway” and hung up the phone.

Five minutes later, I got the call.

“Lt Nakano.”

“Speaking.”

“You've been recalled to base.” and it was game on.

There’s enough written already about the Rodney King riots from a wide variety of perspectives. As I was the assistant intelligence officer supporting the special purpose Joint Task

Force Los Angeles, I would spend much of my time recording incidents, putting pins in maps, and trying to get a sense of what was next based on reports from the field. In a role reversal from where I’d been a year ago reporting from the field in Kuwait, I was trying to create a comprehensive battlefield picture based on the situation updates that flowed over the radios into our headquarters.

On the first day, each “black and white” squad car put two Marines in the back seat as extra support for the Compton police. Within hours the word was on the street and our police liaison told us he’d never seen the streets this quiet before. But there were reasons for the posse comitatus rules of not mixing military forces with police duties.

The next day a police officer responding to a domestic disturbance call in a contested neighborhood, radioed for backup in case things got hot. As I heard the story later that day, two additional squad cars pulled up and a total of six Marine infantrymen were standing outside the

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vehicles. When the policeman climbed up the stairs to the second floor and knocked on the door, one of the occupants fired a shotgun through the door hitting the policeman’s bullet proof vest and arm.

The policeman then shouted, “Cover me!” which to the police and Marines below meant two completely different things. The police upholstered their pistols and prepared to return fire if the occupant were to chase the policeman. The Marines, on the other hand, immediately pointed their assault rifles up at the apartment, took the weapon off “Safe” and began laying down suppressive fire through the windows above. The next minutes was filled with frenzied shouts of

“Cease fire” and later a calmer discussion about the difference between a police, “Cover me” and

Marine Corps “Cover me.”

I remember seeing the six Marines coming in after the incident and getting talked to by the task force commander. There were no recriminations or finger pointing. The Marines performed exactly like they were trained to perform, “task, condition, standard.” It was just that someone hadn’t thought through the second and third order effects of a decision.

The ride alongs stopped that day. But what was worse, having seen the destructive power of a M-16A2 in an urban environment, the command decided to retard the ability of the Marines to return fire. I remember the order being given to keep the weapons at “Condition 4” which means “weapon on safe, magazine removed, bolt forward, chamber empty, ejection port cover closed.” This would mean that in a life threatening situation, the Marine would have to open his magazine pouch, extract magazine and place it into the magazine well of his weapon. The Marine would then have to pull the charging handle back to chamber a round before shouldering the weapon, sight in on the target, remove the weapon from “safe” condition and squeeze the trigger.

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But given that no commander would issue a “Condition 4” order in the environment we were in, my memory must be flawed and the order must have been “Condition 3.” “Weapon on safe, magazine inserted, bolt forward, chamber empty, ejection port cover closed.” This still meant the Marine would still have to pull the charging handle back to chamber a round before shouldering the weapon, sight in on the target, remove the weapon from “safe” condition and squeeze the trigger.

While these distinctions probably make little difference to someone on the shooting range, the two to three seconds necessary to return fire would be the difference between life and death on the street. A relatively untrained shooter can fire all six rounds of a revolver in three seconds. And as we were getting reports of gang members driving by the Marines and flashing their weapons, delay in returning fire would result in lost lives.

It was just another example of how LCPL Gonzalez had understood the game better than

I. We were just rival gang members, and the principal distinction was we had better weapons, uniforms and discipline. We also had leadership that was willing to increase our vulnerability in order to de-escalate tension on the streets.

I wasn’t sure I would have obeyed if I was patrolling the street instead of coloring acetate and putting pins on the map. But I was pretty certain no gangbanger would have obeyed if their boss had said, “Now boys, no round in the chamber, weapon on safe and magazine in your pockets.” They were all Condition 0, “magazine inserted, round in the chamber, safety off.”

Luckily the gamble paid off and none of our Marines were killed. But I was beginning to become uncomfortable with the way other people risked our lives for other people’s gain. It was then I began to appreciate the chant some of the older experienced Marines made when another

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stupid mission was issued, “We the unwilling doing the unnecessary for the undeserving have done for so long with so little we now can do anything with nothing.”

Could we do it? Sure. Of course we can. We’re Marines. Should we do it? Ah, that’s another question.

And my respect for political “leadership” dropped another point when we were told one of the primary reasons we were on the street was that Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Police

Chief Daryl Gates disliked each other and hadn’t talked to each other in months. And while the root cause of the riots was attributed to the police antagonism of the local community, the need to bring in the Marines or National Guard might have been eliminated if the leaders could work through their differences. Instead, like the Saddam Hussein - April Glaspie failure to communicate, the military were the mop up crew for people who couldn’t figure out how to work together.

We were off the streets after a week. A couple months later, I was in Okinawa and checking into my new command. Everything was new and I was introduced to the difference in scale that infantry and pilots think in.

Different scales of conflict

As an infantry Marine, we were constrained by what we carried on our backs, the steepness of the terrain and the vegetation we had to go through. That meant a unit might travel as quickly as two miles an hour if the path was clear, flat and unopposed. But that also meant we could cover as little as a hundred yards in an hour, one football field, if the going were tough and vegetation thick. The result was we wanted very detailed large scale maps that provided us as much information as possible to plan our advance.

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While a 1:50,000 scale map where 1 centimeter equaled 500 meters was good; what most commanders would like, especially in preparing an ambush, was a 1:25,000 scale map where 1 centimeter equaled only 250 meters. And this was the mental attitude I had when entering the Air

Wing. Little did I realize that the time and distances they dealt with was multiples of what the infantry could imagine.

Traveling at 1,190 miles an hour at top speed, the Marine Corps F-18 Super Hornet could cover the 20 miles that would take a Marine infantry unit an entire day to march in 1 minute flat.

And even if they flew at a cruising speed of over miles per hour the fighter aircraft had an unrefueled combat range of about 300 miles. This would mean as an intelligence officer I would have to carry around one hundred and fifty 1:25,000 scale maps around to cover the airplane’s different ingress and egress routes.

Of course, flying above all the mountains, valleys and streams that the infantry had to slog through, the fighter pilots had no need for that level of detail. Instead, the air wing utilized

1:500,000 scale maps and depicted a different set of threats and geographic features. All of a sudden, I was looking for radar range fans, radio towers, abandoned airfields that air crews could divert to in case of emergency.

And while I had gone to six months of Marine Corps basic officer training, another three months of infantry officer training and the two months of Ranger School to prepare me to be a

Marine Corps infantry officer, I had only received the “shake and bake” basic Marine Corps

Intelligence Officers Course before being sent to the Wing. With standard “improvise, adapt, overcome” Marine confidence, I decided to follow my mother’s example of “fake it till you make it” and started swimming.

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In some ways the job of an intelligence officer was no different than the job of an infantry officer. My primary job was to first sift through masses of data to find interesting clusters of information and then process them to begin creating a product that was useful for other people.

The biggest difference was that as a platoon commander I was semi-autonomous and making decisions on what was a priority for the forty odd Marines below me. In the MAW, I would be doing collection and analysis for people who were above me and knew the business better than me.

I was an Air Combat Intelligence Officer who’d never piloted a plane in combat, let alone watched a dogfight or planned an attack on an enemy ground position. I was sitting in the

Command Headquarters where everyone had been doing this work for fifteen to twenty years.

Every day became an exercise in drinking from the firehose to catch up.

Luckily, I found our senior enlisted intelligence specialist, Gunnery Sergeant B was a

Catholic from New York who wore the medal of St. Christopher’s, patron saint of travelers, but actually was partial to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Having a good sense of humor, endless patience and willingness to teach the clueless lieutenant, Gunny B helped ensure that we answered the mail on every intelligence tasker that came from the staff or at least looked like we were working hard to find the answers.

At full capacity, our intelligence shop should have had at least six officers. When I arrived there were two, myself and the MAW Intelligence Officer or “G2.” Covering all Marine Corps air missions in the Pacific region, the Wing normally rated a Colonel in the G2 billet. But because the

Marine Corps was shorthanded, they had plugged the gap with a Lieutenant Colonel, my direct reporting senior. All of this would have been fine except that my boss liked to fly and seemed to be out of the office a good deal. The end result was that as Air Combat Officer and senior ranking

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officer for our division, I had to represent the intelligence section at the General’s staff meetings on a regular basis.

Shuffling into our morning meetings, I would join the other division heads for the

General’s Chief of Staff briefing. Going around the room in order of our staff functions, G1

Administration, G2 Intelligence, G3 Operations, G4 Logistics, G5 Future Operations , G6

Communications. As only a small percentage of Marines make it to the rank of colonel, the Chief of Staff knew most of the other division heads from previous jobs and had flown with several in the past.

“G1, what do we have…”

“Well, VMFA 242 in MAG 12 are going to have a change of command next month and is already short by 14%. We need to figure out how to …” And I would be scribbling furiously or taking mental notes on what information to find out as soon as we left the meeting.

Then the Chief of Staff would turn to me, “Lieutenant Nakano, what does the G2 have?”

“Nothing Sir” I’d squeak.

And then we’d turn to the G3, the Operations Division and priority of focus for the meeting.

“So, what’d they say?” Gunny B would ask when I’d return. And we’d review all the details of the meeting and reverse engineer what was going on in the Command.

After answering all my basic questions about what VMFA 242 did and what the normal change of command cycle was and anything else that had been discussed, the Gunny said, “You can’t just say nothing…” Having been raised in the “better to be silent and have people think you’re an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt” school of thought, I disagreed. But

Gunny persisted saying, “Look, if we don’t report something, they’re going to think we’re doing

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nothing. And once they think we’re doing nothing, they’ll wonder why we’re there at the meeting at all.”

With that logic in place, I began to see that I’d have to prepare for staff meetings the same way that I’d build my intelligence preparation of the battlefield. But instead of the size of enemy forces, location, or threat posture, I had to triangulate rank, importance and relationship with the other Wing staff. “Gunny B, what does…” became the most common opening for our conversations.

While these skills might not seem to be part of an existential education, because if you’re at the Chief of Staff meetings, you probably are well beyond meeting your Maslow’s basic needs, they might be if you were working in a dictatorship where staff who displeased the boss could be imprisoned or shot. How you maneuver as a small fish in a big pond to ensure your section gets what it needs represents the kind of education or training I wish we’d had in the Academy or even growing up. To be sure, you need to be polite, concise and deferential. But more importantly, you need to provide information that logically begs for the option that benefits the larger group as much as your team and is presented in a way where someone else gets the credit for finding the solution. I don’t claim to ever have mastered the skill, but with Gunny B as my coach and backseat driver, we did ok for our boss, the G2. And according to my last FitRep, the boss seemed to agree.

BRILLIANT. INNOVATIVE. EXCEPTIONAL. Served as the G-2 Air Combat

Intelligence Officer (LtCol’s billet). Handled all duties in an exemplary manner. STANDS

APART AS A LEADER. Devised several intelligence initiatives which significantly

increased the capability of the G-2 to support real world operations. Innovative and

aggressive. Always take the lead in any task. Intensely respected by his subordinates and

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contemporaries. Acted as the G-2 (Col billet) during Yama Sakura 93 and Ulchi Focus

Lens 92. Performed in an impressive manner. Possesses the keen ability to translate any

problem into a viable solution with minimum effort. MATURE. POLISHED. CAPABLE.

Head and shoulders above his contemporaries. Displays a level of insight and intelligence

rarely seen by someone of his grade and experience. ONE OF THE FINEST OFFICERS I

HAVE SERVED WITH. Ready for billet of increased responsibility or career level

school. PROMOTE NOW!!!

Of course, the single most important act of intelligence I’d made in my time with the Wing was to listen to Gunny B and the other subordinates in the G2.

The more I thought about the future, the clearer things became. By succeeding in a desk job, I would likely be rewarded with a bigger desk. And with that bigger desk, would likely come a bigger chair. And with a bigger desk and a bigger chair, I’d likely grow a bigger ass until it was so form fitted to the chair, I’d forgotten what the field looked like, which was my entire purpose in making a lateral move from the infantry into intelligence. My chances of getting back to scout sniper school and crawling through the brush in a ghillie suit to observe the enemy headquarters and take out an enemy commander from 400 yards away were over. Forever.

In contrast, my old infantry buddies were in Somalia shooting bad guys, protecting convoys and bringing food to the starving. They were doing real fighting for all the reasons we’d signed up to fight. While I’d done good enough for the Marine Corps, the future options weren’t good enough to stay. The Cold War was over. Old enemies were becoming business partners and it was time to become something new.

Know yourself. Know the enemy. After reading the tea leaves in the classified message traffic and open press, the next near peer competitor the United States would probably face was

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China. Knowing nothing about China, I decided that the best way to learn was total immersion. I put in my papers to leave the service and began making preparations for the next step.

Recognizing Uncle Tom

What next? Who knew? I think that having had to move every three years, repetitive stress was now a comfort and when life became too predictable, I wanted the unknown. The entire evolutionary learning experience of having to rapidly adapt to a new environment, learn the mores of the new community, and find my place within it was something that I craved like a drug.

So, while it would be nice to think that I had a well thought out plan for what next, I didn’t. I think that my mother’s “fake it till you make it” and figure out a way to have fun along the way was more a driving force than my father’s “YOUSTUPIDORWHAT?” and “Think!” Not having shared my reasons for leaving, I told them about my decision after my papers had been already put in. My father’s reaction was, “Stupid” and then passed the phone to my mother. We wouldn’t speak to each other again for another three years.

In retrospect, his logic was based on sound judgement. The military had been good to him.

Growing up a local boy in Hilo, wearing flip flops and swimming in the sugar cane sluices, he’d been sent around the world to see exotic places that he never imagined existed. He’d ridden elephants in Thailand, seen the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia, and climbed Mount Fuji in Japan while being respected in a job that both honored his contributions and provided for his family.

And growing up in World War II when being Japanese was a mark of shame, my father’s transition to being a military officer that white enlisted saluted and white base commanders consulted must have been intoxicating.

It would have been a confirmation that the immigrant’s equation of play by the rules, work longer and harder than anyone else, sacrifice more than everyone else and you’ll be rewarded for

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your efforts. And then to be honored at the end of his twenty-eight years of faithful service with a retirement of 70% current salary for life and the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of

Japan for his work to build bridges between Japan and the United States… my leaving what seemed to be the beginning of a promising career was, well, stupid.

Perhaps the biggest difference in our military experiences was that in Malcom X terms my father had been a “house negro” while I had been a “field negro.” My father sat next to the commanding officer and provided advice on what the military laws said about a particular action and potential implications for the unit. The worst that could happen on any given day was that the commander didn’t listen to my father’s advice and suffered the consequences of the military justice system.

Me? I had been a mushroom, kept in the dark and fed on horseshit. We had been sent out to the field to kill people we didn’t know let alone have a personal quarrel with. And while we knew that we would suffer, get hurt or maybe die in the process, we had a blind faith that our leaders above us had good reasons for what they did. The Marine Corps motto said so, Semper

Fidelis, “always faithful” regardless of the cost.

I imagine when he learned that I was going into intelligence and would be getting the promotion of a bigger desk and a bigger chair in a safer environment, he was probably proud of my invitation to the master’s house. I wouldn’t know as he never mentioned it. But having lived the contrast between the oil fire filled roar of the desert and the copy machine whir of an air- conditioned headquarters; I knew the gap in reality between the battle front and administrative rear. And after crossing the tightrope of life and death, it seemed an exercise in dishonesty to toe the line simply for a better spot at the pig trough.

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Stage 2: Identity Schizophrenia

As I entered the Naval Academy, I was searching for some reliable touchstone that I could hold onto after the internal circle of being Japanese American had been broken. In many ways, the time period between 19 to 27 years of age was not one clear transition from Marcia’s (1993a) foreclosure to a clear state of either diffusion or moratorium. If foreclosure is defined as commitment to the given identity and no exploration of new knowledge, capacities or experiences; then diffusion is defined as a lack of commitment and an anxiety of entering into relationships requiring personal commitments.

Figure 2

Marcia Identity Development Stage 2

Note. The figure reflects my Stage 2 development of identity schizophrenia between the High

Commitment and High Exploration of “Identity Achievement” and Low Commitment and Low

Exploration of “Identity Diffusion.” Figure adapted from Socio-Emotional Development website describing James Marcia’s ” Ego Identity Statuses.” Retrieved from https://socioemotional.weebly.com/james-marcia.html.

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My decision not to go to the Aikido home dojo after high school and quitting my Japanese studies at International Christian University (ICU) after only one year, could be seen as that transition period of rejecting the artificial identity given to me by my parents. But the decision to apply for and then enter the United States Naval Academy would definitely fall into the

“commitment” phase of identity development. Not only did I enter Annapolis knowing that it would be four years of monastic living, but that upon graduation, I would be committed to serving another five years as a military officer swearing to protect the Constitution of the United States with my life.

Looking at my decisions from the outside, someone might say that I was solidly in the

“achievement” phase of identity development, where I was committing to a role that reflected my personal needs. By deciding to attend the Naval Academy, it might look like I was taking a path I believed that matched my beliefs. But looking from the inside out, I think that would be a very generous interpretation of my actions as my attitudes and perceptions shifted from year to year, sometimes from month to month.

With the inner circle of my given identity of Japanese ancestry cracked, I defaulted to the next most familiar identity available, that of a military dependent. And had things worked out differently, I might perhaps have found a stable identity in the military that I embraced to this day.

The challenge was making the transition from military dependent, where all I needed to do was obey the rules, to military officer, where my job was to enforce the rules. But given that my identity required using threats, violence and, if necessary, killing those who didn’t obey the rules;

I began to have doubts of how my chosen identity aligned with my core values when I was threatening or killing others based on a blind trust in the knowledge, wisdom and morals of my superiors.

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This is not to say that I was tricked into some Faustian bargain. Both the Naval Academy and the United States Marine Corps were clear about their intentions. The motto inscribed over the Naval Academy’s chapel door is non sibi sed patriae or “not for self, but for the fatherland.”

And upon induction, we swore to obey the lawful orders of our superiors to uphold the

Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The four years inside

“the Yard” or the 338 acres of land that defined the Naval Academy campus were designed to be a spiritual forge, designed to reshape fat, dumb, and undisciplined civilians into serviceable fighting machines. And given the immersive environment that reinforced all the norms, values and traditions of a single perspective, I adapted to it the same way I’d adapted to each move to a new base growing up.

After graduation, my Naval Academy training was tempered and tested by attending

Ranger School, where after earning my Ranger tab, I began to feel the acceptance and pride of being accepted as an elite within the tribe. The induction into the Marine Corps buttressed my identification as part of an elite community which included the requirement of being willing to kill or die to protect the group. Semper fidelis, “Always faithful” as the Marines would always remind one another.

All these actions firmly reflected “commitment,” which for Marcia (1993b) meant either identity foreclosure or achievement. But my participation in the Gulf War and the Los Angeles riots, the actual execution of all I’d been trained for, tested that blind belief in the knowledge, wisdom and morals of my superiors. That was certainly the case when I helped get my commanding officer relieved of command a week before we crossed the line of departure from

Saudi Arabia into Kuwait. And after shifting from the infantry to intelligence, the added perspective of “why” we (the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, the United States) do

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what we do, caused me to pull back my complete commitment to executing orders I didn’t fully understand.

I imagine I must have dipped down to identity diffusion, the state where I wasn’t committed to any ideals and didn’t want to explore new opportunities. But in thinking back over that time period, I don’t think I remained in that state for long. I was committed by definition and by simply being in the military. As an officer, I had subordinates trusting their lives to me and my ability to pull them through. But there were cracks beginning to form in how many people I was willing to kill and how much of my autonomy I was willing to sacrifice in that process.

In retrospect, I think gutting it out in the military was a mixture of testing my own abilities, competing with my father, as well as trying to understand what the attraction was that made him prefer the identity of being a model military officer to being a loving father. I remember him suggesting that I request a cross-service transfer after graduation to join the Air

Force instead of the Navy or Marine Corps. I hope I didn’t say what was on my mind at the time which was that if I’d wanted to join the Air Force, I would have stayed a civilian. But it took going into the military for me to begin to understand my father’s calculus for charting his life path.

My father was coming to adulthood just as Hawaii was making the transition from territory to State. A former member of the Hawaii National Guard, he was graduating law school as fit men were being drafted to serve in Vietnam. My father’s options were to go overseas as an enlisted infantryman or take a commission as an Air Force JAG (Judge Advocate General) officer. He chose the desk.

After his initial commitment was completed, his options were to return to Hawaii as a civilian lawyer or continue in the Air Force as a military lawyer. In his mind, the choice of being

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a military JAG offered the best of many worlds, starting with job security and ending with a decent salary and respect. For the son of a Japanese immigrant cutting sugar cane on the Big

Island who had uncles who’d fought in Hawaii’s vaunted 442nd Infantry Regiment and extended family members who’d survived the atom bomb at Hiroshima, the choice would have been clear.

Arriving at the same crossroads some thirty years later, I had different perspectives and options.

I wasn’t born and raised in a house that my father and uncles had built on the outskirts of

Hilo. I hadn’t used an outhouse or walked to school in flip flops. I didn’t play in the sugar cane sluices or drive my dad to labor union meetings when I was fourteen; but my father had. I didn’t think graduating high school was an achievement. I didn’t see going to college or even law school as something amazing; but my father did.

By the time I was graduating high school, I’d lived in Thailand, England and Japan and visited half a dozen more countries on family vacations. I’d wandered through museums in

London and Paris, meditated on Buddhist monastery retreats in Japan and watched the Bolshoi

Ballet in Moscow when Russia was still the Soviet Union. Our definitions of success, frames of reference of what being Japanese or American was or what being in the military represented were completely different.

I remember looking at my father’s ribbons after I joined the military, when I could finally read the story they told. “Vietnam campaign medal,” I noted. “But you were never in Vietnam,” I stated, in a half questioning tone. “Thailand,” my dad responded. “We were supporting the operations there and given the award for our service.”

I pursed my lips and internally snorted. I would never wear a medal that I hadn’t earned.

And earning the ribbon I thought meant taking the fire and suffering from the experiences that came with it. For him, it was a more perfunctory thing that you put in your service record because

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it was prescribed.

But because I believed the identity of being a military officer and more specifically an

“Officer of Marines” meant something apart from checking the blocks on a career track, I found the inconsistencies between the intellectual ideal and the physical reality maddening when it came to war, the purpose of my intended career. And in attempting to find some common point between the two, my commitment to my identity within the military was shaken. A smarter approach would have been to adopt my father’s attitude.

Because my father’s identity as a local boy made good was fixed in his mind; the specifics of who, what, when, where, why and how the military was what it was and did what it did never seemed to bother him. And while I’m not suggesting that my father was the super patriot “village idiot” referred to in our SERE course, rather his criteria for legal and moral was simply what he could read in the law and was told by his superiors. And thus, without having to carry the weight of intellectual and moral consistency, military service was something he could do without ever impacting his self-identity and being.

On the other hand, my identity as a Japanese had been cracked, and I was looking for something else to hold onto. Seeing the imperfections of my chosen calling forced me to look elsewhere for inspiration. But I don’t want to make it seem as if all my choices were idealistic.

My life would have turned out differently had I been given the career path I’d desired.

If I had been able to go to sniper school and become the intelligence officer for the

Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance unit, I might have stayed. There absolutely was a measure of quid pro quo in my decision making. But seeing the trajectory of my future life resulting in the things I had no interest in: a safe job with a big title, a big desk, a big chair and bigger posterior to fit; I felt forced to move on. And that choice put me squarely into Marcia’s “moratorium” stage

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(1993b) of no commitment to the identity of a military officer or Marine and embrace of exploration for an identity that matched my needs and desires.

But as this is an autoethnographic paper about my journey to become an educator, we should probably touch on the role my teachers, schools and curriculum had on my identity and life choices. And despite having provided the basics of English, math, physics, chemistry, biology, history, statistics, and electrical engineering, there was little of practical value that I used to survive in the Marine Corps. In fact, most of the functional knowledge that kept me alive was absorbed through training.

Action, reaction. Task, condition, standard. Train until you get it right and then repeat, repeat, repeat until you couldn’t do it wrong.

More than that, the K-12 schooling I received was fantastic as long as I never wandered beyond the boundaries of a consumer economy surrounded by a civil society. But my schooling provided few if any intellectual mechanisms to help me come to terms with the destruction seen and killing done in the Gulf War and Los Angeles riot. Instead, like other observant, thinking participants, I had the option of compartmentalizing anomalies and getting back to “normal life”

(foreclosure), accepting that something had happened and try to make sense of what it was

(moratorium), or disbelieving former beliefs and giving up related commitments (diffusion). And at 27, I no longer felt fulfilled by the title “Officer of Marines.”

That’s not to say I didn’t benefit enormously from my time in the military. My training and experiences provided me with habits and attitudes as parental teachings to keep me alive. The

Marine Corps unofficial motto of improvise, adapt and overcome was added to my mother’s

“Fake it till you make it”; while the FIDO (Fuck It, Drive On) complemented my parents’ encouragement to “Never, never, never give up.” And I think the Marine Corps’ leadership

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principle of self-sacrifice, where leaders eat last, combined with the Ranger School realization that anything was possible as long as you were willing to die accomplishing it, taught me that the only impossible achievements in life were those things never attempted.

None of those things were taught to me in school. If anything, my intellectual mentors were probably fairy tales, biographies and literary classics, which recounted the triumph of the will against seemingly insufferable odds. And having seen how little food, water, or shelter one actually needed to survive, my understanding of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy deepened beyond what the average American civilian could ever imagine. I’d experienced the overwhelming hunger that Maslow describes during Ranger School, where taking another step or trying to dig a fight hole seems impossible because of lack of food and sleep. I’d lived in searing desert heat and learned that not only is your body an incredibly resilient machine, but that to be a leader you must help others recognize their own untapped potential. I’d faced the fire of enemy machine guns and come to realize that life is a crapshoot, that you live in the instant, and that everything you do each day is an incremental step to your culminating death.

These were not about “me” as an individual. These were realizations about myself in the

“existential education” frame of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs. But through understanding myself and the limits of my own potential, I began to see the artificial and transitory nature of what society used to classify and rank individuals. All of this began pushing me to find some universal and timeless criteria to live my life according to.

Searching for a fish pond

Still, I had no master plan. The goal was to do something that utilized all the talents I’d gained in a way that brought satisfaction, whatever that might mean. And so, my first thought was to join the Peace Corps.

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The Peace Corps’ slogan, “the toughest job you’ll ever love” appealed to my sense of challenge. I had already had what I thought was the toughest job I’d ever love, officer of Marine infantry platoon in combat. There seemed to be a symmetry between going from the Marine

Corps to the Peace Corps and I thought if there was a way to tap into that same all-encompassing sense of purpose in a way that helped others and saved lives, I was there.

Unfortunately, I discovered that the Peace Corps had a five year waiting period before accepting anyone previously involved in intelligence work. Apparently, the CIA has used the

Peace Corps as a cover for intelligence officers so many times that many host nations just assumed the Americans were agents. So, the Peace Corps was out.

I did a quick catalog of my education, experiences and skills. I thought I could be a mercenary or fight in the French Foreign Legion. There was certainly a mystique to the Legion, and I’d read the Devil’s Guard (Elford, 1972), a fictionalized account of German Wehrmacht and

SS joining after World War II and fighting in Vietnam. But I remembered how horrific my French language grades were in high school and the thought of going from a Captain in the United States

Marine Corps to a Private in the Legion was not enticing. It wasn't the demotion that was so demoralizing but the restrictions it would place on my freedom to learn, test and grow.

The last two options I came up with were fighting for truth and justice in Yugoslavia and learning Chinese to prepare to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the future. Exactly what that meant and how I would do that, I simply had no idea; but having been taught that the best way to know what is happening on the ground is to go directly to the source, I jumped. I would rely on the skills I’d learned growing up, my mother’s guidance to “fake it till you make it’ and the Marine Corps’ advice to “improvise, adapt and overcome.” I sent off my paper application to the CIA and applications to ten universities in China to study Mandarin. With two

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months of paid leave, I boarded a plane at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and deplaned at

Ramstein Air Force Base, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

Despite having lived in Thailand, England and Japan growing up, been deployed to Saudi

Arabia and Kuwait, and visited India, Korea, Mexico and Russia, I had never actually lived “off- base” on the local economy. Everything I had experienced until that point was within the protective bubble of the military. For the first time in my life, I would be graduating from the kiddie pool to the ocean.

Actually, that wasn’t true at all. After leaving Ramstein Air Force base as a “soon to be civilian,” I kept my military ID card, the Monopoly equivalent of a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, in case I needed to rush back to a United States Embassy or military base. Flash the card at the gate guard and I’d probably get immediate access to the compound or at minimum a hard second look.

And with the United States, the uncontested victor of the Cold War, and NATO being the Cold

War team in Europe, everything American was golden. Most of all the exchange rate.

Post-Soviet collapse

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition from Soviet rubles to the

Romanian leu, Hungarian forint, and Bulgarian lev, meant that the entire economy was in a state of confusion and uncertainty. In places like the former Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, where there was an active civil war or ongoing separation of civil governance, multiple currencies existed simultaneously; and locations they were accepted or rate they were exchanged at was determined by a day-by-day assessment of who winning this week and who would have more control of the central government next month. In contrast to most Americans I talked to, everyone was keenly aware of the political situation in their country and intensely focused on the impact on the price of bread and other daily consumables.

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That’s not to say the situation was one of bread lines or soup kitchens. Quite the contrary.

For the most part, food, drink and lodgings were available and cheap. But the availability and costs depended on which country you were visiting.

I remember visiting my Naval Academy classmate serving as a Marine Liaison Officer at the US Embassy in Bucharest, Romania. In 1989, the Romanians had revoked their president for life Nicolae Ceaușescu’s term of office by firing squad, along with his wife. Now, four years later, with Most Favored Nation (MFN) status confirmed by Congress, Romania was looking to replace the former Soviet Union with the United States as an economic patron and sponsor.

As an American advisor to the Romanian military, he was able to get me a room on a

Romanian military base. And being an American with dollars in an economy that was billions of dollars in debt, anything that was purchasable was. But in the case of Romania in 1993, that wasn’t a lot.

I remember walking into a former State run grocery store to see what I could find. About the size of a large 7-11 in the United States, 80% of the shelves were bare. In the center aisle was a display case filled with row after row of preserved cherries in glass jars. Cherries, cherries, cherries, cherries, cherries. As long as you craved a jar of cherries, you were set for life. But there was nothing else to eat.

Money Talks

But somehow, we ate well in the restaurants and there was always wine, sausage, fresh bread and cheese that seemed to magically be available when dollars were presented. I had no idea how much one lev, leu, or dinar should buy, but I knew how much I thought a dollar was worth. As I traveled from country to country, I began to understand the ephemeral nature of monetary value and the trust required to make fiat currency work.

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As I would go from country to country, there was always the official exchange rate as determined by the national government and the black market exchange rate, as determined by the people. Separating one lump of wrinkled colored papers for another clump of different colored paper, I began to realize that there was no intrinsic value to the paper money. I couldn’t eat it, I couldn’t drink it, I couldn’t weave it into a blanket to keep me warm at night. The only practical value it might have was as toilet paper, which would make it expensive or cheap, depending on the country I was in.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, a balanced international system had been destroyed and reborn as individual nations. But it would be more difficult for the companies and individuals that had relied on the financial system that had facilitated the transfer of goods and services to provide the Maslow essentials of food, water, shelter, health and security for the people. And while I felt sorry for the hard working blue collar workers, the people I felt sorriest for were the white collar workers who had been saving to prepare their children for a better future.

I remember stepping off the train in Prague and being approached by a very neatly dressed man in suit and tie asking me in fluent English if I needed a room. Yes, I did. And so, he took me to his house, a 15 minute walk from the train station, where he showed me to a nicely apportioned room.

It was almost thirty years ago, but my memory tells me that he was in his late thirties and worked as an architect for the government before it collapsed. After I settled in, he introduced me to his wife who was a schoolteacher and his two children, who were roughly nine and twelve years old. I had dinner with the family and for whatever reason, his son and daughter provided a post-prandial concert with the older son on the violin and the younger daughter on the piano.

I’m not musical at all but I soon learned that learning to play a violin is a task of enormous

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complexity. The difficulty comes not only because the violin has no frets but because it can take years to develop a feel for the pressure needed when drawing the bow. Thus, when you get it just a little bit wrong, which our young violinist did a lot, it can sound as if you’re twisting the tail of a lovesick cat.

Their daughter’s piano recital was a little better. Not necessarily because she was more musically inclined, but because when there were mistakes, she was still striking keys that produced notes rather than tortured yelps. And thus, as long as she took her time, her recital just sounded like someone who’d had a little too much to drink. But it made me wonder how different things might have been even five years ago in 1988, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union.

What were the husband and wife thinking as they looked at their four and seven year old children, making selections of which instruments they would play? What were the dreams that they had nurtured about their own future and the future of their children? And in their worst nightmares, did they ever imagine that they’d be moving their children into a shared room so that dad could go to the train station and find strange boarders for the night.

In 1993, twenty US dollars was worth about $35 dollars today in 2020. For me to get a meal and one night’s stay for that amount was a steal. And for the family I was paying, that amount might provide enough to cover bread, milk, eggs and vegetables for a week, especially since my payment was in hard currency. But I doubt the reality we were living was something they had ever imagined before the government collapsed.

One prime difference that was in my favor was that the US dollar was king. The

Maastricht treaty bringing the European Union into existence wouldn’t come into force until

November of 1993 and it wouldn’t be until 2002 that the “euro” was officially launched as an official currency with banknotes and coins. Until then, individuals had the choice of holding their

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savings in local currency, which might be devalued in a matter of weeks or holding it in cash in a foreign currency that wouldn’t decrease in value over time.

But that stability of the US dollar relied in part on the political stability of the United

States government. That was in turn dependent on the size of the United States economy and the ability of the government to pay its debts. And in that calculation, the ability of the military to maintain control of the world’s access to oil, the energy source that powered modern industrial economies, was key. The accumulation of paper money was a meaningless exercise unless the national government had the ability to cover its debts and the respect of other nations around the world for doing so. And I was beginning to understand why the CIA had invested so much time and effort into gaining an economist’s view of the world.

None of these ideas could have been articulated at the time. These were all nascent imaginings that challenged what I had been taught about the inherent value of money as a mark of social status in the United States. But the experiences of the people of Eastern Europe were an illustration that beyond the ability to procure food, water, shelter, and health, Maslow’s basic needs, the actual power money had to provide future security was illusionary. Money in the bank, the position in the company and military rank were social constructs held together by shared delusion that was reinforced at every stage of education and an individual’s social development in the state. Growing up in America we were often taught to compromise what we might personally believe was right or wrong because of the promise of money, power, or fame. And yet because those things were not real, decisions you made based on those potential gains exposed you for who you really were.

Rereading what I’ve written, I realize that it may not make any sense. The only way I can think to explain it better is to recount a politically incorrect joke. A beautiful girl walks into a bar

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and is approached by an unattractive man who she is completely uninterested in.

The man propositions her, “Theoretically speaking, would you sleep with me for a million dollars?” The girl shrugs her shoulders and says, “I suppose so. The man then perks up and smilingly asks, “Well, would you sleep with me for a dollar?”

Visibly upset, the girl responds, “Absolutely not. What do you think I am?” “Well,” says the man, “we established that with the first question. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Of course, this observation smacks of smug moral superiority, especially when I was carrying dollars and everyone was scrambling to make ends meet. But what was the tipping point to start selling drugs, state secrets or your body? And if you were doing it for something more than just enough food, water and shelter to stay alive, were the actions worth the potential damage to your community and yourself? These were the sort of questions that I was starting to sift through when I made it through my lessons on the street.

I remember being cheated by one money changer in Sofia. He took my money, looked for the tell-tale marks to make sure it was real and not one of the North Korean “Super K” counterfeit

$100 bills. Happy that my bill was real, he then counted out the appropriate amount of Bulgarian lev from a thick wad he had in his pocket.

Getting my confirmation that I agreed that this was an appropriate amount for the $100 dollar bill I’d just given him, he pressed the wad into my left hand and shook my right. In the time it took me to look down, he’d disappeared. As I began to peel back the bills, I saw that he’d managed to switch the 50 and 100 lev notes with 1, 2 and 5 lev notes leaving me with a handful of colorful toilet paper.

And it served me right. I was trying to get a better rate on the street and I would at the state bank. You can’t con someone who is completely straight. More than that, I learned a couple

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valuable lessons. Don’t be in a hurry to exchange money. Start with small bills until you’ve built some trust with your contact. Do the exchange indoors, unless it’s more dangerous than on the street.

Thinking that I’d figured out the process, I decided to use my newfound knowledge when

I travelled to Serbia as part of my due diligence for deciding which side I’d fight on in the ongoing collapse of the former Yugoslavia. Getting on the train, the first challenge I encountered was that the Eurail pass I’d purchased in Brussels was not honored on this route. But as this wasn’t made clear until an hour into our journey, I was left with the option of getting let off at the next station or paying the $20 fee to the conductor, so I paid.

Upon arriving at the Belgrade train station, I dutifully made my way past the crowds of street vendors to the central bank. There, I found a surprisingly empty building and was quickly invited up to the teller’s window. How could they help? A currency exchange. What currency?

Dollars. Very good, sir. Can we see the bill? Thank you. $100 dollars, yes? The official exchange rate is 112,439 dinars to the dollar giving… 11,243,900 dinars… Flutter of bills through the electric bill counter and Bob’s your uncle. For the first time in my life, I was a millionaire.

My first job was to ensure my egress route, which meant buying a train ticket out, and then getting something to eat. And it was when I approached the railroad kiosk window and discovered something was wrong with the prices. Either the bank had cheated me or the price to return to Western Europe was $50 dollars. The answer was somewhat more complicated.

In June 1993, Yugoslavia Prime Minister Radoje Kontic had decided to let the Yugoslav dinar value “float” according to supply and demand in an effort to increase hard currency (dollars, pounds, marks...) in the national bank. The result was that the street value of the dinar fell precipitously, and black market exchange managers were selling dinar at 900,000 to the dollar.

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Perversely, the State owned railroad was using the black market exchange rate to price the tickets.

I did some mental calculations and figured out that the kind train conductor who’d let me purchase a ticket from him in US dollars had overcharged me by 300% and was probably celebrating with his family tonight.

Undeterred, my Marine Corps “improvise, adapt, overcome” kicked in and I thought it might be possible to get a cash advance with my Visa card. Hiking back to the bank, I was again solicitously welcomed at the near empty bank with a genuine smile and a warm, “Welcome back!” Ushered to the next available teller, which was any of them and another genuine smile,

“How can we help you?”

After explaining my problem to the teller, she regretfully informed me that Visa was in fact, not “everywhere you want to be.” When Yugoslavia had been a single country, the decision was made to distribute the credit card centers to different cities. While the Mastercard exchange officer had been allocated to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, the Visa exchange office had been established in Zagreb, the capital of breakaway Croatia.

“If you have a Mastercard I’d be happy to make that transaction for you,” she offered sunnily. A street magician’s performance in Bulgaria, $80 dollars. A state sponsored disappearing act, $90. The lesson to “know before you go,” priceless. And without a Mastercard, I was stuck.

After purchasing my return ticket, I had just enough money to buy a hamburger of dubious meat content and an ice cold Coke. As I sat in the throng of passengers waiting to get out on the afternoon train, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I was to get out unharmed and wondered why

I had never been taught any of this in school. And of course, the answer was obvious. I wasn’t where the system wanted me to be.

The validity of the United States education system was to prepare its students to live,

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work, play and succeed within the confines of the Continental United States. The system probably didn’t know and certainly didn’t care about what was happening around the world, because it had the wealth and military force to ensure its internal conceptions of truth were not challenged by external perspectives. But I was beginning to see how the assumptions, lessons and processes weren’t valid once you stepped outside into the messiness of the real world

The biggest benefit of having hard currency in this turbulent economic environment was the vertical and horizontal flexibility it provided me. If I wanted, I could stay in youth hostels and board with families or I could check into five star hotels. I could decide to eat at a street vendor stall or dine at the best restaurant in town. And whereas in the United States, I self-selected to remain among the professional, ethnic, socio-economic group I was most familiar with, as a complete stranger to society, I had no sense of where I fit in or belonged. The result was I talked to everyone equally.

And without any reservations or agenda, the conversations often started with the personal and extended to the metaphysical. Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Why did you decide to do that? Where are you going? How will you get there?

To be asked these questions again and again by different people from all walks of life caused me to reflect on what I believed, knew and imagined. Each time I’d start a new conversation there was the traveler’s gut check of whether it was a con and then calibration on who the person was, where they came from and what level of discussion they were looking for.

But the telling and retelling of my story to different people from different backgrounds required a reconsideration of what was true each time.

The heart’s compass

Who I was, where I came from, what I was doing, and why I decided to do that was

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changing day by day? My only guide for life, besides having enough to eat and a place to sleep, is what made me happy and kept me healthy. And because there were no consequences for telling or not telling the truth, I found it easier to share myself openly in conversations on the road. This led to “Alice in Wonderland” rabbit hole adventures that started in one place and ended up in completely another.

Picking a random Greek island at Athens’ Port of Piraeus and after disembarking, discovering the ferry only comes once a week and the cheapest accommodations (free) were living on the nude beach. Acting as a “manny” for a reservations-only grey market restaurant family in a tiny Belgian village and then being entrusted by a neighbor to watch their house during summer vacation. Being invited to party at the Marine House in Budapest... And of course, my intel assessment for whether I was going to stay and fight in the ongoing war in Yugoslavia.

I remember heading to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where I knew my Visa card would work, and the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) Headquarters was located. Because

I was still technically on leave and had my military ID, I walked straight into the compound.

Reading the different job postings and notices on the board, I heard a voice behind me, “Are you a good shot?”, which is an interesting way to start a question.

Of course, I imagined that it was my sharp military bearing that gave away my former profession. Instead, he waved at the Nikon FM2 camera I had slung around my neck and said,

“We’re looking for public affairs officers” pointing to the notice. “Oh, right.” And we then had one of those conversations.

He had been sent to Croatia to help ensure that civilians in the UN Protected Areas

(UNPA) were protected against violence and the conflict zones were slowly demilitarized. But the multi-national force had little authority to use violence to stop violence. So, when the fighting

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started between the different factions of former Yugoslavian countrymen, they usually retreated to a safe location and let the parties fight things out. It’s why they were called military observers on a “peacekeeping” mission rather than military combatants on a peace making mission. These were the niceties of international conflict.

One of the hubs for meetings and discussions was the Zagreb Hotel Intercontinental.

There you could see businessmen mingling with diplomats as newspaper reporters lunched with sources. I began to understand how stories from the field were brought back to the cities and then fit to national narratives before being broadcast to the populace, “Live from Sarajevo. Today…”

I remember reading the Stars and Stripe, the military’s independent newspaper, while I was in the

Gulf wondering “Where the hell are these reporters?” And then after finishing the paper, “If the

Stars and Stripes are true, then where the hell am I?” I now knew the answer. They were all having lunch at the Intercontinental.

But this was part of the self-imposed ignorance that the American education system promoted to ensure a certain narrative prevailed and certain emotions could be stirred when certain storylines were played. Just like William Randolph Hearst’s yellow journalism, the goal at some level was formulating a black and white picture of a complex and dynamic history filled with interdependent stakeholders for Americans, who were largely ignorant of international history and other people’s cultures, to elicit a response that was good for America’s economy.

And as for strategy, my worst fears were confirmed when I bumped into an American military officer in civilian clothes at the Intercontinental. Spotting him by his khaki pants, polo shirt and regulation haircut, I chatted him up to see what the word was. After learning that I was

American and a former Marine he confided, “There is no plan. We’re going to throw a telephone in the room and see who dials first.”

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As a former intelligence officer, I was stunned to learn that there was no overarching strategy guiding United States policy with regard to the breakup of Yugoslavia. But given that the purported logic for the ethnic cleansing between the Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs originated from religious disputes between Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim believers that started when the

Ottoman Empire absorbed the region in 1463; I could understand the policy makers’ disinterest.

The thing I found most fascinating was that religion was still such a contentious issue in 1993, after nearly fifty years of atheistic communist rule. That said, if I didn’t get out of the

Intercontinental, I recognized I’d be no better than the armchair strategists I would have become if

I’d stayed in the Marines.

Luckily before I left, I bumped into the UNPROFOR officer again and was issued a UN

Press Card by his colleague. “It won’t protect you,” she said, “but if you go missing, it’ll be a starting point for searching” leaving the clarification “for your body” unsaid.

I ended up taking the midnight bus from Zagreb to Split where I arrived in the morning and was immediately stopped by some plain clothed policemen as I admired the picturesque coastline. I imagine it was the sight of an Asian man carrying a camera with a big telephoto lens that saved me. They hauled into the local police station where I thought I might have to reside for a while and then pointed at the cluster bomb container they’d recovered from a previous attack.

“Here, you want to take pictures. Take pictures of this.” they said. I was only too happy to comply. I dutifully regarded the torn aluminum casing and took multiple pictures from all different angles before politely thanking them for helping me see the real war. After presenting my newly acquired press credentials and signing the police registry, I took a cue from the town’s name and took the next bus out of town to Dubrovnik, another three hours down the road. There I discovered the real way to participate in war.

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Called the Pearl of the Adriatic, Dubrovnik is a UNESCO World Heritage site and popular tourist destination today. In 1993, Dubrovnik was still beautiful and picturesque, but largely devoid of any visitors having been shelled the year before and still under threat of attack. Locals estimated that over 350,000 artillery shells had landed on the 1200 year old city destroying 800 buildings and 3,000 residences. With the city now designated a protected area and UNPROFOR observers settled in, residents who stayed behind began picking up the pieces and putting life back into order. As I walked through the Baroque churches and stone buildings with red tiled roofs, I was struck by how its beauty was only marred by the bullet holes in the walls.

The UNPROFOR had established an office in a hotel overlooking the harbor. At a round table covered with a white tablecloth on the open patio, I was able to talk with one of the peacekeepers about the situation on the ground.

“Yes. Things have quieted down since last year. If you are looking for where the fighting is, you can go just up the road to Mostar. You can see some action there. But I wouldn’t advise it…”

The enduring insults caused by the arrival of the Ottomans in 1463 had allowed modern political leaders to reach back 500 years to justify the ethnic cleansing and gang rapes of people they would have called “countryman” only a year or two before. Mostar was only 50 miles away as the crow flew, maybe 90 miles at most by road. It would have been a two hour bus ride normally, except that all public transportation had been suspended since the atrocities started.

“Maybe you can find a taxi,” he offered.

Yes, he’d heard about the Abraham Lincoln brigade, the unit of international fighters, who were fighting for the liberation of who knows what. The problem was that there was no logistical support. You’d be out there on your own without the normal resupply of food, equipment or

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ammunition. You might be with a good group of competent fighters, but who knows what loyalties any of them have and to whom. He noted it was always nice to know who you’re fighting with and what you’re fighting for.

“Would you like another coffee?”

It was a stunning view of the old walled city and Adriatic coast.

“Thank you.”

We chatted for an hour or so until I felt like I’d overstayed my welcome. Although he assured me, at this point, there wasn’t much fighting and they didn’t have many visitors to their mission. I ended up going down near the water and finding a family renting out a room where I spent a couple more days asking questions and seeing the sights.

I began asking myself all the questions the people on the road I met asked. Who are you?

Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Why did you decide to do that? Where are you going? How will you get there?

Not my fight

I’d left the military because I was unhappy my desired advance within the Marine Corps had been blocked and I was unhappy with the path they’d planned for me. I wanted to fight because I believed it was the one thing I had been trained to do and was good at. But the more I read the news, talked to people and looked at the destruction of civil society, the less sure I was about what to do.

First, everyone was dirty and had committed atrocities. Civil wars are apparently like that.

Without the dispassion of strangers killing strangers, as we had been in Kuwait, the desire for personal revenge erases any decorum associated with the rules of war and laws of armed conflict.

And yet delightful as the UNPROFOR conditions were, I couldn’t see myself sitting on the patio

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drinking fresh ground arabica beans served from a French press when I knew that I was armed and might do some good for the women and children being raped and beaten just a short drive up the road. That said, who knew which side the American military would eventually support, and I didn’t feel like being on the bottom of a B-52 airstrike. As with most things associated with combat, it’s always better to give than to receive.

While the shops and restaurants were mostly shuttered, my host family was able to find fresh bread, dried sausage, ripe cheese and red wine, which became my recurring menu for the time I remained. I had no idea what I was supposed to do next, but I decided that I wasn’t going to fight in a cause I didn’t understand for objectives that weren’t completely clear. I’d already done that once for America, which was the whole reason I ended up here. After a couple of days reviewing all I’d learned and reconsidering what I thought I knew, I said my goodbyes to the family and slipped back across the borders to where my Eurail pass was valid.

When I returned to Belgium, where I’d been allowed to set up camp, there were choices to be made. I had been accepted to three universities to study Mandarin starting in the Fall. I also had a note from my parents that a packet from the CIA had arrived to begin the admission process.

I lay out all the material on the table and tried to predict the impacts and consequences three steps out. Know yourself, know the enemy. What option had the greatest opportunity for growth? What if… but then what? Having been thrown aside the American roadmap to success, I was wandering in the wilderness trying to find a compass. Who was my community? What was most important? And every time I’d meet a new stranger, the same questions. Who are you?

Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Why did you decide to do that? Where are you going? How will you get there?

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邯郸学步 “Learning to walk beautifully”

I decided to go to China. And the three years I’d spend at Fudan University would be a daily exercise in humility. I suppose I’d gotten spoiled having always been able to pick up information quickly and digest it to produce an actionable outcome. I’d arrived in Shanghai via train having taught myself to say hello, excuse me and thank you along the way. And for some reason, I expected to be able to walk away after three years at native level fluency. I mean, seriously, how hard can it be?

Studying Mandarin was probably the hardest I ever studied for the least outcome possible in my life. To make all my excuses first, one of the biggest differences that Mandarin has over most Romance or Germanic languages is that it is tonal. This means that while you can say a horse as HORse, horSE or HORSE in English, people can typically make out you’re speaking about an equine quadruped used as a means of transportation before the motor vehicle. Get the

Chinese tones of horse “ma” 3rd tone (马), you could also be saying mother (妈) 1st tone, hemp (

麻) 2nd tone, curse (骂) 4th tone or “?”, question mark (妈) neutral tone, as every word in

Chinese is a homophone.

Unlike languages like Japanese, which is spoken in compact monophthongs and sounds more like playing a piano: ka, ki, ku, ke, ko; Chinese was more like playing the violin where every note had to be calibrated against the next. Having lost a bit of hearing in my self-inflicted demolition accident, I had difficulty hearing the tones at the beginning. Combined with my difficulty making sounds I’d never heard before, I imagined I was now the one who now sounded like a lovesick cat.

And while recent research has documented that it is possible for foreigners to gain near practical fluency after starting as late as 18 years of age, the article noted that it would require

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eight to ten years of language study. But the other thing I didn’t know before I started was how different the dialects were in each province. What I was beginning to understand was that the big tent that Americans covered everything in under a single moniker of “China” was a bustling mega-mall of languages with voices of all sounds making the country work.

There were at least seven different Sinitic language groups as distinct from one another as

English to Danish and Italian to Spanish. Moreover, “China” encompassed at 56 different officially recognized ethnicities that spoke over 200 different languages that were not related in sound, grammar or syntax to “Modern Standard Chinese” or 普通话. With a population of 1.4 billion Chinese compared to the European Union’s 446 million or the United States 328 million, the communication complexities seemed staggering.

I found out later that I had come to Shanghai, the economic capital of the country, the same way New York was the economic engine of the United States. But “Modern Standard

Chinese” was based on the Beijing pronunciation, the dialect of the political capital. So, while I would hear my teacher say, “Wor Shih Shanghai Ren” in class, meaning “I am Shanghainese, I would only hear “nong se sangheh nin” on the street. It was the equivalent of being taught television English in class and then stepping out onto the backstreets of New Orleans for everything else.

The last challenge I had to overcome in communicating was that all my teachers were female and usually spoke in a higher pitch than a male teacher might. As I was trying to mimic their sounds exactly, I spent the first two years speaking one octave higher than my normal speaking voice. So, I am pretty sure I really did sound like that young boy learning the violin.

But through that painful process, I learned something about communication that I hadn’t known before. People see the world in a way that is familiar to them and don’t change their beliefs even

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when faced with evidence to the contrary.

The China Miracle

When classes were over, I’d go with my classmates to explore downtown Shanghai. In

1993, the city was an amazing mix of old and new with mostly old colonial era buildings being torn down to make way for modern skyscrapers. The rate of change was so fast that if you didn’t take the 30 minute bus ride from Fudan University to the Bund or Waitan, the Wall Street of the city, at least once a month, you were likely to turn down an alley and find that your favorite noodle shop had disappeared. Wait two months and you’d find bamboo scaffolding surrounding a concrete and rebar frame. After six to nine months, you would see the new building slowly coming into being. As such, foreigners and, more accurately, foreign capital were warmly welcomed, but some locals also had difficulty comprehending the changes.

In 1993, there were probably three different groups of Chinese language students. The first and largest group was composed of Japanese students who understood that they would need to be able to work with or compete against Chinese businesses in the future. The second group of students were the Europeans, who were still primarily interested in studying Chinese literature, history and culture. The last and smallest group of students was Chinese-Americans who were trying to renew their ties with the language and culture. Unable to communicate with the Japanese nor fluent enough to keep up with the Chinese-Americans, I tended to stick with the Europeans as we went around town.

It became a predictable event where a group of us would walk into a store or restaurant and have a storekeeper or waiter ask us what we wanted. Seeing me as the interpreter for the group, they would direct the questions to me. Alongside me might be a blond haired, blue eyed girl who’d gotten her undergraduate degree in Mandarin responding back in perfect 普通话. The

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shopkeeper would look at her, blink, register what she had said, before turning back to me to respond.

The first couple times this happened, my classmates were incensed at their treatment. “It’s like I’m not even there!” they’d fume. But it was more than simple prejudice. It was an unimagining ignorance that couldn’t comprehend that a female white devil could understand and speak Chinese, but the Asian looking dude could not. And flipping that unimagining ignorance on my own educational upbringing, I was beginning to understand how much most Americans misunderstood the world around them.

Did Americans know that the United States had profited from the Opium Wars when

England, the United States and other Western nations used drugs instead of hard currency to purchase Chinese goods? Were they aware that the United States had supported the Nationalist

Government during World War II against the Chinese Communists who were now in power? Did

Americans care that American CEO’s built factories in China that for companies like (AmCham

China, n.d.): A&T, Acer, Alcoa, Amway, Apple, Avo, Black & Decker, Boeing, Bose, Bostitch,

Briggs & Stratton, Cadillac, Campbell’s Soup, Caterpillar, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, ConAgra,

Coleman, Compaq, Craftsman Tools, Crayola, Dell, Duracell, Frigidaire, Frito Lay, General

Motors, Gerber, Goodyear, Hoover, Honeywell, Huggies, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, KFC, Kodak,

LL Bean, Logitech, Levi-Strauss, Lexmark, Mattel, Merck, Motorola, Nike, Revlon, Smithfield,

Stanley Tools, Starbucks, Sylvania, US Stamp and Sign, ViewSonic, Western Digital,

Westinghouse, Xerox, and the eight hundred other companies who are members of the American

Chamber of Commerce in China? I doubted it.

The reason was that there was a certain narrative about American superiority that was played and replayed to the general public until they couldn’t see that things were changing in

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front of them. In reality, the United States Government wasn’t threatened that China was a communist nation. That was part of the racket, as Smedley Butler described, something that a small group of people know and portray as something else to the general population.

I’d walked in shops and met street vendors who could instantaneously price their wares according to what they thought the market could bear. Not only was there a foreigner price and a

Chinese price; there was a foreigner businessman price, a foreigner tourist price, a foreigner student price. The Chinese weren’t communist, they were hyper-capitalist and they worked harder for less rewards than I’d seen any American work in their life. And given the history everyone had recently survived; it became obvious why.

I remember studying in my favorite noodle shop just outside the international student dorms and enjoying the benefits of the shopkeepers' 8-year old son tutoring me. At one point, she corrected both of us and wrote the answer in cao shu (草书) or grass script, a flowing cursive writing of traditional Chinese characters. Knowing that the style was not normally taught in school, I asked where she learned it. Apparently, she hadn’t always been a noodle shop owner.

Her father had been a wealthy factory owner employing hundreds of people in the town. She and her brothers had private tutors who would review classical literature and teach them calligraphy

When the Cultural Revolution hit, her father was denounced as a bourgeoisie counter- revolutionary by his own son and was removed from his position. Managing not to be executed, her father was appointed the janitor, sweeping the floors and cleaning the toilets of the factory he once owned. Her family was moved out of their mansion, and it was turned over to the factory worker families that ended up destroying it through lack of maintenance in a couple years. She ended up marrying her husband, an illiterate peasant because he had a strong back, good sense of humor and lacked an education, which was an important credential at the time.

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When I commiserated with her loss, she waved away my condolences like so many flies.

That? Ha! That was nothing. And she went on to recount the disaster of the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962. The death toll from the famine is still unknown, but she recounted stories of people eating insects, grass and the bark off the trees in a crazed frenzy of hunger. She related that it’s not talked about, but that neighbors would exchange dead family members so that they wouldn’t have to eat their own kin.

“This? Now is easy. This is wonderful.” She said, looking around at her plyboard shack with self-installed lighting, propane stove, cracked tile floors and smiling. “I have my husband, my son and my life. What more could I want?”

I thought back to the “don’t hurt Johnny’s feelings” sensitivity of not giving students

“F’s” and “everyone is special and gets a prize” approach in soccer mom America. Here in China, no one gave a rip about your feelings. Nor was anyone particularly special. If you happened to be one in a million, there were at least 1,400 people just like you. And the other 1,399 were waking up an hour earlier than you to make sure they beat you by the end of that day.

The Chinese students at the time had a ravenous hunger to learn, know, and grow that surpassed anything I witnessed amongst my international classmates. When I’d get up to go running in the morning, I’d see them pacing back and forth in front of their classrooms memorizing their texts. When I’d come back in the evening, I’d see clusters of them under the streetlight, trying to grab a little light. But that wasn’t limited to academics.

On one trip downtown, I remember walking down the street and hearing a little kid sobbing between what sounded like ping pong balls. “Gaaah aaaaah aaaaah” kpok, “Aaaaaaaah gaaaaaaah aaaaaaaah aaaaah” kpok, kpok. As I passed the window that the sounds were crawling out of, I saw a skinny adolescent in shorts holding a ping pong paddle and bawling his eyes out in

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front of a makeshift ping pong table. On the other side stood his father in a worn white tank top and a tin bucket filled with ping pong balls smashing serves at his son to return as the boy’s mother watched nearby. They never even noticed I passed by.

Another time I was riding the bus and I saw a Chinese toddler, no more than two years old, playing in the toxic sewage that filled the street drains. Half covered in the black muck, the child had a beatific smile on his face and perfectly clear skin and balanced features. I remember thinking that if the next generation survives to adulthood, they will be indestructible. Add to that mindset of no regrets, take responsibility for your own future, and “you’re lucky to be alive” environment was the recently instituted one-child policy to reverse the population bomb that Mao had encouraged between 1949 and 1969.

While the one-child policy was largely ignored in the countryside where physical manpower was still a necessity, families in the city were only allowed one seat in school and had limited access to public services to ensure its enforcement. In 1993, thirteen years after the one child policy had been initiated in China, there was the rise of the “little emperors” or xiao huangdi

(⼩皇帝). With six adults (mother, father, maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, and paternal grandfather) all focusing their energy, hopes and dreams on the sole inheritor of their now conjoined family legacies, China was raising the toughest, most driven and self-centered generation to be unleashed upon the world.

On a predawn walk I took in the old city to get some pictures in the sunrise light, I watched as residents carried their glazed metal chamber pots out to the street, lifted up the small concrete plug to empty the contents of the night. In 1993, there was still an old man pulling the honeypot, a black metal 250 gallon water tank on wheels, who’d walk the center of the street to accept contributions of night soil. And the end result could be seen in the little vegetable gardens

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scattered around the university with watermelon sized cabbages and toilet paper mixed into the soil surrounding them.

To the honeypot man and a billion other Chinese, the eight “bigs” were an electric fan, a stereo, a color television, a refrigerator, a camera, some furniture, a washing machine, and a motorcycle. With the American market already saturated to the point that companies were building planned obsolescence into their consumer production lines, China was and still remains a human consumption gold mine. What do you sell to a billion people who are waking from a century long slumber? Anything and everything you could.

The more I studied about the history and culture of China the more my sense of time and geography expanded. We’d been proud that the Marine Corps had been established 10 November

1775, half a year before the Declaration of Independence had been signed. But when compared to the unification of China in 221 BCE, our claims of long traditions seemed pretty ridiculous to mention. Know yourself, know your enemy.

Understanding historical context

In addition to trying to learn Mandarin, I started reading the Chinese classics. Of course, I reread Sun Tzu’s Art of War, for the third or fourth time. But I was introduced to the Four

Classics, Great Learning (⼤学), Doctrine of the Mean (中庸), Analects of Confucius (论语) and

Works of Mencius (孟⼦), all part of the civil service exam from 1313 until 1905. Then Dao De

Jing (道德经), Three Kingdoms (三国演义), Journey to the West (西遊記) and Dream of the Red

Chamber ( 红楼梦). Know your enemy, know yourself

Through those readings, I was able to begin to compare and contrast enduring concepts that were valued over the centuries against the standards I had been taught as gospel growing up.

Some of the ideas in both countries were remarkably similar while others were in direct

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opposition. Instead of the “manly” Teddy Roosevelt archetype of conquering the West, charging up San Juan Hill and sending the Great White fleet around the world to show America’s power and superiority; the Chinese took a different view of greatness.

The Chinese decided that for peace and prosperity, it was more effective to take a

“womanly” or yin (阴) or retiring and empty approach. A great state they reasoned was like a loving mother that welcomed all and tamed them by her embrace. The other benefit was that instead of imposing a single opinion or approach, the female approach of listening and accepting, would allow them to see the genius in each idea, gestate it, nurture it and combine it with all the other ideas they were hearing to create a unique hybrid that is all their own.

Perhaps the greatest example of this losing to win approach was their transformation of the Mongol invaders in the 13th century. Instead of continuing to fight against an enemy that they could not defeat on the battlefield, they Sinicized their invaders by showing the material benefits of adopting Chinese administrative habits, manners, and rule. By the time the Chinese had finished, the Mongols were calling themselves the “Yuan” (元) or origin dynasty and claiming they were the successors of previous Chinese rulers. And less than a century later, the Han

Chinese had regained political control and the Mongols were back to riding ponies on the steppes.

The Chinese advice to govern a great nation is like grilling a small fish, meaning don’t keep flipping it over again and again. This concept has similarities to traditional American concepts of limited governance, as reflected in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” And in many cases, Chinese “rule” was no more than saying you were willing to accept Chinese gifts.

This “tribute system” or cefeng tizhi (册封体制) was based on the concept of establishing

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a political and social hierarchy between regional governing systems. But unlike the Greek alpha male model expressed in the Melian Dialogue as “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” the Chinese concept of international relations more closely mirrored the Native

American concept of potlatch. In this system of sharing excess capacity and wealth, recognition of an “Other’s” superiority was not based on their ability to beat you down, but by their capacity to lift you up. And there were multiple levels of benefits to this approach.

The European colonial mercantile system based on the Melian dialogue thinking required continual military force to extract goods, services and manpower from the colonies to benefit the fatherland. The Chinese system did not. This meant that while the colonized peoples came to hate their European masters and long for the day they could expel them, they only saw the Chinese during any renewal of official relations and associated those events with increased prosperity.

Moreover, when the Chinese domestic economy was struggling, the Chinese government could stop providing gifts to the tributary nations; and those governments could stop recognizing

China as a superior nation. In contrast, when the European domestic economies were struggling, the colonial mercantile system was used to push those burdens on their colonies, as was the case with the Stamp Tax imposed on the American colonies to pay for Britain's increasing debts from the Seven Years War.

Justification to rule

These concepts of female rule, grilling small fish and rule through gift giving were part of a metatheme in traditional Chinese governance called the “Mandate of Heaven” or tian ming (天

命), literally, “Heaven’s Orders.” In some ways, “Mandate of Heaven'' used the same argument

“Divine Right of Kings” of appealing to divine justification for rule, the metrics for anointing a government were axiologically different. The European “Divine Right of Kings” was based on

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the judicium dei “Judgement of God” or law of the jungle, where a king had the blessing of God when he had the military might to defeat all his enemies. In fact, the reasoning was that his victory in battle was proof that he was divinely blessed in contrast to his defeated enemies. The

Chinese had a different concept to how to determine God’s blessing to rule.

You see, the Chinese had tried the Western concept of the Divine Right of Kings from approximately 475 BCE, when the Spartans were fighting the Persians in the battle of

Thermopylae, until to 221 BCE, when the Roman Empire only consisted of the Italian peninsula and Spain’s southern coastline. For two hundred and fifty years in a period called the “Warring

States” kings, generals, rebels and consorts fought through palace intrigue, pitched battles and mass executions to gain control over their neighbors’ territory, wealth and power. And while there were great victories and defeats between armies and kings, the triumphs were always temporary while the people continued to suffer.

Then, in about 256 BCE, one of the first irrigation systems was dug in Dujiangyan (都江

堰) located in Sichuan (四川) or “Four Rivers” province in China. Over the next thirty years, it began to dawn on the rebels, generals, kings and consorts that if taxation of the people was the mechanism for accumulating the wealth necessary to build and feed an army, perhaps the best way to improve the army was to ensure the peasants had food, water, and shelter so they would be healthy enough to work. And if irrigation could multiply the agricultural production of the land, perhaps it would be useful to divert energy, resources and manpower to Maslow’s basics, rather than weapons and fighting.

The challenge was that irrigation systems were tricky and needed to be constantly monitored and repaired. If an army was to attack a neighboring country and destroy their irrigation system, it could render it useless for years even after conquering the government. The

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trick then would be to destroy each other’s militaries or seizing control of the government without damaging the nation's source of wealth, its agricultural productivity. As Sun Tzu writes in the Art of War (III Attack by Stratagem)

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and

intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to capture an entire army

whole than to destroy it…

Hence, to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; rather supreme

excellence is to win without fighting.

And all of a sudden, the story of Masamune’s sword not cutting unnecessarily and my mother’s comment about the greatest warriors being gentle began to make sense. The war was

“merely a continuation of policy by other means”, as Clausewitz had stated in On War, then the best way to win was to accomplish one’s political objectives without firing a shot.

After nearly two and a half centuries of continual fighting, longer than the establishment of the United States of America, the Warring States period ended after the first Emperor of China,

Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇) conquered all others. He absolutely was the strongest militarily, but in order to remain in power, his government would need to be able to provide for not only his native people, but all the nationalities in his newly incorporated empire. And despite its military prowess, the Qin Empire collapsed after only fourteen years in 207 BCE.

The Qin Empire was divided up into eighteen different provinces that began fighting amongst each other. Five years later, in 202 BCE, the Han Dynasty was established. And incorporating the “Mandate of Heaven” concept domestically and the “tribute system” to the barbarians externally, the Han ruled as a continuous dynasty for four hundred years, until 220 CE.

But as infighting between the wealthy, poor crop harvests and arrival of smallpox and measles

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from Europe resulted in famines and epidemic outbreaks, civil society began to break down resulting in rebellion, dynastic collapse and beginning the Three Kingdom period (三国时代).

Then a return to the “Divine Right of Kings” battles to determine who would command the others to submit. After sixty years of the political intrigues and grand battles of the Three Kingdoms period, the reunification of China under the Jin (晉) dynasty, which lasts from 280 until 420, when the Vandals and Visigoths were sacking Rome. Then a breakup into sixteen different provinces before separating into the Northern and Southern dynasties. And from Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE until the establishment of the Yuan dynasty in 1271, there would be decades of

“Divine Right of Kings” war and chaos followed by centuries of “Mandate of Heaven” stability and prosperity.

All this background to explain that the Chinese didn’t suddenly discard the “Divine Right of Kings” justification to rule for “Mandate of Heaven” overnight. It was a process of a thousand years of practical historical examples where everyone had killed someone else’s family or suffered together in famine and plague. And understanding that the means to joint survival was the collective agreement to help each other, that required the government to do the same.

By the time the Four Classics, Great Learning (⼤学), Doctrine of the Mean (中庸), Analects of

Confucius (论语) and Works of Mencius (孟⼦), had become part of the civil service exam in

1313, Chinese leaders, bureaucrats, and novelists had authored thousands of economic, social, political and philosophical texts that the Yuan Dynasty could have chosen to use as their foundational knowledge for administrative competence. But yet, over a 600 hundred year period that included three different dynasties, the importance of knowledge and education came to be considered existential to the survival of the state and the prosperity of its people.

Comparing the Western militarist Divine Right of Kings theories to the servant leader

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Mandate of Heaven approach, Mencius notes:

“There are men who say I am skillful at marshalling troops. I am skillful at conducting a

battle! - They are great criminals. If the sovereign of a state loves benevolence, he will

have no enemy in the empire.” (14.4 pg. 537)

In another portion of the book, Mencius chastises a king for failing to understand his obligations as a sovereign. After being asked by the king for instruction on governance, Mencius replies, “Is there any difference between killing a man with a stick and with a sword?” The king replied, “There is not.”

Then Mencius asks, “Is there any difference between killing a man with a sword and a style of government?” “There is not,” replied the king. (1.4 pg. 267) Then Mencius said:

“In your kitchens there is fat meat; in your stables there are fat horses. But your people

have the look of hunger, on the wilds there are those who have died of famine. This is

leading on beasts to devour men. Beasts devour one another, and men hate them for doing

so. When a prince, being the parent of his people, administers his government so as to be

chargeable with leading on beasts to devour men, where is the parental relationship to the

people?”

But Mencius didn’t believe that the solution was necessarily good governance or making people comply with rules. Rather, he believed that what was most effective was a good instruction through personal example. (13.14 pg. 517)

“Kind words do not enter so deeply into men as a reputation for kindness. Good

government does not lay hold of the people so much as good instruction. Good

government is feared by the people, while good instruction is loved by them. Good

government gets the people’s wealth, while good instruction gets their hearts.”

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Furthermore, Mencius believed that if a government was able to provide the basic human needs for its people, they could achieve their harmony with themselves and the world around them.

“All things are already complete in us. There is no greater delight than to be conscious of

sincerity on self-examination. If one acts with a vigorous effort at the law of reciprocity,

when he seeks the realization of perfect virtue, nothing can be closer than his

approximation to it.”

Thus by 300 BCE, Mencius had figured out what the American Declaration of

Independence and Maslow’s “A Theory of Human Motivation” would write 2,000 years later.

The authority to govern comes from the ability of a leader to provide the essentials for human life.

If the state nurtures the innate goodness of humans, citizens can self-actualize to become their best selves. And with a nation’s people reaching full potential, the state advances as well.

I wondered where my participation in the Gulf War had fit into this thinking. What cause did we have to worry about Iraq getting Kuwait’s oil? Wouldn’t it be better to follow through on

Nixon’s 1973 Project Independence and assure energy self-sufficiency by 2000? Could we start by ensuring the consumer pickup trucks achieved 25 mpg?

I thought about the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and what were its root causes? Why did the police feel compelled to use violence to patrol economically depressed communities? Why were blacks in America unable to self-actualize their full capacities in the United States?

At the end of the Cold War, why hadn’t we reinstituted a Soviet Union focused Marshall

Plan as we had done with the Japanese and Germans. Wasn’t that like the Chinese tribute strategy that they’d used against the barbarian tribes? And with Japan and Germany now the second and third largest economies in the world, didn’t it make sense for everyone to prosper by turning former enemies into friends?

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As with much of what I’ve written down today, I don’t think I could have articulated these concepts while I was still studying in China. I was still focused on China from a “know yourself, know your enemy” perspective. But there were cracks appearing in the Manichean dualism of

America good and everyone else bad.

Of course, this led me to go back and read the Bible and Koran to understand the origins of Abrahamic philosophy. I dug deep into the Constitution of the United States and tried to understand what I should have learned before swearing to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic. I reread Mao Zedong’s “On Guerrilla Warfare” and anything else I could get my hands on.

The deeper I went into comparing old historical classics with the modern day maneuverings, the more I realized just how vast our shared human experience was and the timelessness of universal truths. The most fascinating thing to me was how all this knowledge had been captured, distilled and transmitted by the Chinese over the ages. Beginning the second year of my study of Chinese, I finally began to appreciate the beauty of the script.

Seeing words

While the English language is made up of 104 letters if you count the different four scripts of upper case, lower case, cursive and print, written Chinese starts with 214 separate radicals. Just as English is combines each of the 26 different letters of the alphabet, each Chinese word is a combination of these different radicals. The primary difference is that while you have to know the

English word in order to recognize it when written, Chinese have pictographic and ideographic elements, meaning by looking at a single character, you are often presented with an idea or object even if you don’t know how it’s pronounced.

More fascinating was discovering the underlying values communicated with each

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character. The Chinese word for good “hao” (好) is the combination of a woman (⼥) and child (

⼦) together. Safe or “anquan” (安全) can be seen as a (女) woman with a (宀) roof over her head next to a 人 man over the king (王). Finally, the word for peace “heping” (和平) is grain (禾) and mouth (口) in balance (平).

Of course, radicals can be used just for their sound and don’t necessarily have to have a direct relationship to the word they represent. But what I found fascinating was that while I read a book in English by essentially reading it aloud to myself in my head, many Chinese would speed through translated books at two and three times as fast because they were seeing a story emerge from each character. And the benefit in using written Chinese across the seven different Chinese languages is that it was primarily the pronunciation of the character that changed rather than a completely different word itself. This meant that a single document could be read by people who might not be able to otherwise be unable to communicate intelligibly with one another.

By the end of the second year, I realized that while I’d made progress in learning the language, I had come to China with the unrealistic goal of becoming fluent in three years. In retrospect, there are things I could have done that might have brought me closer to achieving that goal. The best option would have been to go off the grid and live with a Chinese family. But as I understood it, that option was illegal in 1993 and would have led to my arrest or expulsion.

The other option would have been to focus 100% on learning the language instead of trying to pack in all the other studies I had tried to do concurrently. But if I had taken that route, I would not have learned to appreciate the history, culture and philosophy of the country. Realizing that if I wanted to stay on track for my internal timetable, I’d need to recalibrate my expectations.

Instead of fluency, I’d work to pass the Chinese language proficiency exam or Hanyu Shuiping

Kaoshi (汉语⽔平考试) at a level that would have some professional relevance and move on.

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Having come to the realization that China was not an ideological communist threat to the

United States, but rather a potential economic competitor the same way France, Germany, or the

United Kingdom were, I began to think about what the next greatest national security threat was. I heard about radical fundamentalist Islam and its impacts on global terrorism. Knowing nothing about either, I started reading more.

Language versus Communication

While my last year of school was spent mostly on the street, I discovered two other gems about life, the first being that language was irrelevant for essential communication. While I would need 3,000 Chinese characters to read a newspaper and 8,000 to be considered educated, I needed none to communicate in daily life. And while it was useful to have the vocabulary words and knowledge of grammar to put together a coherent sentence, those too were unnecessary. The trick was, I discovered, that everyone wants to help.

What I mean is that while I would not discuss Mencius or Sun Tzu without being able to say “If one acts with a vigorous effort at the law of reciprocity” or “Know yourself, know the enemy”; I could be fed, housed, clothed and conveyed without knowing any of the words associated with those activities. And in discovering the limitations of language, I became aware of our universal understanding of the essential.

“廁所在哪⼉” or “Where is the bathroom?” should have rendered a quick response with a pointed finger, “Over there” or “Sorry, there isn’t one available.” My pronunciation might not have been perfect, but I’d asked the question enough times before to know that my delivery was serviceable. And yet the three elderly gentlemen regarding me with curiosity weren’t giving any responses.

I tried with different pronunciations. Nothing. Different tones. Nothing. Different words

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for bathroom. Nothing. Finally, I crossed my legs together and pantomimed peeing in my pants and they burst out laughing.

Fingers pointed. Smiles. And I was relieved.

Just like my blonde haired blue eyed classmate, I was furious at first. They knew exactly what I had been saying all along. They just wanted to use their insider privilege to humiliate me.

After other similar situations where people pretended not to understand or were otherwise uncooperative, I began to think about things differently. Why had I come to learn Chinese? In part, it was to gain knowledge for the purpose of superiority or advantage. I would be able to speak English and Chinese, two critical languages for international business and profit from that ability.

How did I view the Chinese? I saw them as a potential enemy, a subject to be studied, categorized and dissected. And after I was done, I’d go back to my homeland, the United States, and profit from that newfound knowledge. In that, the people I was interacting with were not individuals with names, personal lives, families, dreams and futures. What these non- communicators were doing was forcing me to go beyond the intellectual spoken word to find some emotional or spiritual connection that enticed them to engage.

As I traveled through China, I discovered that being happy, simple and harmless were the best ways to invite cooperation. Like attracts like. Instead of trying to show off mastery of some new phrase I’d learned; if I would smile, nod and not be in any rush I would inevitably attract someone who smiled, nodded and was not in too much of a rush to help me.

If I didn’t know the words for whatever I needed, they would offer suggestions for what I might be looking for. And the more helpless and innocent my appeal, the greater the effort to help. As long as my needs were universal, Maslow’s food, water, shelter, and health, I don’t think

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there was ever a time that I didn’t find someone who was willing to help, even when I didn’t know the words to say or have the funds to pay.

Gumdrop wisdom

This learning to communicate without words or at least as few words as possible and my interest in history challenged me to figure out how to have an interesting discussion without learning all the words in between. As my understanding of Chinese progressed, I happened upon chengyu (成语) short compact saying that normally related to a famous event in the past or philosophical concept. While some of the chengyu are just a cleverly constructed turns of a phrase, some are morality tales similar to an Aesop's fable.

Old man loses a horse “sai weng shi ma” (塞翁失马) is a Taoist tale of how an old man,

Sai Weng goes through a series of events that are first seen by others as good or bad but turn out to be the opposite over time. The saying is similar to “every cloud has a silver lining” but with a longer time frame associated with it.

Frog in a well “jing di zhi wa” (井底之蛙) refers to a child’s tale where a frog born and raised in a well believes that this constitutes the entire universe. One day, the frog is visited by a sea turtle on its way back to the sea. The frog invites the sea turtle to join him in the well and can’t begin to imagine the ocean, when the turtle explains where he’s going back to. The term is used to describe people who are naive and ignorant of the world around them.

Foolish man moves a mountain “yu gong yi shan” (愚公移⼭) is a story of an old man who has gotten tired of climbing over the two mountains in his path to get to town. One day, he decided to do something about it and started digging a path directly down through the mountain.

A smart neighbor came by and asked what the old fool “yu gong” was doing. After learning what the old fool was trying to do, the smart neighbor said it was impossible to accomplish. The old

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fool replied, “Well, I may not see it finished, but my sons will dig, and their sons will dig, and their sons will dig and eventually we will move the mountain.” When the mountain gods heard the old man’s response, they realized that he would eventually succeed and moved the mountains for him. The idea is that anything is possible with enough perseverance.

As the date for the HSK national language exam approached, I went back to campus and began my last minute cramming. For the first time, I was leaving a task I’d set out to accomplish unfinished. But I somehow was ok with that because I knew that I was like Sai Weng losing his horse, there was something else that would come of it. I had started off my journey to Asia like a frog in a well, not knowing how big the world was. Learning that language was not necessary for the essentials helped me appreciate that I could be like the old fool moving the mountain and accomplish anything I wanted to. The question that remained was what was worth committing my life, my children’s life and their children’s lives to accomplishing?

I took the HSK and scored a 6 “Intermediate Level C”; maybe equivalent to a “75,” on the

TOEFL. I had memorized some 2,000 Chinese characters and enough grammar to be allowed to enroll as a college student alongside regular Chinese in undergraduate classes. But I decided I was no longer interested in mastering the language. My real purpose had been to understand the potential threat the country posed to the United States. And with that mission accomplished, I began looking for the next adventure.

Choosing different

I spent the next six months in Japan getting my head on straight. Taught English to bored housewives and little kids. Slung tiles and wielded a nail gun as on-call laborer for a residential housing contractor. Volunteered at Peace Boat, Japan's first and oldest NGO. Wondered what was the purpose in life. What was the goal? Why?

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And the questions that foreigners had asked me, I began to ask myself. Who are you?

Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Why did you decide to do that? Where are you going? How will you get there?

I wanted a unique life. And I was beginning to sense that nothing that could be bought was unique simply because someone had to go before you to figure out how to commoditize its sale.

I was thirty years old and had done nothing with my life. I couldn’t claim value by being part of a well-respected consulting company like McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte or Ernst & Young. I had no degree like MD, JD or PhD to put after my name. And although the American service members would always say, “Once a Marine, always a Marine” I knew my own opinions of the fat out of shape veterans who used to talk loudly about their time “in the Corps.” More than that, I think I was developing a disdain for the American hoi polloi who’d never left the United States.

Hadn’t Americans learned anything after the publication of The Ugly America in 1958?

Sure, it has spurred the creation of the Peace Corps and USAID after President Kennedy read it.

Maybe it had helped change some but had anything changed in the American population’s consciousness? Now in 1996, a generation later, were we any better off?

At the end of the Cold War, America seemed triumphant. Yes, the United States was number one militarily. Yes, the United States was number one economically. Yes, America’s opponent during the Cold War, the Soviet Union, had collapsed. But where was the peace we were establishing? What was the future we were creating? Were we taking a Melian dialogue approach of the “Divine Right of Kings” philosophy or trying to figure out the “Mandate of

Heaven” approach that would end the war and create a more prosperous political reality for all?

Philosophical War

The Chinese understood the government’s primary responsibility to supply Maslow’s

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basics and consequences of not doing so. In writing the introduction to Mao Zedong’s commentary On Guerrilla Warfare, retired Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith wrote (Tse-tung,

2017):

Implicit is the further assurance that any popular movement infiltrated and

captured by the Communists will develop an anti-Western character definitely tinged, in

our hemisphere at least, with a distinctive anti-American coloration.

This should not surprise us if we remember that several hundred million less

fortunate than we have arrived, perhaps reluctantly, at the conclusion that the Western

peoples are dedicated to the perpetuation of the political, social and economic status quo.

In the not too distant past, many of these millions looked hopefully to America, Britain, or

France to help in the realization of their justifiable aspirations. But today many of them

feel that these aims can be achieved only by a desperate revolutionary struggle that we

will probably oppose. This is not a hypothesis; it is fact.

A potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government

consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of living

for the great majority of its citizens…

People who live at subsistence level want first things to be put first. They are not

particularly interested in freedom of religion, freedom of press, free enterprise as we

understand it or the secret ballot. Their needs are more basic: land, tools, fertilizers,

something better than rags for their children, houses to replace their shacks, freedom from

police oppression, medical attention, primary schools. Those who have known only

poverty have begun to wonder why they should continue to wait passively for

improvements. They see- and not always through Red-tinted glasses - examples of peoples

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who have changed the structures of their societies and they ask, “What have we to lose?”

Like Smedley Butler, Samuel Griffith was a Marine Corps officer. Griffith graduated from the Naval Academy in 1929 and then served in Nicaragua, Cuba, and England before being posted to the US Embassy in Beijing, where he learned Mandarin. During World War II, he trained with the British commandos before coming back to help establish and then lead the

Marine Raider Battalion, a precursor to the Marine Corps’ Force Reconnaissance units. He participated in the Pacific campaign and was awarded both the Navy Cross and Distinguished

Service Cross for leadership in combat in the island hopping campaign. His final assignment in the Pacific theater was participating in the post-World War II occupation of China in 1946-1947 during the last years of the Chinese Civil War.

Griffith translated Mao’s work in 1961 after twenty five years of active military service.

And Griffith, like Butler when writing War is a Racket, had personal on-the-ground experience that provided unique insights to what exactly Mao was referring to when talking about guerrilla warfare in China. And as if referring to my bewilderment about being in Saudi Arabia to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1990, Griffith continued:

In the United States, we go to considerable trouble to keep soldiers out of politics, and

even more to keep politics out of soldiers. Guerrillas do the exact opposite. They go to

great lengths to make sure that their men are politically educated and thoroughly aware of

the issues at stake. A trained and disciplined guerrilla is much more than a patriotic

peasant, workman, or student armed with an antiquated fowling-piece and a homemade

bomb. His indoctrination begins even before he is taught to shoot accurately, and it is

unceasing. The end product is an intensely loyal and politically alert fighting man. (p.8)

Certainly, the colonial Minutemen fighting the Redcoats and Hessians in 1776 knew what

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they were fighting for. There were intense debates in the press between American colonists discussing the pros and cons of taking up arms against the Crown. But neither I nor any of my

Marines understood the historical, religious, political, and economic factors that resulted in a decision to send India Company 3rd Battalion 9th Marines to Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf.

As we said ourselves, we were mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed on horseshit.

Mao said political awakening was essential, but a successful revolution also demanded that its leaders were exemplary so that revolutionaries would be willing to fight to the death.

... leaders who are unyielding in their policies - resolute, loyal, sincere and robust. These

men must be well educated in revolutionary technique, self-confident, able to establish

severe discipline, and able to cope with counterpropaganda. In short, these leaders must

be models for the people. (Chpt. 1 p. 45)

And because “Victory in guerrilla war is conditioned on keeping the membership pure and clean” officers must “continually educate the soldiers and inculcate patriotism in them.” (p87) In order to do this:

An officer should have the following qualities: great powers of endurance so that in spite

of any hardship he sets an example to his men and is a model for them; he must be able to

mix easily with the people; his spirit and that of the men must be one in strengthening the

policy of resistance to the Japanese. If he wishes to gain victories, he must study tactics. A

guerrilla group with officers of this character would be unbeatable. I do not mean that

every guerrilla group can have, at its inception, officers of such qualities. The officers

must be men naturally endowed with good qualities that can be developed during the

course of campaigning. The most important natural quality is that of complete loyalty to

the idea of people’s emancipation.

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Mao would probably have agreed with Gideon’s army selection process of only taking those who didn’t have families and lapped at the river like dogs. Mao said that only volunteers could join the campaign because the hardships of a protracted guerrilla war would cause people not firmly committed to leave eventually. Better to cultivate those unable to sustain a revolutionary army’s hardships as an informer or local supporter that could be relied on when operations were conducted in the area.

And like the officers, the unit had to be and be seen as exemplary to the local population.

The “Three Rules and Eight Remarks,” (Ch 6, p92) members of the guerrilla army should follow are:

Rules:

1. All actions are subject to command.

2. Do not steal from the people.

3. Be neither selfish nor unjust.

Remarks:

1. Replace the door when you leave the house.

2. Roll up the bedding on which you have slept.

3. Be courteous.

4. Be honest in your transactions.

5. Return what you borrow.

6. Replace what you break.

7. Do not bathe in the presence of women.

8. Do not without authority search the pocketbook of those you arrest.

The end goal of this self-discipline was to ensure the presence of the guerrilla force was not an

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imposition on the local population. Instead, but exhibiting the best manners common to all civil societies, the guerrillas could be seen as a positive model for the community to aspire to. And by being seen as a part of the local community, the guerrilla units could move freely throughout the country like fish in the water, always fed, clothed and housed by the people.

As the local community accepts the guerrilla units as their own protection against the foreign invaders or a distant central government, they help in their own small way. The first way is of course to provide accurate and timely intelligence on the enemy. Unequipped with the technical means of satellites and drones, the local population provides HUMINT or human intelligence on what is going on around the country.

What are the enemy soldiers saying in the whorehouses? What kind of supplies are enemy units buying for the base? At what cost? How many enemy soldiers are buying drugs on the black market? How has that affected the frequency of their patrols? How do the local leaders feel about the occupation?

And as the feeling of solidarity with the guerrilla unit becomes closer, the local population begins to administer a slow death by a thousand papercuts that isolates the invading forces from the community and the local environment. It can start as simply as a cook or waiter spitting in the enemy’s food and sharing the story with his coworkers or family. Insurgent action can increase to adding sugar to the enemy vehicle’s gas tank or deflating their tires; nothing enough to be shot over, but just an annoyance that demands more vehicle maintenance or loss of fuel efficiency. As community self-confidence and hate of the outsider congeals, active support of the insurgency can extend to stealing of weapons or outright sabotage of public utilities, allowing the guerrillas to mount a national strategy of sheng dong ji xi (声东击西) or “make noise in the East and attack from the West” because the difference between who is a guerrilla, insurgent and revolutionary has

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become irrelevant and entire countryside is conspiring to eject the invaders.

Looking back at the twenty seven objections to British rule that revolutionary Americans submitted as causes which impelled them to separation in the Declaration of Independence, I couldn’t help thinking that the British might have benefitted by following Mao’s Three Rules and

Eight Remarks. And yet, as I thought about my own life, I could hear echoes of my father’s admonition to leave things better than you found them and my own experiences of being accepted as an ignorant mute traveler so long as I was happy, honest, patient and polite.

And given what I knew about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the most surprising thing Mao wrote in 1937 was:

It is to be hoped that the world is in the last era of strife. The vast majority of

human beings have already prepared or are preparing to fight a war that will bring justice

to the oppressed people of the world. No matter how long this war may last, there is no

doubt that it will be followed by an unprecedented epoch of peace. The war that we are

fighting today for the emancipation of the Chinese is a part of the freedom of all human

beings, and the independent, happy, liberal China that we will establish will be part of that

new world order. A conception like this is difficult for the simple-minded militarist to

grasp and it therefore must be carefully explained to him.

I was struck by the similarities in sentiment between President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address where Kennedy famously stated:

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of

mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period

is required--not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes,

but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save

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the few who are rich.

And if American and Chinese leaders pronounced we were fighting the same thing, who were we fighting against?

Our American post-World War II leaders had given us all the answers if we just decided to listen. Remembering the crippling reparations of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I that made World War II predestined, a newly empowered United States took steps to implement a

Mandate of Heaven approach to the post-World War II era. In 1947, Secretary of State George

Marshall explained the situation facing the international economic system in the aftermath of the war.

The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange with the city dweller for the

other necessities of life. This division of labor is the basis of modern civilization. At the

present time it is threatened with breakdown. The town and city industries are not

producing adequate goods to exchange with the food producing farmer. Raw materials and

fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out. The farmer or the peasant

cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So, the sale of his farm

produce for money which he cannot use seems to him an unprofitable transaction. He,

therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing.

He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food,

however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization.

Meanwhile people in the cities are short of food and fuel. So, the governments are forced

to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process

exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus, a very serious

situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of

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the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of

breaking down.

Understanding that it was essential to ensure Maslow’s basic needs if people were going be healthy, get educated and rebuild their countries, Marshall continued:

Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of

disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the

consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical

that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal

economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no

assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against

hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working

economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in

which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a

piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government may

render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative.

The forty five years of the Cold War were a competition between the capitalist and communist economic models to see which system could provide the food, water, shelter, health and security of its citizens best. And while the United States was able to do a better job of providing beans, butter and bread while simultaneously producing bullets, bombs, and ballistic missile submarines, the leadership had understood at some level that weapons production was a drain on America’s productive capacity. In 1953, six years after George Marshall’s address at

Harvard University, President Eisenhower would outline in his speech, “A Chance for Peace.”

As the last general to be elected as President of the United States, Eisenhower knew

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something about war. Eisenhower was an acolyte of George Marshall and had been promoted ahead of his peers to command the D-Day invasion, the largest in United States military history.

Eisenhower had been physically present in the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps had later administered the occupation of Germany before being selected to be the first Supreme

Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) commander of NATO. And Eisenhower hated

“war as only a soldier who has lived it can” and “seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Eisenhower addressed the Soviet Union, the former World War II allies of the United

States against Germany, Italy and Japan saying:

The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which

govern its conduct in world affairs.

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares

the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only

in effective cooperation with fellow nations.

Third: Any nation's right to a form of government and an economic system of its own

choosing is inalienable.

Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is

indefensible.

And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in

armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

Eisenhower then accused the Soviets of following the path of the Divine Right of Kings that ruled by the Melian dialogue justification of might makes right. He said:

The Soviet government held a vastly different vision of the future. In the world of its

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design, security was to be found, not in mutual trust and mutual aid but in force: huge

armies, subversion, rule of neighboring nations. The goal was power superiority at all

costs. Security was to be sought by denying it to all others.

And then looking at the impact of endless arms race on achieving Maslow’s basic needs, even if all nations managed to avoid all out nuclear war, Eisenhower saw the best that would come of constant enmity would be the diversion of resources to weapons that might otherwise feed, shelter, heal and teach those in need.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final

sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not

clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its

laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30

cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two

fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single

destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is

humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Eisenhower went on to ask the Soviets if they would join the United States and “the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war.”

This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces

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of poverty and need.

The peace we seek, rounded upon decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can

be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by

meat and by timber and by rice. These are words that translate into every language on

earth. These are needs that challenge this world in arms.

And only three months into his presidency, Eisenhower was committing to disarm and use the savings to help rebuild the world using the United Nations.

The purposes of this great work would be to help other peoples to develop the

undeveloped areas of the world, to stimulate profitable and fair world trade, to assist all

peoples to know the blessings of productive freedom. The monuments to this new kind of

war would be these: roads and schools, hospitals and homes, food and health. We are

ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the

world.

We are ready, by these and all such actions, to make of the United Nations an institution

that can effectively guard the peace and security of all peoples.

Kennedy’s inaugural address in 1961 echoed Eisenhower, Marshall and Mao saying:

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not

as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight

struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against

the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

And yet here the United States were, six years after the fall of the Soviet Union with no one to stop Americans from disarming and using the peace dividend to help those in need. There were no national security threats out there to justify continued production of the military

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industrial complex.

Of course, everyone knew about the fighting in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. But there were separatists battles and civil wars that had erupted or continued to boil around the world that were linked to oppression of a minority population that denied them the basics to live in Indonesia, Mali, South Ossetia, Djibouti, Sierra

Leone, Algeria, Tajikistan, Somalia, Georgia, Transnistria, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Burundi,

Yemen, Ethiopia, Nepal, Afghanistan, Liberia, East Timor, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and

Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990’s. None of these battles would pit the United States against an adversary as powerful as the Soviet Union or even a modern army like Iraq.

When the United States ignored the Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, I wondered what the what was going on in the minds of the American people. Between 7 April and 15 July 1994 there were continuous reports of widespread killings in the most horrific ways possible accompanied by pleas of the United Nations or anyone to help put a stop to the violence. And yet armed with the most powerful and well-armed nation in the world, the United States stood by and watched.

Day after day, Americans watched reports of neighbors bludgeoning neighbors to death on cable news. American leaders watched as armed mobs conducted massacres of unarmed civilians who’d sought refuge in schools and churches with clubs and machetes. And after one hundred days of raping over 250,000 women and killing 800,000 of their countrymen, the madness was done.

Somehow America could be moved to act when a pretty young girl lied about babies being taking out of incubators during the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, but couldn’t be bothered when being faced with the reality of a brutal genocide playing out in slow motion in front of them.

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I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew the reason that we didn’t get involved. Rwanda and the twenty odd countries in conflict didn’t possess oil or some other resources of national strategic importance that America couldn’t buy or just take. But that wasn’t supposed to be the reason that the American soldier went to war. I had been taught that Americans were the good guys. We went to tough places to right wrongs, take care of bad guys and leave things better after we left. And that was exactly the same as what Mao, American’s supposed enemy, said his goal was in fighting the revolution.

Know yourself, know the enemy. Sun Tzu noted in the Art of War that if you know yourself and know the enemy, you will always win 100% of your battles. He then went on to say, if you know yourself and not the enemy or know the enemy but not yourself you will only win

50% of your battles. And if you are ignorant of yourself and ignorant of the enemy, you will win

0% of the time.

Following the Wandering Path

As I wrestled with all the questions swirling around in my mind, I began to think that maybe good and bad had little to do with nationality, race, religion, ethnicity or any other criteria.

Maybe knowing yourself was to know the enemy. Maybe the enemy wasn’t the Marshall Plan’s

“hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” Maybe the enemy was a mindset that produced a lifestyle and resulted in “tyranny, poverty, disease and war.” But I still wasn’t sure.

Having lived as a student for the past three years, I realized that lack of funds limited what

I could purchase, but not what I could experience or think. As long as I had food, water, shelter and my health, there was no limitation on my personal growth or positive interactions with other people; far from it. Not having to run after money, attend endless strategy meetings, and worry about making a positive impression on a potential business partner had left me the time and

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freedom to explore existential questions: Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Why did you decide to do that? Where are you going? How will you get there?

And while each day I spent wandering in the wilderness my potential career opportunities diminished, I was discovering what was most important in life. Life. In my travels, I found that the most generous and caring people tended to be people who had suffered deep hardships, like the noodle shop owner. So, despite not having much, those with the least often shared the most with those who had even less.

I began to see that there were at least two distinct paths to experiencing life. The one that had been taught to me by my parents was to work hard, save money and after you retire, if you still have your health and freedom, go see the world from an air conditioned bus. But that kind of travel was insulated and designed to reinforce the preconceived notions of the people paying for the tour.

But the path I’d discovered for myself was to jump in and start crawling ahead on all fours. When you find your balance, stand up. And then walk forward naked and afraid, step by step, but filled with faith in humanity and hoping for the best.

That sort of traveling was rough and dirty going. It meant sleeping on the floor of the hard seat train where my seat mate’s infant had just pooped. It meant having my passport pickpocketed in Prague. I meant getting tuberculosis from the pushcart noodle vendors in Shanghai.

Rough traveling requires putting your safety in the hands of others without knowing their intentions. But after all those miles, I was still alive, free and learning what I would and wouldn’t fight and die for. The thing I hadn’t found yet was something worth living for.

I’d focused for so long on becoming a warrior to protect the United States that I didn’t know what to do when I found out Americans didn’t need protecting but more exposure. What I

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was still searching for was a clear fight protecting embattled people who needed help.

But I had to make sure that I wasn’t mistaken about what I thought I learned about the supposed threats to America’s national security. If Chinese communism was a false flag threat, then the last thing left was radical Islamic fundamentalism. And as the United States had recently defeated Iraq and was close allies with Saudi Arabia, the Islamic fundamentalism term referred to

Iran. It took nearly a year and the presidential election of the moderate Mohammad Khatami, but I received my acceptance to the University of Tehran and student visa in August of 1997.

Without direct flights from Hawaii to Iran, I flew into Karachi, Pakistan where I should have spent my Naval Academy summer training in 1987 sailing with the Pakistani Navy. Karachi was the country’s largest port and the entry point for all the weapons that the United States had acquired for the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The city would see the killing of four American accountants working for Union Texas Petroleum during the morning rush hour three months after

I arrived and later be the site of the beheading and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist

Daniel Pearl in 2002. But in the fall of 1997, I slipped on through.

Ground truth

It was there I began to see how the other side viewed America’s role overseas. I remember walking on the streets on 14 August during Pakistan’s Independence Day when, just like the

United States on 4th of July, the people celebrated their liberation from Great Britain. I bumped into a group of tall, well-built Pakistani men who looked like rugby players or soldiers and we had the usual travelers’ conversation about who, what, when and where.

Out of habit, I presented vague naivete; not out of deceit but more just general caution of not knowing who I was talking to or what they wanted. They asked the questions of who I was and what I was doing there perfunctorily but didn’t seem terribly interested in my answers. They

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had a knowing sort of look when they talked with me as if to say, “We know the truth.”

And then as they were leaving, the leader of the group looked directly at me and said,

“You know, Pakistan won the Cold War for the United States. We defeated the Soviet Union for you.” Then the group turned and walked off.

Of course, he was referring to the CIA Operation Cyclone that had pushed nearly $20 billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, ammunition and military equipment through Karachi port to be unloaded onto trains and trucks where it was transported to Peshawar, Quetta, and other border towns along the Pakistan-Afghan border. And he was correct. I was headed in that general direction.

But instead of heading 430 miles north to Kabul in Afghanistan, my final destination was

1,200 miles northwest to Tehran, the capital of Iran. I would take the overnight Bolan Mail Train at 6pm to Quetta and arrive at 3pm the next day. And from there an 8-hour bus ride to the

Pakistan border town of Taftan, before making the crossing into Iran.

Later, I would find out that Quetta was the hometown of Mir Aimal Kansi, who had attacked five CIA employees as they waited to head into work at Langley in 1993; and that Kansi had been picked up by the FBI on 15 June 1997 not far from Quetta, only two months before my arrival. But for whatever reason, I felt like everything would turn out all right. Perhaps it was an irrational faith in God, humanity or fate. My sense was that as long as I survived today, everything else was gravy. And as long as I was learning something new about life and myself, then sticking around another day was ok.

After spending the night with the runs on the train, I arrived in Quetta dehydrated and a little worse for wear. One night in a hostel to recover, get my bearings, and find out where to buy a bus ticket. Then westward ho.

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I remember getting on the bus around sunset the next day. Edging past the driver who seemed hopped up on more than caffeine and his radio blasting Pakistani hip hop, I found a seat near the emergency exit door in the back. As we started our journey, I discovered there were no real scheduled stops, but the bus was almost an Uber or Lyft service where our driver would suddenly stop the bus, beep his horn, shout out the passengers or out the window resulting in someone either getting on or getting off.

Our most interesting passenger arrived around 8pm, when we stopped in front of a house and a young boy stepped onto the bus with a goat. After tying the goat to the bus chair, he paid the driver and left. With the bouncing bus, hip hop beats, and episodic goat bleats, my experience was now complete. Luckily, I was exhausted enough to fall asleep by midnight.

We arrived somewhere in the middle of nowhere the next morning and the men got off onto one side of the road, the women to the other and everyone took care of bathroom business.

As the sun got hotter, everyone stood on the shady side of the bus and waited quietly. After about half an hour a motorcycle showed up followed by a pickup truck. Men jumped out of the pickup truck, opened up the cargo hold at the bottom of the bus and began moving the boxes between the two.

Of course, wanting to be helpful, I pitched in. Lift up a box, take a quick look and then move it to the men arranging the boxes on the pickup truck bed.

“Psssssst. Psssssst.” One of the other passengers hissed at me.

I flashed my best harmless idiot smile and shrugged my shoulders to ask in what I hoped was universal language for, “What?”

He responded with a squinting eyes, scrunched face and shaking his head in the universal language for “No, don’t do that.” And then he stage whispered in quite good English,

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“Smugglers.”

We were almost done, so it was no loss for me to stop at that point. But I’d had a chance to see what most of the contents were. There were boxes of brass padlocks, cheap alarm clocks, clothes irons, and light bulbs produced in China. And then rolls of fabric and bales of clothes from unknown origins. What was so wrong about that? And it seemed so sad that people in air conditioned offices were making life harder than necessary for people who just wanted to be able to iron their clothes and lock their doors.

Then everyone got back on the bus and after another hour on the road we finished the rest of our journey to Taftan. The Pakistani customs officer stamped my passport, and I found my way to the chain link fence that marked the Iranian border. An Iranian border guard sitting in his chair lazily inspected everyone's passports as we entered the Iranian customs building.

Covering an entire side of one was a mural of Ayatollah Khomeini glaring down on us as if to say, “I’m watching you.” When I held up my American passport to the border guard, he grinned wickedly and began whistling a military marching tune that resembled le Marseille, the national anthem of France. Knowing that once I entered Iran, there would be no US Embassy, no

Visa cash advance, and no UN press card to help get me out of a jam; I had one last chance to stop, turn around and use the crisp $100 bills I’d hidden throughout my belongings to buy a plane ticket home.

I stepped across the threshold. And everything changed. It was almost as if the air became clear and a weight was lifted.

The Straightened Road

In the customs area, the guards seemed completely uninterested in me and the other foreign traveler next to me. Of course, we had to empty our backpacks out onto the inspection

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tables. But unlike the diligence with which they picked through the local’s clothes and luggage, they only gave a cursory nod at my Walkman with banned Western music cassette tapes and waved us through.

Outside the customs officer we boarded small minivans that would take us in groups of five to seven from Mirjave, the small border town, to Kerman, the regional capital. We turned out of the gate and in contrast to the snaking potholed roads in Pakistan, we looked ahead at a straight wide paved asphalt highway. It was a hint of what was to come.

I can only express my sense of transition in terms of Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier. When a plane approaches the sound barrier of ~770 miles per hour it goes through increased turbulence and stress. But once the aircraft begins flying faster than the speed of sound, apparently there is a quiet calm that surrounds the plane. I have never gone supersonic in an airplane, but my year in Iran is what I imagine it feels like from a spiritual perspective.

Contrary to everything I had been taught to believe about the Iranians being an irrational and hate filled society, I found them to be thoughtful, generous and warm hearted people. In fact, having traveled to some twenty countries by that point, I was convinced that they were the most hospitable people on the planet.

But more than being welcoming to travelers, Iranians, like the Chinese, enjoyed a rich culture that spanned thousands of years. However, unlike the Chinese who seemed to take pride in their military strategy or business acumen, the Iranian took the greatest enjoyment in sharing their romantic literature and spiritual philosophy. In fact, every Iranian I met seemed to describe the world in stanzas and couplets of poetry. From shop owners to taxi drivers, everyone seemed to be spouting Hafez, Khayyam, Sa’adi, Rumi, or Ferdowsi. It was almost as if I had been dropped into a film set where everyone was a classically educated caricature of Tevya from Fiddler on the

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Roof.

It’s not to say that there weren’t difficulties or challenges. Ever since Iran occupied the US

Embassy in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, resulting in the downfall of Jimmy

Carter’s presidency and rise of Ronald Reagan, Iran has been under crippling American sanctions.

But like the noodle shop owner in Shanghai, the Iranians bore their suffering lightly.

Of course, the United States had been able to use the primacy of the dollar and unbeatable military to ensure that the other nations fell in line and maintained America’s sanctions. But it’s not because their citizens believe the sanctions are justified. Most of their citizens don’t know the issues involved or history behind the conflict and their leaders find it profitable or safer just to comply to American demands.

Iranians would sometimes use the film Rambo to emphasize their point. America drew

“first blood.” Iranians have never gone to the United States and occupied their government during

World War II. Iranians have never gone to extract American oil and made Americans second class citizens in their own country. Iranians had never overthrown their democratically elected government and installed a puppet monarch. Iranians had never trained secret police in the United

States to brutally suppress internal dissent. But Americans had done all those things in Iran.

The more I went back to read the historical interaction between Iran and the United States, the more I could see the validity of their point of view. And I was embarrassed by how little I knew about the Middle East, despite having been ready to fight and kill its people only years before. But like the Chinese who’d seen empires rise and fall over thousands of years, the

Iranians I talked to seemed to maintain a “this too shall pass” approach to life. They accepted that everything on Earth was Oz, where dirty things happened and “Hameh chiz poshteh pardeh ast” or everything is hidden by the curtain.

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It doesn’t mean that they took things lightly or just accepted the status quo. Rather, they understood that warfare was about politics, that politics were about the mind, and the mind was about knowledge and philosophy. The key to winning when you didn’t have the means to fight back physically, was to first know the truth. Because in the end, the truth would always triumph.

The King’s Story

In one conversation, my host used the Persian literature classic the Shahnameh, “The

Kings Story”, to describe the actions of the United States. Once upon a time there was a king

Jamshid, who ruled the land with the blessing of the gods and was blessed with “Farr” or perfect wisdom given by heaven. Jamshid had a cup that allowed him to see everything in the world and brought many new wonders to his people like the mining of jewels, smelting of metals, ocean navigation, manufacture of armor and weapons, building of brick houses, and making of clothes, perfume and medicine. As the people grew and prospered, Jamshid became famous throughout the world until Jamshid became conceited and believed that all the great things came from him, instead of the heavens.

At the same time, there was a young prince named Zahak who was good looking and clever, but easily influenced by others. Seeing an opportunity to rule the land, an evil spirit

Ahriman took the form of a courtier and convinced Zahak to kill his father and ascend the throne.

After Zahak became king, the spirit Ahriman took the form of a chef who cooked wonderful meals for Zahak and for the first time, gave the previously vegetarian royal court a hunger for eating meat.

After providing sumptuous feasts day and night, Ahriman convinces Zahak that he is indispensable to the king’s happiness and asks for a personal favor. Ahriman asks only to kiss

Zahak’s shoulders, and his wish is granted. As Ahriman’s lips touch Zahak’s shoulders, two

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snakes magically appear that bite Zahak day and night.

The spirit Ahriman then transforms himself into the form of a physician to provide a cure for the problem he created. After attempts to surgically remove the snakes fail; the physician

Ahriman tells Zahak that the snakes will stop biting him if he consumes a soup made of two children’s brains every day, one for each snake.

The physician Ahriman tells Zahak that the once good king Jamshid has lost his Farr or divine wisdom to rule and his people who are suffering hunger and hardship as a result are ready to revolt. Ahriman convinces Zahak to take his father’s army, kill Jamshid and ascend Jamshid’s throne. Now ruler over Jamshid’s people, Zahak is able to command that two of his new subjects’ children be killed each day and their brains be used to make his soup.

Zahak’s rule by force lasted many centuries. But one day, two men discover that the

Zahak snakes’ can be sated by sheep’s brains as well as children’s. Replacing the sheep’s brains for children, the spared children are told to hide up in the mountain, so no one will suspect any treachery on the part of the cooks. Over a generation, the saved children are educated and trained into an army that eventually overthrows Zahak and imprisons him for eternity.

Given that Zahak was supposed to have come from Mesopotamia or Arabia, the tale might seem to fit current events. But given that Ferdowsi wrote Shahnameh in 1010, nearly a thousand years before the wars for control of oil, it had little to do with Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Instead,

Shahnameh is heavily laden with references to Zoroastrianism, the monotheistic religion established in the 6th century BCE and believed to have influenced Greek philosophy, Buddhism,

Gnosticism, Bahai, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The Shahnameh also reflects on concepts of just rule by contrasting Jamshid at his peak and Zahak at his depths to illustrate that power to rule comes from obeying divine truths. Moreover, evidence of the ruler’s adherence to eternal truths

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would be the health, fecundity and prosperity of the nation’s people. And the explanation sounded very similar to Mencius and the Chinese Mandate of Heaven rather than the Melian dialogue

Divine Right of Kings.

But as I’d never heard of Zoroastrianism or the Shahnameh, I wondered what all this had to do with Iran being a hotbed of radical Islamic fundamentalism. So, I began asking Iranians, obliquely at first, “Why is Iran trying to export radical Islam around the world?” And the answers

I received were nothing I could have imagined before arriving.

“Islam? Iranians are not Muslims,” many Iranians would say. And then they would explain, Iranians are Persians, not Arabs. Iranian culture is much older than that. 2,600 years ago, we ruled from the Indus River in Pakistan in the East all the way to Macedonia, Turkey and Egypt in the west. It was a Persian king, Cyrus, who freed the Jews from Babylon over a thousand years before the arrival of Mohammad and five hundred years before the birth of Christ. When I would press the issue, noting the preeminent political position of the religious leader Ayatollah

Khamenei and the way everything shut down during Friday prayer, I would get a range of responses from outright dismissal to measured concurrence.

Even at the time, I realized that my findings were skewed because I didn’t speak much

Farsi, which meant those who I could discuss things with were those predisposed to the West.

Moreover, the President of Iran in 1997, Mohammad Khatami, had been elected on a platform of modernity and reconciliation with the West. And with so many Iranians who had studied in the

United States during the 1960’s and 1970’s hoping for a chance to go back, I imagine much of what they told me was what they hoped might be rather than what actually was.

Ibn Lenin Khomeini

But when I asked about the recent history of Islam in Iran, one Iranian gave me an

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explanation that seemed straight out of the Iranian version of the National Enquirer, but one that had enough resonance and coincidental facts to possibly be true. They said that after Ayatollah

Khomeini had opposed the Shah’s push for modernization and secularization of Iran in 1963, he had come under increasing censure from the government. When Ayatollah Khomeini openly opposed the Shah agreeing to the United States’ Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) meaning that American service members would have diplomatic immunity from prosecution in local courts, Khomeini was forced into exile.

“But where did Khomeini go in 1964?”, my host asked. He went first to Turkey, where the United States had military bases and nuclear missile launchers. Then in 1965, Khomeini went to Iraq where he spent the next thirteen years until 1978. It was only in 1979 that Khomeini arrived in Neauphle-le-Chateau, a small town 25 miles outside of Paris, where he stayed for four months before coming back to Iran. And while those facts were well known to everyone, the narrative my host pushed was that the United States and Western powers wanted him to overthrow the Shah of Iran. How else could Khomeini, a Shiite cleric, survive in Iraq, a Sunni country that hated Iranians?

According to my narrator, the idea was to use the Ayatollah against the Shah like the

Germans had used Lenin against the Russian Romanov dynasty in 1917. President Carter and his foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had apparently crafted a “Green Belt'' strategy to foment radical Islamic fundamentalism in countries on the southern border of the Soviet Union like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran to ensure that the Soviets would be unable to gain access to a warm water port. Simultaneously, the United States would encourage greater religious fundamentalism in Central Asian Soviet Republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,

Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, with the long term goal of using the higher birthrate among the

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Muslim families to create a breakaway region in the atheistic Soviet Union. Radical religious fundamentalism was an American funded policy to overthrow the secular Soviet Union.

As evidence of this policy’s existence, my roadside instructor pointed to the support

Khomeini received in France delivering his message to the Iranian people. How was it that an exiled cleric, who’d spent thirteen years outside his home country in Iraq is suddenly whisked away to France where he was besieged by Western reporters broadcasting a religious message to the world? Who in the media would even know that Khomeini was living outside of Paris in

Neauphle-le-Chateau unless someone told them? Who helped copy all those cassette tapes and copy all those pamphlets of the Ayatollah’s speeches and writings, especially with the SAVAK,

Iran’s secret policy, still there? Finally, how was it possible that the Ayatollah, who had no financial resources of his own, was able to return on a chartered Air France 747 filled with a hundred Western journalists?

As I didn’t know any of the information he presented before, I had no answers to his questions. But his assertions might easily be true, as most Americans weren’t aware of the things that were documented facts. Not only fun tidbits like Shiraz or Syrah wine comes from a variety of grapes originally cultivated for wine 2,500 years ago in Shiraz, Iran; but also, darker open secrets, like the CIA and Mossad had helped create the Iranian SAVAK, the internal security force with nearly unlimited power to censor, detain, torture and kill dissenting Iranian voices. The real reason the United States hated Iran, my guide continued, was that the Ayatollah Khomeini had tricked the United States into helping him but wouldn’t turn over the control of the oil as the

Americans had wanted. And given that the United States had orchestrated the CIA coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 using similar tactics, the reasoning was plausible.

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Faces of Jihad

As I learned more Farsi and began to build a level of familiarity with people, we began to discuss Islam in depth. When I asked about Islamic jihad and what that meant to them individually, I received another fascinating answer. Jihad in the original sense is simply a verb that means “to struggle.” But as several people explained to me, struggle comes in many forms.

In general, when Muslims talk about jihad, it normally falls into two categories, Jihad-e-Asghar, the “little struggle,” and Jihad-e-Akbar, the “great struggle.”

The “little struggle” or Jihad-e-Asghar, was the struggle against appearances and the material world. It was fighting to change lines on a map, LGBTQ equality or for equal pay in the workplace. Even suicide bombers and wars of independence were considered “little struggle” efforts.

Jihad-e-Akbar or the “great struggle” was rectifying oneself. It was taming one’s “id” so that the limited concept of “Me” as conceptualized within one’s society could be surpassed by the indescribable potential of the divine within. In that it wasn’t necessarily tackling one’s individual pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth and transforming them into chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility; but rather going beyond the words and concepts of those ideas to become one with All.

Most Iranians I talked to had a very spiritual understanding of reckoning with the divine and didn’t seem too concerned about the doctrinal differences between this sect and that faction or whether something was technically allowed or not. Many subscribed to the belief that while society might use a “religion” to enforce certain behavior, that practice had nothing to do with true faith. Nothing regarding an individual’s acceptance of the divine could be imposed or even understood by anyone else because each individual was unique and had been created by the divine

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to receive their understanding in their own perfect way.

And while that might seem to smack of the “Me-ism” of “I’m unique and respect me as such,” the Iranians I discussed the concepts with didn’t care what society or anyone else thought of them. They were “Sufis” and embraced a mystical asceticism that believed the less material stuff you needed the freer you were to embrace the divine. Unlike Jamshid, who came to believe that the benefits to society came from him as a person rather than through him as a conduit, Sufis believed that their striving was to disbelieve the barriers of desire, preference and even intellect through “Islam” complete surrender to the entirety of the now.

And unlike Zahak’s hunger to dominate other people and feed off their minds, a Sufi worked to reduce their own need for the human physiological requirements of food, water and shelter. And the quicker they could minimize their physical needs of food, water and shelter, the more quickly they could begin the inward journey to enlightenment or in Maslow’s terms “self- actualization.” And as individuals became more in harmony with the divine, the less humanity’s rules about the material world had any relevance.

More than once they would remind me, alcohol wasn’t prohibited. It was that alcohol diminished one's inhibitions allowing an individual’s true self to be revealed. It was only because most people’s true self is immature and violent that alcohol was a threat to society.

It was interactions like these that encouraged me to sneak away from class so I could be instructed by strangers in bazaars and across the Iranian countryside. One phrase I heard often was Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous saying, Ma barodar va barobar hasteem, “We are all brothers and equal”. That favorite was followed in frequency by “siasat madar, pedar nadoreh” or “politics are a bastard.” And that was lucky for me.

Because nearly all of the Iranians I met agreed that we were essentially all brothers, that

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politics was a bastard and that “Hameh chiz poshteh pardeh ast” or everything was hidden behind the curtain. It didn’t make a difference that I was an American, a former Marine or anything else for that matter. I could be Director of the CIA for all they cared because in their Sufi interpretation of the Jihad-e-Akbar, their struggle was not a physical conflict against any outside individual, idea or force or individual, but rather the intellectual and emotional encumbrances that hindered their spiritual journey to the divine within. This allowed me to travel with little fear of ever being attacked or hurt. If anything, some foreigners would joke about being “hospitality hostages,” where Iranians who would engage you in philosophical conversations, while continuously pouring tea and providing dishes of fruits or sweets.

And my sense is that because Iranians, like Chinese, saw themselves within humanity’s rich and varied history that spanned many thousands of years, the idea of being the “best” or the

“greatest” seemed a little infantile at best. And the more I learned about human history, the more I tended to agree. Nearly every Iranian city I visited seemed to include a historic temple or mosque that was centuries or millennia old. One of those places I wanted to visit was the first Iranian site to be recorded in UNESCO’s World Heritage List, Chogha Zanbil.

Chogha Zanbil

A 10-hour series of bus rides took me from Tehran to Susa, the burial place of the biblical prophet Daniel. Another hour long bus ride before reaching the 3,000 year old ziggurat. Arriving in the early morning to avoid the midday heat, I found a place to sit and waited for the ticket office to open. At the appointed time, I joined the queue of other visitors hoping to escape the heat; and after buying our tickets, we trudged slowly up the hill.

Built largely out of mud bricks, the years had worn away at what must have been an imposing site at one time. Still, I guessed that this would be a once in a lifetime visit and decided

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to take my time looking at the cuneiform scratched out on the baked bricks and the reconstruction work being done to restore the site to its former glory.

Sometime after my arrival, several busloads of Iranian university students tumbled out of the buses and swarmed up the ziggurat. Laughing schoolgirls in clusters of three and five noisily swept up the hill while groups of young men in twos and threes plodded slowly behind. As the groups wound their way up the pathways to join me at the top, I stepped aside so they could enjoy the view at the summit.

“Hello. How are you?” someone asked behind me in very clear English.

“Hello. How are you?” I responded in kind.

“What are you doing here?”, which was a logical or obvious question depending on how he meant it. And then the conversation of who, what, when, where, why started.

As we talked, a small crowd gathered to hear our conversation and then drifted away when they discovered it was nothing of interest. It started with the normal back and forth that locals ask tourists who, what, when, where, how and why. And then somehow, we pivoted to history and international politics.

He was older than his classmates, well read and interested in a wide range of issues. So, when we talked, it was possible to switch from one topic to another without having to explain the background of an issue or lay out how different topics were connected. And then came religion.

What is the nature of God? What are the similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and

Islam? What are their differences? Is Christ a prophet or the last messenger? What is truth and is it knowable?

As his English vocabulary ran out my Farsi-English dictionary kicked in. We kept philosophizing about why things worked the way they did using hand signs and passing the

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dictionary between us when we both were at a loss. As the school buses were getting ready to leave, he invited me to stay at his home that evening. When I said yes, he convinced the bus driver to allow me to join the other university students on the journey back.

The struggle to heal

The bus ride back from Chogha Zanbil took about two hours to reach the University of

Ahvaz. From there, he drove me to his home where we shared a simple dinner of scrambled eggs, flatbread and ketchup. After dinner, we drank tea and played a game of chess before starting to talk again.

He had fought as a child soldier during the Iran-Iraq War. Living in Ahvaz, he had been sent to fight in the Battle of the Marshes when I was a plebe in the United States Naval Academy.

There, 250,000 Iraqis faced off against 250,000 Iranians in the wetlands and lakes near Basra and

Ahvaz.

In some of the most vicious fighting of the war, Iranians used human wave tactics against tanks and artillery. Unable to hold the Iranian forces back, the Iraqis used mustard and nerve gas before putting power lines in the waterways to electrocute thousands. In a little over a month, an estimated 52,000 soldiers, some as young as 13 years old, were killed in the fighting.

My host talked about his time in the army without emotion and then shuffled around one of the back cabinets to pull out a photo album with some faded pictures pasted into the pages.

Then his eyes got bright as he pointed himself out in the pictures along with his friends.

Oh him, he was funny, used to crack jokes all the time, even when we were getting shelled… shahidi. Oh my god, and him, he was so nasty. His feet smelled the worst… shahidi.

And going through picture after picture of smiling young faces, he’d point out some funny story he remembered or character trait they had always ending the anecdote with shahidi, shahidi,

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shahidi. Martyred, martyred, martyred… all of his childhood friends killed. All dead.

He knew the Allies had occupied Iran during World War II to prevent the oil from going to the Axis powers. That was in everyone's history books. He knew the United States had overthrown Iran’s democratically elected president Mohammad Mosaddeq to put in a dictator who would give America access to Iran’s oil. Every Iranian learned that in school. He probably even knew that Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. had been a military officer during the World War II occupation of Iran, was part of the CIA coup to overthrow Mosaddeq and had trained the internal security forces that would eventually be called the SAVAK; which is why his son, Norman

Schwarzkopf Jr., and our coalition commander during the first Gulf War, knew so much about the region.

He knew the United States considered Iran its enemy and we might meet again under vastly different circumstances. But that didn’t really matter right now. “Ma barodar va barobar hasteem; Siasat madar, pedar nadoreh.” We’re all brothers and equal; politics are a bastard.

So, he cooked us a soldier’s meal. Maybe something that he would have eaten when lucky enough to find eggs and some fuel to cook with. And then he could share his pictures that probably never got to see much daylight with someone else who’d fought and been “there,” cold, wet, tired, scared, and yet unable to run away because he was more terrified of leaving his friends behind.

“I just want to be a doctor,” he said, “that’s why I am back in school. I want to do something that helps people…” Then he closed his album and left me in the living room to sleep.

As I remembered SSgt Chambers, my Marine platoon sergeant who’d left us before we deployed to the Gulf to become a nurse, I began to see the weird symmetry of my life. I still had no idea what it all meant, but I knew that most of my Naval Academy classmates and fellow

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Marines knew little to nothing of what I was learning. And I was beginning to suspect that ignorance was by design. But knowing the values we’d been taught to defend, I somehow doubted that they would want the United States to go to war with Iran if they could talk with the people I was meeting.

So increasingly, more than anything, I wanted to change the United States’ process for developing foreign policy where national leaders made choices based on estimated profits and then sent ignorant soldiers to face death in the trenches. If we were a democracy, we ought to ensure that every citizen was educated of the human consequences of going to war. And maybe if we met the people we’d be fighting against, we’d shift our attention from the temporary illusions of the material world and begin on the greater struggle of improving our character as a nation.

More and more, I began to get the idea that we could build an exchange program between the United States and Iran using “Track 3” or people-to-people diplomacy. In contrast to “Track

1” diplomacy of presidents, kings, ambassadors and generals or “Track 2” diplomacy between unofficial government representatives and influential agents, I believed that citizen diplomacy was the long term key to lasting peace between our countries. Instead of focusing on the injuries of shared histories, look to the benefits of future collaboration.

Trying to put all my thoughts into a coherent form, I drafted a proposal to the United

States Institute of Peace (USIP), which I hoped might be interested in supporting this sort of work. Established by Congress in 1984, the USIP is “dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical, and essential for U.S. and global security,” which is exactly what I believed. In addition to working with local partners to restore peace to areas in conflict, the USIP sought to “support those who are working to build a more peaceful, inclusive world.” Not knowing what I expected, I sent my letter and waited.

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In the meantime, I was finishing up my last semester of study at the University of Tehran.

There was a group of American college students who were on a summer exchange program that had been arranged through a collection of the top universities in America. And while it was initially annoying to see how much attention and effort the University of Tehran staff went into ensuring the newly arrived Americans’ needs were met, I understood the importance a good experience was for developing institutional relationships down the road. Moreover, I had fun taking the visiting American students to the bazaars, hidden restaurants, and beautiful parks that dotted the capital.

Submitting to reality

It was fun watching the Americans bump up against their preconceived notions and be surprised by the real reason Iranians did what they did. Many of the American students were women and believed that hijab, the wearing of head coverings and shape concealing outer garments, was something imposed by the men to oppress women. Most of them found, as I had, that the answer is more complex than that.

At its core, the idea of hijab was the Islamic belief that modesty and chastity were values to be promoted. But in Iran, part of the thinking behind hijab was driven by the Jihad-e-Asghar and Jihad-e-Akbar. If a woman is too focused on her appearance or outer shell, how much time, energy and effort was being wasted that could be spent developing her internal spirit? And if men were attracted to a woman because of her appearance, how long would a husband and wife stay together after the physical attraction faded?

It’s not that Iranian women weren’t beautiful or didn’t dress in a sexy manner. All you had to do was be invited to a dinner party and wait for the door to close. The women would take off

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their sunglasses, head scarf and overcoat to reveal someone ready for the paparazzi on the red carpet. But those were special occasions between friends who knew each other well.

Perhaps what was most surprising was that it was not the men or religious police who regulated how conservatively the women dressed. Most men enjoyed seeing a “scantily dressed”

Iranian woman scandalously showing a little more ankle, wrist or neck than was normally allowed. Most of the time, it was the other women in the family or community who set the rules for what was or was not acceptable. And as for believing that Iranian women were somehow oppressed, I quickly discovered that they were, as one Iranian woman put it, “women are the neck that moves the head.”

Going back to the great and little struggle of Jihad-e-Asghar and Jihad-e-Akbar, because what was most important in life was living with internal harmony, your relationship with your family, not your job, not your salary, not your title, was the most important thing in life. Thus, the man’s job was the “little struggle,” to go out and find a job, make money, and do all the things that were necessary to provide for enough food, water and shelter for the family. But once he brought those resources home, he was essentially a vestigial organ, an appendix, to the inner workings of the family. Rather, it was the wife-mother who ruled the movements of energy, resources and people within the house.

Unlike Muslim women in Saudi Arabia, the United States’ ally, who couldn’t drive cars or go outside without a chaperone, Iranian women had full autonomy outside the house as well.

They drove, owned businesses and were not shy about telling men what they thought about them when upset. Of course, being Iranian, they’d rarely tell you in an angry tone or use harsh language; rather they’d sweetly remind you of your lapse in intelligence, thoughtfulness and chivalry in a way that made you simultaneously embarrassed and wanting to improve yourself.

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As the summer came to an end, I was again at the end of the road. Instead of exposing an enemy in Iran, I’d found a spiritual teacher of sorts. And with the lessons from China and Iran, I was beginning to understand what Smedley Butler and all those who’d come before me were trying to say. We’re all brothers. War is a racket. Politics is a bastard. Everything is hidden behind the curtain.

I was coming to believe that being good or right isn’t about identity politics. It’s about how to achieve your full potential while providing for those who don’t have enough of the basics.

In the end, good governance is always about the Mandate of Heaven. The lying, cheating, and stealing of the Divine Right of Kings may work out in the short term; the approach may even work for a hundred or two hundred years. But in the long term, over the thousand years spread of time, the truth will always come out and destroy you, your reputation and your offspring.

Stage 3: Moratorium on Achievement

In terms of Marcia’s identity development theories, the time period from 27 to 33 years of age was the shortest stage in my life, and yet, those years were most significant in ways too numerous to list in full. In the classic Moratorium phase, I was in a state of high exploration of new ideas and experiences with a low commitment to anything that restricted my growth.

Moments of personal reflection during this six-year time period were driven by the process of having to answer questions like: “Who are you?”, “Where do you come from?”, “What are you doing here?”, “Why did you decide to do that?”, “Where are you going?” and “How will you get there?” over and over again to different people from different backgrounds in different countries around the world. And having to calibrate my response based on my listener’s ability to understand English, my ability to speak the local language, and our relative relationship with each

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other, the answer was always slightly different, even if my intended answer might have been the same.

But it wasn’t. Because I was changing. Daily.

When I left the United States after completing my military service commitment in 1993, I didn’t know if I would ever return. After graduating from the Naval Academy, SERE, Airborne

School, Ranger School, and participating in the Gulf War and Los Angeles riots, I felt that my best military opportunities were behind me. The Soviet Union had collapsed and there was no military force on the planet that approached America’s military might.

Figure 3

Marcia Identity Development Stage 3

Note. The figure reflects my Stage 3 stage of “Moratorium” characterized by Low Commitment and High Exploration. The transparent stop marker indicated the growing commitment to achieving an identity independent of outside influences. Figure adapted from Socio-Emotional

Development website describing James Marcia’s” Ego Identity Statuses.” Retrieved from https://socioemotional.weebly.com/james-marcia.htm

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And having begun to pick apart the hypocrisies that covered up patriotism’s blind assumptions, my willingness to kill others or sacrifice my life for the “American way of life” had withered. But I didn’t know what else to do. And so, I ping ponged between super patriot, intellectual bohemian, and ascetic monk from day to day, encounter to encounter.

On the one hand, I felt I had all the training and background to become a valuable tool for the United States intelligence community. I had the necessary military background to conduct direct action operations or the “wet work” of destroying things and killing people up close and personal who might be involved. If I successfully learned strategic languages like Chinese or

Farsi, I would be one of a very small number of individuals with a very rare combination of skills.

In the back of my mind, as I tested the edge of civil wars and lived in America’s enemies’ lands, I was repeating Sun Tzu’s Art of War mantra of “know yourself and know the enemy.” But those daily questions of “Who are you?”, “Where do you come from?” and “What are you doing here?” caused me to weigh the value of becoming a super spy differently in the face of new knowledge and experiences.

After getting off my Space-A flight in Germany and beginning my European walkabout, I was free. I had spent the first eighteen years of my life as a military dependent and living in mortal fear of getting in trouble with the law. My four years in the Naval Academy redoubled my fears knowing that any lying, cheating or stealing would result in my expulsion. And then five years as a military officer where my role was now to serve as a model for young men who’d chosen the Marine Corps over jail time or joining a smaller, less well organized and poorly armed gang. But now those external expectations were now gone.

I was a single, healthy, (relatively) wealthy, young man in post-Cold War Europe. My passport had the power to cross borders while my dollars opened doors. It was easy to ascribe the

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“Other’s” warmth and hospitality or simple acceptance of my presence to “me” rather than the entitlements and privileges my citizenship and economic advantages conveyed. And without any repercussions for any conduct “unbecoming of an officer,” I was left to the direction my internal moral compass provided for what actions I could live with.

Therein lay the challenge. My Stage 1 upbringing had been one of relative freedom, as long as I thought about the consequences and did the right thing. At each crossroads I approached,

I could hear my father’s “Think!” and “YOUSTUPIDORWHAT!?!?” echoing at me. And while my mother’s encouragement to push the boundaries, I knew that the further I roamed from the oversight of the United States Government, the less protection I would have if I broke a local law.

As I left the Marine Corps not drinking or smoking and doing twice-a-day workouts, I had little interest in doing drugs or damaging my body in any way. And with part of me wanting to join the CIA or some other clandestine service, I knew I’d have to account for all my actions down the road. But there was no reason I couldn’t have a drink or three, stay up past midnight and wake long after the sun passed BMNT (Begin Morning Nautical Twilight) when we’d normally

“stand to” in preparation for a dawn attack.

The greatest challenges from an identity perspective that I faced day to day was that I’d deliberately slipped my moorings and lost sight of the shore. As a stranger in a strange land, what was normal became whatever everyone else was doing. Luckily, having spent my youth learning to rapidly chameleon myself to whatever background colors and sounds prevailed, I survived by blending in. And the pressure of continually code switching from situation to situation and person to person was probably what kept me sane.

Having to always be “switched on,” watching, assessing, calculating, preparing and acting according to the changing situation dynamics helped me recapture the stress of staying alive on

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the battlefield. Instead of the ruminant sleepwalking that was expected to fit in the herd at home in America, where there were few fatal consequences for stupid actions, being alone in the unfamiliar wilds was exhilarating and required being constantly awake.

Internal questions of “Why did you decide to do that?”, “Where are you going?” and

“How will you get there?” had to be answered for simple tasks like changing money on the street or buying tickets at the train station. There were endless unknown variables to consider when I couldn’t speak the language let alone predict the listener's responses. But after years of the constant pressure of making continuous life or death decisions for myself and the men beneath me, being completely out of my depth provided me with the mental and emotional pressure I needed to transition back to civilian life.

I don’t think I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But then I’d never know because I avoided any psychiatric examination on principle. First, a medical record of mental problems might be grounds for dismissal from the Marines. Second, I worried that any hint of psychosis would block my admittance into the CIA or some other elite intelligence organization.

But more than that, I had faith in my own abilities to figure it out. And if I didn’t, I was ready to die.

By age twenty-seven, I felt I’d exceeded the abilities of my parents, the military or

American society to teach me… anything. I’d done things most people would never attempt and seen things they couldn’t imagine. I’d followed my dad’s example to become a military officer only to discover that the blind obedience to authority put me in positions where I killed people I didn’t know for slights I never felt.

My unconditional faith in the Marine Corps had been shattered when I realized that their promotion of leaders through a supposed absolute meritocracy was tempered by political

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correctness. While the relief of our Company Commander a week before we crossed into Kuwait probably saved lives, I suspected that his being African American allowed him to remain in the position long after his incompetence was known. And the Marine Corps’ unwillingness to support my own desired path for self-improvement proved unsupportable when I knew I could be called to kill or sacrifice my life following a path someone else dictated.

My respect for civilian authority was challenged when I realized LCPL Menendez was right and the Marines really were just another gang, albeit better armed, trained and disciplined.

And after being given the order to put myself and our Marines in a lower state of readiness to return fire during the Los Angeles riots, the political cost-risk-benefit equation became clearer.

The civilian leaders considered the life of a Marine less valuable than a gang banger on the streets of Compton.

My kinship with fellow Americans had been strained when I realized that I had gone to war to provide them the luxuries that cheap oil provided. And if that was not insulting enough, I’d later discovered that Americans couldn’t be bothered to ensure their trucks achieved greater than

25 miles per gallon not because it was technologically impossible, but just because it was inconvenient and might raise their taxes.

And although I had been placed on the launching pad for a rocket ship ascent through the

Marine Corps’ ranks after my assignment to the Marine Air Wing’s headquarters’ staff; if society’s idea of a reward was a bigger desk with a bigger chair that promoted a bigger rear, I wanted no part of it. So, I threw myself at the world, essentially daring reality to kill me. I wanted to test what I thought I knew and the skills I had gained against the unknown situations that would show me what, among all the things my elders had taught me, was actually bulletproof.

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Remembering my state of mind as I got on the Space-A flight from Dover, Delaware to

Stuttgart, Germany, there’s a nostalgia similar to going through old boxes of uniforms and gear only to find a well wrapped knife, still shaving sharp. Grasping the handle and then flipping it back and forth to remember the balance, I can remember the incandescent rage of self- righteousness that sucked the light from the twinkling lights of comfort and entertainment that surrounded me in the United States. As one of those “you had to be there” moments, I have to rely on the famous speech by Colonel Jessup in the movie “A Few Good Men” (Reiner, 1992) to speak for me.

When asked if he had ordered the hazing of a Marine who was not performing to standard, he replied,

You can’t handle the truth.

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men

with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater

responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the

Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that

Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque

and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at

parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.

We use words like "honor," "code," "loyalty." We use these words as the backbone

of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line.

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I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and

sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner

in which I provide it.

I would rather that you just said, "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise, I

suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don't give a DAMN what

you think you're entitled to!

But as no one was saying, “Thank you” and I no longer was standing on the wall, I walked across the line that separated “Us” from “Them” and began my search for truths that remained intact in every situation.

Luckily for me the mighty American dollar was king, and I was able to always leverage the United States’ economic power to my advantage. That’s not to say there weren’t times, like being stuck in Bosnia or Iran, that I didn’t have trouble getting money. But the experiences of

Ranger School and the Gulf War had already taught me that you didn’t really need that much food, water, sleep or shelter to survive. And with an existential understanding of Maslow’s physiological basics, I could push myself to places of discovery that others haven't reached because of their unwillingness to endure physical discomfort or deprivation. Sleep when you’re dead. That which does not kill me makes me stronger

From a Marcia identity development perspective, I had moved from blind belief in my parents’ gods in Stage 1 (ages 0 to 18) and through the Stage 2 (ages 19 to 27) identity vacillation between thinking I’d found an identity that fit and not wanting to think about what that identity meant. But after losing faith in the secular temples of my parents’ and military upbringing, I became wary of any identity or ideology that required unquestioning loyalty. I was immersed in the moratorium phase of searching for something to believe in with an incredibly high standard

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for commitment. I will fight, kill and die for identity, but any definition needs to be able to endure continuity tests that go beyond race, color, creed, religion, culture, history, nationality and family.

And through answering the questions: “Who are you?”, “Where do you come from?”, “What are you doing here?”, “Why did you decide to do that?”, “Where are you going?” and “How will you get there?”; I started to strip away the inessential to find a center point of unassailable logic.

In searching for the common intersection of the identity Venn diagram, I began to realize the challenge was not appreciating reality in all its variable complexities. The more I traveled on the far side of my American education, the more I realized just how much initial conditions determined the trajectory of an individual’s life. That’s not to say that there was no possibility of a triumph of the will that allowed an individual to go beyond their origins. but sharing a humble meal with a former child soldier in Iran or hearing my favorite noodle shop proprietress recount her surviving the Cultural Revolution helped me realize that “there but for the grace of God, go

I.”

Finding common themes of civil responsibility and individual morals in the references as diverse as the Bible, Art of War, Analects of Confucius, Shah Nameh, writings of Mencius, Tao de Jing, and works of Plato helped convince me that there are timeless and universal truths, all capital letter TRUTHs, that are generally applicable across time and space. Furthermore, these

TRUTHs are not limited to any one race, gender, religion, social status, or any other human criteria of social distinction. Rather their existence as timeless and universal meant that they existed outside of any social structure more complex than what happens when two strangers meet in the wilderness: (1) appreciate and love the world around you, and (2) treat the other as you’d like to be treated.

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In that, I began to realize (but not yet embrace) the idea that all the individual intelligence, skills and capabilities in the world are secondary to wisdom and the ability to live in harmony with the natural movements of the universe. In terms of grand wisdom, the above TRUTHs are nothing more than guidelines on how to maximize capital letter LIFE in a reality based on the

Newtonian laws of thermodynamics, namely: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; and every system tends towards chaos.

Funnily enough, my lesson was learned by doing the pee pee dance for the old men and realizing that language and the formal communication of information was less powerful than humor and the ability to transmit emotions without words. That realization that words, sentences and speeches were bottled spiritual energy that existed before and after the intentional vibrations had echoed from throats to ears. This was reinforced by my time living with Iranians, erstwhile enemies of America, who would tell me Ma barodar va barobar “All men are brothers and equal” and then displayed a hospitality towards me that I hadn’t experienced before or since.

That hospitality on the road, devoid of any transactional expectation of quid pro quo, forced me to reexamine both my understanding of my taught understanding of enemies and relationship with money and the socioeconomic value system that I’d adopted through living in

America. The United States wasn’t against the Chinese or the Iranians because they knew nothing about them. Rather the system used public ignorance to ascribe characteristics we didn’t like in ourselves to the “Other,” whether the Chinese, Iranian, African American, or liberal, as a justification to take what they have. And by placing accumulation of capital as representative of social worth, the norms of American society were able to disregard the poor sickening and dying around them, something that seems unimaginable in places like Iran, given what I experienced.

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This realization sparked my desire to bring back this larger TRUTH with the hopes of eliminating the need for other Gregg Nakano’s to go to war and steal resources from the “Other” to provide luxuries for an ignorant, indulgent, unappreciative “Us.” My thought is if individual

Americans could meet Iranians see that “but for the grace of God, that would be me”; maybe

America would be slower to send bombers, cruise missiles and battalions of Marines to storm their shores. But my well-intentioned ideas had not taken into account the totality of the Art of

War’s “Know yourself, know your enemy.”

I had learned something of America’s enemies by living amongst them. But I had yet to learn fully about myself and the United States. My incomplete education about America and new identity as a truth bearer were to be reshaped in returning to the United States.

Coming home, again

Existential education was doing what good you can for the people you live with. And in the absence of doing good, at least doing no harm. The greater the population included in your definition of community, the greater the self-discipline needed to do more with less. For the rest, it was to be happy and content no matter what illusionary external conditions existed, because the kingdom to be captured and ruled justly was the one inside your heart. I decided to return home to

Hawaii to figure out, “What next?”

Of course, I was disappointed when I received the letter in the mail from the USIP. One of the program directors wrote a kindly letter explaining that while my intentions were admirable, I was essentially nobody. I had no degree. I had published no articles. I was not associated with any recognized organization.

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The message was clear. If I wanted access to the system's resources and privileges I would have to submit to its norms and swear obedience to its rules. Ending on a positive note, they wrote, keep at it and let us know when you have done all those things.

And I decided they were right. What did I know that they didn’t?

The Annointing Vessel

I’d always wanted to go to The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts

University. First established in 1933 after World War I, the Fletcher School’s mission is "to prepare men for the diplomatic service, and to teach such matters as come within the scope of foreign relations, [which] embraces…a thorough knowledge of the principles of international law upon which diplomacy is founded." The USIP response seemed like a perfect reason to get my master’s and then go back to try and build bridges between the United States and Iran.

After taking all the requisite entrance exams and sending my application in, I was overjoyed to be accepted into the Class of 2001. Arriving in September of 1999, I went through the pre-academic team building exercises that were designed to help introduce us to each other. It was an intimidating experience to be surrounded by so many beautiful, intelligent and accomplished people at once.

About half of our class were American citizens from a variety of different backgrounds.

The rest were foreign students, many sent by their governments, from over fifty different countries. In the week before our studies began in earnest, I simultaneously awestruck and excited by the variety and range of ideas and perspectives my classmates had.

But as classes started and reality set in, I began to notice something about my foreign classmates that wasn’t immediately apparent on induction day. While everyone was super accomplished and each seemed to be set to be the next Minister of Bhutan or Ambassador to

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South Africa after they graduated, there was a commonality between them. Almost every single one of them came from a privileged background and had never lived on the road with “common people.”

My observation wasn’t a criticism per se, so much as an initial sense of exclusion when they’d talk amongst each other. Even though one might be from France, the other from Venezuela and the third from India, they’d all gone skiing in Gstaad and partied in Biarritz. And they had a knowing air that no matter what happened, nothing was going to change their world or dim their future prospects.

In contrast, the Americans were mostly middle classed like me and hoped the knowledge and degree from Fletcher would allow them to leapfrog to their next stage in life. The purpose of the class composition seemed to be one of allowing the international countries’ elite to gain an understanding of international politics from an American perspective while giving the American students an opportunity to make contacts that might be valuable in the future. My mistake at the time was not understanding that while we were in graduate school, classes were not necessarily debating society.

Given my interest in security studies, I was excited to start our classes examining international strategy from an American perspective. But after our first month, I’d already exceeded the patience of my professor. Having been pressed to think about the underlying causes in Marine Corps Intelligence School and then navigating the structureless discussions with

Muslim seminary students in Qom or Chinese businessmen in Shanghai, I thought we were supposed to dissect and challenge everything that didn’t match what we thought we knew. Not quite so.

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The first couple weeks, the professor would ask, “Does anyone have any questions?” and then dutifully called on me when I raised my hand. By the middle of the semester, he became increasingly annoyed and at one point observed, ““But Gregg, you were a Marine and graduated from the Naval Academy…” as if that somehow should have taught me to accept what he was saying or just shut up. By the end of the semester, he quit trying and would still ask the question,

“Does anyone have any questions?” but ignore my raised hand.

And by the end of the Fall Semester, I was ready to quit. What was I doing at school besides going deeper into debt? My feelings of uselessness had been amplified when Toni

Ruttimann or “Toni El Suizo” visited the campus.

Toni “The Swiss” was a Swiss citizen who’d gone to Ecuador as a high school student to help after a devastating earthquake struck the country. Taking his life savings and several thousand dollars donated by friends and neighbors, Toni flew down to the stricken area and built a

52 meter suspension bridge that reconnected one of the communities isolated by the disaster.

After six months in Ecuador, Toni had returned to Switzerland to start studying to be a civil engineer. But after discovering it would be years before he’d be certified and even more years before actually constructing anything, he went back to Ecuador to build bridges that connected communities to each other. By 1999, when he was visiting Fletcher, Toni and his partners had built over 123 bridges in Ecuador, Columbia, and Honduras, always with donated materials and always with the labor of the local population.

The Fletcher community was hosting a dance that evening and everyone was in high spirits. I remember walking up to the dance hall with Toni and stepping into the auditorium of pulsing thumping music with beautiful young people laughing and dancing together. We stood

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there quietly for a while before Toni snorted gently and asked, “Huhn. Is this the best you can do?”

We didn’t talk about what he meant. But I didn’t imagine we needed to. All this talent. All these privileged intelligent people. All the resources they had access to. And none of them are working to relieve the suffering of the world.

I felt guilty as charged; but only half so. I didn’t feel empowered or entitled. I had no trust fund and wasn’t part of any government or Fortune 500 company. But his life example reminded me of what I had been learning on the road. Just as you don’t need language to get along with people, you don’t need to have resources to help. You merely needed the desire to share what you know to achieve a common purpose.

I slowly began to realize that Fletcher was not about transforming the status quo so much as it was in a finishing school for the elite. The best and the brightest within one nation would be introduced to the best and the brightest from other nations and together they’d create the best and the brightest ideas for elevating their personal position in the international world order. But where did that leave those who couldn’t make it here? Where was the role of people-to-people Track 3

Diplomacy?

Mary’s Room

I remember discussing human rights violations in times of war with a classmate. She was incredulous that anyone would think it was acceptable to rape or torture another person, let alone a minor or elderly person. I tried to explain to her that war itself was an aberration and once you’d chosen that path, all these actions were not only possible but became more probable the longer the conflict lasted.

“But don’t they realize it’s wrong?” she asked.

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I did my best to explain the overpowering emotions: the exhilarating terror of an attack, the feeling of invincibility when you survive, and uncontrollable shakes when it is all over. And I said it’s hard to judge someone else’s actions unless you’d been in their shoes and been faced with their choices and consequences.

“Are you saying I can’t understand it unless I’ve been in war?”

That question stopped me for a minute. Was it possible that you could communicate those feelings and experiences of being in battle to someone who’d never put their life at risk? I didn’t know. So, I asked rhetorically, “You’ve had sex, right?” And not giving her time to answer, I continued, “Well did you ever think about sex or dream about what sex would be like before you had it?”

I could see she was thinking about the question.

“Well, was it the same?”

And she moved us politely on to another topic.

Many years later I’d discovered I’d come upon a thought experiment called Mary’s room where a researcher, Mary, was kept in a world where she only saw things in black and while. She was taught everything quantitatively possible about color: what wavelengths associated with red, yellow or blue; what combinations of colors make purple, orange or green; what emotions are associated with each color; ad infinitum. But if Mary had never actually seen red, green or purple, what would happen when she was released into the world?

The hypothesis that Frank Jackson (1986), who had written “What Mary Didn’t Know”, posited was that there is knowledge that can only be gained through direct conscious experience.

And no matter how much information you were able to cognitively transmit through classroom discussions, it would always fall short of communicating the entire experience being lived in the

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field. And having seen the gulf of awareness between sweating in our foxholes and attending staff meetings at Wing headquarters, it seemed like an obvious observation.

But then what was the value of me being here getting a degree with the elite at Fletcher as opposed to building bridges with the local population with Toni el Suizo in Ecuador? Was it knowledge? Or was it something else?

I sat in on the doctoral exam about Iran by a Fletcher student who’d been at the University of Tehran the same summer I had. They had a great deal of knowledge about the “bonyards” or charitable trust system that funded much of the social relief efforts for injured workers, widows and veterans. They had outlined the way in which money was collected, projects were prioritized and impacts were assessed. And in all it was great doctoral defense.

But is it real?

But I wonder what a host nation expert might think of their conclusions from a local perspective. Was this the case of L.S.B Leakey telling Jomo Kenyatta what Kenyan culture was and being authoritative because Leakey was a dominant white colonizer and Kenyatta was the suppressed black colonist? What if we took the approach of “autoethnography” from a national security perspective? What if we actually opened a dialogue with the Iranians directly so they could tell us what they knew from their daily workings within the system instead of having foreign experts examining the outputs of a system they didn’t design telling other foreigners how it all worked?

And I began to realize there was nothing that the classroom could teach me about the field that I hadn’t already experienced. That’s not to say the classroom research was useless. The nights spent studying the origins of the Durand Line that divided Afghanistan and Pakistan were

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essential for understanding how foreign policy was made. But the knowledge was lifeless without having visited Quetta and shared a ride through the region it bordered on a bus with a goat.

What I began to figure out was that just as I had gone to China and Iran to learn those countries’ languages and cultures, coming to Fletcher was about learning the language and culture of the privileged elite. I was learning the beliefs, priorities and ways of thinking of the people who would make decisions that impacted millions of people. I was not “one of them” in the sense that there was no guaranteed promotion or career advancement after graduation. But successful attainment of the master’s degree was like my military ID card or UN press card in Croatia. It would get me access into doors that might otherwise be denied.

A master’s degree didn’t necessarily provide the graduate any information that wasn’t available on the road. We knew that OSINT or open source intelligence could get you the same information as the technical collection ELINT or COMINT platforms. But the degree provided certification from a known credible authority that its holder would be acceptable to the society they were asking permission to join. It was a pre-screening process for acceptance. And after developing that rationalization for staying, I completed the degree.

My intellectual justification was that I could shout on the streets to protest Davos and the

G8 summit or I could be part of the discussions and change things slowly from within. And even if all I was able to do was help shift 0.01% of the United States’ $9.6 trillion dollar economy in

1999 towards a more peaceful future, that was still $960 million dollars, more than I’d ever make in a hundred lifetimes. But in many ways, I felt like the girl in the bar making a quid pro quo calculation of money, effort, time and benefit rather than embracing a qualitative decision of what

I felt was right in my heart and joining people like Toni.

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As we neared graduation in May 2001, everyone was excited to learn that the UN

Secretary General Kofi Annan would be our graduation speaker. Only eight months before, the leaders of the world had published the Millennium Development Goals that committed to eradicating extreme poverty, providing universal primary education, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, reducing infectious diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and achieving these goals through global partnership. The time seemed ripe for taking my newfound access and doing something good in the world.

Wanting to share my newfound knowledge, I wanted to go back into government service, and submitted letters of interest to both the USAID and the CIA. But as the paperwork began to come back for next steps, I began to think through what the probable second and third order impacts would be. And in the end, it was what I had begun to believe about big “T” Truth that made the decision for me.

While at Fletcher, a Naval Academy classmate and fellow Marine had visited me. He shared that he had been recruited for the CIA’s direct action program while in the Marine Corps.

After going through the selection process and initial training, he had left. He knew that I’d been in intelligence and had traveled to places that the Agency was interested in gaining access. So, when

I asked about his decision to leave, he understood my underlying question.

The people were top notch. The training was great. The program was very professional.

But he wanted to start a family and couldn’t come to terms with continually lying to his wife and kids. How could he build a loving relationship when they didn’t know who he was?

I chewed on what he said for a long time. I didn’t have a wife, kids or desire to start a family. In fact, I’d deliberately avoided intimate personal relationships to have the freedom to make selfish choices. But how good were the actions you were taking if you had to lie to

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everyone about them? And if you were lying to others about what you were doing, do you imagine the people giving you orders aren’t lying to you? And finally, after living in continual lies, how would you ever extract what was actually true?

It was tempting to have access to all the information and power. But when the call came, I thanked them for the invitation and regretfully informed them that I would have to decline. And while I felt spiritually lighter, I was worried about what kind of job I could get.

Valediction

In the last weeks of school, the class was asked who would be the graduation speaker.

Unlike other schools which identified the valedictorian based on academic performance, Fletcher took the approach of letting the students decide. And somehow my classmates selected me.

I was terrified. Not only was the UN Secretary General going to be in the audience but all my classmates, their parents and friends. Most importantly my parents were flying into Boston to

Honolulu. And all that kept repeating in my brain was don’t make an ass of yourself.

But in many ways, this is exactly what I had said I wanted to do. Try and do something that will influence the elites. Provide an opportunity for others to see another perspective. Move the needle on the dial just a little bit towards more human choices. And while I’d experienced moments of sublime calm in the middle of firefights, I was shaking as I took the podium.

Good morning and welcome to the graduation of the class of 2001 for the Fletcher

School of Law and Diplomacy.

When I was told that I’d be speaking today I was overjoyed... until I heard the

warning, “You have to keep it under 5 minutes.” I thought, “How do you put two years of

life changing experience into 5 minutes?” It sounds like your typical Fletcher exam…

Describe the importance of your Fletcher experience and how it integrates with the

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universal paradigm of truth. Be witty, concise and historically accurate. Give examples with footnotes. Original sources preferred. You have five minutes from… now.

To tell you the truth, I wonder if I’m up to the task today. I mean I’ve spent the better part of every waking instant since barely turning in my thesis twisting up this problem in my mind. What do I say and how do I say it?

Do I talk about the 157 students from over 50 countries? How about the first day we arrived and being intimidated because everyone we met seemed to speak at least three languages (two we’d never heard of before), or that the person sitting next to us had started their first Internet company at 16 and (oh yes) played cello for the London

Philharmonic on their time off. Or how about orientation where the foreign minister from

Bhutan argued with the supermodel from Georgia over the best way to throw a rubber chicken? And is that an accurate reflection of what Fletcher is about? I don’t think so.

Well then, what about the classes and the insane reading lists? Or the extra heavy course packs what doubled as dumbbells in the library because we certainly wouldn’t make it to the gym tonight… and I haven’t even begun talking about stealing wine and cheese from lectures unattended or begging for another 5 minutes in the computer lab at

2am in the morning.

I don’t know if any one instant can do justice to what the whole Fletcher experience is about. So perhaps I should concentrate on what makes Fletcher unique.

Perhaps I should just talk about the part of the school that makes each instant of the day a frustratingly joyous experience. And that is all of you here today, the Fletcher community.

For without you, none of this would be possible.

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Today is a celebration like no other, because in beginning anew, we are forced to say goodbye to our old truths and worn comforts. But before we say goodbye, I’d like to remember all the people we’ve shared the journey with and all the people who’ve supported us along the way. Our fathers and mothers who’ve waited patiently as we circumnavigated sanctions against Cuba and checked their pocketbooks as we sank another $10,000 into debt.

We thank our teachers, who challenged us to challenge ourselves by giving us impossible goals so that we could redefine our conception of what was possible. We thank the administration and staff for creating a space of dynamic tension, which is what creation is all about. And last, but not least, we should remember to thank each other for sharing the trials and tribulations of self-doubt that accompany each and every journey of self-discovery, which in the end is what the whole Fletcher experience is about.

We came from different backgrounds to share our lives, hopes and dreams for a brief moment and now, will return to our separate ways. But before we part, I’d like to remind you of three things you have taught me that I hope you will remember as you face the challenges you have chosen to define you.

First - be good to yourself. Only by being gentle, kind and patient with yourself can you begin to be so with others. We are all reflections of one another.

Second- Share everything you have with everyone you are with. Share with everyone, even the worthless and hated, because it is exactly in the worthless and hated that we discover new truths about ourselves and the world around us. Everyone and everything have a purpose, even if we are too blind to recognize it now.

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And last- love without reason. Because love is unreasonable. It will ask you to do

things that you would do for no other reason. All the money in the world and the fame that

goes with it cannot equal the simple thanks of a dying man or the smile of a newborn

child. Follow your hearts and be true to yourselves.

We stand here at the edge of life, each uniquely talented by Nature and each

uniquely gifted by God. We have received opportunities that 99% of the world cannot

imagine. Having received the tools to rebuild anew, we should be mindful that our

contributions will define the future of the world we live in, and our ideals will determine

the truths that will triumph. We are part of a greater family, and we should remember,

honor and respect that.

Dear classmates, I’d like to ask all of you to stand up, look to your left and right,

and embrace your new family, remembering that this day will never pass this way again.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Class of 2001.

Were all endings so bright and rosy. As I look back on my speech, I see many of the ideas and themes that I’d learned on the road in China and Iran. And I think back then, I had a clearer, cleaner view of what was and should be. Each day of living seems to add a new wrinkle of experience that belies any belief that the intellect can comprehend all that is and should be.

I think I also was beginning to formulate the belief in “experiential service learning,” which would be so key to building the Pacific ALLIES program sixteen years later. At this point,

I wouldn’t have recognized the term “experiential service learning,” if you beat me over the head with it. It was more a realization that whatever the intellectual policy decisions that were being made at the upper atmosphere needed to be followed down to the rivers, streams and irrigation ditches on the ground, where people grew their crops and tended their flocks. And without that

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connection between policy and practice, ideas were like rainless clouds that cover the heavens but never provide relief.

I would spend the next three months unemployed finishing my application to USAID and waiting for my security clearance. While I thought it should be a relatively simple process as I had held a TS-SCI clearance and was only being asked to get a TS or Top Secret, my four years in

China and Iran were problematic. After being notified that things were close and it was only a matter of time before I could begin the induction process. I found an apartment and moved down to Washington D.C.

As the days dragged into weeks, I remember feeling more constrained in our nation’s capital than I had felt in Tehran or Shanghai. It wasn’t that there were any barriers to going out exploring. It was more I couldn’t imagine finding anything worth learning. And so, I did laps in the Riverplace apartment complex pool, lifted weights in the gym and went back to the room to read.

And then one day it happened. I remember hearing a “boom” and then a fleet of sirens on the highway outside several minutes later. Remembering Mir Aimal Kansi, who’d attacked CIA agents as they waited to go through the gate to Langley, I morbidly imagined that maybe someone had graduated from the AK-47 assault rifle to an RPG-7 rocket propelled grenade. It wasn’t until I came out of my apartment later that morning, Tuesday 11 September 2001, that it began to dawn on me what was happening.

Alice in Wonderland

I spent the rest of the day with friends either glued to the television, discussing the implications of the attack, or standing on the balcony watching the survivors walking up Highway

110 and the George Washington Parkway after all the roads had been closed off. And weirdly, my

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recurring thought was not about the attack itself but, quite selfishly, my future goals.

I had come back to the United States to create opportunities for Track 3 or people-to- people diplomacy, specifically between the United States and Iran. My enrollment in the Fletcher

School and application to USAID had been to gain the institutional knowledge and credentials that would allow me to secure funding for international exchanges. And yet instinctively I suspected that no matter who was behind the 9/11 attacks, the American leadership would attempt to use the ignorance of the American people and their unfamiliarity with the region's history and economic issues to reshape the balance of power in the world. And Iran, as the international pariah and one of the “usual suspects,” would somehow get splattered with the blame.

As news came out that Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national of Yemeni heritage had executed the attack using only nineteen soldiers leveraging America’s lax security protocols, I was hopeful that all nations in the region wouldn’t be painted with the same brush. Fifteen of the nineteen or 78% of the team had come from Saudi Arabia. Two of the attackers came from the

United Arab Emirates. One came from Egypt. Another from Lebanon. So, the logical place to start any investigation or retaliation would be in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

And as more details emerged about the thinking that had gone into the attacks, the more I marveled at our attackers’ ingenuity. Instead of trying to use explosives at the base of the structure as had been attempted in 1993, bin Laden had decided to use the planes as a flying gas bomb. And by pouring jet fuel into the center of the glass and steel tube that made up the World

Trade Towers, the attackers were able to create a chimney effect that melted the structure from the inside out.

And while I was saddened by the loss of human life, I knew that the line between peace and war, soldier and non-combatant was neither as clear nor clean as classroom lessons would

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have school children believe. Of course, bombs and bullets kill. But as Mencius pointed out, so do bad policies, ignorance and discrimination. And when the people who benefit from the maintenance of the status quo do nothing to address the inequalities, they become legitimate targets of the aggrieved. At least that’s the sentiment America’s Founding Fathers expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is

the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its

foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall

seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

But more than any philosophical justifying of the attack, I respected the dedication, passion and intensity of the attackers. This was the enemy’s A-Team, and they were playing for keeps.

Even twenty years after the attack, I risk being seen as a sympathizer or apologist for what the attackers did by not condemning every fiber of their being. And anyone who reads my comments in a Manichean manner would probably not understand any expression of admiration for their commitment. But I’d slept under the roof of America’s potential enemies, the Iranians and Chinese. I’d shared meals with them and tried to learn their language, understand their culture, history and social values. I knew the level of commitment it took to try and live amidst strangers. And the attackers had done that well.

It was the essence of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Know yourself; know the enemy. And despite all the shortcomings of Al-Qaeda and bin Laden, knowing the West and the United States was something that they had done well. The members of the team had obviously known the strengths of the United States military and avoided any confrontation that placed them toe to toe against the most technologically advanced killing machine on the planet. Instead, they searched out the

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United States’ weaknesses and planned their attack around them.

Al Qaeda had exploited the trust of an open society based on a rule of law. The things that made the United States a beacon of hope to people around the world: the freedom of speech, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the right to personal privacy, the ability to travel without encumbering checkpoints and easy access to credit all created openings that made the attack successful. And now that the United States has declared war on every individual, organization and nation that used violence to oppose American interests at home or abroad, the battle would be won by the combatant who could exploit their opponent’s weaknesses best.

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu quantified the chances of winning a war based on how well you knew yourself and your enemy. Know yourself and your enemy; and you would never fear defeat in a hundred battles. Know yourself but be ignorant of the enemy and you would win 50% of the time. To not know yourself and be ignorant of the enemy; and you were certain to lose every single time. Moreover, Sun Tzu believed that fighting battles was the least efficient way to win and because “war,” as Clausewitz concurred, was “a mere continuation of politics by other means,” having to resort to violence to achieve one’s political objectives was an idiot’s response to a game of wits.

In that, tactics to win battles were important for killing the enemy and saving troop lives but were ultimately not the decisive point for winning the war. And the United States had already been taught this once during the Vietnam War.

As recounted by American Army Colonel Harry Summers (n.d.), in a conversation with his North Vietnamese counterpart in the weeks before the fall of Saigon; Summers told his erstwhile enemy, Vietnamese Colonel Tu, “You know you never beat us on the battlefield.”

“That may be so,” Tu replied, “but it is also irrelevant.”

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The Americans were able to beat the Vietnamese in battle for any number of reasons, including air power, better logistics support, and better equipped troops. In the Americans minds they were fighting a quantitative battle of numbers where when they killed enough Vietnamese, the opposition would stop. The Vietnamese, like the American revolutionaries, Chinese communists and now Al Qaeda, were fighting a qualitative war against oppression.

America lost the Vietnam War because they misread American support for the war (know yourself) and had no interest in understanding the legitimate aspiration of the Vietnamese people to be an independent nation (know your enemy). And armed with the sole goals of returning to the geopolitical status quo ante before French were kicked out and saving face, America continued to lose allies and gain enemies each year it continued fighting. And America was in danger of making the same mistake again.

In 2001, the United States spent as much on the military as all the nations in Asia, Africa and South American combined. There was no military in the world that came close to matching the destructive power of the Department of Defense now that the Soviet Union was gone. But members of Al Qaeda who had fought with the US, Saudi Arabian and Pakistani support to defeat the Soviet Union learned what the American revolutionaries had proved centuries before, that tiny forces can defeat superpowers with guerrilla warfare or as some called it, the War of the Flea

(Taber, 1965).

In the battles ahead, there was no question that the United States could win every shooting battle that they had with Al Qaeda and their ideological brethren. The question was what was the political aim that the United States was trying to achieve by the use of force, and how was it working to defeat the strategies and logic used by the enemy? And without first answering those larger philosophical questions in our own minds and then providing a path to peace with our

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enemies, American military forces would be reduced to playing “whack a mole” against an enemy that grew in number with every non-combatant killed or injured by mistake. And despite having seen the ineffectiveness of using violence to change a people’s minds in Vietnam, America’s

“Global War on Terrorism” was committing the nation to a course of action that would kill and injure tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent sick, elderly and children in response to al

Qaeda’s political demands.

With the challenge, “You’re either with us or against us,” Americans charged headlong into a war with unknown adversaries with the sole intent of returning the world to a status quo ante, a unipolar world order defined by American economic, cultural and political norms held in place by American military force. And rather than spend the time or making the effort to understand the epochal implications of why the 9/11 attacks were initiated and how it was successful, America would spend the next two decades trying to turn back the clock to a history that was disappearing by the second. And though I didn’t have all these thoughts clearly in my mind at the time, I sensed that ignorance, arrogance and hubris were the greatest enemies

American policy makers faced, not Al Qaeda.

In 2002, the National Geographic Global Geographic Literacy Survey found that only

17% of the Americans asked could find Afghanistan on the map, which could be problematic given that the survey targeted respondents 18 to 24 years of age, the most likely demographic sent to fight. Every time I heard a military service member talk disparagingly about “fucking ragheads,” “sand niggers,” “camel jockeys,” or “donkey fuckers” I took it as a failing of our public education system and military training to help those heading to the fight to respect or at least know something about their enemy. Further highlighting the Sun Tzu challenge of knowing yourself and the enemy, nearly a third of the Americans thought the United States population was

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between one and two billion, as compared to the actual 2002 size of 288 million. Most worrisome was the survey that found that one in ten Americans (11%) couldn’t even point out the United

States on a world map, which spelled trouble if that was their sole means of finding their way back home after a fight.

Somehow, I felt that wasn’t my problem anymore. I’d left the military because I didn’t want to resolve disputes with weapons anymore. I’d joined USAID as a steppingstone to build up the credentials to establish a people-to-people diplomacy effort with Iran and other supposed enemies of America. And as I’d submitted my application before the 9/11 attacks, I had no clue how development assistance might be used in the fight. But as I was to find out, everything is always connected everywhere.

When I first learned about USAID, the idea of being a civil-military coordinator of humanitarian assistance in post-disaster responses appealed to me. I hadn’t been able to join the

Peace Corps because of my past association with intelligence. But here was a perfect opportunity to take the knowledge and skills I’d learned in the military and retool them to help others.

USAID was part of what the United States Government (USG) called the “Three D’s” of

American foreign policy or Diplomacy, Development, and Defense. Diplomacy was represented by the State Department and American embassies and consulates around the world. Development was the mission of USAID, reflected by the work in helping countries in need improve their health, education, agriculture and industrial infrastructure. Defense was of course the DoD. But the legs on the stool were unequal in both size and strength.

In 2002, the United States GDP was around $11 trillion dollars. The USG federal budget was around $2.1 trillion dollars or 19%. Out of that, the military’s budget was around $325 billion dollars, which came out to around 15% of the federal budget or 3% of the US GDP. Looked at

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another way, the DoD budget of $325 billion dollars a year was around $890 million dollars a day.

With a total population of 289 million American men, women and children in 2002, that meant the United States spent about $3 dollars a day per person on war, or about the cost of a Big

Mac or Double Whopper that year. That might not seem like much until you compare it to the amount of money that Americans invested in “Diplomacy,” all the State Department diplomats, embassies, and consulates around the world working to get things done by making friends with others, and “Development,” all the overseas health, education, and welfare assistance provided through USAID in the form of textbooks for classrooms, medicine for hospitals, and agricultural research to grow better crops. In comparison to the $3 Double Whopper the United States fed its war machine each day in 2002, Americans only invested about 11 cents on talking to people to resolve disputes and 11 cents on helping others in need for a total of $0.23 on “Diplomacy” and

“Development” combined; not enough to afford a quarter a small $1 bag of fries. All darkly ironic if one considered that illegal migrants in America trying to escape the wars, famines and chaos around the world were the ones who farmed American’s fields, processed its harvests, cooked its food and then served it to those comfortably causing chaos abroad.

And if one measured intent by budget allocations alone, the numbers would indicate that

America policy maintained a death grip on the “divine right of kings” approach where political legitimacy to rule was based on maintaining a monopoly of violence within the governed territory rather than a “mandate of heaven” validation that required rulers to ensure the health, welfare and prosperity of those governed. These contrasts between America’s 3D foreign policy budgets were replicated when it came to personnel.

In 2002, the total number of DoD personnel numbered around 1,400,000 military service

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members. The total number of State Department foreign and civil service officers was 16,930 while the number of USAID direct hires was 1,985. These numbers could be explained in two radically different ways. It could be argued that each USAID development officer was worth 83

State Department foreign or civil service officers and 705 military service members if we based the valuation from development assistance first. If we reversed the valuation to one of war, then for each military service member the United States assigned to an overseas relationship,

Americans would only allocate 0.012 or 1.2% of a single diplomat’s time and 0.0014 or 0.14% of a development assistance officer’s time to the problem.

Having joined USAID two weeks after 9/11, this is the world I was entering into and nothing I’d been taught or experienced to this point prepared me for the international political rollercoaster that I’d ride for the next five years of my life. I remember walking into USAID headquarters located in the Ronald Reagan Building on 1300 Pennsylvania Ave, equidistant from the White House, Washington Monument and Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

After having my passport and driver’s license confirmed, I was signed in and escorted past armed guards in body armor and MP5 submachine guns into the inner sanctum. After getting badged and receiving my initial induction, everything became a blur.

Looking back, I think USAID hiring me, a former military officer who had been abroad, was something of an experiment. Throughout my in processing and during the first year of employment, I don't remember many other people having a military background, at least not openly. And in general, the majority of the USAID employees were, to put it politically incorrectly, liberal minded intellectuals, reformed hippies, tree huggers or some combination of all three. They were also some of the most well educated, humanitarian and globally minded people I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

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Most of my USAID colleagues had gone to a “little Ivy,” one of highly selective public universities or private colleges that offered a first class education at a more affordable cost. While in school they did volunteer work at the local shelter or soup kitchen. After graduation, they found a way overseas to spend five to ten years working and volunteering for the UN or some local NGO overseas.

Some learned the local language. Some got married to a local coworker. But all developed a deep love and respect for the “Other.”

After returning to the United States, my USAID co-workers earned their master’s degrees in economics, political theory or gender studies before applying to the Agency. And now, they were taking their self-directed, hard earned experiences and working to leverage the full power of the United States to make the world a better place. And they graciously taught me something new every day.

Largely ignorant of the international humanitarian community and insensitive to the nuances of economic and gender equality, I often bumped into and sometimes broke the accepted norms of naming situations or discussing topics. But like a group of wise cats observing an overgrown Labrador puppy, slobbering and tracking mud all over the place, my colleagues generally indulged my missteps and hoped I would accelerate my pace of learning to fit in. It was here that my childhood background as a military dependent proved invaluable as I knew enough to spend the first few months keeping my mouth shut, watching how everyone operated and ask lots of questions off to the side of people who seemed sympathetic to my presence.

Even so, my rate of acceptance might have been different had I been assigned to one of the regional offices or health bureau, where the typical flash bang return on investment was measured in terms of generational reduction in maternal mortality or improvements in access to potable

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water. Instead, I was going to be part of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, alternatively referred to as “Oh-FDA” or “off-da” depending on how intimate one was with the work. At the time, OFDA was USAID’s most tactically responsive and operationally structured unit and completely focused on disaster response. Accordingly, it had what was probably the simplest and purest mission statement of any USG organization, “Safe lives, alleviate suffering and reduce the economic impact of disasters.” As a former trigger puller, I could think of no better place to do penance.

The disasters OFDA responded to came in all imaginable forms. Of course, there were the universally recognizable natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. But OFDA also responded to man-made disasters like famines, civil wars, nuclear power plant meltdowns and disease outbreaks. Much like the operational mindset of the Marine Corps, OFDA was the humanitarian “quick clot”, or tourniquet used to keep the patient alive until USAID’s larger, slower more specialized bureaus could assess the situation and develop a long term strategic recovery plan.

In October 2001, as I completed my induction process, OFDA was simultaneously responding to disasters in Afghanistan, Angola, Belize, Burundi, Guatemala, Honduras,

Indonesia, Kenya, Mali, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tajikistan and Zimbabwe. And the operations tempo only increased from there. January 2001, there was a volcanic eruption in the Democratic

Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a refugee crisis in Rwanda that required assistance. In

February a cyclone hit Tonga while a flood overwhelmed the Rio Abajo community in Bolivia that March. Responding to a total of 75 disasters in over 50 countries that year, there was little time to bother with niceties or explain why things were done this way or that. It was a case of pitch in and help or get out of way; OFDA has lives to save and a mission to complete.

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OFDA shifted focus from country to country like New York cab drivers changed lanes. If you didn't know your geography or didn't keep up with CNN minute by minute, you'd be lost when you came in the next day and the team wanted your help moving supplies from Djibouti to

Abuja in the next 48 hours. Although we submitted timesheets like every other government worker, the concept of a 40 hour work week was laughable. A 60 hour work week was accepted by almost everyone at OFDA as the norm and being an organization composed mostly of over- caffeinated adrenaline junkies, we thrived on the overwork. Working to fit in was, as we described it in the military, “drinking from the firehose.” And what I slowly discovered through my on-the-job training was that as part of the “Military Liaison Unit” or MLU, my primary job was to keep the other overeager puppies, America’s military forces, in line.

The challenge being that in the post-Cold War breakup of the Soviet Union, both former republics under the CCCP as well as their client states were unable to maintain basic public infrastructure, sometimes falling into civil war and in the worst cases, anarchy. When combined with drought or flooding that impacted a season’s harvest or destroyed people’s houses, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of average people, could be isolated from access to their basic needs of food, water, shelter and health care. OFDA’s mission was to ensure we eliminated those obstacles.

Called, “complex humanitarian emergencies,” these natural and man-made disasters combined to create a Gordian knot of interconnected relationships with interdependent feedback loops. Unlike the Cold War era where traditional courtesies protected non-combatant humanitarians from theft, attack, rape or murder, large ungoverned areas emerged on the map where food became a currency and selling one’s body for sex or child into slavery was often the only way to survive. And while the arrival of the military was sometimes a valuable resource to

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have, many folks at USAID regarded the US military as a slightly retarded 800 pound gorilla with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In that, one might benefit from inviting the military to airlift food supplies into an area with no viable roads or airports for a 1 week period of time. But woe betide anyone who decided to invite the military to try to solve a long term famine or a drought.

Armed with a large arsenal of destructive weapons and limited selection of constructive tools, the military’s expertise and comfort zone was killing or eliminating any opposition to the immediate goal and compelling obedience of all survivors through threats of pain and destruction.

It was often an extremely effective tactic in the short term and allowed the military to point at the pre-arrival violence and increased delivery of aid to the embattled community. But more often than not, unless the fragile peace was shored up with a rebuilding of public infrastructure and strengthening of civil society’s rule of law, the temporary use of force became like failing to follow a complete course of antibiotics, leaving the violence and chaos to rebound multifold when the military inevitably left.

CENTCOM

As the lead federal agency for overseas disaster response, OFDA had authority over all disasters outside the United States, which were covered by FEMA, the Federal Emergency

Management Agency. Although it was never exactly explained to me this way, my job was to be the “gorilla whisperer”; somehow get into the head of the gorilla and ensure that when USAID needed something, the military would provide it. But also take care that the gorilla didn’t get too interested or involved as they could upset the intricate negotiations and delicate relationships that

USAID had worked to develop with local partners over time. And so as soon as my mentors deemed I’d learned enough about USAID and OFDA’s mission, they sent me down to Central

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Command (CENTCOM), the Geographic Combatant Command (GCC) that covered the Middle

East.

A quick note of explanation here might be useful. Unlike many other nations that might concern themselves with the nations they share a border with, the United States had divided up the world into GCC’s that are then placed under a four star general or admiral, who ensures that the counties within that regional command conduct themselves in a manner that the United States approves of.

Figure 2

Map of Geographic Combatant Commands (GCC)

Note. The figure reflects the geographic divisions that represent the area of responsibility for each

Geographic Combatant Commanders. This image is copied from the Department of Defense’s

United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) which supports all the GCCs.

Retrieved from https://www.ustranscom.mil/cmd/associated/customs/gcc.cfm

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In general, the regional groupings are based on physical proximity. But the actual selection of which countries should be in which GCC is a matter of culture and history as much as economics, politics or military threat. This leads to quirky anomalies like Israel, which is clearly in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, being part of European Command (EUCOM); or previously having the African nations included under EUCOM until 2007, when it no longer become politically correct to have newly independent nations lumped together with their former colonial overlords.

Still, the actual headquarters of the GCC didn’t always have to be in the same location or even time zone as the countries controlled, although for the Western nations, it is. NORTHCOM headquarters, which covers the United States, Canada, and Mexico, sensibly has its headquarters in Colorado. Similarly, EUCOM headquarters, which covers the fifty one countries traditionally associated with Europe, has its headquarters in Germany. Less obvious is the reasoning behind placing AFRICOM’s headquarters in Germany or CENTCOM’s headquarters in Florida. But these sorts of details were of little concern to me as I got on the plane from Washington DC to

Tampa, Florida. My job was to figure out how USAID would work with the DoD gorilla on the emerging challenges in Afghanistan.

While the United States had invaded Afghanistan in October of 2001 and had overthrown the Taliban government in a matter of weeks, the greatest challenge facing the United States now was one of creating a stable nation that could take care of its people and become a productive member of the international economic system the United States controlled. Perhaps most important and pressing for a post-9/11 America was finding Osama bin Laden, who had been allowed by the Taliban to reside in Afghanistan and ensure that any remaining elements of Al

Qaeda were expelled.

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In the wake of 9/11, there was enormous international support for the United States with

136 nations offering military support to catch and punish the perpetrator. Even countries normally antagonistic to America like Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Libya condemned the attacks. By the time I landed in Tampa and drove to MacDill Air Force Base, there were military representatives from forty seven nations waiting to help in any way possible. With each nation occupying a double wide trailer, the parking lot in front of CENTCOM resembled a mini UN with clusters of military Arabic speakers from Jordan, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia bumping into Europeans from Slovenia, Sweden and Estonia all working to communicate with the Asians from Japan,

Mongolia and Korea.

As I walked down the halls of CENTCOM, I’d see a patchwork of illustrated letters sent by Ms. Adam’s fifth grade class praying for our safety or a large poster from some school in

Kentucky exhorting us to get the “bad guys” Scotch taped on the command’s concrete walls. The outpouring of patriotism reminded me of the stacks of letters we received during the first Gulf

War addressed to “Any Service Man,” telling us to stay healthy, kill the enemy, and come back home in one piece. And it was interesting to see the blank check approval for our impending attacks being validated by school children across the country.

Each morning, I’d get up early to get through my daily emails before heading to the auditorium for the CENTCOM Commander's morning brief. Shuffling in with the other liaison and staff action officers, we tried to ensure our seats gave each of us a clear view of the large cinema sized screen at the front of the room as well as the expressions of our bosses or any other key individuals we needed to work with during the day. After finding our place and nodding to each other in mutual recognition, we’d prepare to take notes on what caught our boss’s attention, or the key priorities identified for the day. Then muffled murmuring until the minute hand hit

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twelve and then, “Attention on deck.” Everyone stopped talking and stood up from their seats in the position of attention before the senior officer briefly looked up from the conversation he was engaged in to say, “Carry on” and we all sat back down.

The CENTCOM AOR was defined by Egypt to the west, Yemen to the south, Pakistan to the east, Kazakhstan to the north and encircled hotspot countries like Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

Encompassing a land area of 4 million square miles, CENTOM was larger than the landmass of the Continental United States. The combined national populations exceeded 500 million people from at least 22 different ethnic groups speaking more than 15 languages with hundreds of dialects. The region also was the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and is home to roughly 2/3rds of the entire world oil reserves. As we watched the tightly orchestrated briefing covering the twenty countries in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility (AOR), we’d get a broad overview of the key events of the past 24 hours with any potential actions needed in the next 72 hours.

Each slide had been put together with dozens of staff officers and polished over the course of the previous day to provide just the right amount of information with enough specificity to be actionable yet not enough detail to bog down the flow. The slides reflected the Commander’s preferences - even details such as text size and font. The biggest compliment to the briefing team was having the Commander calling out a particular detail on a slide and saying, “Tom, drill down on force structure” and allowing the briefing team to display the backup slide they prepared to display the current disposition and strength of military forces in Afghanistan, before the

Commander would back out of the information rabbit hole with, “Good. Continue.” The impressive graphics, polished presentations and genteel rituals made me feel like I was on the set of a major Hollywood film until I remembered that we were the original to the entertainment

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industry’s copy and the decisions made here would end lives and create nations.

As I worked to get up to speed on the variety and masses of data being projected on the screen, I was reminded of the utility behind the service academy training that focused on developing the ability to absorb enormous volumes of information and be able to spit out embedded details at a later day on command. After I got to know some of the action officers who were responsible for producing the slides, I realized that briefing was an art form where one needed to master the ability to transmit critical information within a particular format while maintaining a narrative that was interesting to follow. And while there were opportunities to be creative, most of the work was a mechanical grind of checking and rechecking sources, determining the acceptability of references, and thinking through two, three and four steps ahead of the boss in case he got interested in doing a deep dive into any one particular topic.

Of course, it was an honor to dangle a lead that enticed the boss to ask for more information, but a professional embarrassment if you hadn’t thought through the answers that he’d probably want. But the ones who were successful jokingly called themselves “PowerPoint

Rangers,” in reference to the endless hours of screen viewing and keyboard typing associated with drafting, editing, revising, polishing and updating each slide before the daily brief. And while some individuals were able to thrive in the environment, most real Rangers viewed an assignment to a combatant command as banishment to one of Dante’s nine rings of hell.

For myself, the briefings impressed upon me the massive contrast in available personnel between the DoD and State Department (83:1) or DoD and USAID (705:1). While the military could assign dozens of staff to help put together the CENTCOM Commander’s daily briefings,

USAID was hard pressed to find enough personnel to visit all the countries it had projects in. And the situation wasn’t getting any better.

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During the Cold War, there was a competition between the Soviet Union and the United

States to attract the non-aligned “Third World” into communism or capitalism’s respective orbits.

But after the dissolution of the Soviet Union around the time of the first Gulf War in 1990, there was only one option, the American way. And thus, Congressional interest in maintaining a professional pool of development assistance officers diminished causing the total number of

USAID foreign and civil service officers who would get a retirement after decades of faithful service to drop by a third from 3,163 in 1992 to only 1,985 in 2002.

Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t diminish the former Soviet republics and client nations' need for economic assistance. The empty corner store in Romania stocked only with jars of cherries during my European walkabout had shown me that. And as I saw in Croatia, in the absence of the basic food, water, shelter and healthcare, multi-ethnic nations “balkanized” into smaller communities that defined themselves by more personalized commonalities of race, religion, ethnicity or history. The result was that at the same time that USAID’s personnel rosters were being cut 37%, the number of countries needing USAID assistance had increased 93%, from

82 countries in 1992 to 159 in 2002. So, while the DoD had dozens of PowerPoint Rangers available to argue the finer points of what to include in the Commander’s morning briefs, understaffed USAID field offices were trying to cover the eighty-eight countries without

American representation resulting in the shuttering of strategic communication projects like the

American Culture Center in Quetta that I passed on my way to Iran.

Personnel challenges were even more urgent when brought down to the tactical responses of OFDA. There were only about 130 employees available to coordinate and respond to the 75 different disasters OFDA responded to in 2002, which meant that we were always shorthanded.

As the boss of the Military Liaison Unit liked to point out, there were more musicians in the

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Marine Corps Band (160) than OFDA, the lead federal agency for all the United States overseas disaster responses worldwide.

To complicate things, out of the 130 people in OFDA, there were really only about 30 direct hire foreign or civil service USAID officers. The rest of us, including myself, were either secunded from another federal agency or Personal Services Contractors (PSCs) on short term contracts. The final result was that OFDA had a >50% turnover rate in personnel every three years.

Early on, I realized that as an army of one, the only way to beat the 705:1 odds of DoD to

USAID was to approach my engagement like a virus. If I was going to make any impact, I’d have to get into the mental processes of the military’s decision making loop and infect the commander’s staff, his PowerPoint Rangers, with USAID priorities, metrics and values. And going back to the Art of War mechanism of winning without fighting, I worked to use the Aikido method of redirecting the military’s enormous communication, logistics and command abilities energy in a way that might “save lives, alleviate suffering and reduce the economic impact of disasters.”

After the Commander’s briefing I'd go back out to confer with the coalition’s foreign military partners who were working with USAID teams on the ground overseas. And through them, reverse engineer which American military teams were working complementary efforts to

USAID. It was through them that I was first introduced to the United States Army’s Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC).

While the “big Army” and conventional military forces specialize in killing people and breaking things, Civil Affairs or “CA” units focus on rebuilding civil society in the aftermath of war which means working “by, with and through” the civilian population. Formally established in

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the aftermath of World War II, civil affairs units helped rebuild a crippled Europe. While focused on supporting the military objectives of the local commander, civil affairs commanders often gained the support of the local population by addressing priorities that might have no battlefield value, like replacing a church bell that had been taken by Mussolini in the romanticized retelling

A Bell for Adano (Hersey, 1944).

Civil Affairs were often considered misfits to the “real” military service members, because they tended to be a little different. Because they needed to be able to live and work with the local population, they did not always maintain a ramrod straight posture or have the habit of speaking in loud, clear, short sentences as if giving orders. Civil affairs specialists often slouched, smiled and joked a lot, and wore uniforms that might only have a passing acquaintance with starch. But this was mostly an act to get the civilians to see them as “one of us” and share information that might not otherwise be proffered to intimidating martinets.

Required to swim effortlessly between civilian and military communities as well as have a good understanding of the regional and trans-regional political-military dynamics, civil affairs specialists who’d been in country a while were a wealth of knowledge for “who’s who in the zoo” being able to tell you Who runs Chicago? (Kilian et al., 1979) in whatever small African, Asian or South American town they found themselves in. Most of the civil affairs officers I had the pleasure of working with were gregarious, easy going, natural scroungers as well as some of the most thoughtful, inventive and resourceful thinkers I encountered in my time with USAID. And more importantly, they provided me with a model for how I should work.

That said, not everyone in the military believed that they needed to work with civilians to fight Al Qaeda and regarded anyone not in their unit or at least the military as a potential spy.

While this operations security (OpSec) posture was understandable when discussing the tactical

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details of ongoing or planned operations, it made less sense when the “I have a secret” attitude was used with potential partners who had more valuable information than you did. One example that sticks in my mind was the attitude of superior knowledge taken towards the United Nations liaison officer (LNO) sent down from New York to facilitate coordination with CENTCOM in order to minimize civilian casualties.

The UN LNO, Mr. Waltz, was a retired US Army colonel and was perfectly placed to translate the military jargon into humanitarian equivalents. While he could have provided

CENTCOM planners background information on the ongoing UN activities in each of the twenty countries in the AOR, Mr. Waltz was normally sequestered in one of the double wide trailers with me and the other CA personnel. That was fine by him and knowing his way around bureaucracies, he was able to do his job despite the obstacles placed in his way. But the level of fear in releasing classified information seemed excessive to someone like me.

It made sense that foreign officers weren’t allowed in the CENTCOM Commander’s daily briefings. Although some nations with special relationships were granted exceptions. And in general, the UN and international organizations (IO’s) like the International Federation of the Red

Cross (IFRC), Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), or International

Organization for Migration (IOM), were similarly excluded from participation. But given that the

UN rep was an American citizen, retired senior military officer, and there to improve coordination with our international partners, it seemed counterproductive to keep guessing everyone about the

“big blue arrow” or broad strategic objectives and macro timelines the Command was pursuing.

The reason was that those details were often unconcealable against any competent adversary.

If you think about all the different steps and details that go into planning a two week family trip to a destination that requires a passport, you can imagine the complexity of preparing

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the 4,000 service members of an Army brigade combat team to deploy for 6 months. Besides the last minute checks of equipment and personnel health records or requisitioning of food and ammunition, there are leases to be renegotiated, spouses and dependents to be taken care of and a million other touch points that connect the military to the community that surrounds it. Unless you’re dealing with a small autonomous unit that no one knows about, somebody always knows.

So, when I asked my military counterpart why they excluded the retired Col Waltz, they said, “It’s the weather.”

“Huh?”

“Well, the briefings cover anticipated weather for the next 72 hours. Based on the weather forecasts, enemy units will know whether or not we can conduct air operations; and if constrained, what type.”

That seemed like a made up excuse to me in that America was supposedly fighting terror cells made up of individuals dedicated to an ideological cause. My guess was that the planners of

9/11 were worried less about the United States’ ability to launch air attacks against them and more about being located in the first place. And that meant people on the ground who could read maps, speak the local language and had the necessary relationships to get the information needed.

And that was the UN, IO and NGO communities working with local colleagues throughout the region.

After a month or so at CENTCOM, I flew back to DC where I was soon reassigned to

European Command or EUCOM, the geographic combatant command that had oversight of all the countries in Europe and Africa. My job was to represent USAID’s interests in EUCOM’s

JIACG or Joint Interagency Coordination Group, one of the newly established mechanisms to facilitate information exchange between all the agencies in the US Government. As one of the

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first people in the position, my real job was to help USAID figure out what administrative hoops needed to be jumped through and what the opportunity costs of staffing the position were versus the hundreds of other empty positions that might need a military liaison officer.

First was the passing of security clearances to make sure I was allowed into the building and could be talked to by the FBI, CIA, Department of Treasury and other liaison officers already working on the team. Then was the badging, finding a workspace, getting a computer, and establishing a classified and unclassified presence both physically and electronically. Finally, was the work of getting to know my coworkers, understanding EUCOM’s priorities and the internal dynamics of the workday. I think I failed at all three tasks.

EUCOM was the second Geographic Combatant Command established by the United

States in 1952 to help facilitate the coordination of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or

NATO as it is generally known. Established in 1949 to help facilitate the rebuilding of Europe in the aftermath of World War II, it was founded by twelve original members: United States, United

Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, the

Netherlands, and Portugal. With the United States being the first among equals in the relationship,

EUCOM was established in Germany with the EUCOM Commander being dual hatted as both the United States’ commander of all American military troops in Europe and Africa; and the

Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), who led SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters

Allied Powers Europe.

Greece and Turkey entered NATO in 1952 and were followed soon after by Germany in

1955. Spain joined NATO in 1982 after the end of the Franco dictatorship and joined the rest of

Western Europe. In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO, with Bulgaria,

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia following in 2004. European nations

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continue to add to NATO’s membership roster with Albania and Croatia joining in 2009,

Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020 for a total of thirty member nations today.

Of course, the Soviet Union had established the Warsaw Pact, the mutual defense treaty of

Eastern European nations in 1955, six years after the creation of NATO and three years after the establishment of EUCOM. But with its dissolution in 1990, former Warsaw Pact members:

Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), East Germany (now reunited with West Germany), Hungary, Poland and Romania, were all now part of the Western orbit. And in 2002, the SACEUR and EUCOM Commander, Air Force General Joe Ralston, was simultaneously focused on ensuring the force protection and operational readiness of the more than 70,000 American civilian and military service members living in hundreds of military bases scattered across Europe while maintaining military control of EUCOM’s AOR, which before the creation of AFRICOM in 2007, covered 91 countries and territories representing more than 13 million square miles, roughly four times the area of the Continental United States; all while trying to woo the newly independent Eastern European nations into joining NATO and get everyone to support America’s Global War on Terrorism.

For these reasons, among others, I decided not to be offended when I was never invited for an office call with the big boss. On the contrary, I wanted to find my niche, understand how to add value and begin working to show results. And OFDA had already thought about how they wanted me to do that. After being issued my badges and desk and memorizing my access passwords; I was sent to the south of France to inspect one of the commercial vehicles that OFDA was getting fitted with bulletproof armor.

Mr. Bairdain

In my memory, it’s one of those time warp scenes, like the tongue of flame in the desert,

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where I can see the train station with the overhead power lines and open railway lines stretching off toward there and beyond. I don’t even remember how I got there, as logically would have started my journey in Stuttgart, as that’s the location of Patch Barracks, EUCOM’s Headquarters or Frankfurt, the nearest international airport about two hours away. But I don’t remember any airline tickets in my pocket or overnight bag. Stepping off the train in some small city on the coast of France, I’m looking for my contact who I've never met or seen before, Mr. Bill Bairdain, an

American with expertise in armoring commercial vehicles for private firms outside the United

States.

I get off the train. It’s morning. The air is crisp and clean, chilly even. There are few people on the platform. And I spot a gentleman in a tweed jacket, wearing jeans, sensible walking shoes and a grandfatherly sort of smile on his face.

“Gregg?” he asks. I confirm. Extended hand. Hands shook. Bags shouldered. “The car’s this way.” And we exit the platform and drive off.

I know that bits and pieces of these memories are imagined. Part of my mind tells me that

Bill had a Van Dyke beard, which another part tells me that’s incorrect, because Bill never sported a mustache. But in my mind’s eye, he’s there like a Hogwarts professor, about to introduce me to my first lesson in the wonderful world of wizarding.

After checking into the hotel, we head down to the company headquarters, and we’re introduced to the manager of OFDA’s account. Bill and I are offered coffee and we are given a review of the project information, which Bill confirms and then we’re whisked off to lunch. It’s a beautiful cafe with a bright white interior and cozy feel. We walk on the wood floors to a table near the window and I’m offered a seat overlooking the water.

Lunch is served with white wine, which Bill suggests I shouldn’t pass up. It complements

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the fish. Imprudently I imbibe and being unfamiliar with noonday drink, feel the alcohol go straight to my head.

Somehow through the fizzle, I feel my conscience tingling the base of my skull; I’ve failed a first test and am being watched by both parties for my second misstep. It’s like the old saying, “If you’re invited to a poker game with card sharks and don’t see the chump... ‘Tag, you’re it.’”

These boys are old hands and knew each other from past transactions. They had history from different times and banter jobs back and forth like badminton players at a friendly exhibition match. “Did you hear about the new lamination process Saint-Gobain is working on? I heard they achieved Level 5 with only …” or “You can do that. But then you lose on speed and mobility. I prefer naked jackrabbit to armored turtle” and “But even if the OEM spec is actually 150% of the

GVWR how do you get around the shift in center of gravity?” Blissfully ignorant of the language being spoken, I squinted in concentration, smiled politely and turned my head appropriately as each speaker responded in turn. It was all English, but it reminded me of hearing Farsi or Chinese for the first time again.

It only occurred to me years later that although I represented “the client” and therefore the money, my role was not expected to be active in any way. In fact, the less I interfered in the process, the smoother the transaction would go. It was back to Airborne School and putting my trust in all the people and systems that brought these two people together to hammer out what was what and how to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution.

“Are we ready?” Bill asked. And not knowing we had finished, I smiled in relief and reverted to my comfort zone, “Yes, sir.”

I remember fishing around for my wallet and trying to get a look at the check to pay my

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portion of lunch. Bill smiled brightly at the gesture and quietly leaned over to let me know, “It’s taken care of.” Waiting near the exit, the company rep smiled at my fumbling the same way you might regard a child who’d dropped his wet lollipop in the playground sand. At least they were kind about my inexperience.

The afternoon was spent in the hotel unpacking, cleaning up, and returning emails that were arriving now that the day was starting in Washington DC. At dinner, I learned that Bill had arranged a visit to the factory before we checked out the vehicle in question. And there began my one-on-one master class about armoring.

Bill had been in the business for decades and knew things I couldn’t imagine to ask him about. Of course, there was the basic information you needed to understand when talking armoring to other armorers. First were the levels of armor to protect against everything from a .22 caliber pistol barrel (Level 1) to the five 7.62 mm armor piercing rounds fired from a long barreled rifle (Level 8). Then came the different materials used to absorb or deflect the impact of the round (ceramic, steel, glass, aramid fibers, polycarbonate, acrylic...). Then came the different considerations and trade-offs behind selecting one material and system over another to include threat, visibility, weight, conformability, longevity, post-impact resilience and cost. And finally, the biggest issue everything was measured against, “Why?”

As Bill pointed out, the best protection was never being a target in the first place. It went back to the “cover and concealment” class I’d given back in Marine Officer Basic School. If the enemy can’t see you, they can’t put their rifle sights on you. This also means your vehicle and armoring should be indistinguishable from the surrounding environment. You shouldn’t drive a car that isn’t normally seen on the roads you’re driving, and your armoring shouldn’t identify itself as being protected.

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The second best is to be able to disappear. Disappearing means that your vehicle should be able to get out of range of the weapon being used to attack it. You need to select an armor and vehicle that has the speed and maneuverability necessary to rapidly exit the kill zone and quickly negotiate any obstacles between the ambush site and safety of your home base. The weight of an excessively armored car will not only slow your vehicle down, but also limit the number of escape routes you’re able to utilize.

Bill emphasized, there are no perfect solutions. Even if you have all the money in the world, there are always tradeoffs because you never can predict with 100% accuracy the type of weapon being used against you, the place you’ll be attacked and how intangibles will play out on the day everything happens. And the next morning, we were treated to a tour of the factory where all the magic happened.

Just like the surreal experience of attending the CENTCOM Commander’s daily briefings,

I felt as if I was on a set of a James Bond movie with a “Q” speaking in a charming French accent. This is the materials testing lab. These are the different materials we normally use. Here is the indoor shooting range where we do quality control. You can see here some of the examples of the difference between full metal jacket versus hollow point as compared to armor piercing. Of course, these are all fired at the standard distance of ten meters at a 90 degree angle because… and then…which, of course you know, means...

I regretted at that point that I didn’t have my notepad on my or better yet, voice recorder.

Although I suspect the information would have been somewhat less forthcoming as soon as I turned it on. And part of the volubility of the explanations from the armoring company representative was less for my benefit and more to assure Bill that the company was professional and knew what it was doing. After an hour or two tracking through the factory floor, we were led

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to the garage where the newly armored OFDA vehicle was parked.

“And, here we are.”

“Ok. Great. Thank you very much. Just give me an hour or so and I’ll give you my assessment.”

“Of course. You can call me on my office number or just tell anyone here that you need to get a hold of me. Is there anything else you need?”

“No. Thank you very much. We’ll call as soon as we’re done.”

And as the armoring company rep left the garage, Bill turned to me and said, “Let’s get to work.”

Having no value in the inspection, I stepped back to give Bill room and asked, “Mind if I watch?”

“Of course not. Come.”

After hearing Bill’s detailed explanation of the complexities of armoring I was excited to see how an expert determines the bulletproof integrity of a vehicle. I placed my jacket on a chair, rolled up my sleeves and watched as Bill took a slow walk around the vehicle before starting in one corner and slowly examining the exterior following the lines of vehicle panels and pillars, like a scanner, searching for any anomalies. The next step was opening all the doors, hood and trunk and examining the welding, paint and interior upholstery.

After a couple minutes, he said, “Ok. Looks good.” Bill then stepped back and walked back to his briefcase. Giving me a smile, he opened the lid and pulled out a wire coat hanger, the kind you find in a cheap hotel, and said, “Now let’s see what they did.” And then he went to work finding the gaps in their work.

Bill began by untwisting the neck of the hanger before straightening it out into a three foot

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long prod. He began by searching out every point where there were wires going into or air tubes to ensure there was no direct line of sight going into the armored box that protected the driver and passengers. After prodding for openings, he began peeling back the interior upholstery and checking for any gaps in the metal welding seams, pushing the straightened coat hanger from the inside out and then in reverse. After about half an hour, he was done.

“Good. But not great.” Motioning for me to come closer. “Look here,” he said, pushing the coat hanger from the back corner of the trunk area into the main compartment. “That won’t work. It’ll need to be redone.” And Bill stepped back to call the company rep with his assessment.

We were done here.

Later, Bill explained to me that armoring was never a panacea and, if done improperly, could cause more problems than it solved. The reason had to do with mindset and implications.

People decided to armor their vehicles because they had identified a viable threat. Armoring their vehicle was part of a cost-risk-benefit calculation that prioritized the individual’s need to be in a location of risk over anything else. The challenge of armoring the car was that it caused some people to believe that they were more invulnerable than they were and to take increasingly greater risks without corresponding benefit to one’s mission, job or life.

Bill’s explanation reminded me of the guidance one of my Fletcher classmates from South

Africa, Matse Keshupilwe, had given me about walking alone in the African bush, “Just carry a stick.” The daughter of a former African National Congress leader when the United States still designated the ANC a terrorist organization, Matse had grown up in Botswana before being raised in the best schools all over the world. On a scholarship to Fletcher as the Nelson Mandela

Economics Fellow, she kindly helped me expand my thinking on race, colonialism, and religion.

“But why not a machete or gun?” I asked.

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“No, no,” Matse smiled brightly, as if pleased with my naivete. “You make mistakes when you rely on force.”

Matse went on to explain that the stick wasn’t for hitting things or defending yourself, but helping you climb hills, clear brush, or test the depth of water being crossed. The thing that kept you safe was your gut or instincts of what and where was or was not safe.

Matse shared that just as you didn’t want to meet most of the animals of the jungle, they also didn’t really want to meet you. In the open savanna, where you could be seen, and animals would usually retreat before you even saw them. Within the jungle or grass, they’d smell or hear you before you stumbled across them. As long as you walked slowly and made some noise with your approach, they’d move before you arrived.

The challenge was that carrying a gun made people reckless. Weapons, Matse believed, made people overestimate their power and abilities. And believing the gun gave them rights and privileges that the wilderness had to obey, individuals ended up being drowned, poisoned, crushed and eaten by nature.

“But how’s a stick going to stop you from being eaten by a lion?” I asked.

“It’s not,” Matse smiled.

“So, what’s the point?”

“If you are only carrying a stick, you’ll never venture into a place where a lion can eat you. Your common sense and gut will tell you where to stop. When to turn around.”

All of which seemed to mirror Bill’s lesson with armoring. Don’t make yourself a target in the first place. But Bill followed up with another observation about armoring that I hadn’t thought about before. Improper armoring can be more dangerous than no armoring at all.

Apparently, what most people don’t understand is that if you don’t have a properly

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armored car, it can be more deadly than a completely unarmored car. This is because if a bullet was able to find an entry point, as Bill had discovered with his magic coat hanger, it would continue to ricochet within the metal box until all the kinetic energy had been expended. And as steel has a greater elasticity than rubber, the bullet could only be slowed down by flesh and bones meaning you might be hit two or three times by the same bullet instead of just passing through you and the vehicle once, as would be the case in an unarmored vehicle.

Thus ended my 48 hour master class on vehicle armoring. I returned to my desk with the

JIACG at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart the next day. And several weeks later, I was flying back to another desk in Washington DC.

If anything, my time in Washington DC was being thrown into alphabet soup and learning the priorities, responsibilities and legal authorities of the largest, richest, most powerful government in the world. There were recognizable acronyms like CIA, FBI, DoD, or HHS. But in the course of international disaster response work, we’d be seated next to representatives from

PRM (Department of State’s Bureau of Populations, Refugees and Migration), InR (Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research), FAS (Department of Agriculture’s Foreign

Agricultural Service), NGA (Department of Defense’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and told, “Here’s the problem, here’s the desired outcome, here are the obstacles and resources; now give us your best estimate on the way forward. Actually, that’s an idealized version of how we could have solved problems.

Most of the time we’d be brought into an ongoing discussion piecemeal and consulted on one piece of a larger puzzle that the leadership was working on. Many times, a particular course of action had already been predetermined as a political necessity. The result was our advice might be limited to how to ensure the United States’ response was able to get into Pakistan first or

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ensure we used this particular delivery platform rather asking us if it was necessary to go to

Pakistan in the first place or if there might be other means of accomplishing the same objective cheaper, faster, or, best yet, in a way that empowered the local community and by strengthening national capacity to reduce the need for America to respond in the future.

What I was slowly learning was that everyone was predisposed to responding in an immediate action-reaction manner to the immediate Maslow needs of food, water, shelter, health of the disaster affected population without investing much time or effort in understanding how social, political, or economic inequalities created physical vulnerabilities to natural phenomena or how to prevent the recurrence of a similar disaster at a later date. That was someone else’s job.

Not that I would ever have questioned any leadership priorities or decisions at the time. I didn’t have the experience to understand the consequences of actions and reactions, let alone the reference points to compare potential second and third order effects. Drinking from the firehose, I was just trying to keep up and avoid drowning.

With the invasion of Afghanistan complete and the Taliban government overthrown, the

United States became the de facto occupying power as defined by American military forces being the uncontested dominant armed force in the country as defined by the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Conventions. As the occupying power, the United States now had the duties and responsibilities to restore and ensure public order and safety of the Afghan people, as well as provide for their food, hygiene and medical care. The occupying power should also ensure protected persons, civilians not party to the conflict, were not taken hostage or subject to reprisals and revenge killings.

Instead of repeating the American military occupation of Germany (1945-1949) and Japan

(1945-1952) instituted by the United States after World War II, the United States decided to

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immediately create an Afghan shell government that would release it from the international law obligations of restoring normal civil functions. With the expulsion of Taliban leadership from

Kabul on 17 December 2001, the United States “facilitated” the selection of Hamid Karzai

(Whitlock, 2019) as the president of the Afghan Interim Authority (AIA) on 22 December 2001.

Coalition partners at CENTCOM were enlisted to help non-Taliban Afghan leaders begin the nation building process.

Italy was given responsibility for rebuilding Afghanistan’s judicial system. Germany became responsible for rebuilding the Afghan police force. The UK took the lead on curbing illegal drug use while Japan began tackling the disarmament and reintegration of Afghan warlords into civil society under a rule of law (Solis, 2009). The United States would take on the responsibility of rebuilding the Afghan military to make sure the nation could defend itself.

OFDA’s role in all of this was to address the immediate needs arising out of the “complex humanitarian emergency.”

The challenges facing the foreign advisors were immense. From 1979 to 1989, the United

States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported radical violent religious fundamentalists by pumping billions of dollars’ worth of food, weapons and equipment to oppose the Soviet occupation of

Afghan. “Operation Cyclone,” the religiously defined insurgency coordinated by the CIA was simultaneously attributed with contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Al

Qaeda. But after the expulsion of Soviet forces in 1989, the United States abandoned any grand plans to rebuild a civil society in Afghanistan allowing the country to fall into a state of civil war between the regional warlords.

By 1996, the Taliban had secured military control of the greatest portion of the country.

The name Taliban comes from the Urdu language word for “the students” and represented a

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militia composed largely of Afghan orphans and refugees who had been educated in the madrasas,

Islamic religious schools, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Using whatever resources they had at their disposal, the religious scholars at the madrasas gave the best education they could to the next generation’s leaders.

Mujahideen Math

With University of Nebraska at Omaha textbooks funded by USAID, third grade math students during the war against the Soviets were educated through such practical questions as

“One group of mujahidin attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russian soldiers were killed. How many Russians fled?” (Davis, 2002)

By fourth grade, the math questions advanced from simple addition and subtraction to multiplication and division.

“The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a

distance of 3,200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head,

calculate how many seconds will it take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the

forehead.”

An Afghan child born on the run from the Soviet invasion (1979 to 1989) might spend ten years living at the minimums of Maslow’s essential needs in a Pakistani refugee camp, hearing of the heroic Afghan revolutionary war against the atheistic Russians. Young Afghan orphan and refugee children would spend another six years (1990 to 1996) learning how the international community had used the Afghan people like pawns in a revival of the “Great Game” to enrich themselves at Afghanistan’s expense. And when you connect the dots of: (1) an estimated 2.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, (2) average Afghan household size of eight individuals, (3) an Afghan life expectancy of 55 years of age; you can calculate up to 1.8 million Afghan youths

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ideologically primed to fight to the death for their religious beliefs against any unbelievers. Thus in 1997, when I was passing through Karachi on my way to Iran via Quetta, it was completely normal for a group of young men to look at me and claim they’d won the Cold War for the United

States.

While likely ignorant of their obligations as the occupying power under international law in 1996, the Taliban appreciated the need to govern using norms understood by everyone who had survived the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war. And given the decade of religious jihad schoolbooks printed to facilitate the CIA’s Operation Cyclone goal of leveraging violent radical

Islamic fundamentalism to overthrow the Soviet forces, sharia law, the fundamentalist Islamic tenets for social interaction, would have been a logical choice. However, instead of taking the

Iranian interpretation of sharia law, which has a liberal policy towards gender equality in the classroom; the Taliban adopted the gender education norms of their refugee camps and Pakistani hosts denying girls from attending school after fifth or sixth grade.

But as the Cold War victors, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan did little in

1990 to rebuild roads, power plants, telephone lines, irrigation systems, hospitals, schools, and houses destroyed in the United States-Soviet Union proxy war battleground. Thus, the Afghan people welcomed any form of governance that provided both protection against chaotic violence and Maslow’s basic need. In the absence of any humanitarian assistance or reconstruction efforts from the West, the surviving Afghans who remained in-country would be hearing the interpretation of world events through the eyes of Mullah Omar, the Supreme Leader of the

Taliban or Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda. And after nearly a generation of fighting

(1979 to 1997), the most affluent and educated Afghans had been able to make their way to the

West, where I’d sometimes meet Afghan university professors driving taxi cabs in Washington,

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D.C. Of those who remained, the local Taliban representatives would have been some of the most educated and organized leaders available.

Now that the Taliban was finally unifying the country under a single nation government, the West was back. Except this time, it would be the Americans on the ground instead of the

Soviets. And ironically, after nurturing a radical violent Islamic agenda against the Soviet’s secular government during the Cold War, the Americans were pushing for the same things that the Soviets had been promoting during their occupation to include democratic elections, separation of Church and State, promotion of national authority over local familial relationships, universal access to basic healthcare, gender equality, women in the workforce… and I was a microscopic cog in the immense American bureaucracy helping make it so.

Of course, there was a need to provide humanitarian assistance. After twenty years of continuous warfare, there were 6 to 7 million Afghan refugees living outside the country of which about 5 million resided in neighboring Pakistan or Iran. Another one million Afghans were IDPs

(internally displaced persons), uprooted from their hometown and family support network, living in an unfamiliar location without reliable means of support. And as the only difference was that in

1979 the invaders were the Soviets and now in 2001 it was the American, it felt as if the United

States had learned nothing from the Vietnam War where America entered into a civil war of national liberation where they took the place of a defeated colonial overlord, the French by continuing a France’s losing strategy.

It goes without saying that the Americans, like the Soviet troops before them, could win in any toe to toe military engagement that the Taliban, Al Qaeda or local militia chose to engage on the battlefield through better technology and superior firepower. But as the American strategy offered no improvement to the marginal quality of life (health, education, shelter) for the average

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Afghan, there was no shift towards rule of law, stability and peace.

Why? The American problem seemed less about resources available and more about self- perception, identity and values. Like the Athenians talking to the Melians during the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian wars, the Americans believed that a question of right and wrong is only a question to discuss between those of equal power, whilst in other situations, ”the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

In 2001, the United States was the undisputed leader of the world in terms of economic prosperity, cultural dominance and military might. Afghanistan was not even a budgetary rounding error in comparison. And because the United States had embraced the “divine right of kings” logic for rule which equates military might with moral “Right”; American policy makers just expected that their demands would be obeyed. Full stop.

No matter that the Founding Fathers had been in the position of the Afghans in 1776 fighting for the American Revolutionary War for religious freedom and political self- determination against the British monarchy, the superpower of that age. Apparently, the United

States policy makers belief in American exceptionalism meant that they were immune from repeating history’s mistakes whether it was the Soviet’s folly in the 1980’s or Great Britain’s defeats in Afghanistan a century earlier. And American disdain for studying the past was about to test Santayana’s theory, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the United States’ per capita GDP was somewhere in the range of $37,000, meaning every one of the 285 million American men, women and children had access to an average of about $101 dollars a day. At the same time by comparison, the per capita

GDP of Afghanistan was around $180 dollars, meaning that each one of the 21 million Afghan men, women and children had access to about 50 cents a day.

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Figure 5

Average annual per capita GDP - Afghanistan

Note. This figure is a bar graph showing the World Bank estimates of the average annual per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from 1960 to 2019. The inset shows that the average

Afghan made $179.43 when the United States overthrew the Taliban in 2002. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=AF

Recognized as the global hyperpower, American language and culture had become the lingua franca for diplomacy, business, and transportation. All UN directives and peace treaties were primarily negotiated in English before being printed in the other five UN languages of

Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. As the United States had the largest economy in the world, countries wanting to do business with American had to first learn to speak English.

And as international commerce expanded, all airplane pilots and ship captains were required to learn enough English to take off and land at international airports or depart and return to port.

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With an estimated 630 million people speaking English as a first or second language out of a 2001 global population of 6.2 billion, it was expected that roughly 50% of the world’s population would be functionally proficient by 2050.

The lingua franca of Afghanistan, Dari, was spoken as a first language of only 77% of the

Afghan population or 16 million people and even those speakers had a regional lahijeh or dialect that distinguished inhabitants of one district from another. And while Hollywood was a multibillion dollar industry spreading the English language, American culture and values around the world, there was no equivalent in Afghanistan.

Finally, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, 2020), the United States military budget was around $280 billion USD in 2000 or about 37% of the total world expenditure on weapons or $756 billion USD that year. The $280 billion dollars that the

United States spent on weapons was more than the military budgets of all the nations in Asia,

Africa, North America and South America combined. Framed another way, America’s $280 billion dollar a year investment in purchasing weapons and preparing its military forces for war equaled $760 million dollars a day or equal to Afghanistan’s entire national GDP every three days. The situation reminded me of the classic Hollywood plot of the rich, ignorant, entitled snot beating up on the poor, hardworking, morally righteous underdog before being put back into their place. The problem being that America was playing the role of the privileged aggressor.

Rich, powerful and universally recognized by the developed world as the essential country of the future, the United States of America seemed to feel entitled to issue commands that could not be denied. But even in the glittering splendor of its cities and the awesome power its military forces were able to project, America’s actions abroad reminded me of Matse’s warning about bringing more than a stick to the jungle. There were always unknowns surviving in the wilderness

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that could be fatally dangerous to the civilized society who were completely unimpressed by any hype.

Even so, the above description would probably still be incomprehensible as a comparison to what the United States’ military budget meant for the average Afghan. Given the miniscule annual per capita GDP earnings of the average Afghan, we need to consider the cost of the smallest component of projecting military power. For the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who represented American boots on the ground, that symbol is the M16A2 combat rifle, which cost between $586 (FAS, 2000) and $237 a copy.

If we accept the SIPRI estimate of the DoD budget of $280,620,000,000 in the year 2000, that budget can be converted into $8,898.40/second spent on military weapons and personnel maintenance. Calculations below:

● ($280,620,000,000/year) / (365 days/year) = $786,821,917/day

● ($786,821,917/day) / (24 hours/day) = $32,034,246/hour

● ($32,034,246/hour) / (60 minutes/hour) = $533,904/minute

● ($533,904/minute) / (60 seconds/hour) = $8,898.40/second

● $8,898.40/second/ (1000 milliseconds/second) = $8.90/millisecond

This means that the basic tool of the infantry soldier on the ground in battle, the M16A2 cost roughly between 66 and 27 milliseconds of the United States military budget.

[(@$586/M16A2) / ($8.898/millisecond of DoD budget)] = 65.85 milliseconds/M16A2.

[(@$237/M16A2) / ($8.898/millisecond of DoD budget)] = 26.64 milliseconds/M16A2.

So, what does this mean in Afghanistan?

M16A2 Math

The average family size in Afghanistan is estimated at 8 people (United Nations,

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Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). At $180 per capita

GDP, an average Afghan family would make around $1,440 a year. At $237 a copy, a single

M16A2 would represent the combined earnings of an average Afghan family for roughly 60 days or two months. At $586 a copy, a single M16A2 would represent 148 days or nearly half a year's earnings of an entire Afghan family.

Add to the cost of the M16A2, the per unit cost of 30.5 cents for each 5.56 bullet. A single magazine of 30 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition fired out of a M16A2 represented $9.16 in munitions costs.

Remembering that the annual Afghan per capita GDP in the year 2000 was around $180 or

49.32 cents per day, an Afghan family of eight would hope to have $3.94 to live off of each day.

This means that the 30 rounds of ammunition costing $9.16 would be the equivalent to more than what an Afghan family of eight could hope to earn in two days. At the maximum rate of fire (700 rounds/minute), a soldier could fire all 30 rounds in less than 3 seconds.

And with a soldier or Marine carrying a minimum combat load of seven 30-round magazines, the 210 rounds of ammunition represents $65 dollars in cost for ammunition. A standard platoon at full strength, like the once I commanded in the first Gulf War, is forty three

Marines. If they were engaged in a firefight where only half of them fired half their full combat load in a firefight, the total cost in ammunition would be around $670 dollars, nearly half a year’s earnings for the Afghan family of eight.

● 43 Marines x 50% = 21 Marines

● 210 rounds x 50% = 105 rounds.

● 30.5 cents/round 5.56 mm ammunition

● 21 Marines x 105 rounds x 30.5 cents/round 5.56 mm ammunition = $672.52 USD

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Of course, this is like the combat math that the University of Nebraska textbooks taught the Afghan refugees in Taliban led madrasahs in Pakistan.

I’m not saying I was doing these calculations in the winter of 2001 and sitting in the command briefings of CENTCOM or EUCOM. When I wasn’t unpacking and repacking, getting on and off airplanes, switching badges and passwords, or swiping in and out of commands, I was trying to stay abreast of the hunt for Bin Laden and emerging narrative being built into the

“Global War on Terrorism.” I remember getting that itchy feeling that something wasn’t kosher when I read about the first capture of Afghan prisoners and watched the reporting on the first

American casualties of the war.

Castle of War

25 November 2001, Johnny Michael Spann a CIA agent from the Special Activities

Division interrogated John Philip Walker Lindh, an American volunteer supporting Afghan forces fighting the Northern Alliance. The television stations broadcast clips of the interrogation and

Newsweek later provided a transcript of Spann interrogating Lindh (Soloway, 2001). (Edited for brevity).

Spann [to Walker]: Hey you. Right here with your head down. Look at me. I know you

speak English. Look at me. Where did you get the British military sweater?

Spann squats down on the edge of the blanket, facing Walker.

Spann: Where are you from? Where are you from? You believe in what you’re doing here

that much, you’re willing to be killed here? How were you recruited to come here? Who

brought you here? Hey! Spann snaps his fingers in front of Walker’s face. Walker is

unresponsive.

Spann: Who brought you here? Wake up! Who brought you here to Afghanistan? How did

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you get here?

Long pause.

Spann: What, are you puzzled?

Spann kneels on the blanket and takes aim with a digital camera.

Spann: Put your head up. Don’t make me have to get them to hold your head up. Push your hair back. Push your hair back so I can see your face.

An Afghan soldier pulls Walker’s hair back and holds his head up for the picture.

Spann: You got to talk to me. All I want to do is talk to you and find out what your story is. I know you speak English.

Another CIA agent walks up.

Other Agent: Mike!

Spann [to Other Agent]: Yeah, he won’t talk to me.

Other Agent: OK, all right. We explained what the deal is to him.

Spann: I was explaining to the guy we just want to talk to him, find out what his story is.

Other Agent [to Spann]: The problem is, he’s got to decide if he wants to live or die and die here. We’re just going to leave him, and he’s going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life. It’s his decision, man. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us. We can only get the Red Cross to help so many guys.

Spann [to Walker]: Do you know the people here you’re working with are terrorists and killed other Muslims? There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New

York City. Is that what the Koran teaches? I don’t think so. Are you going to talk to us?

Walker does not respond

Other Agent [to Spann]: That’s all right man. Gotta give him a chance, he got his chance.

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Spann and other Agent stand and talk to each other. Both look frustrated. Spann stands

with his hands on his hips, and other Agent kicks up some dust with his boot.

Spann [to Other Agent]: Did you get a chance to look at any of the passports?

Other Agent: There’s a couple of Saudis and I didn’t see the others.

Spann: I wonder what this guy’s got?

Shortly after the video stops, the Afghan prisoners who had been rounded up by the Northern

Alliance stage a revolt against their captors.

Seventy-two hours later, out of the five hundred odd Afghan and foreign fighters in captivity, only 86 fighters survive. CIA Special Operations Group agent, Johnny “Mike” Spann, former Marine Captain, father of three, aged thirty-two is dead. John Walker Lindh, aka

Sulayman al-Faris or “Solomon, knight of peace,” single and twenty years old at the time, is alive.

But for the grace of God

At the time, I didn’t have too much time to think about the paths that led Johnny Spann and John Lindh to meet in some dusty old fort near Mazar-i-Sharif, 6,853 miles away from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and 7,275 miles from Marin California, where Lindh’s family lived. But looking back, I can see them as extreme versions of what I could have become had I taken different paths in life.

For Lindh, it would have been a simple case of going to Afghanistan instead of Iran after getting off the train in Quetta City in 1997. Instead of jumping on the overnight bus with a bleating goat and bouncing 392 dusty miles west to Taftan on the Iran-Pakistan border (roughly the same distance between Washington DC and Boston), I could have taken a shorter trip, some

80 miles northwest to the town of Chaman, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (roughly the same distance between New York and Philadelphia). From there, Chaman, it would have been a short

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taxi or minivan trip of 10 miles, about half the distance between Tijuana and San Diego and with fewer border restrictions, before reaching Spin Boldak, the border town inside Afghanistan.

Instead of studying Farsi at the University of Tehran, I’d have learned Dari, the Afghan version of the same language. Instead of the cosmopolitan Iranian infused Shia version of Islam, I would have been immersed in the tribal Sunni Afghan version of the faith. And as 1996 represented beginning of the Third Afghan Civil War, I probably would have embraced the

Taliban’s Pashtun/Pakistani cultural perspectives of Jihad Asghar or the “little struggle” of faith against the physical manifestations of oppression rather than the Sufi infused mystical journey of

Jihad Akbar or the “great struggle” against the delusions of the self that marked Iranian culture and belief.

By 2001, if I survived, I would be fluent in the language, religion and culture. I would have fought and killed many times over my body count in the first Gulf War with the United

States Marine Corps. And I would have probably been leading the foreign fighter unit that Lindh joined in May of 2001. For my almost being Spann, my transition to becoming a CIA agent was a case of the path not taken, twice.

I had sent my letter of interest to the Agency in 1993 after leaving the Marine Corps.

When the full application packet arrived at my parents’ address, my official home of record; I was on my European walkabout contemplating going to China or returning to the United States. Had I been accepted into the fold, I very well might have still gone to study Mandarin in China and/or

Farsi in Iran. But under a completely different set of directions and reasons for doing so.

My second opportunity to join the CIA arrived as I was graduating from Fletcher. I had filled out the short half sheet with my contact information and put it into the wire tray indicating my interest in applying to the service. And having received the non-descript phone call asking me

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if I was still interested in beginning the process after finishing all my finals, I easily could have been at the same place that day.

Having studied enough Farsi to be able to interrogate the Afghan prisoners in Dari, it’s probable that I would have been selected to ride horseback alongside “Mike,” as the CIA and

Special Forces team rode into Mazar-i-Sharif with the Northern Alliance. But I may or may not have survived the Battle for the Qala-i-Jangi or “Castle of War” where Spann was killed. Instead, on 25 November 2001, I was sitting at USAID Headquarters, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW,

Washington, DC 20004 in a centrally heated office cubicle hammering away on a computer keyboard ten-minute’s walk from the White House, FBI Headquarters, Smithsonian Museum or

Washington Monument, depending on what direction I took.

The difference had been my desire to establish “Track Three” or people-to-people diplomacy options between the United States and Iran, two nations in conflict by taking Lincoln’s approach of destroying our enemies by making them friends. Had I learned nothing from my time in the Marine Corps and tried to resolve things with the gun, I could easily have ended up as

Johnny Mike Spann or John Walker Lindh, a dead hero or imprisoned traitor. In many ways, the reality shifting outcomes of a single decision seemed like Alice in Wonderland’s miniaturizing potion or, perhaps more accurately, the perception shifts associated with choosing the blue pill or the red pill in the movie the Matrix. Simply, a finger snap decision at critical turning points in one’s past could result in irreversible trajectories that determined the range of imaginable futures for decades and possibly for life.

In 1936, George Orwell wrote in his reminiscences from the Spanish Civil War in

Homage to Catalonia, “We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and

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it is often the lesser evil.” Then Orwell went on to expound on Christ’s wisdom (Matthew 26:52) that, “Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, part of me wished that I was slinging lead and fighting tooth and nail in the “Castle of War” with Mike, John, and the 500 hundred odd prisoners for “Truth,

Justice and the American Way.” But there was a growing part of me that realized the battle of the living was about surviving disasters, famines and the smelly diseases rather than killing one another over ideas and slogans that didn’t clothe, shelter or feed people. Perhaps those thoughts were the beginning of old age or maturity as others like to call it. Perhaps they were the seeds of cowardice because I was unwilling to risk my life to kill another who didn’t agree with what I believed. But a bigger point that I came away from the interrogation of John Walker Lindh and the death of Johnny Mike Spann was the potential differences education could have on the life choices an individual makes.

I remember watching the video of the field interrogation and shaking my head in disbelief.

John and Johnny were both born American citizens, but the bold arrogance of Spann and the submissive intensity of Lindh seemed to reflect that they were experiencing two distinct realities even though they happened to be occupying the same space and time. Spann knew that he was in charge, backed up by the world’s biggest economy and most destructive military force. While relatively alone in the middle of a foreign country where he didn’t speak the local language, but he could turn around and grab an encrypted VHF radio or satellite phone to order devastating air strikes to rain missiles, bombs and gunfire on everyone in sight, which is exactly what American and British soldiers and special agents did after the prison uprising started.

In contrast, Lindh was an individual who’d given up the protections his citizenship

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provided by going to Afghanistan, where the US Embassy had been evacuated in 1989 after the

Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan ended and the country’s utility in the Cold War ended.

Lind’s identity was not tied up with being American, but rather an individual wanting to fight against the injustices that he believed were being perpetrated against members of his newly adopted faith, Islam. Of course, Lindh or “al-Faris” as he then called himself, understood English, the language that Spann was using. But the questions Spann was asking no longer had any relevance.

When I went back to look at their upbringing, the inevitability of their attitudes became apparent. Spann was born in 1969 in the small town of Winfield, Alabama located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains about 26 miles east of the Mississippi State line. Today, Winfield has a population of about 4,500 inhabitants and the dubious fame of being the headquarters of a division of the Ku Klux Klan called “The Traditional Confederate Knights” (Southern Poverty

Law Center, 2016). In 1969, when Johnny Spann was born, Winfield had only about 3,000 people, meaning that just about everyone knew just about everything about each other’s lives.

According to Wikipedia, Spann played football in school, got his private pilot’s license at

17 and went parachuting and SCUBA diving. While attending Auburn University, he joined the

Marine Corps Reserve and was commissioned as a Marine Corps officer after graduating in 1992.

Spann served six years in the Marine Corps reaching the rank of Captain before leaving to join the

CIA in 1999. There he spent two years in the CIA “SAD” (Special Activities Directorate) before being deployed to collect intelligence from prisoners in the “Castle of War.” Spann died at age

32.

According to Wikipedia, John Walker Lind was born in Washington D.C. in 1981 and was named after John Lennon, who had been murdered only two months earlier. John’s father was a

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lawyer for the Justice Department and the family were practicing Catholics attending Mass every

Sunday. According to one neighbor, the entire family was “intellectually curious, very thoughtful and very philosophical, always interested in new ideas.” (Sanchez, 2019)

When John Walker Lindh was 10, the family moved to San Anselm, a well-to-do town of

12,000 inhabitants to include George Lucas of Star Wars fame, roughly twenty miles north of San

Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge. After turning fourteen, John attended Redwood High

School for a semester before attending Tamiscal High School, an alternative education school which focuses on nurturing successful independent learners (Borger, 2002). By 1997, John’s parents’ marriage began to unravel with his father declaring his homosexuality and living apart from the family with his partner in San Francisco for extended periods of time (Goldberg, 2002;

Roche et al., 2002). John, now sixteen years old, passed the California High School Proficiency

Exam and began studying Islam in earnest.

In 1998, when I was finishing up my studies at the University of Tehran and Mike Spann was making his transition from the Marines to the CIA; John Walker Lindh traveled to Yemen, where he learned enough Arabic in ten months to read the Quran. In 1999, as I was starting the

Fletcher School and Mike Spann was going through his induction training, John spent eight months back in California while his parents finalized their divorce. In 2000, as Mike Spann was working for the CIA SAD doing “James Bond” type missions around the world, John went back to Yemen before heading to Pakistan to study in a madrasa or the Islamic equivalent of Christian seminary.

In May 2001, as I was sharing the stage with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to deliver the Fletcher School valedictory speech, John was traveling north with his madrasah classmates and co-religionists to the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Six months later, when John

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Walker Lindh and Johnny Mike Spann met on 25 November 2001, their ability to understand each other would have been hampered by a lack of shared perspectives of what exactly was

“Truth, Justice and the American Way” and how you protect it. And while I never met either

Mike or John, I feel I have some ability to comment on their journeys and the relative complexity of both.

In many ways, my path was very similar to Mike’s. While I moved every three years and

Mike stayed in the same town all his youth, the bases I grew up on were like small villages that resembled each other no matter where you were in the world. Like Mike, I’d been a Marine officer, gone combat arms and had attended advanced military training schools. Like Mike I’d considered joining the CIA, although he took the final step, whereas I drew back.

In some ways, my path was similar to John’s. I too had become disillusioned with the logic and rules that governed the United States and looked outside for alternative explanations.

Like John, I traveled to distant lands to study the language, culture and religion of a community much different than my own. But I never took the final step of converting to Islam or promising to fight in its name.

That said, if I had to compare the amount of independent thinking and soul searching required for the two different journeys, I believe that John Walker Lindh’s path was orders of magnitude greater in complexity and difficulty than Johnny Mike Spann’s. My logic is that I’d essentially done everything Mike Spann had, which was sanctioned and encouraged by the society I’d been brought up in. But I hadn’t accomplished what John Walker Lindh had done in terms of language proficiency or physical acculturation, all of which was against the accepted norms of he’d been raised in. And without any sense of shame or disloyalty to America, I believe what John Walker Lindh did was enormously courageous. More than that, John had created an

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identity that was of his own making, rather slipping on Mike Spann’s off-the-rack “one size fits most” status quo CIA identity that had previously existed. John Walker Lindh was unique.

All of this would have been treasonous to express in 2002, when President Bush was telling the world, “You’re either with us or against us.” After the planes hit the World Trade

Center and the Pentagon, I knew that any dream of building a Track Three diplomacy between the

US and Iran was going to have to wait at least ten years, no matter who was responsible until

America’s desire for revenge subsided. But what disappointed me most was exactly how ignorant the American people were and how cynically American leaders exploited the electorates’ lack of critical thinking skills to advance personal agendas.

What to think?

One of education’s most hackneyed sayings is: “We don’t teach you what to think. We teach you HOW to think.” With regard to Americans and international relations, this is patently untrue. And I point to the Pavlovian response of the American public after 9/11 as evidence.

In some ways, I was not surprised to read the jingoistic pap that spewed out from the

Western media outlets in the wake of 9/11. I’d read enough about history to “Remember the

Maine” and William Randolph Hearst’s famous statement, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” to know the ability of the press to sway the general public. But I was surprised to see how hungrily the American people lapped the “Us versus Them” narrative up.

Of course, political, religious and business leaders had used gender, race, religion, nationality and class to divide, conquer and ride herd over their citizenry since the beginning of history. But what amazed me was how unthinking American support for a violent response was. It all began with a simple suspension of logic when trying to discern where the real threats came from.

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Of the nineteen individuals who executed the 9/11 attacks came from four countries. One was from Egypt (5%), one was from Lebanon (5%), two were from the United Arab Emirates

(10%) and the other fifteen hijackers or nearly 80% of the team citizens of Saudi Arabia. If one were a police detective or academic researcher, you might want to start your inquiries in Saudi

Arabia, UAE, Lebanon or Egypt. And yet here was America focusing all its attention on

Afghanistan. If one took a deeper dive into the genesis of the 9/11 attacks, the search for the source of terrorism didn’t lead to Afghanistan or spotlight the Taliban, but instead Pakistan, the country the United States used to funnel weapons during the Cold War or Saudi Arabia, the country whose national religion nurtured an extreme radical violent fundamentalist version of

Islam in Afghanistan.

Seeds of destruction

And while Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian citizen from Yemen, gets most of the headline attention for planning and executing the 9/11 attacks, the concept of using planes to take down the World Trade Center was as much the brainchild of Khalid Sheik Mohammad from

Pakistan. KSM as he was called by those following him is thought to have been born on 1 March

1964, the same day as Johnny Mike Spann, only five years earlier. And although thought to have been born in Kuwait, KSM is known to have been raised in Baluchistan, Pakistan, the sparsely populated wilderness region that borders Afghanistan and Iran that the overnight bus from Quetta to Taftan traversed in the summer of 1997.

KSM’s father was an imam or Islamic preacher of the Deobandi sect, which was a major religious sect within the Taliban, much like Christian Fundamentalists are associated with the conservative Republican movement. As the United States implemented the Green Belt strategy of radicalizing Islamic sects to repel the Soviet southward expansion through religiously fueled

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violence, the Deobandi sect was selected as one of the local religious sects to be used by the CIA to funnel money, supplies and arms from the Pakistani and Saudi Arabian governments to mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan (Ashraf, 2012; Reeves, 2014)

In some ways, KSM’s childhood in the boonies of Pakistan surrounded by death, fighting, holy warriors and refugees streaming across the border, might not have been too different from any true believer minority believing that they were struggling against a corrupt “Mene, Mene,

Tekel, Upharsin” (Daniel 5:25) sea of unbelievers, like the KKK in Winfield, Alabama. And though Spann’s immediate family members probably weren’t active KKK members, as that would have been flagged in his security clearance investigation, they likely had friends and neighbors who were. Correspondingly, even if KSM hadn’t been actively recruited or indoctrinated by a violent radical version of Islam in his youth, he would have had friends, neighbors and relatives who were.

Like John Walker Lindh would do some fifteen years later, KSM made a choice to take a different path at 16 years of age. KSM joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which believed that the religious teaching of the Quran should be the basis of civil society and national government and

Islam should be used to liberate Muslims from foreign non-Muslim oppressors. After graduating high school in Pakistan, KSM traveled to the United States in 1983, where he enrolled in Chowan

College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Ironically, Chowan College, a private Baptist college, expects students to study Christianity extensively to include singing, prayers and Bible study on top of attending regular academic classes. And while no mention of KSM’s aptitude in religious studies is readily available, according to Dr. Garth Faile, his chemistry teacher at the time, KSM was one of the best students (Temple-Raston, 2009).

Already fluent in Balochi, the local language of his childhood, Urdu, the national language

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of Pakistan, and Arabic, the language of parents and the Quran, KSM was able to pick enough

English at Chowan College to feel comfortable transferring to North Carolina Agricultural and

Technical State University in Greensboro after only one semester. There, KSM studied mechanical engineering, graduating early after only two and a half years in 1986. In 1987, the same year I was disappointed not to be allowed to go to Pakistan as part of my First Class

Summer Cruise at the Naval Academy; KSM was back home with a BS in engineering and began supporting the mujahideen efforts to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

From most accounts, KSM lived and worked in Pakistan for the next six years. During the same time that I was sent to the first Gulf War and Los Angeles riots, KSM was celebrating the victorious expulsion of the Soviet Union by religious freedom fighters from Afghanistan and watching the country fall into chaos. In 1993, as Mike Spann was entering the Marine Corps and I was leaving it to go on my European walkabout, KSM was moving his family to Qatar, where he had been hired as an engineer.

According to unclassified media accounts, KSM would spend the next eight years utilizing his American university acquired chemistry skills and engineering degree to plan and execute increasingly deadly attacks against the United States and governments that supported the West.

KSM’s first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center was in 1993, using a car bomb filled with an improvised explosive device. After that failed attempt, KSM conceived a plan to plant time bombs on multiple airliners and beta tested his plan in 1994, resulting in the death of a

Japanese citizen flying home after vacation on Philippine Airlines.

Although not originally a member of Al Qaeda, KSM’s shared interest in attacking the

United States resulted in his being placed in contact with Osama bin Laden, collaborating and eventually joining forces. KSM shared his ideas of bombing airplanes and attacking the World

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Trade Center, a symbol of American economic dominance around the world with Osama bin

Laden. Bin Laden used background expertise in construction engineering and personal funds to create and execute the 9/11 strategy.

Prodigal Son

Osama bin Laden, the principal funder and co-architect of the 9/11 attacks was a Saudi citizen by birth. Although Osama’s father, Mohammad bin Laden was originally from Yemen, the bin Laden family built a multibillion-dollar construction company by developing close ties with the Saudi royal family and becoming a favorite choice for some of the country's largest infrastructure projects. Osama’s mother, Hamida al-Attas was originally from Syria and the eleventh wife of the twenty two wives Osama’s father would marry before dying in 1967. While

Hamida only remained married for a year between 1956 to 1957, Osama inherited $25 million dollars, (Economist, 2011) after Mohamad bin Laden’s assets were divided amongst his fifty two children. It was primarily this inheritance money, earned by Osama’s father by building roads, skyscrapers and critical infrastructure for the royal Saudi family, that was used to fund Al

Qaeda’s attacks (Dobbs & Anderson, 2001). These works included bin Laden Sr. building the

King Abdul Aziz Air Base, (Golden et al., 2001; Neumeister, 2007) for the United States Air

Force, the same airfield that was used by ARAMCO since 1946 and by U.S. airplanes forces to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait during the first Gulf War in 1991 (Grathwol & Moorhus, 2009).

None of the key architects or funders of the 9/11 attacks were Afghans or had any direct tie to the Taliban government. The inference that a population that barely survived a brutal war with the Soviet Union and was eking out a living on 50 cents a day in the midst of an equally brutal civil war had the time to come up with ideas to attack the United States, interpret religious texts to justify killing non-combatants or the resources to pay for the airline tickets or pilot

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lessons used to execute the 9/11 attacks begs a suspension of all logic.

The funding and personnel to execute the attacks came primarily from Osama bin Laden, a

Saudi citizen. The target selection and technical expertise for bomb making came from Khalid

Sheik Mohammad, a Pakistani citizen. And yet the American people were providing full throated support for the bombing of Afghanistan, a poor and desolate country struggling to recover from the aftermath of a proxy war created by the United States against the Soviet Union.

By 1999, the Taliban had established enough control over Afghanistan that the United

Nations (UN Res 1267) was reaching out to the government to enact policies across the entire state. I remember meeting representatives from the Taliban at Fletcher, before they headed up to

New York to ask to be formally recognized as the legal government of Afghanistan (Crossette,

2000) and make them eligible for international development assistance and bank loans. And though the United States had requested that the Taliban expel bin Laden or turn him over to the

United States for the USS Cole and US Embassy in Nairobi bombings, the US Government didn’t deign to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of the country.

In the wake of 9/11, the United States again demanded that the Taliban turn over bin

Laden, who had sought sanctuary in Afghanistan under the Pashtunwali code of melmastya and nenwate or hospitality and asylum. Because the code required believers to shelter and protect anyone from their attacker when asked; the Taliban repeated the response they’d given the United

States since 1998. (Los Angeles Times, 1999) please provide some proof that bin Laden orchestrated the attacks and/or give us a promise that he will be tried in the third country that could ascertain his guilt without prejudice.

In 2001, President Bush’s response was "There's no need to discuss it." "We know he's guilty. Just turn him over. … There's nothing to negotiate about. They're harboring a terrorist and

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they need to turn him over."(ABC News, 2001) And so honoring the Pashtunwali code of hospitality and sanctuary even if it meant the host’s death, the Afghans refused.

Of course, I was disappointed that Americans were buying into the bait and switch of the

Bush Administration to target the Afghans for 9/11 instead of looking to Saudi Arabia, the philosophical origin of the violent religious ideology, or Pakistan, the national conduit through which CIA funds and weapons had been moved. But with only 17% of young Americans able to point out Afghanistan on the map, it was understandable why.

Life was simpler when looked through the binary lens of Manichean black and white, where the actions of “Us” and our tribe are intrinsically right and the actions of “Them” and the

“Other” are always wrong. I should know. I’d been there before in the first Gulf War where, as

LCPL Menendez pointed out, I was just well trained muscle for a globally active gang.

Moreover, because so few Americans had traveled to the wild places or developed a personal relationship with anyone who lived there, they were unaware that we share many of the same values regarding family, justice, and virtue. And the combination of volatile emotions and general ignorance resulted in widespread support for the decision to threaten, use violence and kill

“Them.” In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I felt like I was living a modern day version of the Chinese chengyu “jing di zhi wa” (井底之蛙) where the American people played the role of the ignorant frog in the well, content in their ignorance, believing they knew all there was about truth, life and the universe, but really having no clue at all.

But while I disdained the average American’s ignorance about the outside world, I couldn’t yet claim to be the wise sea turtle heading to the ocean. Why? Because here I was, working for USAID in Washington, D.C., being paid good money to develop and implement the policies that shaped a skewed reality for the American people to believe.

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Of course, I could see that the narrative being spun for the American people was false. I had smelled, touched, and tasted the reality of living far off lands and made friends with the people who lived there. I had personal experiences that told me the national media and government officials were misrepresenting the facts. But I thought that because I was not involved in the dirty aspects of international politics (shooting people as a Marine or spying on them as a CIA agent), I was clean. What I was soon to be taught was what my Iranian friends would tell me again and again, “siasat modar, pedar nadoreh” or “Politics is a bastard.”

They hate us because we’re “free”

Still, some of the most common pronouncements were patently absurd and obvious gaslighting on a national scale. The most witless catchphrase I silently endured in polite conversations was, “They hate us because we’re free.” Even writing down the phrase twenty years later makes my mind scream, “Whaaaaaaaaaaat?” And that’s the polite version.

The thought killing phrase had been cribbed from George W. Bush’s address to Congress one week after the 9/11 attacks, when the President pronounced, “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.” In a half an hour speech filled with constant interruptions of applause and standing ovations, the President said Al Qaeda was to terrorism what the Mafia is to crime. Bush then lay out the mental framework to delegitimize any grievance Al Qaeda might have against the United States that might justify their actions by saying, “The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by

Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.”

Of course, Bush failed to mention that the fringe form of Islamic extremism Al Qaeda believed in had shared roots with Wahhabism, the preferred religion of the house of Saud or that

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Wahhabist interpretation of the Islamic duty of al-amr bi'l-ma‘ruf wa'l-nahy ‘an al-munkar to

“commanding what is good and forbid what is reprehensible” (Mahendrarajah, 2015). Bush conveniently omitted the fact that the violent radical Islamic extremism that the American, Saudi

Arabian and Pakistani secret services used to justify pushing out the “godless” communist Soviet focus included clerics of the Wahhabist or Deobandi Islamic sects. The fact that the same logic and justifications used to push out the Soviets were adopted by the Taliban to establish Sharia law in Afghanistan seemed to be a textbook case of an inability to fully anticipate future consequences or what former CIA employees like Chalmers Johnson (2004) called “blowback.”

Instead, the President’s speech worked to link the Taliban to Al Qaeda making them nearly one and the same to any listener who wasn’t aware of the differences. And given that

Richard Clarke, the Bush Administration counter-terrorism lead was still asking the President and principals "are we serious about dealing with the al Qida (sic) threat? . . . Is al Qida (sic) a big deal?" in January 2001 and that 83% of the youth in America couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map, the average American voter probably couldn’t tell the difference. Instead of following Sun Tzu’s advice in the Art of War to “Know yourself and know the enemy,” the Bush just lumped the

Taliban together with Al Qaeda making no attempt to understand their different priorities, objectives and aims and thus missing opportunities to divide their opposition to America.

On the positive side, Bush’s speech did note that, “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’” But instead of encouraging American interest in learning more about the 9/11 attackers’ source of anger to open the door for more discussion that might correct past grievances of American economic, political, and religious policies in the Middle East and thus eliminate

Arab or Muslim opposition to the United States; the President shut the door on critical thinking and took an ad hominin approach. “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our

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freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” And in twenty three words, the President implied that “They,” the “Other,” and anyone who opposed

American policies was not only a terrorist, but against freedom of religion, free of speech, and democracy itself (Washington Post, 2001).

The nonsensical explanation of “They hate us because we’re free” was parroted so frequently amongst Americans after Bush’s speech that it seemed to become a panacea for any uncomfortable discussions that might force self-reflection or require knowledge, study and critical thinking skills. It made no difference that there was no clear description of who “They” were or what freedoms we had that they might hate. Anyone who said anything that might ask questions about any American policies were considered the alien “Them,” against mom, apple pie and all things good true in the United States of America and thus a legitimate target for attack.

And while Johnny Mike Spann, the CIA agent who died at the Castle of War would probably have been among the 1 in 6 youths who could pick out Afghanistan on the map, chances are the rest of his classmates living in Winfield, Alabama couldn’t. That kind of awareness would have taken the qualities of being “intellectually curious, very thoughtful and very philosophical, always interested in new ideas” or the way John Walker Lindh’s neighbor described Sulayman al-

Faris’ family.

Perhaps ironically, had there been enough of an effort to introduce the religion, culture, and history of the Middle East, Central Asia or specifically Afghanistan, the small, isolated

Alabama hill community that Spann came from would probably feel some kinship with the

Pashtunwali customary obligation of hospitality and asylum to people seeking protection against the law. If not, I can’t imagine how the small community of only 3,000 inhabitants could allow the KKK’s Traditional Confederate Knights to maintain their headquarters in Winfield unless

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they were all racist white supremacists. And I don’t believe they were or are.

Deliberate omissions?

But in many ways, Bush’s speech represented a missed opportunity for the United States to begin a national discussion of “how we got here” and reevaluate the tools and philosophies of where, when, how and why we use national power abroad. In reading and rereading the speech, I perhaps place too much blame on the President. If you read the full text of the 20 September address to Congress, you can see that Bush explicitly stated,

I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect

your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans and by millions more in

countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those

who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are

traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.

The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab

friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports

them.

Bush emphasized that Al Qaeda and the other religious fanatics twisted the words of the

Quran to incite violence who were the enemies of the United States, not the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. Speaking of Al Qaeda, Bush said, “We're not deceived by their pretenses to piety.”

We have seen their kind before. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies

of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning

every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and

totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's

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unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

The challenge was not that the President didn’t say the right words. Bush emphasized,

“We're in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith.” The problem was that the American people couldn’t hear them.

Bush attempted to emphasize the universal justice implied in the global war on terrorism saying,

This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just

America's freedom.

This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who

believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.”

But despite the opportunity 9/11 presented Bush to become a great president by bringing the people of the world together regardless of race, religion, color, gender, gender expression, age, national origin, disability, marital status, or sexual orientation, the intolerance and fear, the urge to demonize “Them” and the “Other” was just too strong. And in the wake of 9/11, I remember feeling the suspicions against people of color and non-Christian religions increasing (Department of Justice, n.d.).

As a Japanese-American with relatives who’d been sent off to the internment camps in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks, I knew this was a natural reaction. But as a Japanese-American with relatives who’d served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated military unit in the history of the Army, I imagined it was just a matter of time before the anger subsided, reason prevailed and the United States began to fight the root causes of the acts of terror: absolutism, ignorance, fear, and intolerance.

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Optimistically, I imagined that the United States Government might take the same approach as the Roosevelt Administration during World War II and help explain “Why we fight” through educational films designed to explain the history behind the conflict and philosophy behind our policies. I waited the Bush Administration might expand on Roosevelt’s call to achieve the Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear) as an intrinsic solution to the war on terrorism. And I hoped that instead of using pitting Christianity against Islam in a holy war of faith, Bush would be able to show how

Judaism, Christianity and Islam were close relatives in the same family of faith that held the same

God as supreme.

If building bridges of peace between the three Abrahamic religions had been a desired pathway for resolving the war on terrorism, communicating that message shouldn’t have been that difficult. There was no need to go the full route of John Walker Lindh to learn Arabic and memorize the Quran. After reading the Bible and Quran from cover to cover and then hearing the perspectives of Muslims in Iran, I felt that they seemed like three generations of the same family of faith.

In my simplistic understanding, Judaism was the grandfather, Christianity was the parent and Islam was the child. The principal difference between Judaism and Christianity sprang from

Christ’s pronouncement that it wasn’t necessary to share the bloodline of one of the twelve tribes of Israel, but that non-Jews (Gentiles) only needed to have faith and believe to be saved. And just as my first generation immigrant Japanese citizen grandparents believed, marrying someone of

Japanese ancestry was important, where my second generation Japanese ancestry, American citizen parents did not.

The way I understood my lessons on the road was that the principal difference between

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Christianity and Islam was Mohammad’s clarification that belief in God was not enough to gain salvation, but that that faith must be accompanied by good works as measured by the five pillars of Islam: profession that there is no God but Allah, recognition that Mohammad was His prophet, fasting during Ramadan, giving alms to the poor and making a pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) in one’s lifetime if able. And that distinction between Christianity and Islam seemed to me quite similar to my realization in the Tokyo train station that although I might “look Japanese” and have Japanese blood flowing through my veins, but that I wasn’t really Japanese if I couldn’t speak the language or live to my full potential within the culture.

Separation of Church and State

Even if that was too much detail, Bush could have highlighted that Morocco, an Islamic country was one of the first countries to recognize the Thirteen Colonies as an independent sovereign nation in 1786, two years before the Constitution of the United States was ratified (

Avalon Project, n.d.a).

Bush might have mentioned that the United States signed a Treaty of Peace and

Friendship with Tripoli (Avalon Project, n.d.b.), another Islamic country ten years later which stated explicitly:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on

the Christian Religion, -as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion

or tranquility of Musselmen (sic), -and as the said States never have entered into any war

or act of hostility against any Mehomitan (sic) nation, it is declared by the parties that no

pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony

existing between the two countries.

Or that by 1815, the United States made it clear in the treaty with Algeria, yet another Islamic

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nation (Avalon Project, n.d.c.),

As the Government of the United States of America has in itself no character of

enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of any nation, and as the said States have

never entered into any voluntary war, or act of hostility, except in defence (sic) of their

just rights on the high seas, it is declared by the Contracting parties that no pretext arising

from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of Harmony between the two

nations; and the Consuls and agents of both nations, shall have liberty to Celebrate the

rights of their respective religions in their own houses.

But despite the words saying that the war against terrorism wouldn’t be against Islam or shouldn’t be construed to target those of non-Western European ancestry, it felt like that part of the message was not embraced by a significant portion of white Christian Americans.

Part of the reason could have been shows like “24,” the popular action television series that idolized the narrative of “Jack Bauer,” a white Christian male who bent or broke the rules under an “ends justifies the means” reasoning (Keslowitz, 2007) to kill the evil “Other,” and stop plots that would otherwise take down the entire United States Government in the course of a single day. Perhaps another reason not to encourage Americans to study religion or the religious roots of Al Qaeda might have been the difficult questions that might arise when citizens asked how a country that was based on democratic elections, freedom of religion, gender equality and separation of Church and State like the United States could be so close to a country that was ruled by a dynastic monarchy that persecutes non-Muslims, discriminates against women and is ruled by religious laws (Sharia) like Saudi Arabia. But I also suspected that part of the unspoken enmity towards Islam was that it had become used as a belief system to facilitate black empowerment by groups like the Nation of Islam.

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Attacking the religion of Christ as a “white man’s religion,” Malcom X claimed that

Christianity had been used to colonize, enslave and subjugate people of color by telling its white believers that they had a God given right to do so. (Jones, 2020) Instead of submitting to a racist

Christianity by embracing Islam which traces its genetic lineage through Ishmael, the son of the prophet Abraham and his African slave Hagar, blacks had a way to claim the same divine blood that a “white” Christianity denied them (Khutbah Bank, 2016; Junior 2019). And, perhaps not surprisingly, when Frank Lindh, John Walker Lindh’s father was coming to grips with his homosexuality and eventual divorce from Marilyn Walker, his wife of nearly twenty years; it was the Autobiography of Malcom X and African-American empowerment hip-hop/rap songs that intrigued his son, John Walker Lindh to study Islam as an alternative value system to his Catholic upbringing.

But if Islam as a religion and the Arabs as a people were not the enemy, who was? As late as 2002, there were only 170 individuals who Osama bin Laden listed as official members of his

Al Qaeda terrorist group (Blair, 2012) How could a nation state go to war with such a tiny terrorist organization?

The Military Industrial Racket

In 2002, America had a population of 287 million citizens protected by a military with 1.4 million active duty service members (Parker el al., 2017). The American military had the best weapons money could buy and a budget of $335 billion dollars or roughly 43% of the total global expenditures on weapons that year (equivalent to all the armies of Africa, Asia and the Western

Hemisphere combined) to buy them with (Sköns et al. 2003). With 8,000 times as many armed service members than Al Qaeda maintained on its rolls and a weapons budget 13,000 times as rich, the American people might not be completely convinced that it was absolutely necessary to

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mobilize the full might of the largest, most expensive and technologically advanced military on the planet to crush an enemy so small.

As a USAID drone in the US Government hive I imagined the President and his Cabinet knew the average American might be trusting of its leadership and ignorant of the outside world, but not completely stupid. But I had my own suspicions that the first reason for targeting

Afghanistan and lumping the Taliban in the same target group as Al Qaeda was to ensure that any

“collateral damage” or killing of innocent civilians not involved in the fighting could be eliminated by reclassifying Afghans as enemy combatants. But there had to be a larger strategy behind creating a larger target by combining Al Qaeda and the Taliban as the common enemy.

Especially, rolling into Kabul, Kandahar, or Mazar-i-Sharif in a HMMWV that cost more than all the livestock of the village with soldiers carrying rifles that represented more than an Afghan family would earn for months might look too much like the rich and powerful beating up on the defenseless poor.

Luckily Afghanistan was over eight time zones different from the United States meaning that any breaking news of unjustified attacks against poor defenseless civilians could be massaged before it hit the morning news. And with 7,000 miles between Kabul and Peoria, there would be few investigative journalists jumping on a plane to get a ground truth view of what was actually happening on the ground. And these time-distance challenges presented opportunities when considering the money to be made delivering military ordnance and personnel to such a distant battlefield.

From a time-fuel perspective, a one-way flight of a C-17 military cargo plane from Dover

AFB, Delaware to Kabul Afghanistan would take about 14 hours and 29,000 gallons of fuel and produce about 550,000 lbs. of CO2 (Schanz, 2009; U.S. Air Force, 2018; ICAO, n.d.; Laherty,

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2015; EIA, 2016). Given that the C-17 burns about 2,000 gallons of fuel an hour and fuel tanks that hold 27,000 gallons of fuel (GAO, 1984), the plane would need to be refueled once during the trip. Estimating aviation fuel diesel at $3/gallon of fuel, the C-17 would cost around $6,000 dollars an hour to fly totaling roughly $84,000 dollars for a 14 hour worth of fuel (DLA, 2002).

Add in salaries for the two pilots, a loadmaster or the various other consumables associated with flying, a one-way flight might cost around $100,000 dollars. And with a maximum capacity of 102 passengers when in troop carrying configuration, a C-17 flight would cost around $980 per military service member. And without getting too far ahead of ourselves, by

2010 Boeing (n.d.) would boast:

On Dec. 20, 2010, the worldwide fleet of C-17 Globemaster III airlifters surpassed

2 million flying hours during an airdrop mission over Afghanistan. Reaching 2 million

flight-hours equates to 1.13 billion nautical miles — the equivalent of a C-17 flying to the

moon and back 2,360 times.

But the question any taxpayer might eventually ask is “What does the average American citizen get for that?” Dost Muhammad, one of the prominent Afghan leaders during the first

Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842, had the answer, “We have men and we have rocks in plenty, but we have nothing else.” (Parliamentary Papers, 1879) And after using Afghanistan as a proxy war battleground to lure the Soviet Union into a Central Asian version of Vietnam and then abandoning the civil reconstruction after the Red Army left, the United States policy makers had no one but themselves to blame if there wasn’t more to capture.

Of course, I don’t know if President George W. Bush was thinking about the potential financial windfalls in the oil industry, stock market or real estate markets as he was planning the post 9/11 global war on terrorism, even if that’s how his father and grandfather had made most of

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the family’s money (Dangremond, 2018). I have no insights as to whether Vice President Dick

Cheney, who had served as Secretary of Defense under George Bush Sr and formerly the CEO of

Halliburton, the world’s second largest oilfield services company was thinking about the way oil company share prices might benefit from a war that required flying C-17’s to the moon and back

2,360 times. And I had no opportunity to ask Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had previously served as the youngest Secretary of Defense under President Ford and was now serving as the second oldest Secretary of Defense under President Bush the younger, if he had already calculated how much share prices of companies in the military industrial complex might increase. But it was public record that both Cheney and Rumsfeld were old war horses and the war on terrorism would not be their first rodeo.

If we care to believe Marine general Smedley Butler’s observation that “War is a Racket,” there would be a clear logic to expanding the retribution for the 9/11 attacks from the 170 individuals bin Laden counted as card carrying members of Al Qaeda and the poorly armed

Taliban government that was toppled with 2,500 American soldiers in 2 months of fighting by the end of 2001 (AP, 2019). If the Administration’s desire was to expand continuous military operations to other part of the world to ensure economic profits for the military industrial complex, that objective might have been facilitated when Bush noted twice in his speech, that the enemy in the global war on terrorism would be people who threatened the American “way of life.”

Which “American Way of Life?”

So, what exactly defined the American “way of life?” Was the American way of life the

Bill of Rights with a specific emphasis on the first and second Amendments, the right to free speech and the right to bear arms? Was the American way of life a democratic government built

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on a separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial powers of the government? Was the American way of life freedom of religion and the separation of Church and

State? Was the American way of life the military subordination to civilian authority where officers swore to protect the Constitution of the United States rather than obey the dictates of the

President? Was the American way of life living under a rule of laws where due process was protected, torture was illegal and no one, not even the President was above the law?

Or was the American way of life the institutionalized racism written into law with the founding of the country requiring a bloody civil war to overturn? Was the American way of life the gender inequality that had denied women the right to vote until 1920 and blocked ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment which would mandate equal protections under the law regardless of gender? Was the American way of life the right of tobacco company executives to escape prosecution after lying to Congress and continuing profiting from cigarette sales long after scientific research proved smoking was known to cause cancer? Was the American way of life the ability of automobile lobbies to resist building fuel efficient pickup trucks that achieved 25 miles per gallon because Marines could be sent to the Gulf to maintain access to cheap oil overseas?

And if Johnny Mike Spann and John Walker Lindh were both American citizens living what they believed was the “our way of life”, is there any way both could be right?

What are we calling you to do?

In some ways, Bush’s claim that “they hate us because we’re free” was not entirely wrong.

In a letter to the American people, bin Laden addressed two questions (Guardian, 2002) being asked of Al Qaeda, “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” and “What are we calling you to do?”

The primary argument that bin Laden used for attacking Americans was that the United

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States was attacking Muslims around the world, and it was their right to fight back. Bin Laden started his list with America’s direct support of Israel in expelling the Palestinians from their lands and then pointed to the American support for nations attacking Muslims in Somalia,

Chechnya, Kashmir and Lebanon. Bin Laden noted that the American government overturned elections in Muslim nations and coerced their leaders to reject or weaken the establishment of

Sharia or religious rule in their own countries.

Echoing the Founding Fathers’ objection of Great Britain “Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us,” bin Laden pointed out that America established military bases around the world that both offended local customs and pillaged the public wealth, especially the oil countries of the Middle East. Bin Laden pointed out that while Americans grieved over 3,000 civilian casualties caused by the 9/11 attacks, there was no feeling of remorse for his estimated

1.5 million Iraqi children who died as a result of US sanctions because the casualties were

Muslims. Bin Laden rhetorically asked the letter readers, “Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will leave her to live in security and peace?”

Confirming Bush’s claim that Al Qaeda hated America because it was free; Bin Laden explained his justification for attacking American civilians was because they were free to stop the abuses their United States Government conducted overseas in their name, but didn’t. He recognized that while American civilians might claim they were not responsible for the atrocities their soldiers committed overseas, they were mistaken. American citizens were still responsible, because it was their votes that decided what actions the military would take, and it was tax dollars that purchased the bullets, bombs and missiles that were used to kill Muslims. Thus, any argument that American civilians should be exempted from attack would contradict the concept

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that the United States is a representative democracy.

(T)he American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their

own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus, the

American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli

oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its

continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American

people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to

change it if they want.

The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that

bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the

armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the

blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and

penetrate our lands. So, the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us,

and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish,

through their elected candidates.

Also, the American army is part of the American people. It is these very same

people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.

The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in

the American Forces which attack us.

And then in a manner similar to the way the United States associated Al Qaeda with the

Taliban, bin Laden connected the actions of Israel with American taxpayers writing, “This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and

Jews against us.”

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Yes. Al Qaeda’s attack against the United States was about Americans being free. But not in the way most Americans would probably like to think about themselves. Rather, bin Laden justified his outraged attack by reasoning it was he should be able to kill a people who freely chose a government that demanded “Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness” for themselves but denied those same freedoms to the “Other.”

Echoing an Old Testament “eye for an eye” logic, bin Laden continued.

Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge.

Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our

villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever

has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has

killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.

Stated more succinctly in the terms of the popular 1982 film “Rambo,” a story about a disaffected veteran who is rejected by the community he fought to protect in Vietnam, bin Laden could have just repeated John Rambo’s words, “They drew first blood, not me.” (Kotchef, 1982, 00:53:03)

In ways that mirrored Bush’s call to use violence to protect “our way of life,” bin Laden promised to use violence to stop the ills created by the American way of life. The Al Qaeda leader entreated Americans to “stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.” In responding to his self-posed question “What are we calling you to do?” bin Laden answered the United States should submit to Islam and Americans should become Muslims.

In language similar to Pat Buchanan’s desire, “to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America,” (Weber & Reynolds,

2009, pg. 17) bin Laden replaced Christianity with Islam and explained that Islam is

“the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best manners, righteousness,

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mercy, honor, purity and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others,

establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed

and persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the

hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word

and religion reign supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on obedience to

Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their color, sex or

language.”

Replacing the Buchanan’s Bible with the Quran, bin Laden professed,

“The Quran will remain preserved and unchanged after the other Divine books and

messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgement. Allah

has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it.”

Then in a manner similar to the American Declaration of Independence, bin Laden enumerated the “long train of abuses and usurpations” designed to enslave and corrupt Muslims under the absolute despotism of American foreign policies. (Edited for brevity)

You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet

you build your economy and investments on Usury

You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also

permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest

consumer of them.

You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of

personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until

incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your

laws object.

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Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval

Office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a

mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment.

You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as

well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.

You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling

upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and

strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of

women.

You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly.

Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art,

entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.

You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other

nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can

secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.

Bin Laden called out American exceptionalism as the reason why the United States thought they could act in this manner. In Letter to America, bin Laden argued that the United

States had two different scales, one for themselves and one for others. Moreover, any freedom or democracy that was promoted was for Americans “and for the white race only.” (Guardian, 2002)

For others, freedom was only allowed if it also served the United States’ desires at the time.

Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political

parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews,

who control your policies, media and economy.

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That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind, is that you have used your

force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history; not to defend principles

and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits. You who dropped a nuclear

bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. How many

acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?

Bin Laden pointed out that Americans claimed to want to eliminate weapons of mass destruction attacking those countries that tried to produce them yet was perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to Israel’s development and possession. He noted that while the United States routinely ignored the resolutions agreed to under international law, Americans used those same resolutions as justification to punish countries they didn't like. Bin Laden noted that despite the United States claims of being a protector of human rights and castigating countries that violated commonly agreed on standards of conduct; America readily dismissed habeas corpus when it came to arresting Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11.

I suppose in this way, Bush was correct in stating that Al Qaeda was against America’s freedom and way of life. But the attitudes and actions that bin Laden was opposed to were not intrinsically American. Moreover, the actions Israel had taken against the Palestinians and Arab nations were often not directly executed with or even supported by American troops overseas.

Rather, American policies around the world seemed to me the unconscious result of a rich, powerful and ignorant population who’d turned over the development and execution of their foreign policies to opportunistic profit minded leaders who saw international politics as a zero- sum game, where one’s loss is another’s gain. In my estimation, most Americans had failed in

Sun Tzu’s dictum to “know yourself and know the enemy” thus reducing their chances of winning any war they might embark upon. And having abdicated their responsibility to understand “Why

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do they hate us?” by blindly accepting the unthinking response of “They hate us because we’re free”; Americans were unable to decide for themselves what elements of the American way of life were truly worth fighting, killing and dying for.

Luckily for me, I had seen this sort of political misdirection before when President Bush

Sr. repeated the lies of “Nayirah,” the alias that the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the

United States, who misled Congress about the atrocities of Iraqi troops in Kuwait City to bolster support for the first Gulf War (MacArthur, 2004). It had been my realization that America wasn’t always fighting for the version of “Truth, Justice and the American Way” taught to me by my parents that had pushed me on my journey to post-Cold War Europe, China and Iran so many years ago. It was as President George W. Bush would attempt to say while teaching American history and civic education at East Literature Magnet School in Nashville, Tennessee the week after 9/11, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” (White House, 2002)

Unluckily for me, there were few people I could talk to about my suspicions.

My personal challenge was that like the fatal encounter between Spann and Lindh at the

Castle of War, perspectives of reality are driven by previous life experiences and there were scarce few people I met who had shared a similar life journey. In the absence of common experiences, any reasoned conversations I had about “Truth, Justice and the American Way” in

Washington D.C. after 9/11 quickly became unproductive given the high emotions of the times.

And as the approval ratings of President Bush soared from 51% to over 90% in the aftermath of

9/11 (Moore, 2001). And thus, any objections to Bush’s claims that “These measures are essential. The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it and destroy it where it grows,” made me sound unpatriotic.

Even so, I was concerned with the militarization of the United States foreign policy and

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how quickly the American people gave up their right to determine who, what, when, where, how and why we fight in the coming days. As a Marine, I’d sworn an oath to protect and defend the

Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. And the Constitution, clearly states in

Article 1, Section 8 that, “The Congress shall have Power To declare War, grant Letters of

Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” This meant that the people, through their elected representatives in Congress, would determine where, when and why to go to war.

AUMF

But in the aftermath of 9/11, it seemed the entire United States wanted blood and willingly handed over all their authority to the President. As if in a trance, the Congress passed the

Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) stating that (PL 107-40, 2001):

“That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those

nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided

the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations

or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United

States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

The scariest thing was not necessarily that American forces would pound the Afghan people “back to the stone age,” as radio and television pundits breezily encouraged. As Tamim

Ansary (2001), an Afghan author and scholar living in the United States noted, his birthplace had already been bombed back to the stone age through the proxy war initiated by the United States to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Nor did I find it all that terrifying that

Americans were happy to go along with the plan to overthrow the Taliban even though there were no Afghans connection with planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. I still held on to hopes of

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an Afghan Marshall Plan as had been implemented for Germany after World War II.

No. The scariest thing was what happened when a single person was given completely unfettered control of the largest military force in the history of mankind. What oversight, checks and balances remained when the American people gave the president the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force” without defining what was “necessary” or “appropriate.” And when the AUMF gave the President the legal right to use military force against “nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks” “in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States”; what place in the world could escape America’s jurisdiction and be immune to US attacks as defined by a single man?

I suppose I might have felt differently if George W. Bush had been the Cold Warrior and realpolitik leader his father, George Herbert Walker Bush had been. George Bush Sr. became one of the youngest Naval aviators at only 19 years of age and flew combat missions in the Pacific during World War II. After returning home from the war, Bush Sr. became the president of his own oil company in Texas before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1966.

During the Nixon Administration, Bush Sr. was appointed the US Ambassador to the

United Nations before being appointed the Chairman of the Republican National Committee following Nixon’s reelection. After Watergate, President Ford appointed Bush the Head of U.S.

Liaison Office in China before appointing him the Director of the CIA in 1976. Dropping out of politics during the Carter Administration, Bush Sr. went back to Houston where he served as a bank executive and part time professor before entering the Republican presidential primaries in

1980.

After losing the primaries to Ronald Reagan, Bush Sr. was selected to join the

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Administration as Vice President where he served for eight years. By the time he was elected

President in 1988, Bush Sr. had over 44 years of military, business and public service experience.

The younger Bush was less impressive.

Admittedly, I wasn’t paying much attention to the Gore-Bush elections, but what I knew didn’t impress me. From what I’d read, Bush was a born again Christian who’d found redemption after abusing alcohol and using drugs (Weisman, 1999). And while he’d served in the military, I’d read that he joined the Texas National Guard to escape serving in Vietnam (Lardner & Romano,

1999), doing a lackluster job when he decided to show up (Goldenberg & Burkeman, 2004). And while George W. Bush or “Dubya”, as he was often called by his detractors, had been elected

Governor of Texas, he had become President with seemingly little exposure to the world outside the privileges his upbringing provided him.

And while this assessment might seem harsh, I can only point to his words and actions in the months and years that followed 9/11. Despite having said all the right words in his 20

September 2001 speech, four days earlier President Bush had described the war on terrorism as a

“crusade” against evil people. While few Americans even noticed the use of the term, European and Muslim allies expressed concern that the American president was using a term that referred to the nine Christian invasions of Muslim lands over the course two centuries (1096-1291) that were launched under Pope Urban II’s rallying cry, “Deus Vult!” or “God wills it.”

The White House (2001a) later issued a clarifying statement saying the President used

“crusade” in "the traditional English sense of the word” meaning “a broad cause." But if any

Muslim was looking for evidence that America regarded Islam as the enemy, they would have had their worst suspicions confirmed. More than that, Bush’s use of the word hinted at how tone- deaf America’s approach to a global war would be.

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This disregard in gaining the support of non-Americans around the world was compounded by a seeming disinterest incorporating the American people into the response.

Despite millions of Americans ready and willing to make some sort of sacrifice to win the war on terrorism, Bush would famously tell the public to carry on traveling around the country and living as they were before (The White House, 2001b)

Get on board. Do your business across the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great

destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life,

the way we want it to be enjoyed.

All of this seemed a strange way to respond to an evil enemy so dangerous that the president felt compelled to create an entirely new cabinet level position, the Department of

Homeland Security or DHS, charged with transforming and realigning “the current confusing patchwork of government activities into a single department whose primary mission is to protect our homeland.” But no one I talked with at the time seemed interested in answering the question,

“If the DHS is supposed to be protecting ‘homeland security’ what is the mission of the DoD… external aggression?” Instead, everyone dutifully removed their laptop from their carry-on luggage, took off their watches, shoes and belts, and shuffled forward in socks through

Transportation Security Agency metal detectors to ensure future terrorists wouldn’t be able to get on board American airplanes with pepper spray and box cutters. It seemed to me a bit like locking the barn door after the horse had already bolted.

What did we know when?

It wasn’t like the United States hadn’t been warned about the 9/11 attacks or known about the threat that Al Qaeda, KSM and Osama bin Laden posed. The first World Trade Center attack had occurred in 1993 which was followed up by KSM's airplane attack in 1995. The CIA

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considered the threats from Osama bin Laden so great that in January of 1996, they decided to create an interagency task force dedicated to following him.

Then several months later, in May 1996, Jamal Ahmed al Fadl, “a Sudanese-born Arab

(who) had spent time in the United States and had been recruited for the Afghan war through the

Farouq mosque in Brooklyn,” and worked as payroll manager for Al Qaeda walked into the US

Embassy Asmara in Eritrea to defect. (Weiser, 2007) Through his debriefings, the CIA bin Laden team discovered Al Qaeda connections to the “attacks on U.S. troops in Aden and Somalia in

1992 and 1993 and to the Manila air plot in the Philippines in 1994-1995.” (9/11 Commission,

2004; pg. 109). Later that year, on 27 August 1996, bin Laden made a formal declaration of war against the United States with the explicit aim of expelling all non-believers from Islamic holy lands, especially the American military on bases in Saudi Arabia who drank alcohol, ate pork and violated any number of Muslim practices with impunity. (Widener University, n.d.)

In March 1997, roughly six months after his call to jihad, bin Laden invited CNN to interview him face to face in Afghanistan. (KellyWurx, 2012) where he repeated his very specific objections of American troops being stationed in Saudi Arabia and United States support of Israel in their attacks on Palestine as some of the reasons for calling for attacking America. And yet no significant action was taken against this individual who was literally calling all true believers to oppose and attack the United States presence in the holy lands.

True to his word, Osama bin Laden continued to press forward with the attacks. On 7

August 1998, Al Qaeda successfully carried out a simultaneous bombing of two separate US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed over 200 people and left thousands injured. After visiting the embassies, the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “I think it is important for the American people to understand that we are in a long-term struggle. This [the war against

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terrorism] is, unfortunately, the war of the future.” To emphasize the point, two weeks later,

President Clinton authorized the launch of roughly 80 cruise missiles costing roughly $750,000 dollars apiece at a suspected Al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan and pharmaceutical factory in

Sudan. This would be America’s only military response against Al Qaeda from its inception in the

1980’s until 11 September 2001.

Four months later, December 1998, the CIA’s top leader, Director of Central Intelligence

(DCI) George Tenet told his staff that "We are at war. I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community." To assist law enforcement officers, the FBI issued a classified ORCON (Originator Controlled)/Law Enforcement Sensitive warning that identified bin Laden and fourteen other associates as the perpetrators of the attack. (PBS, 1988) And yet the

9/11 Commission’s Executive Summary General Findings observed:

“Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them. What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al Qaeda plot.”

And as 9/11 was the deadliest attack on United States interests since Pearl Harbor, some sixty years earlier, the conclusion left some disturbing questions. Does that mean that nothing was done despite orders from America’s top leaders that the country was at war? Was this the best that the richest country in the world with the most powerful military assembled in the history of mankind guided by the most technologically advanced intelligence services could do? Was the success of Al Qaeda the incompetence of the United States or was there some more nefarious conspiracy to blame?

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9/11 forensics

More disappointing was the 9/11 Commission’s finding that the underlying reason that the terrorists had been successful is that the various intelligence agencies tracking them had been unable and/or unwilling to share the information collected because of institutional stovepipes. In fact, separate intelligence agencies watching the individual Saudi, Lebanese, Egyptian, and

Emirati members of the hijacker team knew they:

● included known al Qaeda operatives who could have been watchlisted

● presented passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner

● presented passports with suspicious indicators of extremism

● made detectable false statements on visa applications

● made false statements to border officials to gain entry into the United States

● violated immigration laws while in the United States.

All of which seemed to simultaneously confirm that the Al Qaeda team was not a sophisticated team of super spy ninjas, and that the intelligence community was not taking bin Laden’s threats and/or the CIA DCI Tenet’s declaration of war against Al Qaeda very seriously.

The first Al Qaeda team members arrived in the United States 15 January 2000 and over the next year and a half the nineteen individuals spent an estimated $270,000 renting cars, paying for flight training, and purchasing airline tickets using their credit cards and bank accounts in their real names while planning their attack. There never was a need for any fictional “Jack Bauer” to crush fingers, bang heads or break laws to stop an imminent attack that would bring down the country in the next “24” hours. There had been over 14,496 hours to follow through on the simple, unassuming, perhaps even boring administrative police work of investigating individuals breaking the law more thoroughly.

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The 9/11 Commission General Findings then goes on to repeat the claim that the attacks were successful because of a “failure of imagination” on the part of the United States Government three times. Yet somehow, I imagine the agents from the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA who served on the

“Bin Laden Issue Station,” the interagency intelligence collection center would have objected to the accusation. Apparently the “bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their C.I.A. colleagues uncomfortable," and members of the team “called themselves 'the Manson Family' because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat."(Manzetti, 2006) So what stopped the United States Government from acting on the alarming analysis put forth by its best intelligence officers?

Exhaustive discussions about leadership failures to recognize Al Qaeda’s threat and prevent the attacks were largely absent from the 9/11 Commission report. Instead, of examining the reasons bin Laden attacked the United States or discussing how to recalculate the cost-risk- benefit equation of American policies in the Middle East in the aftermath of the attacks, the

Executive Summary focused on to providing recommendations on how to protect the nation in the face of these new national security threats under the broad questions of “What to do?” and “How to do it?”

The Report’s answer to its own first question of “What to do?” with a global strategy with three lines of effort: “(1) attack terrorists and their organizations, (2) prevent the continued growth of Islamist terrorism, and (3) protect against and prepare for terrorist attacks.” In essence, force the “Other” to change through violent force rather than change our own actions that creates a reaction in the “Other” to oppose us.

The 9/11 Report’s answer to the second question of “How to do it?” calls for “unity of effort on the challenge of counterterrorism itself:

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● unifying strategic intelligence and operational planning against Islamist terrorists across

the foreign-domestic divide with a National Counterterrorism Center;

● unifying the intelligence community with a new National Intelligence Director;

● unifying the many participants in the counterterrorism effort and their knowledge in a

network-based information sharing system that transcends traditional governmental

boundaries;

● unifying and strengthening congressional oversight to improve quality and accountability;

and

● strengthening the FBI and homeland defenders.

Under the “Unity of Effort: Sharing Information” heading, the Executive Summary pointed out, “The U.S. government has access to a vast amount of information. But it has a weak system for processing and using what it has. The system of ‘need to know’ should be replaced by a system of ‘need to share.’” And it was this intelligence sharing function that the Department of

Homeland Security was created to serve.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these seemed like logical conclusions and responses to the threat of terrorism, as long as someone was ignorant of United States history and the existing

American intelligence structure. But as any American citizen who knew their government’s history could tell you, President Truman signed Public Law 235 of July 26, 1947; 61 STAT. 496 or the National Security Act of 1947 to address these same 9/11 problems of information sharing and coordination between America’s different military departments and intelligence agencies at the end of World War II. It had been this recognition of the rivalries between the military services and need for peacetime intelligence collection, that President Truman established the Department of Defense, National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency.

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But if the CIA, the agency created to “correlate and evaluate intelligence related to the national security and provide appropriate dissemination of such intelligence” was the same organization that failed to share the information with the FBI and local police authorities that might have led to the arrest of the 9/11 hijackers, how was the creation of another federal organization, the Department of Homeland Security going to solve the problem of intelligence sharing? And if the primary missions of DHS included “(A) prevent terrorist attacks within the

United States” and “(B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism”; how did the

DHS expect to succeed if it failed to explore how to eliminate or at least reduce American foreign policies that make the United States a terrorist target in the first place? And by America’s unwillingness to address the specific policy issues that bin Laden, Al Qaeda and his allies objected to meant that they would continue attacking the United States until one or the other were destroyed.

Perhaps the United States never questioned whether or not they would be triumphant over bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the violent radical religious fundamentalism that fueled the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Perhaps, like the Athenians speaking to the Melians some 2,400 years ago, Americans believed that what is “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” And perhaps because Al Qaeda was not a country, armed with weapons of mass destruction or equal in any other way that

America recognized, there was no need to pay attention to potentially valid opinions, grievances and demands.

Certainly, in the opening weeks and months of the global war on terrorism, it seemed that the United States military and intelligence forces were superior to all opposition. But if the existing authorities and structures used to respond to the 9/11 attackers seemed adequate to the

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task, what then was the purpose behind expanding Presidential fiat through AUMF and creating the Department of Homeland Security, unless fighting terrorism was seen as outside the

Department of Defense’s mission to “ensure our nation’s security.”

Of course, it’s easy to pick apart the timelines of my jumbled recollections. The AUMF was approved on 18 September 2001. The 9/11 Commission report wasn’t publicly released until

22 July 2004. And although bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” was published in Britain’s The

Guardian 24 November 2002, I don’t remember its contents ever being discussed on American news outlets. It wasn’t until I stumbled across the book, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden published in 2005, that the letter’s contents became known to me, and that was a decade after the attacks. All of this to highlight my own ignorance of what was happening behind the scenes despite my employment within the government.

Kierkegaard is known for saying that “life can only be understood backwards: but it must be lived forward”; the full quote being (Lang & Blight, 2005, pg. 214):

It is perfectly true, as the philosophy says, that life has to be understood

backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A

proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up

concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully

understood.”

Thus, only through the luxury of time created by the EdD and autoethnography mechanism of self-reflection is it possible to find connections that I was unable to see as things were occurring.

And perhaps it’s because we often don’t take the time to reflect upon our lives or make the effort to understand the history we’re making in the present as a nation, we repeat the same mistakes again and again. The difficulty in living, thinking and being in the present is the balancing

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between the micro, macro and meso perspectives as you make your way in life.

Paulo Coelho lays out this dilemma in his story called the “Two drops of oil.” (2013). In the story, a young man makes an arduous journey to learn the Secret of Happiness from a holy man living in a great castle. The holy man is unable to answer the question and tells the young man to take time to look throughout the castle while he waits with a single caveat. The youth must hold a spoon with two drops of oil in it as he walks.

The youth goes off and wanders about the castle staying focused on not spilling the oil.

After the young man returns, the holy man asks him what he saw. And the young man says he isn’t able to recall anything of interest in the castle, but he didn’t spill a single drop.

The holy man chides the youth paying so much attention to the spoon and oil. He sends the young man off again and tells him not to miss out on all the wonders the castle holds.

Upon returning the second time, the youth is able to tell the holy man all the wonders that he has seen. But when the holy man asks the young man to look at his spoon, he sees that all the oil is gone.

The holy man explains, “The Secret of Happiness lies in looking at all the wonders of the world and never forgetting the two drops of oil in the spoon.”

This was the lesson I was learning over time. The guidance, “Hameh chiz poshteh pardeh ast” and “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” wasn’t referring to any physical curtains that separated us from understanding. Rather our attention, focus and perspectives limit the range and depth of our awareness resulting in a perception of value and priority. And thus, the starting point of our intent (keep the oil in the spoon or see the wonders of the castle) determines what we see, do and accomplish in life.

In that context, it is almost inevitable that Johnny Mike Spann and John Walker Lindh end

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up at the “Castle of War” at the same place and the same time with completely different understandings of “self-actualization” and living the American Dream. It is obvious why Iraqi

President Saddam Hussein and United States Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie would understand different things from the sentence, “(W)e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” (Or most importantly with regard to the creation of the mujahideen to fight the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, the differences in perception between

President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr. on the one hand and Osama bin

Laden, Khalid Sheik Mohammad and the tens of thousands of religious freedom fighters on the other. All occupying the same objective time space reality; all having different subjective experiences within it.

In my clumsy, poorly worded explanation, I’m trying to convey my belief in the chaos theory as manifested by individual decisions that affect the nation and the world. If the chaos theory supposes that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane a continent away, then how can we use it to understand the choices of one individual, Osama bin Laden, who dedicated their life to opposing the United States in changing world history. How might that same analysis be used to examine the counterfactual differences between George W. Bush as president after

9/11 as compared to his father George H.W. Bush? And to spark discussions over the importance of including an autoethnographical approach to studying history and thinking of how we educate future world citizens, “What were critical experiences in the lives of Johnny Mike Spann and

John Walker Lindh that led them to be in alternate realities of understanding of what it meant to be American in the Castle of War?

For my own part, the examination of my life is helping me understand the nearly unlimited possibilities an individual has in the information age to create their own reality that

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impacts the status quo relationships and structures of the past. Whereas an individual might die within a day's journey from where they were born during the feudal times, the planes, trains and automobiles made it possible for an individual in the industrial age to travel around the world in their lifetime if they so desired. And while the digital age hasn’t improved on the physical transportation of the body, the internet has made it possible to be virtually present in multiple places around the planet.

The question for modern education is how has the development and instruction of essential knowledge kept pace? Are the information, customs and processes being taught to K-12

American students relevant to working in a post-industrial world? Are the perspectives, priorities and values of the United States the same, similar, or even translatable to people of other cultures?

And when the answers to any of those questions, what are the global implications?

Shifting Curtains

In many ways, I should have seen the future coming. But at the time, I was still in awe of the “United States” as a concept and manifestation of America’s supposed values as symbolized by the State Department, Department of Defense or USAID. As I was introduced to each new level of power, influence and authority, I was enveloped by a sense of achieving something great simply because I was making it through the hoops the system used to limit access to others who reached this stage. I was special, see?

Twenty years later, I now see my role as just a pawn in the bigger game. As the Iranians told me time and again, “Hameh chiz poshteh pardeh ast” everything is behind the curtain. But just like the readjustment from being an infantry platoon commander using 1:25,000 scale maps to being an Air Combat intelligence officer using 1:500,000 scale aeronautical navigation charts, I needed time and experience to step back and understand the micro to macro continuity of action

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that revealed the global picture.

I think my first inkling that everything I believed was not quite what it seemed was Jenin.

Between the trips to CENTCOM and EUCOM, I was back at my desk at USAID Headquarters in

Washington D.C.. It was only seven months into my employment with OFDA, but I felt I’d already learned so much. It was Spring 2002, and the cherry trees were at their peak along the

Tidal Basin, although I would never smell their blossoms in person as I was living for my work.

Metro-boulot-dodo as the French called it. Get up before sunrise and walk fifteen minute walk to Rosslyn Station and ride the Washington Metro until Federal Triangle Station, which exited directly into the bowels of the Ronald Reagan Building where USAID was housed above.

Work or “boulot” was the daily grind of getting assignments, asking questions, doing research, hammering away on the keyboard, making phone calls, and checking on outcomes. Then back to the apartment for “dodo,” the way French say “beddy-bye” to little children, where I’d flop into bed, dream of all the good OFDA was doing and do it happily again the next day. But sometimes small variations changed everything else.

Jenin

Jenin was just one of seventy-five declared disasters OFDA responded to in FY 2002. And my part in it was probably no more than 1000 keystrokes on my computer and a total of a couple hours of making phone calls, walking papers around to cubicles and talking to people. But the chairborne commando that I was, I regarded Jenin, like each and every other assignment I was given as a life-or-death mission where we provided lifesaving resources for the destitute to survive another day.

With no background on the situation or context as to what I was doing, my job was to help move tents, hygiene kits and water jugs to a refugee camp. And as I wasn’t a logistics officer, I’m

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pretty sure a more accurate assessment of my interaction with Jenin was more like a hundred keystrokes on the keyboard and only two or three phone calls equaling several minutes. But it was the echoes of our efforts that I remember to this day.

Did the shipment get made? Yes? Good. Ok. What? Why? Really? What happened? And I began to get an itchy feeling that although I joined USAID because I believed we were a humanitarian arm of the United States Government, our efforts might not be as altruistic as advertised.

Because the West Bank was in a state of civil unrest in 2002, USAID did not deliver the relief materials directly to the people in need. Instead, the 784 tents, 1,602 hygiene kits and 1,600 water jugs had to be passed over to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian

Refugees or (UNRWA), who loaded them onto white UN trucks and delivered them for us.

Everything seemed to be going according to plan, until the UNRWA personnel lifted back the tarps exposing the red, white and blue stenciling of “USAID: From the American People.”

According to the reports we received from our UNRWA colleagues, a near riot ensued as the Palestinians refugees told them where they could put America’s supposed “relief.” As the story was related to me, the UNRWA workers were told that if the United States wanted to provide any assistance, Americans should send guns and ammunition, so that the Palestinian refugees could defend themselves against the attacks by the Israeli army. “You want to help us?” a young Palestinian shouted.” “Then give us some of those,” he said, pointing to the UH-60

Blackhawk helicopter flying in the distance with Israeli markings. And after learning that the

United States Government was providing USAID assistance after Israeli troops had killed dozens of civilians and destroyed 800 Palestinian homes with helicopters, tanks and bulldozers in the

Occupied Territory making more than 4,000 of them homeless, I could see his point (HRW,

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2002).

After doing a little more digging, I discovered that since World War II, Israel has been the largest recipient of US aid and that most of American assistance has been in the form of weapons

(CRS, 2016; 2018). In FY 2002, when Palestinians were attempting to repel Israeli incursions into the West Bank, the United States provided the Government of Israel $2.787 billion dollars in assistance. Of that, 73% or $2.061 billion was in American weapons like the Blackhawk helicopter and only 27% or $727 million was given to Israel for the civilian projects like building of hospitals, schools and other public infrastructure.

From the perspective of the Palestinian, I could see the why they would feel that it was unjust that the United States gifted the Israeli government roughly $428 dollars for every Israeli man, woman and child when Israel’s average per capita GDP was already $26,582 or thirty times the average Palestinian per capita GDP of only $879 a year ($2.40 cents a day). And when the

United States made sure that over 70% of American assistance went to Israel in the form of weapons; it could seem insulting if not infuriating that each of the 4,800 Palestinians left homeless from the Israeli attacks using American weapons was being provided roughly $54 dollars in tents, hygiene kits and water jugs. And after putting Jenin into the context of a post-9/11 world and where the reason that Osama bin Laden attacked the United States was support of

Israel’s attacks against the Palestinians, I wondered what else we might inadvertently be doing to invite the righteous hostility of others.

Hearing about Jenin transported me back to the summer of 1998 at the University of

Tehran, when, for a couple of short weeks, I shared my dorm room with a Palestinian doctoral candidate. From what I can recall, he was an Arabic-Farsi translator for the Iranian Embassy in

Jordan and taking his comprehensive exams for a PhD in linguistics. While his English was

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rudimentary and my Farsi barely functional, we were able to communicate in some depth about his childhood. And just like bin Laden, with one mention of Israel and his mood changed.

As my roommate relayed the story to me, he had been a child when Moshe Dayan, the famous Israeli general of the Arab-Israeli wars, rolled up to grandfather’s farm in an Army jeep with two or three other soldiers. After jumping out Dayan announced that he wanted to talk to the owner of the farm. When my roommate’s grandfather arrived, he said that Dayan presented his grandfather with a small box of gold saying this is what the State of Israel has decided is the fair value of your farm; we’d like to purchase it.

He said, his grandfather laughingly refused. The farm had been in the family for generations and his grandfather told the Israelis no amount of money could buy their birthright.

Dayan and the soldiers politely accepted that answer, returned to their jeep and left. And the family thought it was the end of the matter.

The next day, my Palestinian roommate said that three jeep loads of soldiers returned early in the morning armed with automatic weapons and told the family that they were taking over the farm.

“But you can’t do this,” his grandfather argued.

“You have until noon to gather up what you want to take with you,” the soldiers responded.

“At least give us the gold you offered yesterday,” his grandfather pleaded.

“The offer of gold was for yesterday. Your order to move is the situation today.”

In the blink of an eye, the family’s future went from being wealthy landowning farmers to being crammed in a tent living on handouts. My roommate’s responsibility was carrying a large mashak or goatskin water bag, as the family fled their farm in Palestine across the desert to a

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refugee camp in Jordan. It took years of scrabbling as homeless foreigners in the refugee camp until his parents were able to find work and make Jordan their new home. It was there that he finally was able to go to school, study Farsi and, after years of hard work, eventually become a translator for the Iranian Embassy in Jordan.

“I will never rest until my grandfather’s farm is back in our family,” he said.

And while I wondered how much of his story was composed of personal memories and how much was a remembering as recounted by his mother, father and grandparents, I had no doubt in his sincerity or desire for revenge.

But if the primary reason that the Israelis were able to kick the Palestinians off their land or maintain possession of the Occupied Territories in the face of international opprobrium was through force of American arms, I wondered what responsibility the United States bore for my roommate’s current condition. And if bin Laden was attacking the United States because of what

Israel was doing in Palestine, how legitimate were his charges? And what did it all mean for my former Palestinian roommate in a post-9/11 world?

If the AUMF gave Bush the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he (the President) determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks” if they opposed “our way of life,” what did that mean if the Palestinian interpreter for the Iranian Embassy living in Jordan provided funding to a group that was attacking the Israelis living on his grandfather’s old farm?

What if it was his mother or grandfather giving money, meals or a place to sleep to other

Palestinian refugees trying to reclaim stolen land? Did sharing a meal in a refugee camp constitute supporting terrorists and terrorism? And even if my temporary roommate’s situation had now improved, would American agents be authorized to kidnap off the streets of Amman, suspend

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habeas corpus and/or use enhanced interrogation methods like waterboarding against him? These thoughts weren’t at the forefront of my thinking at the time, but looking back, there were already noticeable cracks in the seams of America’s self-image of infallibility and virtue.

I remember stumbling over banker boxes filled with the University of Nebraska textbooks that the Taliban had used to teach machine gun math to Afghan refugee youths in Pakistan when visiting a USAID colleague in a different division. Another time, I was regaled with the intrepid work USAID had done to get Tennessee mules to Afghanistan in order to move everything from medical equipment to Stinger missiles by one of the old hands, by greying USAID economist in a windowless room in the bowels of the Agency. And then there were the contracts with the various

NGOs and companies that would appear like mushrooms after a rain to execute a specific government contract requirement for a limited amount of time before disappearing again as quickly once the funding expired.

Like droplets of awareness condensing in the top of my skull, I was beginning to understand my entrapment within a Mary’s Room scenario of my own. I’d earned my bachelor’s degree at the Naval Academy in political science and had gotten my Master’s in “security studies” from the Fletcher School, “the oldest graduate professional school of international affairs in the

United States,” but was completely ignorant with the actual way policies were made or implemented. And in a reversal of my Fletcher School experience of using the analogy of reading about sex versus experiencing sex to explain the difference between theorizing about war and being a participant in battle to my classmate; it was now my USAID colleagues showing me the actual way the factory made its filling and the sausage skins got stuffed.

Nothing was as it seemed. Decisions came down from on high. Changes made without explanation. Our job was to take a piece of the puzzle from one point and time, manipulate it, and

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make things fit for another place and time without asking why.

For the most part, no one asked any questions. With multiple disasters occurring around the world, OFDA was always busy initiating, continuing or closing a disaster response. And without enough staff to address all the needs of all the people impacted by the floods, fires, famines, hurricanes, droughts, and earthquakes around the world, we were just doing the best we could with what we had before being redirected to the next disaster that seemingly had impacted more people worse.

Most of us were adrenaline junkies who didn’t care about the politics. We were focused purely on overcoming the physical time and distance obstacles that stood between moving this water purification unit or ton of wheat from here to there; and we were happiest in the instant we matched resources to needs and were given another task as our reward. It was that sense of mission accomplishment that made us glow with life.

That said, there were old hands, who like the prior enlisted during Plebe Summer, could see the forest for the trees. They’d spent months or years in the field living the squalor and destitution that we attempted to respond to by making phone calls, sending emails and analyzing message traffic. They knew when and how to disassociate themselves from the images of pain and suffering we were seeing, as well as the internal politics and bureaucratic strings that were pulled to make things happen.

“Focus on the mission, but don’t get too caught up in ‘success’,” they’d tell me. Take time to eat. Take time to breathe. Don’t run to your meetings, walk. There’ll be another disaster waiting for you once this one is done.

And then there were the jaded ones who still did solid work but were always careful to sniff out the political strings attached to each mission. Why was this disaster being responded

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to… and not that one? Who had been picked to lead the response and where had they come from before arriving at USAID? How many resources were being allocated from where to whom at what urgency? Why?

But I wasn’t paying much attention to the aloof or dispassionate. Each day was a master class in geopolitical office politics where thousands of people were already dead, and our mission was to help save thousands more from dying. I was thirty-six years old, a former combat Marine in peak physical and mental condition. “Can’t” and “quit” weren’t in my vocabulary. Caffeine and calories were all I needed to keep going.

Each day I’d put on my self-appointed uniform of dark grey flat front trousers, white

Brooks Brothers non-iron shirt, Thomas Pink silk tie, and black Mephisto Marlon leather oxfords.

Before walking out the door, I’d slip on my neck lanyard holding a flutter of electronic access badges, slip on my navy Brooks Brother blazer and throw my otter green Filson 24 Hour Tin

Briefcase over my shoulder, still full of the readings I’d done or forgotten that night.

Each day of work was an honor. I felt good. I looked good. And most importantly, I went into the office believing that I was doing good, each and every day.

The benefit of my past was that I had no questions about my future. I had held the sword and used it to kill our nation's enemies in places I’d never known existed. Now I was holding the pen, or at least hammering the keyboard and using the phone to move Maslow’s essentials of food, water, shelter, and medicine to help the world’s most destitute survive. And for the first time since becoming a Marine infantry platoon commander, I felt I had a life calling again.

My Marine Corps’ lessons of “improvise, adapt and overcome” came in handy when facing bureaucratic obstacles. I learned that most of the delays and blockages were less about law or ability, and more about individual apathy or the static inertia of the status quo. As Newton’s

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first law of motion noted, things at rest tend to stay at rest and to change any state from rest to motion requires priming the pump with more energy and enthusiasm.

As I lacked position, seniority and authority, I’d attack problems with optimism, smiles, and an endless series of questions: What’s best? What’s optimal? What is stopping us from achieving that? How do we get around that? Who do we need to get on board? When can we start? What can I do? And by being relentless, I helped move our missions forward over, under, around and through any problem a humanitarian delivery faced.

But even as I felt joy and pride to be part of USAID executing the Office of Foreign

Disaster Assistance’s (OFDA) mission of “Save lives, alleviate suffering and reduce the economic impact of disasters,” I was reminded by the old field hands and survivors that there were things going on behind the curtain that I wasn’t aware of. Instead of the Iranian phrase, “Hameh chiz poshteh pardeh ast,” my USAID colleagues used the Wizard of Oz’s reference of “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” (Baum, 1939, 1:28:45) And as things like the Congress’ ratification of Bush’s AUMF or the nearly rejected shipment of “humanitarian assistance” to the

Palestinian survivors of the Israel military attack on Jenin reminded me, there were greater forces at play than could be solved by my ever-smiling hyperkinetic circuit of metro-boulot-dodo.

Without heeding it, I was given one of the most important pieces of wisdom for life by my boss one day. A bit different than “everything is behind the curtain” and “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” he simply said, “pay attention to the backdrop and be ready to move when it changes.” Of course, his observation was given in explanation to our mission in disaster response.

OFDA’s mandate in disaster response was much like that of a paramedic or Emergency

Medical Technician (EMT) arriving at the scene of an accident. Our responsibility was to assess

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the damage, stabilize the patient and keep them alive as we transported them to the hospital. But we overstayed our welcome and exceeded our capabilities when we tried to cure them. That was for other people and organizations to take care of.

Remembering his advice years later, I found the “pay attention to the backdrop and be ready to move when it changes to be applicable in a wide variety of situations in life. But at the time, I was too overwhelmed with the sensory overload to separate the signal from the noise. How do you pay attention to saving the life in front of you while keeping track of the changing backdrop behind you? And what do you do when the number of injured are greater than you can help or the organizations you were passing them off to weren’t able to provide better care than you were currently providing? These were decisions that no one could make for you and had to be made on the fly in the place you were in often without help.

I soon learned that the answer to almost every question we faced at OFDA should be prefaced with “Well, it depends.” And then taking the seconds it took you to say that to think through the three, five, or twenty different outcomes that might immediately result from any specific action before trying to consider the myriad secondary and tertiary implications that might be important depending on who was looking at the situation. The answers always changed depending on who was asking, when, where and why.

My challenge was that this level of wisdom and self-awareness might take years to accumulate, and I had just started the job. On top of that, the Mary’s Room separation between the classroom theory of how the system works versus how we really got things done created cognitive dissonance of what was “right” when providing humanitarian assistance to a famine in

Zambia, a flood in China or a fire in Peru from an office cubicle in Washington D.C.. And without previous real-world experience on the ground in refugee camps on disaster sites to teach

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me the human impacts of each different decision, I was back in the same scenario I had occupied as a Marine infantry platoon commander masquerading as an intelligence officer at the Marine

Air Wing headquarters.

What I slowly came to believe was the 9/11 Commission observation that, “The U.S. government has access to a vast amount of information. But it has a weak system for processing and using what it has” was really ignoring the essence or at least intent of a bureaucratic government. The bureaucracy was designed so that the bottom level workers were only allowed to see the micro piece of the puzzle they were working on without any inkling of how it might fit into the bigger picture.

Bureaucracy aka Information Pyramid Scheme

Information is power. And our job within the bureaucracy was to sift through mounds of errata and then identify, collect, distill and format the desired nuggets of information into usable pieces of intelligence. And once our efforts were rendered valuable, then pass them up to the next level in the chain of command. The aim of the system was not to maximize the quality of life or self-actualization of its workers, but to enrich the knowledge, power, ease, and quality of life of those higher up in the pyramid.

Only as you climbed up the administrative ladder were you allowed to look over other people’s cubicle walls or read the findings of other divisions to understand what they were working on and connect different streams of information to develop a comprehensive picture of the entire enterprise. In this way, an individual had to rise through the ranks of power in order to improve the quality and variety of the information they received. And only through a form of administrative pointillism could the senior leadership understand what the true purpose of all the energy, resources and personnel were devoted to.

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In my understanding, a bureaucratic approach to information sharing resembles a Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme in that early investors profit from the additional inputs of those who come after them. As the number of additional investors in the system increases, the amount of profit to the founders of the system increases exponentially. But the new joins receive less and less return on their investment.

But if my interpretation was accurate, this also meant the 9/11 Commission criticism that the hijackers were successful because of a “failure of imagination” on the part of the intelligence agents and their respective agencies also missed the entire point of a bureaucracy, which was to restrict the independent thinking and action of subordinate units outside of top-down command and control. As I would hear time and time again in my time with USAID, “That (decision) is above my pay grade…” And the statement would usually be followed by, “Let’s wait and see what the leadership decides.”

This bureaucratic, “the boss knows more” or “the boss knows better” seems to be philosophically antithetical to the definition of democracy, a government of the people, by the people and for the people. In a participatory democracy, the collective will of the people decide what is best for the group. So how could an individual citizen determine if any particular government policy or initiative was in their own best interest if they did not have the same access to information as the elected official or secret agent “acting on their behalf” because of a bureaucratic practice of only informing the elected leadership?

Thomas Jefferson’s comment that, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be” might seem to be useful in answering the question. And if human nature and the tendencies of modern government are similar to the people and governmental systems of the past, then it might be useful to remember Jefferson’s

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observations:

“The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the

liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the

people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is

free and every man able to read, all is safe.”

But what did that mean in the case of deciding to bomb Afghanistan, when roughly 83% of American youths aged 18 to 24 years of age, the most likely demographic to be sent overseas to fight, couldn’t find the country on the map? And how did that fact sync with education’s pronouncement that “We don’t teach you what to think. We teach you how to think.” And if

America’s youth couldn’t even find the country they’d be fighting in on the map, how could they begin to understand the reasons why they were going or the challenges they’d face once they got there? My confusion over the democratic formulation of foreign policies increased when I learned that the US was actively working to keep information from the American people.

In 1999, roughly a decade after the end of the Cold War, the United States did away with the United States Information Agency or USIA. As an agency most Americans inside the United

States had never heard about, there was little outcry at its disappearance. But for millions of people around the world, USIA and its primary broadcast arm, the Voice of America, were beacons of hope in times of darkness.

Charged with the mission to “understand, inform, and influence foreign publics in promotion of the U.S. national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions and their counterparts abroad,” the USIA had four specific goals (Chodkowski, 2012):

● To explain and advocate U.S. policies in terms that are credible and meaningful in foreign

cultures;

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● To provide information about the United States, its values, institutions, and culture;

● To build mutual understanding and lasting relationships through the exchange of people

and ideas; and

● To advise U.S. policymakers on foreign public opinion and its implications for proposed

policies.

In my mission to establish Track Three or people to people diplomatic efforts, USIA would have been one of the official organizations to work with. And USIA would have been the funding agency of the shuttered Pakistan-American Cultural Center in Quetta, that I visited on my way to

Iran. But with that effort to explain the casus belli or America’s justified cause for launching a

“Global War on Terror” gone, how could misunderstandings resulting from the American president calling for a “crusade” be negated?

Perhaps there was no misunderstanding.

Going behind the Curtain

In the five years between joining USAID in Fall 2001 until Fall 2006, I was deployed to five different disasters on behalf of OFDA. I helped coordinate the provision of humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. I was part of the USAID disaster response team that deployed to Iran after the 2003 Bam earthquake. I helped coordinate the US Government’s response to mudslides in the Philippines. I was the lead civil military liaison in Banda Aceh during the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. And I served as USAID’s principal disaster response advisor to the SOUTHCOM Commander after Hurricane Stan struck Guatemala in 2005.

While there is probably enough material for another dissertation of findings, I’m keeping my observations short for a variety of factors. First, I still don’t know what is and isn’t classified.

While everything we did was “unclassified,” I’m gun shy of writing too much, as I’ll explain later

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in the dissertation. Second, I’m still processing exactly what happened and will likely take another decade to appreciate the implications of those experiences on my life. Third and most relevant, the different operations I participated in didn’t teach me anything new from an academic standpoint but rather forced me to question what I had already learned in school. What follows are my distilled reflections to date.

Drumbeats of War

By the Summer of 2002, it became apparent that something was happening, although it wasn’t clear to everyone. Certainly, the old hands at USAID, whom I considered jaded, knew because by the Fall of 2002, several had decided to take early retirement or just quit. But I wasn’t paying attention to why they were leaving because I was still committed to my Marine Corps training of “accomplish the mission at all costs.” It hadn’t occurred to me yet to question the morality of mission or human costs of obeying orders. I was just excited to be part of the grand adventure.

President Bush’s speech identifying Iraq as part of the “axis of evil” in early 2002 was the first stage of laying the emotional groundwork for leading the country into war. By creating the mental linkages between 9/11, Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the minds of the American people, the logic of linking the Global War on Terrorism with the invasion of Iraq became more acceptable over time. Working overtime in the Ronald Reagan Building at USAID Headquarters, I wasn’t really making the micro to macro connections of all the different pieces being put into place. But there were tiny clues that the old hands were paying attention, allowing them to move off stage while the backdrop changed.

Of course, I found it curious that I was sent to a Biosafety Level (BSL) 3 lab in Dugway

Proving Grounds, the location of our last airborne drop during Ranger School. The remoteness of

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Utah had been one of the reasons this location was selected to test and develop the United States’ the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and high Explosive (CBRNE) capabilities. I found it fascinating to visit a BSL-3 laboratory that tested mustard gas and “fingerprinted” variants of diseases like anthrax, tuberculosis, West Nile virus, and yellow fever. Still, I wasn’t quite clear how going into a lab where we had to suit up and use Powered Air Purifying

Respirators (PAPR’s) was relevant to my job at OFDA.

The same year, I was sent back to Mercedes Benz Headquarters in Germany to help develop specifications and procure armored civilian vehicles for deploying humanitarians to complex humanitarian emergencies. Once again, I was paired up with Bill Bairdain, who introduced us to the directors of Mercedes Benz’s armoring division. Bill also helped secure an invitation to visit Mercedes Benz’s test track in Graz, Austria where we drove their

Geländewagens or G-wagens at speeds and upgrades that buggered the imagination. Nope.

Nothing out of the ordinary here.

Later that year, I was allowed to attend the one-week Hostile Environment and Emergency

First Aid Course (HEFAT) run by former Royal Marines in the foothills of Virginia. Originally designed to prepare unarmed civilians like journalists and humanitarian workers to survive in war zones, HEFAT introduced me to a place I knew well but this time in the role of a “woke” sheep rather than an alert sheepdog or hungry wolf. Still no alarm bells going off.

I think it wasn’t until OFDA welcomed a Marine Corps Officer on a “exchange” tour and we were paired up with a Special Forces officer to give briefings around the country to civil affairs soldiers on the “5W,H” (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How) of USAID that I could no longer pretend ignorance or innocence. We were preparing for war, and I was helping make it all happen. The only question left now was “When?”

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While it seemed most Americans were not paying attention to the passage of the Patriot

Act, that allowed intelligence agencies to conduct domestic surveillance on the American people or the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Iraq, the rest of the world was. In a nearly complete reversal of global support the United States received in the aftermath of 9/11, the announcement that America was preparing to invade Iraq was met with protests from some of its strongest allies. In the five months between the signing of the AUMF against Iraq on 16 October 2002 and the invasion of Iraq on 19 March 2003, there were hundreds of protests around the world involving millions of people from countries like Australia, Canada,

United Kingdom, Spain, India, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Republic of

Ireland, Brazil, and Israel. The average person around the world was not convinced that America was doing the right thing.

As outed CIA Agent Valerie Plame and her husband, former United States diplomat Joe

Wilson explained (Plame-Wilson &Wilson, 2013) after watching Secretary of State Colin Powell testify at the United Nations on 5 February 2003:

The implications suddenly became obvious: we were watching a kabuki play and the

outcome was predetermined. The Bush administration was determined to go to war,

however bad the intelligence, and not even Secretary of State Powell was going to stand in

the way.

Drinking the Kool Aid

In agency terms, we called it “Drinking the Kool Aid.” The phrase came from the 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana where religious cult leader Jim Jones convinced over 900 of his followers to drink colored sugar water laced with cyanide. In US government parlance, the phrase meant unthinking or blind obedience to an obviously flawed and self-destructive policy

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that would result in one’s own death.

I wasn’t thinking about USAID’s work as “Drinking the Kool Aid” in 2002. The organization was “saving lives and alleviating suffering” and I was, by extension, “doing good.”

It would take me deploying to Iraq to understand how much Kool Aid I’d already swallowed.

There are probably hundreds of dissertations worth of research that could be derived from the United States’ invasion of Iraq. For the purposes of the autoethnography, there are three lessons I learned: prestidigitation; indulgences and expendability.

Prestidigitation

The prestidigitation, legerdemain or general sleight of hand by which the Bush

Administration manipulated US foreign policy in the minds of the American people was accomplished with the ease of a New York grifter playing Three Card Monte with marks coming off a Greyhound bus from Peoria. The reason wasn’t necessarily that the entire American population was fooled. There were any number of intellectuals, political leaders and military experts who opposed the invasion of Iraq in terms of morality, feasibility and international law.

But the average American voter, the ones who through their elected representatives in Congress should have been making the decision to go or not to go to war, cared little about the human and financial costs of a future war because they knew they would not be fighting in it.

Avoiding the Draft

Ever since the end of the military draft in 1975 and the institution of an all-volunteer force, the general public was content to sleep under the figurative “blanket of freedom” that

Marine Colonel Jessup talked about in the movie, “A Few Good Men” (Reiner, 1992). As long as there was someone else to join the Marines, Rangers and Special Operations, citizens who would pick up a rifle and stand watch on the wall, the average American seemed happy to say, “Thank

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you” and focus on getting ahead in the rat race. The Iraq War architects Bush, Cheney and

Rumsfeld likely calculated that as long as the oil flowed, few Americans were killed and the daily rhythm of American life remained undisturbed, no one was going to miss Saddam Hussein, care that international laws were broken, or innocent Iraqis were killed. Hence Bush’s encouragement to get on the plane and fly to Disneyland.

I was in a slightly different situation. I had volunteered to pick up the weapon and stand post on the empire’s wall to guard against the barbarian hordes. After resigning my commission in the Marine Corps and spending years wandering in the wastelands, I’d come back with a vision of destroying America’s enemies by making them friends. What I didn’t realize before going to

Iraq with USAID was that just because I was helping deliver lifesaving assistance, I wasn’t actually acting as a humanitarian.

Indulgences

I was selected to be on the advance team for the interagency Disaster Assistance Response

Team (DART) put together for the invasion of Iraq and flew to the Middle East in February 2003 to prepare for the invasion. I flew business class for the first time in my life from Washington DC via London and arrived refreshed for our meetings in Qatar. A quick flight to Kuwait City before linking up with our counterpart from other government agencies and setting up camp along the coast. It seemed surreal to be landing in the same airport that we had fought over during the first

Gulf War and then unpack my gas mask and bulletproof vest in a four star hotel instead of a foxhole with some camouflage netting.

The days were spent meeting our Kuwaiti government hosts and introducing our DoD colleagues to USAID’s UN, ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and NGO counterparts. It was here that I began to understand a distinction between USAID, a government

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organization that provided food, water, and shelter to people in need and an actual humanitarian organization that did the same.

As my NGO colleague told me, “You’re not a humanitarian. In order to be a humanitarian, you need to be neutral, impartial and independent.” And they left unsaid, that because I was working for “the Man,” I could not be working for humanity.

Carrot or stick when dealing with donkeys. Plata o plomo (gold or lead) when dealing with drug dealers. In my NGO colleague’s mind, USAID was simply the kinder, gentler face of

US domination. The reason was that USAID OFDA was supplying Maslow’s basics as an incentive to effect a national political agenda, rather than to address a humanitarian need. It wasn’t necessarily that OFDA’s actions were physically different from UNOCHA, Catholic

Relief Service or Medicins Sans Frontier. But our motives and intent for providing the assistance were.

Their concept was new to me. Providing food, water, and shelter to those in need was doing good. Right? But in March 2003, as we rolled through the newly conquered country, I began to understand how food, water or healthcare could be a weapon, especially for a population that had been held under crippling US designed sanctions since the first Gulf War when I was last sent to visit the neighborhood.

To counter the negative impacts of the US designed sanctions, Saddam Hussein made sure nearly every Iraqi received a monthly ration of food and fuel from his government. Now with

Saddam’s government overthrown, that system was gone and there were over 25 million people who were suddenly wondering how long they could survive with the food they had managed to store up. And in the face of overwhelming needs and insufficient resources, what population should the US Government prioritize?

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As United States Secretary, Colin Powell described in his “Pottery Barn” rules (Safire,

2004), “You break it, you own it.” Now that the United States was the “occupying power,” we were responsible for providing all the Maslow essentials previously provided by Saddam. But with so much need and so little capacity, the question was where to start.

Should USAID start with the minority Sunni Ba’ath party that supported and benefited from Saddam Hussein’s rule? Maybe we should work with the Kurds in north Iraq who controlled key oil regions that bordered Iran and Turkey? Or maybe the food and resources should flow to the majority Shia population in Iraqi’s southern region because they’d attempted an uprising against Saddam after the first Gulf War, even though the Iraqi Shia were connected to Shia Iran.

No matter who we supported first, we were changing the dynamics of political power and setting the stage for who would later rule the country.

As we drove with our military escorts from Kuwait City to Basrah and then up Highway 1 through Nasiriyah to Baghdad, I kept on wondering how much America had thought about the international consequences of our actions and the human costs? How much did the American people care? If actions speak louder than words, the answer was “Not much.”

One team, one fight

I remember stumbling on a pre-invasion military briefing at Camp Commando filled with intelligence officers who I’d worked with in the Marine Corps. After exchanging high fives and catching up on what we were doing, the senior officer arrived at the tent to address the group.

Despite my Top Secret clearance and the Marine intelligence officers vouching for my bona fides, the Lieutenant Colonel refused to even look at me and my USAID colleague. Instead, he addressed the senior Marine sticking up for me and said, “Get them out.” One team, one fight; not so much.

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Then several weeks later, a flashlight sweeping the dark in the middle of the night and frantic whispering, “Hey, where’s the USAID guy?” After being escorted to the Operations

Center, I remember watching real time tracking of SCUD missiles being launched toward us as the Watch Officer, a full bird colonel briefed me that Baghdad had fallen and that the military’s

Phase 3 of “dominate” the enemy was complete. What was the US Government’s plan for Phase 4 or “stabilize” the situation? We needed to reestablish security and restore essential services.

Quieting the internal voice that whispered, “Well, you stupid fuckshit, if we’d started this conversation back in March, you’d know the answers, asshole”; I smiled, took a calming breath and explained. Our team had been coordinating with the multinational coalition’s Humanitarian

Assistance Coordination Center (HACC) for the past couple of weeks. Now that the southern roads were cleared, we’d be driving north to conduct our initial humanitarian needs assessment.

And I then returned the favor by briefing him on our scheme of maneuver.

Here is our comms plan with cell phone numbers, sat phone numbers, radio frequencies and call signs. We’re unarmed, but will have armed military escorts providing security. These are routes we’re planning to take and military units we’re working with. We’re using the blaze orange panels on top of our vehicles to identify us as “friendly,” but any assistance you could provide to ensure we aren’t targeted by coalition aircraft would be greatly appreciated.

After asking a few perfunctory questions he wished me good luck. I promised to share any information we found and thanked him for all his help. It was still zero dark thirty and hours before I was scheduled to leave. But instead of going back to sleep, I went back to unpack, double check everything and then repack. It was going to be a long day.

It turned out to be a couple long weeks. Even with the time provided by the dissertation, I can’t reconstruct the timeline of our daily activities. But in recalling my actions, the NGO

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comment about my inability to be humanitarian rang true.

Because everything I did was to support the United States’ success in overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, I could not be neutral, impartial or independent. I prioritized those efforts that complemented American military forces achieving their objectives over the needs of the local Iraqi population. And I acted only when ordered to or after receiving clearance to proceed.

That doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have been a humanitarian. As long as America’s justification for invading Iraq and the way in which we rebuilt the country was recognizable as upholding universal humanitarian values, then our actions could have been considered moral and just. But where our decisions claimed waivers from international judgement, standards and norms because of “American exceptionalism,” we became no better than the senior Nazi leaders at

Nuremburg claiming personal innocence because “my country told me to.”

In a déjà vu of the dead Iraqi soldiers my platoon of Marines dug up when trying to dig a defensive position near a burning oil well during the first Gulf War; we discovered the mass graves of Iraqi civilians killed in retaliation for the 1991 uprisings encouraged by the United

States (Zenko, 2016). I hadn’t known about the uprisings until we drove past the crowds of Iraqi villagers who’d dug up the corpses in an attempt to find their executed family members and give them a proper burial. I dealt with seeing families trying to match rotted corpses to faded pictures of “Uncle Hamid” the same way I dealt with seeing the human spine in a burnt out Iraqi T-55 tank; a snap recording of the information and then compartmentalization of the data until I could process its meaning more carefully.

Writing my autoethnography thirty years later might be the time.

Looking back, I was beginning to see that when it comes to universal TRUTHs, there is no

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“Us” and “Them,” but that we are all connected. And if we wanted to study timeless TRUTHs, there could be no temporal logic that allowed actions judged immoral in the past (like lying, cheating, stealing, or killing) to be moral today, because “that was then this is now.” The problem was the standards for truth and justice varied with who was being talked to or dealt with.

In a logic similar to the Melian Dialogue, individuals and systems thought it was ok to lie or suspend to act with justice with the “Other” because of economic, legal, racial, religious, or social superiority. And while I had been taught it was ok to lie, cheat or steal from the “enemy” on the battlefield if it helped accomplish the mission and saved my men’s lives, there was a corrosive effect to taking the step into the shadows to “win.” This represented the slippery slope reflected by LtCol Oliver North’s testimony to Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings.

As both North and Pointdexter, Naval Academy alumni who’d been taught to obey the

Honor Code, responded to the Committee, they believed it was ok to lie to Congress if it accomplished the mission. The problem was that in lying to Congress, they were lying to the

American people, which meant that the democratic process was being destroyed because the people no longer had the complete information necessary to make accurate decisions based on the facts. To put it into computer programmer terms, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). No matter how perfect your program is, if the data input into the system is flawed, then your solution will be lacking.

Apparently what Pointdexter and North didn’t consider before lying to Congress was whether or not the mission was moral or not in the first place. And if they in fact never questioned the morality of their orders and impact of their actions on the Constitution of the United States, then the promotion of Pointdexter to Rear Admiral in the Navy and North’s selection to serve on the National Security Council, would seem to call into question the American education’s belief

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that: “We don’t teach you what to think. We teach you how to think.” That is unless American education had no interest in teaching how to live in a moral manner.

The real problem is that telling “little white lies” created problems for a population that wants to consider themselves truthful, moral and just in their own eyes and the eyes of others. As little lies are told and small wrongs are committed to achieve an immediate objective and secure some personal gain, increasingly larger lies must be told to cover up the truth, which then require greater injuries and wrongs being done to hide the original guilt of the decision maker. It may not translate to the reader, but the poem, “For want of a nail” expresses the “best laid plans of mice and men” concept (Steinbeck, 1994) of cascading effects of one small decision on a world changing event.

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For

want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a

battle, the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

To me, this poem echoes the chaos theory metaphor of a butterfly’s wings causing a hurricane on a faraway continent by reflecting the implications of relying on Procrustean knowledge frameworks that discard certain facts or information because it might seem irrelevant or result in an answer that is emotionally, intellectually, or morally discomfiting. How might 9/11 have been avoided if the United States had paid more attention to Osama bin Laden’s objections?

How might the radicalization of Osama bin Laden have been avoided by not initiating the CIA’s

Operation Cyclone of creating a violent radicalized Islamic jihad to expel the Soviet Union from

Afghanistan? How might the need to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan have been avoided by maintaining good relations with Iran so that the Soviet advantage by occupying Afghanistan was negated? And so on, ad nauseum.

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All of these actions and reactions were started in part by the assumptions that communism was wrong, and communists were evil. And because labeling of the “Other,” made them less than human, it became “ok” to lie, cheat, steal and kill “them.” All of this thinking echoes the

Manichean logic of “good” versus “evil” and “Us” versus “Them.”

The problem I began encountering in making micro-to-macro linkages over time was that

I began to find evidence that everything that goes around comes around eventually. And if my observations were accurate, then it meant that the hubris of ignoring universal and timeless

TRUTHs to gain a temporary, localized advantage by claiming to be “exceptional” would eventually fail in the end. Moreover, failure to accept that every individual and human built system are subordinate to these infinite TRUTHs eventually results in the destruction of an ecosystem built by the man-made MICE of money, ideology, coercion and ego, simply because any imbalance cannot be sustained indefinitely.

This is because high school physics students staying awake in class knew what world leaders might have forgotten. Energy is not created or destroyed. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And everything tends towards chaos. And this predicts that every crusade proselytizing lower case “truths” to create a Thousand Year Reich will eventually return to a universal homeostasis, often sooner than you think. Just ask Pope Urban II, Adolph Hitler or

Ozymandias.

But in the instant, I was driving by a mound of corpses surrounded by the living. It felt like I was locked in a Groundhog Day of returning to a slightly different place at a slightly different time in a slightly different role to deal with the corpses of people I had some responsibility for killing. All “(f)or the want of …” something.

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Osama bin Luther

Without attempting to draw too strong a parallel or inflate his historical significance, but in attacking the United States Osama bin Laden was playing a role similar to that of Martin

Luther when he attacked the Borgia papacy. At the beginning of the 15th century and height of the Renaissance, the once humble and pious position of spiritual leadership embodied in the Pope or “father” of the Catholic Church had become one associated with assassinations, bribery, nepotism and sex scandals under Pope Alexander VI. One of the prime objections that Luther raised in his 95 Theses was against the practice of indulgences or the selling of salvation to evil doers. One of his core arguments being that money, a man made thing cannot be used to buy salvation, a divine state.

In a similar manner, at the height of American dominance around the world, bin Laden’s

“Letter to America” was pointing out the United States’ feet of clay showing where “the walk,” or the actions the CIA and American military took overseas diverged from “the talk,” the lofty ideals the American people supposedly upheld. The high ideals that the United States proclaimed from

President Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill” to Bush’s “thousand points of light” didn’t seem to be matched by the actions like the Iran-Contra affair or the first Gulf War. And by failing to live up to the universal TRUTHs that American leaders proclaimed to follow, the United States became a legitimate target for attack. My role in USAID could be seen as one of buying salvation to cover the sins of the nation.

Selling indulgences

Invade a nation and overthrow its legitimate government in direct violation of the UN

Charter Article 2 (4), “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other

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manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations”? No worries. Just provide

“humanitarian assistance” to the survivors and have a military so large and powerful that no other nation will dare question your decisions or criticize your efforts.

Supply billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel that are used to steal Palestinian lands and make them homeless? No problem. Send the Palestinians plastic tarps and water jugs to help them meet the SPHERE standards for survival in the refugee camps.

So, while I was committed to ensure that our efforts provided the Maslow essentials to the people left unhomed or without power, food, and running water as a result of the invasion, I was beginning to see how our delivery of “aid” was really “chicken on a bayonet.” In presenting the needed food to the destitute, we were creating a narrative of being saviors to a disaster without acknowledging our role in making the dispossessed destitute in the first place. And by ensuring the local population knew that they had the choice of complying with the American rule and eating or resisting and being shot, we deluded ourselves into thinking that silence meant consent.

Expendability

But perhaps the biggest difference between my time in the Gulf as an officer of Marines and a member of the USAID OFDA Military Liaison Unit was just how expendable civilian

“humanitarian” lives were. In my mind, one of the greatest indicators as to how much the United

States valued me as a warfighter and life saver is reflected in the amount of education and training that was invested in preparing for my deployment. Five years versus almost nothing.

When I was accepted as a midshipman to the United States Naval Academy, I knew that my role was going to be to fight and win the United States’ wars. And while some alumni who shared my alma mater referred to the Naval Academy as the “Severn Higher Institute of

Technology” or S.H.I.T and joked that our $268,000 education was shoved up our backsides one

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nickel at a time, no one ever claimed that our education and training was deficient. From our induction during Plebe Summer to the Blue Angels flying overhead for our graduation, no expense spared during our four years enrollment. From all-you-can-eat sit down meals to

Olympic sized pools and all-inclusive summer cruises on nuclear submarines or foreign ships, we had it all.

After graduation from the Naval Academy, the Marine Corps sent me to TBS or “The

Basic School” which taught newly commissioned officers the standards every Marine had to meet. After the six months of TBS, also known as “Two Baloney Sandwich” and “The Bullshit” by its graduates, prospective infantry platoon commanders were sent to IOC, a three month long

Infantry Officers’ Course. Add in the three weeks for the prisoner of war SERE school, three weeks for Army Airborne school and two months of Ranger School; by the time I arrived at my first unit, I had been marinated in military knowledge and culture for at least 60 months.

In contrast, after joining USAID, I may have had a week or two of orientation on the organization before going through the various information security, human relations, and sexual harassment trainings. All told, I imagine the courses might have totaled a month in length. The fact that I can’t remember the dates, times or course content is a reflection of the impact the courses had on my life.

So, in the Fall of 2002, when the old hands were quitting the Agency and it became obvious we were gearing up for war; I was curious to see how USAID would prepare middle aged civilians of average physical fitness who worked comfortable desk jobs for a war zone. That’s not actually true. I was more worried about how I would stay alive when I was deployed with middle aged civilians of average physical fitness who worked comfortable desk jobs and believed that their authority to lead a team in the field was based on their job title. And that’s not true

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either, as that question didn’t even enter my imagination until I asked one of our leaders how we would deliver aid to the people in need.

After spending years preparing for war, I had several assumptions about the environment.

First, the battlefield contained dangers that could kill you and knowing what those were could reduce your chances of dying. Second, there were people who wanted to kill you and knowing who they were could reduce your chances of dying. Third, by practicing to avoid the situations and people who wanted to kill you could increase your chances of surviving despite the risks.

Thus, I was surprised to find the leadership did not agree.

“So, Gregg, I hear that you’re asking about security training and getting armored vehicles for the DART.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“You know, we’ve been in war zones before. We know what we’re doing. Don’t worry.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

And being a well-trained Marine, I excused myself from her office and went back to the ten other tasks on my checklist for that day. But being a former intelligence officer, I started asking what was the logistics plan for moving unarmed civilians around the battlefield. And what

I discovered baffled me.

The “plan” was to go in-country (meaning Iraq), find a local Iraqi transportation company and hire out a fleet of vehicles and local drivers. The reasoning was that having a contract with an

Iraqi company would infuse the local economy with American dollars, which would in turn help spur economic development. The hiring of local drivers would do the same while providing our

USAID employees an assistant who both knew the local language and way about the country.

And while USAID had operated in multiple war zones using exactly this strategy with satisfactory

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results, I was a bit concerned that wasn’t how the scenario would play out this time.

The primary difference of USAID deploying to Liberia or some other Third World war zone was that in those cases, the United States was not the invading force or active participant in the conflict. Sure, the USAID leaders making that decision could point to the regional advisors who’d cut their teeth on “complex humanitarian emergencies” in Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea and Angola wearing flip flops, riding bicycles and scribbling consignment contracts on paper napkins. But that time had passed, as soon as the United States tried to weaponize the delivery of humanitarian assistance to achieve a political outcome as happened with “Blackhawk Down” in Somalia.

Now more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, “muzungu” or white people roaming around a civil war with food, water and shelter material were no longer respected guests who had the protection and respect of the entire population. After watching the United States do nothing during the genocide in Rwanda and understanding how control of Maslow’s essentials could tip the political balance of power, the unarmed convoys of “humanitarian” aid had transformed from aid to be shared with everyone to slow moving juicy grubs to be plucked and hoarded. And that situation was in places where the United States did not have an active military presence or long standing history with the people.

Iraq was a place everyone knew each other intimately. After the United States gave aid to both Iran and Iraq during their bloody eight year war, expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait after giving Saddam the “green light” to invade, and then imposed economic sanctions on the country that resulted in hundreds of thousands of excess child deaths, the Iraqi people were not starving refugees in Africa waiting for someone to save them. Somehow, I doubted that we’d be greeted as liberators after initiating a bombing campaign of “shock and awe.”

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If I were an Iraqi male with former military experience who spoke English and was hired as a driver, I imagined what I would probably do to Americans arriving uninvited. I would obsequiously welcome my USAID passengers and happily answer their ignorant questions with answers I imagined they wanted to hear. Then after determining they had no idea where we were going, I would drive into a blind alley and leave them to be executed by my cousin who’d lost his arm in the war or uncle who’d lost his family to the recent American bombing.

The only disagreement I can imagine happening during the killing was where to shoot us

(the American USAID “humanitarians”) and how to dispose of our bodies.

“No no, Hamid, not in the car. It’s messy and the blood is hard to get out of the upholstery…” or

“Don’t use all the kerosene, we need that to cook with. Just dump them in Hassan’s back yard. Then they’ll think he did it and we can get his farm…”

Luckily, the Iraq DART Commander was a former Army Special Forces officer who’d been recruited by USAID to lead the operation. And serendipitously, Lynn Thomas, a Vietnam era SEAL now working with the OFDA Military Liaison Unit had already recognized the changing security environment years before and had written, completely unrequested, an entire training program for unarmed civilians operating in a battle zone. Finally, Bill Bairdain helped us purchase and build a small fleet of armored commercial vehicles.

As a former Marine with combat experience and a background in infantry and intelligence operations, I had a front row seat to the development of all these new initiatives and was even put on the playing field from time to time. We worked with contractors to teach our interagency

DART team from USAID, HHS, USDA, DoE, and any number of acronymed agencies how to be the “grey man” or invisible in the crowd. We learned “tactical driving” and were taught the J-turn,

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“postman” and tactical pick. While all these preparations were completed at the last minute and to the minimum standard for utility in my mind, I suppose we were ready to go when Baghdad fell, and the humanitarian community started streaming across the border of Kuwait.

Upstairs-Downstairs

All that said, the most surprising part of my experiences was not the lack of planning or even lack of investment in training, but the internal decision making process that hadn’t recognized there was a problem that needed to be fixed in the first place. Looking back from the dispassion of almost twenty years, I think the primary challenges were not physical, but mental, emotional and social. And the root cause of our culture of unpreparedness was an inaccurate self- perception created by a Mary’s room education, bureaucratic decision making process and the social divide between Malcolm X’s (X, 1963) “house negros” and “field negros.”

The Mary’s room education challenge was like my war and sex conversation at Fletcher and emerged because most of my USAID colleagues were intelligent, idealistic, well-read individuals who came from comfortable upper middle class backgrounds. They were committed to making the world a better place based upon the theories they’d learned in school taught by teachers who’d never faced the wrong end of a rifle or used one in fear or anger to protect a life.

Those who had made it to the field almost always did so in a temporary manner as a privileged elite who never had to submit to the chaos of the situation and could remove themselves from danger at will. And so, like the first time I failed Ranger School, their “field” experiences were the difference between a horse, born, bred and trained to race at Santa Anita,

Longchamp or Ascot and a workhorse ridden for weeks on end on a cattle drive or, tougher, a field horse that was beaten each day as it pulled a plow. The result was a romanticization in the minds of disaster and warzone tourists of the dangers they experienced (“And then, once I was

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stopped at a checkpoint and told to get out of the car…”) or privations they endured (“You can’t imagine the difficulties we endured when the power went out. I mean hot water stopped for almost a week, until the landlord came back to fix it.”).

So, in Chinese chengyu form, it would be unfair to use the phrase (井底之蛙), or “Frog in the Well” because they had been outside the United States. Although like my living on American military bases in Japan, the reporters filing copy from the lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental in

Zagreb or peacekeepers “assessing the situation” during civil war in Yugoslavia from a hotel patio in Dubrovnik, their time abroad was spent mostly in the capital city or more isolating, the protected artificialities of the US Embassy compound. They hadn’t dug fighting positions near oil wells, broken bread with former child soldiers or shared a midnight bus with goats and smugglers.

And even my experiences were tame compared to those of individuals like John Walker Lindh or the volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

The chengyu that was probably more accurate for their almost field experiences was 叶公

好龙, Lord Ye loves dragons. In the story, Lord Ye is infatuated with the idea of dragons and decorates everything in his life with their image. His home, clothes, and artwork are filled with images of dragons. But when a real dragon comes to visit Lord Ye, he nearly dies of apoplexy.

The reality of living like the “rest of the world” was too real.

This lack of “real” field knowledge of what it was like to be a pawn in the new Great

Game created unacknowledged barriers for US Government workers to understand the mindset of potential beneficiaries of USAID assistance, like the post-Cold War architect trying to put food on the table by taking in foreign boarders or the Chinese noodle shop owner who’d survived the

Great Leap Forward by marrying an illiterate worker. But even these people from my own personal memories would have been “the lucky ones” compared to those described to me by a UN

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worker deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, he’d provided food, water and shelter to clusters of half-naked strangers who had banded together in the forest as protection against wild animals for survival. They would share clothes so that an individual had a full set of clothes when going into town to beg, search work or buy provisions. And I knew even my experiences wouldn’t be sufficient to fully understand the reality of their world as they knew it.

These gaps in perceptions of reality between policy creator, policy implementer and the policy’s target population were inherently widened by the process of accumulating knowledge and power in a bureaucracy. As aspiring workers climbed towards the summit of their organization’s leadership, they would often come to the conclusion that they had the choice of telling the facts unadorned or to arrange the data in a way that confirmed what those above them already believed to be true. And by confirming the predetermined conclusions as their bosses, they would be invited to the next rank of power and decision making because they reaffirmed the assumptions and prejudices of those in power. Those of us on the bottom or outside of the system called this willful deception “the self-licking ice cream cone.”

The system was set up to address a “problem” created because of conditions created by assumptions that required a certain response. The response reinforced certain assumptions of reality, like “Us” “Good” the “Other” “Bad” or we need to invade Iraq. And once put into motion, policy created the conditions that produced more “problems” that required more of the same response and resulted in more tongues and ice cream.

As long as you were trying to advance your career in an ice cream making bureaucracy, that was jolly. But there were problems for people interested in feeding people or helping them stay healthy, when they were collecting data that showed the population was allergic to ice cream

(lactose, casein, whey), didn’t have refrigerators or were obese with Type 2 diabetes. And while

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the reader may dismiss the use of a product like ice cream to expose the sometimes thoughtless and amoral decision making process of a bureaucracy, we have real world examples in similar products like baby formula.

Enriching Baby Killers

In the 1970’s, Nestlé and other baby formula companies decided that they could make a profit by selling their dehydrated baby powder to mothers in Africa. There may have been concerns that many (almost all) mothers in Africa didn’t have access to clean drinking water or baby bottles, let alone a refrigerator to store unused milk and the ability to sterilize the containers after use. But if so, it didn’t seem to dissuade the corporate management from trying to raise sales and increase profits.

The alarm was raised by investigative reports like “The Baby Killer” (Muller, 1974), that pointed out how poor mothers in Africa were over diluting the baby formula because they couldn’t afford to buy enough, which caused malnourishment and stunting in their babies. The report also noted that, “Where there is no choice but squalor, the choice of an artificial substitute for breast milk is in reality a choice between health and disease” (p. 5) and by using dirty water

(generally the only water available) to mix the baby formula, the mothers were feeding their babies a product that resulted in diarrhea, dehydration and death.

But the baby formula companies apparently decided that increased profits outweighed the negative press and African infant deaths, because they continued to sell their baby formula to

African mothers. And because African mothers apparently associated Western baby formula as a magic advantage to give their children a head start in life, they continued to buy the deadly product (Krasny, 2012). Finally, because the African economy still relied on manual labor, their families tended to be large. And as one baby died, because of disease and malnutrition, another

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would be conceived to replace the lost labor potential, keeping the family stuck on the baby formula stage, instead of moving to adolescence and adulthood.

In 1991, one K-12 education cycle or seventeen years after the 1974 “The Baby Killer” report was published, “UNICEF estimates that more than 1.5 million other Third World babies die each year because aggressive promotion of infant formula persuades their mothers to bottle- feed rather than breast-feed” (AP, 1991).

“It may work in practice...but how does it work in theory?”

By the time I was driving through Iraq in 2003, USAID was no longer dispensing dehydrated milk or baby formula when responding to disasters (Ferris-Morris, 2003). But the baby milk was just one example of how the bureaucratic decision making process resisted transforming field knowledge and lessons learned into standard operating procedures for decades.

The question that I kept asking others and myself was, “Why?”

The answer that kept on resurfacing was the old Marine Corps explanation, “It’s mind over matter; They don’t mind, because we don’t matter.” “They” were “the Man,” higher headquarters, the protected elite sitting in comfortable chairs making “tough” decisions sitting in air conditioned offices. “We” were, well, us - the ones on the ground, sweating through our clothes, watching for roadside bombs. And because “They” were in the conference room discussing “the problem” with the other administrative leaders, the social, emotional power dynamics of what the “right” solution for the field was became different than “Us wrestling with the problem on the ground.

The difference in realities reminded me of the Marine Corps joke about the field commander telling the higher headquarters how the terrain made it difficult to advance more quickly only to have those above him say, “But it’s only an inch on the map.” But my time

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overseas was exposing me to other reasons that American foreign policy makers might choose to keep the American population ignorant or dehumanize the average Iraqi citizen and African baby.

And those reasons came back to Smedley Butler’s realization that overseas wars were all about money.

If the American people knew how many lives it cost to pump cheap gasoline into their gas guzzling pickup truck, they might not be so willing to engage in Middle Eastern wars for the sake of oil. Certainly, once the Western world finally accepted that millions of African babies were dying as a result of exploitative business practices, the selling of baby formula on the continent slowed, a little bit, eventually. Increased awareness of how the unregulated mining of diamonds could fund conflicts certainly helped people understand how luxury items caused misery and pain for those who produced them; even if the strategy was as much a business ploy by DeBeers to maintain dominance of the diamond trade (Cowell, 2000). And who knows, maybe if the

American consumers knew that the Western nations used the ongoing civil instability of the

Democratic Republic of Congo to extract coltan (the columbite-tantalite ore required to make electronic devices like smartphones, computers and flat screen televisions possible) at a killer profit (Blanco & Villaecija, 2016) it might reduce demand. Certainly, I began to reconsider my

“need” to regularly upgrade my phone after learning about the clusters of naked people hiding in the DRC forests. Or maybe not.

Those in the boardroom may have once come from the field but were no longer in it. And with their salaries and daily personal safety now assured, the US Government bureaucrats had less and less reason to care about those in the field doing the doing. With their children’s tuition, housing mortgage and annual vacation to save up for, their priority became self-preservation of the pyramid at the expense of those on the bottom. This lack of concern was not limited to the

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foreign destitute the United States Government was supposed to be “saving” but the American citizens in the field doing the actual work.

Coming back from Iraq should have confirmed everything good about the United States actions overseas and the American way of life at home. Instead, like chaos theory’s flapping butterfly wings, the above thoughts started as imperceptible mental incongruities that grew in size over time. It took me responding to other disasters and being called on other assignments to recognize the “say-do” gap and then say out loud (at least inside my head), “Hey wait a second, that doesn’t seem right.”

Six months later, I flew to Iran to help with the 2003 Bam earthquake. The following year

I flew to the Philippines to help coordinate the US military’s response to mudslides in the

Philippines. After returning to D.C., I was sent back to Indonesia where I served as the military liaison for the military forces responding to the 2004 tsunami in Banda Aceh. The following year, in 2005, I deployed with SOUTHCOM to provide American assistance to Guatemalans impacted by Hurricane Stan 2005.

Each time there were reminders that I was not neutral, impartial or independent as well as some flicker of evidence that our assistance was an indulgence for someone’s previous sins, whether ours or the host nations. With the occupation of Iraq still ongoing, it made good business sense to send a team to Iran, if only to gain more intelligence on the country. The mudslides in the

Philippines were caused in part by illegal logging that I heard was linked to local government corruption. Banda Aceh was the center point of a religious insurgency that wanted to breakaway from Jakarta and the US presence there helped strengthen the central government’s hold on the region. The hardest hit areas that we responded to in Guatemala were those occupied by indigenous Mayan communities who had been the victims of scorched earth attacks by the

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Guatemalan Army. “Chicken on a bayonet” redux, with different flavorings for local tastes.

As long as I focused on my assembly line tasks of finding the destitute, determining

Maslow’s needs, locating suppliers, facilitating transportation, and repeating; life was good. The itchy feeling in the back of my skull that diminished my self-satisfaction of “saving lives, alleviating suffering and reducing the economic impact of the disaster” came from trying to understand why the disaster happened in the first place. Each time I deployed, the former Marine in me saluted smartly and prepared to do the best I could with the resources I had, “improvise, adapt, overcome…” But the former intelligence officer in me filled my carry-on luggage with books, factsheets and reports about the country and region I was going to. And in nearly every case, the disaster’s death and destruction were the predicted outcome of policies that discriminated against a people or region based on race, color, religion, or socio-economic status for years.

This seeming correlation between policy of discrimination and predicted death and destruction I was responding to led me to the conclusion that there were two plausible explanations for the inability of smart, knowledgeable, educated, experienced leaders to construct a system that prevented injuries and deaths caused by natural phenomena like floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. The first was that the leaders were not actually smart, knowledgeable, educated, experienced because there are construction techniques and infrastructure systems that could prevent damage from any type of natural or man-made disaster that might be encountered, to include a nuclear strike, if the hype about the Cheyenne Mountain is to be believed (Scoles,

2018). The second was that the leaders were actually smart, knowledgeable, educated, experienced; but they were amoral and didn’t view all human life as being of equal value. In that, by valuing the lives of people differently, they were able to engineer systems where disasters

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became predictable in terms of where they would happen and who they would affect even if the exact when or how much would be unknown.

If we imagine these are our two basic options, then what might we conclude from the

United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq? How might someone understand the American people justifying the overthrow of Saddam Hussein because of his possession of weapons of mass destruction, when none were found (Maddox, 2020)? Which explanation about why bad things happen (incompetence or malfeasance) makes more sense when the United States’ 2002 AUMF makes the case for invading Iraq was based on the finding that:

Whereas members of al Qaida (sic), an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on

the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on

September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;

Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations,

including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens

And then on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush tells the American people:

I'm often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11

attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat. My

administration, the Congress, and the United Nations saw the threat -- and after 9/11,

Saddam's regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take. (American Rhetoric,

n.d.)

This clear contradiction of stated facts doesn’t necessarily prove anything. New information might have come to light that changed the assessment. Try to remember the difficulty the CIA, FBI, NSA and other American intelligence agencies had in assessing the true threat posed by Al Qaeda or their inability to prevent 9/11. But when you triangulate other data points

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like the Iraqi oil ministry being protected by several dozen American tanks immediately after the occupation of Iraq (Sydney Morning Herald, 2003) and the National Museum of Iraq holding humanity’s cultural treasures being left to looters (Sigal, 2018), one wonders if that priority for deploying troops wasn’t planned in advance. Add in the fact that Lockheed Martin, Boeing,

Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, L-3 Communications,

Honeywell, Textron, and General Electric, (the top ten companies representing the military industrial complex) saw an average increase in stock value of 269% between 2001 and 2016

(Nakano, 2016) and the idea that the war was preplanned to make profit seems more plausible.

If we return to Smedley Butler’s explanation that “War is a Racket” (2003, p. 23), we may have an explanation.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority

of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit

of the very few at the expense of the masses.

Something certainly seems awry when you consider that Lockheed Martin stock prices increased from $33.50 in 2001 to $236.28 in 2016 representing a 605% increase in value compared to the average American wage earner salary which increased only 49% from $14.60 to $21.72 in the same time period.

These connections and relationships are, for lack of a better term, OSINT or open source intelligence. Micro pieces of the puzzle that don’t necessarily provide a macro picture of the process or goal without advancing within the ranks of the bureaucracy. And it was even more difficult for the chess pieces, those individuals on the ground concentrating on fighting the

“enemy” or responding to a “disaster” to understand the bigger game being played behind the scenes. As Butler, noted (2003, p. 24):

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For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I

retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds again

gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

If Butler, a Marine general who was awarded the Medal of Honor twice in his distinguished career of 34 years, had to get out of the system to see why it existed or how it was run, what chance did the average American citizen not participating directly in the action understand what was going on?

This led me back to the American education claim that “we don’t teach you what to think but how to think.” I began to wonder if that was a meaningless boast or if it was backed up by some quantitative peer reviewed evidence. In my own mind, I certainly was well trained to work in the “world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock” (Toffler, 1970, p. 400). In fact, I was able to work 24/7 in war zones providing Maslow’s essentials to people in need while avoiding other people trying to kill me. But had I been trained, “how to think?”

What about my American K-12, Service Academy or Fletcher School education had asked me to delve deeply into the capital “T” TRUTHs that were universal and timeless? Had I been given the tools or methodologies to understand “how” to put together the micro-personal experiences and craft a micro-to-macro framework of reality that was robust and maintained validity no matter what country I was in or what role I was playing at the time? Or were my instructors telling me, “you were a Marine and graduated from the Naval Academy,” meaning I should just obey orders because, as my USAID superior told me, “You know, we’ve been in war zones before. We know what we’re doing.”

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Certainly, the endless rounds of multiple choice tests taken throughout my education process had been helpful in training me to distill everything down to a single “shoot don’t shoot” or “accelerate through the crowd or trust they won’t hijack the car” decision. Similarly, learning my rates and learning to clear the brain, shut out the static, deal with the anticipatory tension, focus on the required action and execute without hesitation (Captain, 2016) had probably saved my life before. But these were skills for a binary sort of thinking processes of advance, hold, retreat on a linear path of advancement. They weren’t “how to think” solutions that reconfigured the variables in the equation to provide solutions that were not previously imagined.

The best joke I heard explaining this process was a foreigner being faced with masked gunman screaming “Christian or Muslim?” in Lebanon. During the fifteen year civil war (1975-

1990) the Syrians, Iranians, Armenians, American, Palestinians, Israelis, Maronites, Druze, Sunni and Shia all armed militias who fought each other over a variety of racial, national, religious and political distinctions killing each other and the surrounding civilian population. The visitor, quaking in their shoes, responded, “Don’t shoot me, I’m a tourist.” And was let go.

The respondent had learned “how” to think. He knew that even though there was a civil war going on, in truth, race, nationality, religion and politics were secondary to Masare, Leerat,

Fooloos, bones, bills and bank. At its root, the fighting was about controlling the economy and all the money it produced. Because tourism was one of the few industries that still worked in war- torn Lebanon at the time, any tourist remained worth more alive than dead.

Knowing how to think

The best real world example of knowing “how” to think was exhibited by LtCol Chris

Hughes 3 April 2004, during the invasion of Iraq. With fighting still going on around the country, he had been ordered to go to Najaf, home to the Imam Ali Shrine, one of the holiest places of

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worship in Islam. His mission? Approach Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein Sistani, a key religious leader put under house arrest by Saddam Hussein and request his blessing to stay in Iraq.

Despite advance notification of his unit's arrival and an invitation from Ayatollah Sistani to visit, as the 200 American troops began to approach the Shrine, the previously friendly crowd began to shout epithets and throw rocks. Go, NoGo. Shoot, don’t shoot. All the years of training distilled down to a single decision.

Knowing “how to think,” LtCol Hughes did something that was not in the Standard

Operating Procedure list of approved official options. Despite having been in hunt mode,

“running and gunning” Iraqi soldiers in the push up to Baghdad since the starting gun on 20

March, he told his soldiers who hadn’t had a peaceful night’s sleep in weeks to step back, lower their weapons, take a knee, and… smile (Chilcote, 2003; Bacon, 2007). He then told the men to turn the vehicles around and as he left, LtCol. Hughes placed his hand over his heart, in the traditional Arab salute of peace and told the crowd, “Have a nice day.”

What could have been a bloodbath that rallied the Iraqi people and Muslims around the world against the United States’ occupation, was defused without incident. And after the

Americans’ actions belied the misinformation Ba’athist agitators in the crowd had spread about the United States coming to destroy the Shrine and kidnap Sistani were shown false; the agitators were removed and the unit was welcomed when it returned.

In all my formal education, I can remember no class named “Staying Alive in a Civil War

101” let alone “How to Avoid Starting a Riot That Will Have Global Religious Implications 327.”

Part of the reason is that like John Walker Lindh, who found himself unprepared for the realities of Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, I was going to places that America’s industrial education model did not want me to go. That is unless I was straightjacketed within an off-the-rack identity

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like Marine Infantry Platoon Commander, USAID OFDA Military Liaison Officer or in the case of Johnny Mike Spann, CIA SAD officer.

What had helped me survive and LtCol Hughes to successfully carry out his mission, was that somewhere along the way, we’d tapped into the idea that there were universal and timeless capital “T” truths that would allow us to find positive-sum or “win-win” outcomes for everyone concerned. For me it was something simple like performing the “pee-pee dance” to entertain

Chinese greybeards tired of having their picture taken by entitled foreigners as novelties for scrapbooks, so that I could go to the bathroom.

For Chris it was something more. His actions became the embodiment of American values in the way we conducted war and echoed the values espoused by the Code of Conduct (AUSA, n.d.) First, he believed that: “I am an American fighting in the forces that guard my country and our way of life, I am prepared to give my life in their defense.” Last, he promised:

I will never forget that I am an American fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions,

and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in

the United States of America.

As an American upholding the values of truth, freedom and democracy, Chris had to figure out “how to think'' of a solution that would accomplish the mission in a way that didn’t betray American ideals. The private security contractors from companies like Blackwater had less concern about unjustified Iraqi casualties, as evidenced by the way they responded at Nissour

Square in 2007 (NYT, 2007). There seventeen Iraqi civilians going about their daily business in their hometown were gunned down by Americans apparently without cause.

While an American jury would uphold the verdicts of murder and manslaughter against the American contractors, I would say in their defense, their actions might be understandable

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given their situation. Most of the Blackwater employees were military veterans from the SEALs,

Special Forces, Airborne Rangers and Marines. They had been trained from induction to get the job done at all costs and protect (our) men doing it. The only difference was that instead of wearing a uniform and being in a military unit that had the administrative support and surrounding protection provided by air cover or artillery, they were out there on their own.

Oh. I did forget to mention one other difference.

In the military, a Lieutenant Colonel like Chris Hughes, an O-5 with over 18 years service, would make about $6,968 ( FederalPay, n.d.) plus $250 Family Separation Allowance, $225 imminent Danger Pay, $100 Hazardous Duty Pay, and $150 Hazardous Duty Incentive Pay, for a total of $7,693 a month (Boyd & Burgess, 2003). If he were to leave active military service and join a company like Blackwater, someone with his background, experiences and network could probably command a salary approaching $20,000 a month or 250% more than he’d receive in the military (InjuredOverseas, n.d.). Not quite Lockheed Martin profit margins, but substantial, nonetheless.

This monetary incentive was complicated by the situation in Iraq, where there were few people watching how the private security contractors actually accomplished their mission. In contrast to Blackwater, US forces had to operate under the Fourth Geneva Conventions which, as we discussed in my Marine infantry platoon before coming out to the first Gulf War included a lot of extra requirements. All the Maslow’s basics. For example:

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of

ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in

the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied

territory are inadequate. (ICRC, n.d., Art. 55)

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The Occupying Power shall, with the co-operation of the national and local authorities,

facilitate the proper working of all institutions devoted to the care and education of

children….Should the local institutions be inadequate for the purpose, the Occupying

Power shall make arrangements for the maintenance and education, if possible by persons

of their own nationality, language and religion, of children who are orphaned or separated

from their parents as a result of the war and who cannot be adequately cared for by a near

relative or friend. (ICRC, n.d., Art. 50)

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of

ensuring and maintaining, with the co-operation of national and local authorities, the

medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the

occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the

prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious

diseases and epidemics. (ICRC, n.d., Art. 56)

Instead, the Blackwater contractors only had their mission to perform. And without the legal protection afforded by wearing a military uniform under the Geneva Conventions, it’s understandable how they might “shoot first and ask questions later.” As we even said ourselves in the Marines, “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” Because even if you were convicted, there was always the chance of a Presidential pardon.

The American education claim that “we don’t teach you what to think but how to think” isn’t necessarily wrong. It just might not be terribly useful for surviving in the situations and environments outside the shopping mall that USAID and the United States Marine Corps placed me in. So, while I while I attended private Christian schools growing up and read the Bible,

Koran, and a good number of the “classics” in adulthood, perhaps the biggest gap in my formal

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education had been learning “how to think” axiologically about the moral and ethical implications of my daily actions and how they impacted the community around me.

Despite the absolute nature of the Naval Academy’s Honor Code (GAO, 1995; LA Times,

1987), which I memorized as, “A midshipman does not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate anyone who does”; my real world experiences in the United States Government were teaching me was that I was no longer a midshipman. If I did not tolerate people who lied, cheated and stole, I would not be able to remain employed very long.

The American political structure was trying to teach me that “truth” was a fungible commodity that could be traded and exchanged between individuals, organizations and countries.

The disaster site and battlefield corollary being that the exchange rate in transferring those

“truths” was similar to my time in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, where American “truths” were worth more in other countries. And you would have to pay dearly, often with your life, if you, as a non-American, tried to get a 1:1 exchange. The truth exchange rate also applied to interactions between the “house negro” and the “field negro.”

With this in mind, I should not have been surprised by the way the contractor lead for

USAID OFDA’s Training Team regarded our efforts to try and prepare the DART members for sending unarmed civilians into a war zone. Instead of welcoming the opportunity to prepare

USAID colleagues to deploy to and return from Iraq safely, I was the object of one of those,

“Reply all:” emails highlighting how I was overstepping my bounds and creating a disturbance in the workflow by asking questions about safety and security. Weeks later, when the DART Team

Leader agreed that developing a safety and security course was essential, the OFDA Training

Team scooped up our curriculum drafts, groundwork and contacts we’d developed before pushing us aside. Months later, when the State Department was giving out awards to the OFDA Training

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Team for the amazing speed by which they’d put such a comprehensive and thorough safety and security course together, there was no reference of Lynn Thomas or the other the people who’d done the constitutive work that made the course delivery possible. And of course, that meant we didn’t get an invitation to the award ceremony.

This wasn’t academic plagiarism or even “stealing” in the practical sense. This was the

United States Government and how you survived in a bureaucracy. As I pieced together later, if the OFDA Training Director had recognized Lynn Thomas as the author, there would have been questions as to why the Training Team didn’t hire him or pay him for his work. The other question that might arise is why the OFDA Training Director hadn’t thought of building a safety and security course, given the obvious need for deploying to a place like Iraq.

But since the Training Director was a friend of one of the senior management and shared the old school perspective of securing a contract with a local company with local drivers to respond to a disaster of our own making, the idea that we would need a safety and security course never arose. And because the OFDA Training Director had no combat experience or recent disaster field time, the opportunity to recalibrate training requirements to the rapidly changing security environment never presented itself. Finally, because the OFDA Training Director would be staying in Washington DC and there was no personal investment in ensuring deploying personnel had the best training and equipment available. She was safe.

The more I reflected on the decision making process and my life’s experiences, the more I believed in the chaos theory’s ripple effect of how the actions of a single person could determine the future outcome of organizations and nations. From the negative experience of KSM in a

Greensboro, North Carolina jail (NPR, 2009) that likely helped solidify his hatred of American to the positive decision of LtCol Chris Hughes to calm the waters when a mob was itching for a

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street fight in Najaf, individuals making small choices in faraway places had hurricane sized consequences on millions of people hundreds and thousands of miles away. And so, it didn’t matter that Lynn Thomas, Bill Bairdain, or any of the other “grey men,” the invisible professionals, didn’t get credit or recognized for their time, efforts or sacrifices. It was enough that the work was done and maybe one person’s life was changed.

My own rewards for work done came in other forms. In between disasters, months after returning from Baghdad, a colleague stopped by my cubicle and started chatting about one of the people who’d nearly been killed in Iraq. They pulled out a manila folder to share photographs of the investigation.

I flipped through them slowly as my colleague talked about how the Iraqis had swarmed the G-Wagen and the USAID employee used the driving techniques learned in the safety and security course to get out of the crush of the crowd. The saving grace was reflected by the starburst crack in the driver’s side window where someone had fired a pistol at our colleague’s head. The bulletproof glass worked.

I nodded silently and smiled. Uh huh. Yup. Wow. That’s great. Ok. See you later.

I would never know the impact of my actions to help the local people in any of the disasters I participated in. But at least I knew now that our efforts had saved the life of one person. Even if that person was an American.

While I never received any official credit for the OFDA DART safety and security course, the process taught me a valuable lesson about getting things done. I began to understand my sin was not doing the work. The threat I posed was potentially embarrassing someone higher up in the bureaucracy by exposing their incompetence. Thus, if I wanted to get the work done and ensure it was incorporated into the bureaucracy, I would need to use the method favored by

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veterinarians and pet owners of stuffing the medicine into some yummy treat instead of trying to get it down using pleas, logic or force.

Joint Humanitarian Operations Course (JHOC)

After having the USAID logo stitched onto my DART polo shirt poked by an Army soldier in Iraq and told, “USAID… yeah, yeah, you’re an NGO … and you work for us”; I recognized there was a problem in the way the military was educated. Lack of basic manners aside, he was wrong on both accounts. USAID was a US Government organization and not, as my

NGO colleagues reminded me, part of the humanitarian community. Second, USAID was (at least on paper) a co-equal in the USG’s 3D (Diplomacy, Development, Defense) strategy for reconstructing Afghanistan and Iraq. But given that there were about 149,000 military service members in Iraq at the time (Belasco, 2014) and fewer than 149 on our entire DART team, I wasn’t about to provide immediate corrective instruction then and there.

The problem was systemic ignorance in the military education and training process. In the five years of training I’d received at the naval Academy and in the Marine Corps, I never once heard of USAID or the role development assistance in US foreign policy. In fact, I knew little about the Agency until I did research before applying to OFDA in my final semester at Fletcher.

So when I was part of the combined State Department-USAID CBRNE Response Team standing by in case of a technical emergency at the Athens Olympics in 2004, I decided to do something about it. CAPT Joe Hughart USPHS and I left the undisclosed location where the response team and CBRNE equipment stood ready and flew to Patch Barracks, Stuttgart,

Germany, where we worked with Colonel Norm Cotton to host our first “Joint Humanitarian

Operations Course” or JHOC. There, we taught the EUCOM staff officers USG overseas disaster response 101. 5W,H. Who, what, when, where, how and why.

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Creating the course wasn’t illegal, but it was unsanctioned. The OFDA Training Director knew nothing of what we were doing. But then again, she knew little about the content we were teaching and nothing about our audience. As long as there wasn’t a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high explosive attack on the Olympics that occurred while we were away, no one would notice. Our luck held. And more than that, the military loved it.

As word about the JHOC spread by word of mouth, other COCOMs began to ask USAID, somewhat petulantly, “When are we going to get the JHOC?” For the first couple years, content and delivery was held within the Military Liaison Unit (MLU), which was rapidly expanding given all the work USAID was doing in conflict zones around the world. But as JHOC demand increased and its value to the OFDA brand grew, it attracted the attention of the OFDA Training

Director.

After three years, the roles reversed and the OFDA Training Team was in charge of content and delivery with MLU members providing support. Mission complete. The little treat swallowed. As someone once said, “it’s amazing what you can get done if you don’t worry about the credit.”

Mustering out

There’s a saying that “no good deed goes unpunished.” And as a reward for all my “good work,” I was sent to be the OFDA Liaison Officer to the SOUTHCOM Commander, a four-star general in charge of all military interactions within Central and South America. There I worked within the J4 Directorate which handled logistics for the thirty one countries in the area of responsibility. The assignment represented the unofficial recognition that I was a qualified

“gorilla whisperer” and could be trusted to represent OFDA’s priorities and equities without direct oversight or guidance.

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A couple months into my assignment, I was told by my supervisor that he wanted me to upgrade my security clearance from Top Secret (TS) to Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented

Information (TS-SCI). I had held a TS-SCI clearance as a Marine Intelligence officer, so it wasn’t anything new. But it was an upgrade that I wasn’t terribly interested in as I enjoyed moving (and speaking) freely amongst the civilian NGO community that included people from all nationalities and walks of life. The higher the security clearance I had, the more careful I had to be about who I talked to and remember what brushoffs and obfuscations I’d told to who, about what, when... And

I am lazy. I found it much easier to just tell the complete truth.

Still, my boss reasoned, in the absence of a military rank, the security clearance was a way to show the trust and confidence the bureaucracy had in my importance. Holding a TS-SCI and being able to go into the windowless, faraday cage SCIF or Sensitive Compartmented Information

Facility showed my SOUTHCOM counterparts that I was one of the few privy to seeing the crown jewels of the US Government. Knowing that most of the secrets were available through

OSINT, I wasn’t convinced. But I also knew that few people in USAID retained a TS-SCI and recognized that to be offered the chance to receive the upgrade was an honor.

But there would be differences between getting a TS-SCI as a Marine Corps officer in

1991 and as a Personal Service Contractor (PSC) working for USAID in 2006. The first was that the DoD, with millions of service members who maintained a security clearance, had their own adjudicating authority for who could and could not be allowed access to national secrets. USAID, a small organization with few personnel and limited budget, did not. Instead, as it was explained to me, security clearances needed to be adjudicated by the Department of State, which could certify access up to Top Secret. Any higher clearance was passed from State to the CIA.

This meant that my assessment to be read in would not be an “in-house” examination of

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one of our own, but an external look at someone else’s goods. But the technical differences in clearance procedures was secondary to the person being examined. In 1991 there had been a clear chain of custody from a child born and raised as a military dependent who, despite a short year as a college student in an allied nation’s Christian university, then went on to study and graduate from a service academy. By the time I was being reviewed as an officer of Marines, the potential that I was anyone other than who I claimed to be was virtually nil.

By 2006, I was a different person, with different experiences, and a different world view.

Yes, I was a Naval Academy graduate Airborne Ranger infantry Marine with combat experience and who’d gone on to become a military intelligence officer. But I was also “that person,” someone who’d quit what looked like a promising career and visited post-Soviet civil wars looking for a fight, studied Chinese and Farsi in countries that the United States considered competitors or enemies, and worked odd jobs like being a newspaper copy editor and construction worker before coming back home. Probably more disturbing to a CIA security clearance investigator, twice I had expressed interest in the CIA and twice I had backed away.

My background was an amalgam of Johnny Mike Spann and John Walker Lindh, half

Alabama patriot, half California misfit. Whoever got my case file must have thought they were given a platypus, a fur covered mammal that had no stomach, laid eggs, sported a duck’s bill, and poison claws. And their approach reflected their confused distrust.

I flew up to D.C. for my first “interview” with a junior “G” man who seemed like he’d just finished college. Our hours-long discussion took place in a small square white cube of a room with no windows and one door. Despite asking dozens of questions, he didn’t seem to write much of anything down.

I thought perhaps this was just a casual interview or that maybe he had echoic memory,

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the auditory equivalent of photographic memory. It wasn’t until I was on the flight back to Miami at SOUTHCOM that it hit me, the vanes of the ventilation plate on the roof were open and facing me. I was probably being video recorded the entire time.

The second time I flew up to D.C. to be “interviewed” the quotation marks were off. My interrogator was an older battle hardened veteran who placed a clipboard in front of me with non- disclosure and release forms to sign including that I’d seen the video explaining the polygraph process, which I hadn’t. He made it clear with his words, tone and attitude that this was not a friendly chat and we would be getting to the bottom of things, whatever those were.

In retrospect, I suppose that was the purpose of the entire process. Start with a nice easy engagement to invite the suspect to say things that they might not think was damning and then hit them hard with implications of their own words. As the Washington D.C. The Spy Museum posted the quote attributed to Cardinal Richelieu: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

I suppose it was classic good cop, bad cop. But never having been in an interrogation and scared witless by the straps around my chest, pressure cuff on my arm and different thingies attached to my fingers I could feel my heart racing as he tightened everything up and turned the machine on.

First questions that were positive known-knowns. Date of birth, job title, place of residence were all questions that were answered, “Yes” to provide the first baseline. Then the negative known-knowns to provide a second baseline. Then the known unknowns, which were the purpose of the questioning.

I left the nondescript building in the middle of a Washington metro suburb shaken to my core. And if the emotion that I felt most growing up was one of shame for never being good

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enough, then the emotions I felt after leaving the polygraph was one of rage and indignation at trying to shame me. I wasn’t some spy working for China, Iran or any other country. I was an

American working to help people around the world in disasters despite the dangers the United

States’ foreign policies put me in. And if the CIA wasn’t screwing around in other countries or doing a better job catching terrorists on a watch list that they knew were in the country, perhaps we wouldn’t have the wars and disasters to respond to.

Those sentiments weren’t crystalized in that specific fashion at the time. But the indignation was. I definitely had an attitude of “I’ve adhered to the Honor Code all my life.

“Who the fuck are you to question me when I have seen the lying, cheating and stealing your

Agency has done?” But I also knew that like the Melian Dialogue between Athens and Melos, that “justice” is “only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

In any case, I was asking to be allowed to join their elite club of cognoscenti, not the other way around. If I wanted to be part of their club, I would have to fit their norms and standards.

And even though I might have a duck bill as a platypus, I didn’t look like a duck, quack like a duck or waddle like a duck.

My other concern being if my application to upgrade my security clearance was denied it had negative implications for my existing security clearance. Like the game snakes and ladders, it’s difficult to ascend the ranks of the security clearance process but very easy to slide down. And once I had my TS-SCI clearance denied, it would become more difficult to renew my Top Secret or even Secret clearance levels in the future.

When the news came back that the CIA denied my upgrade to “SCI,” I wasn’t shocked. If

I was in their position, I don’t know if I would have upgraded my clearance for myself. But I saw

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any dreams of being a Secretary or high ranking SES (Senior Executive Service) civilian evaporating. My career as anyone working in the inner sanctum was dead man walking.

True to form, when my 5-year PSC contract came up for renewal, I was told that I no longer had my Top Secret clearance and would no longer be eligible for employment with

USAID. In some ways the news struck me like turning over my Marine infantry platoon to another commander. And for the second time in my life, I felt like I was being banished from my calling.

Luckily, the same lack of communication between the interagency stakeholders meant that just because the CIA or USAID rejected me, it didn’t mean that the DoD felt the same way.

Several months after my forced departure, I was unexpectedly invited back to SOUTHCOM

Headquarters in Miami for a surprise ceremony. The SOUTHCOM Deputy Commander, Major

General Glenn Spears had decided to award me the Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award, which was granted to any government civilian employee of a Joint Staff or combatant commands who has provided commendable service of major significance to the DoD. The SOUTHCOM

Chief of Staff, Brigadier General Nolen Bivens read the award:

Mr. Gregg Nakano distinguished himself by exceptionally meritorious service

while serving as the liaison officer to the U.S. Southern Command for the United States

Agency for International Development and the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

Mr. Nakano created a disaster response notification system, which systematically

allowed USAID/OFDA to notify USSOUTHCOM of the events in the area of

responsibility that would potentially require a US Government response, as well as the

reporting of disaster events that had the potential to generate a disaster declaration from a

host nation. He conducted a US Government disaster response protocol briefing during all

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Chiefs of Mission visits to the Headquarters. Mr. Nakano presented the roles, authorities

and responsibilities of USAID OFDA at the Chief of Missions Conference, Component

Commanders Conference, Staff Judge Advocate Conference, Military Group

Commanders’ Workshop and many of the visits by incoming Ambassadors and Chiefs of

Mission. Mr. Nakano provided interagency coordination support during the US

Government response to Hurricane Stan in Guatemala, the volcano eruptions in Ecuador,

and the alcohol poisoning in Nicaragua. Mr. Nakano aggressively sought to educate the

USSOUTHCOM staff by conducting two Joint Humanitarian Operations Courses and

training more than forty personnel on roles, responsibilities, authorities, and interagency

relationships for a US Government disaster response. He provided invaluable guidance

and input into the development of Pre-planned Emergency Action (PREACT). Mr.

Nakano facilitated Command Surgeon participation in USAID Avian Influenza

Continuation of Operations Course. He conceived and executed a feasibility test of rapid

disaster assessment capability at JTF-Bravo with USSOUTHCOM J-2, NGA and USACE.

Gregg facilitated the deployment of equipment and the training of personnel for JTF-

Bravo to execute rapid disaster response assessments operations with USACE and

cooperated with USSOUTHCOM Humanitarian Assistant Program to build the host

nation’s capacity in El Salvador and Honduras to conduct rapid assessments with

equipment procured through USACE. Mr. Gregg Nakano’s dedicated and faithful service

reflected great credit upon USAID, OFDA and the US Southern Command.

The award was a nice surprise and it felt comforting to be praised so highly for my efforts.

Like the OFDA Safety and Security Course or armoring of DART vehicles, all of the accomplishments listed in my commendation had been the result of a team effort. But the sheer

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volume of activities reflected what could be accomplished in a year and a half with partners who just wanted to do good and get the job done. And getting a nice medal didn’t solve the problem that I was now out of a job.

Somewhat out of the blue, Fidel Castro provided a temporary solution by falling deathly ill. Since I’d previously helped arrange the USAID assessment of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a potential internally displaced population (IDP) camp to house Cubans leaving their island in the event of a transition of power; I was hired through a short term contract to work with the Cuban-

American diaspora in Miami to prepare for Castro’s anticipated death. There I met with local leaders to ensure that we’d be able to provide the Maslow’s essentials to the Cubans once they made it ashore.

While Fidel Castro eventually recovered and transferred the day to day running of the country to his brother, Raul; the short term contract gave me enough time and funds to regain my bearings and begin charting a new course. I was done with working for the US Government. Not only because I would be limited in my potential advancement, but also because I began to see that many of our foreign policy actions were the result of poor or corrupt planning processes. The wars and disasters I had responded to were created at some level because the American people were either ignorant of the facts or immoral in their intentions. And I wanted to fix that.

Having learned that the best way to address bottom-up/inside-out transformation was by presenting the facts to individuals not yet locked into a career path that forced them to maintain the status quo, I decided to go work with undergraduates in college. In 2007, I was invited by students from Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) to be part of a panel on civil-military collaboration in humanitarian responses. The students’ knowledge, self-confidence, and ability to think critically about issues impressed me greatly. After meeting the founder and

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Director of the IGL, Sherman Teichman, I understood why.

Sherman Teichman

Sherman or “Sherm” as he was known to everyone, was a charismatic force of nature. He saw and lived life not as it was, but as the better version of what it might be. And his goal of being in academia was to tear down the ivory tower and help teachers remember what it was like to plow the fields.

In a way I’d never seen before, Sherm would make things magically appear by a process he referred to as “serendipity.” As brainstorms generated flashes of brilliance, the ideas were thrown out into the universe and somehow, somewhere, someone would answer the call to provide what was needed for the next step. It was as if he embodied the Goethe attributed quote:

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

More importantly Sherm infused his students with the belief in creating the impossible.

So, while bystanders like myself would stand mouth agape at the process and other faculty or staff might seethe green with jealousy at the ability of the IGL to cross canyons of despair with no visible means of support, Sherm would just smile and say, “Serendipity.” And because he believed completely in his students, his students moved mountains on faith alone.

From a technical standpoint, one might call Sherman’s technique one of “backcasting,” where the group or team starts at the desired outcome or endpoint and then works backwards to find the pathways to achieve the goal. But his approach was less one of hard intellectual reasoning and more one of spirit navigation. If Kevin Kelly’s belief that “being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points,” (KK, 2020) then not only was Sherman a leading light of Mensa, but so were all of his wards. He viralized enthusiasm in a way I had never seen before or since.

But there was more to Sherman than my mother’s “fake it till you make it,” scattered

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energy. Sherm was an omnivorous autodidact and combined his understanding of the micro-to- macro linkages of individual actions upon global systems with his preternatural sensitivity to changing winds. This allowed him to identify which butterflies were most likely to be game changers and then forecast what sized hurricanes their wings would create when and where. And by paying attention to the backdrop and being ready to move when it changed, he was able to position himself in front of a locked and seldom used door, just as it was about to reopen.

Coming from my Honor Code background of telling the absolute truth and operating in a world where deviation from the verifiable might kill people or at least ruin people’s lives,

Sherman represented the opposite of everything I’d been taught and trained to do. And after embracing the “grey man” concept of being nondescript and invisible in the disasters and war zones I visited, Sherman’s approach seemed like P.T. Barnum energizing carnies before a show.

But the more I watched how he did things and the results he achieved, the more I learned of the genius behind his approach.

Sherman would almost always overstate the accomplishments and importance of the person that he was introducing. And given that “Sherm” had heads of state and CEOs of Fortune

100 companies in his contact list, it sometimes required some doing. But the end result was always the same. After the individual smiled embarrassedly at the embellishment, and then they would invariably strive to make the description true.

Other approaches Sherman used were directly out of the Marine Corps leadership and maneuver warfare handbooks. The Marine leadership technique Sherman used was to give his students a “Message to Garcia” (Hubbard, 1899). Give them a seemingly impossible task and enough information and guidance to make it happen. And then let them know you were giving them full authority and responsibility to do whatever was necessary to get the job done.

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This delegation of authority was tied directly to the second approach of maneuver warfare of the guerrilla educator. Much in the same way that a software designer wants to “get to failure fast” so they can rewrite the next code based on lessons learned, Sherm was a believer in a million tiny steps. Sherman would give his students a mission based on the confirmation of their stated desire. “You want Amartya Sen to be on the panel? I think that’s great. Ok, go get him.”

“Sherm” would check in on the student every time he saw them giving praise when there was a step forward and encouragement to take the three other possible approaches when they were forced backwards. This approach was 180 degrees different than the “zero defect mentality” of the “house negros” who served the big bosses in the US Government bureaucracy. Sherman embraced “failure” as an opportunity to improve and recognized change as improving the chances of success.

Instead of “driving forward looking through the rear view mirror” created by research articles from peer review journals, Sherman’s students got off the school bus and walked. And by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, the location, subject or topic being lectured on by the class bound professors “who wrote the book on it”... twenty years ago, IGL students were able to understand strengths, weaknesses, and context of the subject in ways their multiple choice “test perfect” classmates were not.

For the first time I felt I was witnessing an example of the gold standard, “we don’t teach you want to think, we teach you how to think.” But it meant that first the teacher had to listen to what the student themself wanted and then link the lesson to the student’s life in an existential way. In that, the class wasn’t about getting a good grade or even graduating from Tufts. What was far more important than the content (which would likely change or be proven wrong within the students’ lifetime) was to understand the process of learning the content and having a life

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changing experience (like hosting Amartya Sen for dinner and then moderating his panel afterwards) along the way.

Sherman’s approach seemed to be implementing the process that Mao and other guerrilla insurgents used in training their recruits. Instead of keeping the soldiers out of politics and ignorant of the social, economic and political reasons for the war, guerrillas do the exact opposite.

“They go to great lengths to make sure that their men are politically educated and

thoroughly aware of the issues at stake. A trained and disciplined guerrilla is much more

than a patriotic peasant, workman, or student armed with an antiquated fowling-piece and

a homemade bomb. His indoctrination begins even before he is taught to shoot accurately,

and it is unceasing. The end product is an intensely loyal and politically alert fighting

man” (Tse-tung, 2017, p.8).

And just as Mao taught his guerrillas “Why we fight” so Sherman taught his students “Why we learn.” I was only able to spend one year with Sherman and the IGL, but like the year and a half with SOUTHCOM, I left with a backpack full of ideas, knowledge and experiences.

Whiskey - Tango - Foxtrot

On the return journey of bringing half a dozen of the IGL’s students, cadets and midshipmen from a Joint Research Project in Jordan, I opened an email to discover that for the first time in my life, instead of searching for a job, the job was hunting me. Nearly two years after leaving USAID, I received an email from Colonel James Brown who I’d served with at the

Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center (HACC) for Iraq. It simply said, “WTF.”

Given that I hadn’t seen him in four years and couldn’t remember anything I’d done that might deserve the note, I sent a quick email asking what I’d done. After some back and forth, I found the email he had been referring to which asked me to reply to in my Junk Mail folder. The

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author invited me to apply for a position in the International Health Division (IHD), an experimental office created by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs (ASD-HA) to implement military health support for stability operations.

After reading the email several times to make sure I understood what was required and the type of individual they were looking for, I wondered how I received it. I was not a doctor, in the military and no longer held a security clearance. I wrote a reply offering my thanks, pointed out my shortcomings and suggested half a dozen better candidates to include triple board certified

MD, MPH’s with decades of experience in the military.

That’s fine, the responder to my email wrote. We know all those folks. Please apply.

I realize the situation will probably never repeat itself in my life, which makes me smile all the more when I remember it.

For all my life, I’d been the outsider trying to fit in. As a military brat, every three years

I’d be thrown on the bottom of the social pile and have to work my way back up. In Japan, I was neither fish nor fowl to the Japanese. In the Naval Academy I was forced to conform or be expelled. And whether in the Marine Corps, USAID, Iran, China or countries visited during my post-Cold War walkabout, I was always trying to figure out how to fit in or at least chameleon myself into invisibility. It seemed here they didn’t mind that I was a duck billed mammal. In fact, for them it seems a platypus was a purple squirrel.

The next four years from 2008 to 2012, I was introduced to the law of no absolutes, where the various assumptions and givens about “the system” or individuals were disproved or reduced to limited times and places. The concept behind the International Health Division was a return to the conversation of American Army Colonel Harry Summers and his North Vietnamese Colonel

Tu. Summers told Tu, “You know you never beat us on the battlefield” (Summers, n.d.). And Tu

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replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

Ever since launching the Global War on Terrorism 7 October 2001, the United States military was able to win every battle they fought with the Taliban, Iraqi Army, or Al Qaeda terrorists, when any of their members decided to stand and fight. But after nearly seven years of continuous fighting, the United States was no closer to winning the war, because there didn’t seem to be a shared vision for a future peace.

Colonel Warner “Butch” Anderson MD, a Special Forces doctor who’d taught and fought around the world was convinced there was a better way. Having the academic background, medical licensure and combat field time, Butch convinced the Assistant Secretary of Defense for

Health Affairs, Dr. Ward Cassells, a Harvard trained orthopedic surgeon who had helped invent the practice of arthroscopic surgery, that any lasting peace had to include the creation and/or strengthening of a national health system in conflict zones like Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

The idea was to identify the underutilized assets of the Military Health System, a $50 billion dollar a year enterprise dedicated to providing healthcare to DOD service members, dependents and veteran, and use them to provide healthcare in communities recovering from war.

Specifically:

The MHS shall be prepared to perform any tasks assigned to establish,

reconstitute, and maintain health sector capacity and capability for the indigenous

population when indigenous, foreign, or U.S. civilian professionals cannot do so. (DoDI

6000.16, 2010)

My job as a Development Outreach Coordinator was a reverse of my previous role as an

OFDA Military Liaison Officer. Instead of trying to be a “gorilla whisperer” and get the massive might of the United States military to help the civilian US Government, UN, ICRC and NGO to

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share imagery, lift cargo or keep the peace; now I was being employed as a “cat herder” to find those same civilian organizations I worked with in the past engaged in medical or health activities on the battlefield and facilitate their success. Of course, that was the official concept that was approved for funding.

In my four years supporting military medical stability operations, I helped: teach courses at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, develop the Army Veterinarian

Command's Veterinarian Support for Stability Operations Course (VSSOC), implement the newly developed Medical Stability Operations Course (MSOC), author a book chapter on NGO funding, and coordinate between the National Defense University's Center for Applied Strategic Learning

(NDU/CASL), the United States Naval Academy (USNA), and Tufts to create the first Simulation

Exercise (SIMULEX) for next generation national security leaders. But there are three other memories I have from that time there that have stuck in my mind as lessons for future living: the

Haiti earthquake, meeting your doppelganger and being a private security contractor.

Haiti earthquake

In 2010, Haiti was struck by a massive 7.0 Richter scale earthquake that killed over

100,000 people and displaced over 1 million survivors. My old employers OFDA were on the ground immediately and my former colleagues in SOUTHCOM were standing to support. It felt like old home week as many of the people I’d worked with in the past were leading the interagency discussions and coordinating the disaster response. But when the big boss, Dr.

Anderson suggested that I get on the plane and deploy on the ground, I hesitated and then declined.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. It was that I didn’t have a mandate or bring anything valuable to the fight. And with the disaster being so close and so newsworthy, any number of

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individuals and organizations with dubious qualifications wanted to get their “happy snap” in front of the destroyed building or pile of corpses.

Part of me still remembered seeing a fit, attractive Western woman in a Home Depot shirt standing with arms akimbo in the middle of the coordination zone in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Not recognizing her as being part of our team or representing any of the UN offices or western NGOs,

I approached her and asked, “Hi, how you doing? You’re not from around here, are you?”

It turned out that she was a Vice Mayor from some city in Arizona and their city had decided they were going to help. Given that the earthquake that triggered the 2004 Indonesian tsunami measured 9.0 on the Richter scale and killed and estimated 200,000 deaths in Indonesia,

Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, Myanmar, Maldives, Malaysia, Tanzania, Seychelles,

Bangladesh, South Africa, Yemen, Kenya and Madagascar, there certain was need for assistance.

So, I asked her what she was thinking.

If my memory serves, she introduced me to her entourage of five or six people and said they were looking for the leader of the response to present them with a $10,000 dollar check they’d collected from the community. It was one of those moments of smiling, taking a calming breath and trying to find the most polite way to respond. I shook the hand of each of her group and gave them a quick run-down of the international disaster response process. In general, there were three options of who to present the check to: the host nation, the UN or the US embassy, who would then include it in the total donations given by the American people.

And then noting that she was an elected official formally representing her constituency, I asked if she or any of her members had received country clearance from the State Department or

US Embassy in Jakarta before coming here. Did she know that Aceh was in the midst of an active insurgency and the airfield had been struck with mortar rounds and sporadic sniper fire in the first

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weeks of the response? And did she or any of her team have relevant skills for the response or would they be interested in volunteering in an unskilled labor capacity in the ongoing operation?

No, no, no and no. They had round trip flight reservations and had to get back to the capital to make them.

Another smile, slow breath, round of shaking hands and then waving goodbye as the team photographer posed the group in front of the various signposts, relief supplies and transportation aircraft cluttering the airfield. It’s not that they were doing anything wrong. They just hadn’t thought through all the angles and were ignorant about where to get the answers. If they had sat down for a minute or two and done a back of the napkin calculation on how much it would cost them for five or six round trip tickets from somecity Arizona USA to Banda Aceh, Indonesia and back, they probably would have seen that the combined cost of their air travel exceeded the monetary value of the gift they were bringing. If they had known how to donate their money to the proper authorities, they could have doubled the amount of funds provided to the nearly 2 million survivors who lost their homes and livelihoods.

But I imagine they wanted their proof of having been “there” and the stories to tell at barbeques and re-election speech stumps of how much they’d helped the needy “Other” in the faraway land. And remembering how I looked at the group in disgust and suppressing the thought that they were ignorant, self-referential, sanctimonious f-idiots, I didn’t want to be “that” person in Haiti.

Instead, I sat down at my cubicle and hammered out Murphy’s Laws of Overseas Disaster

Response, the collected wisdom of all the people I’d worked with at OFDA.

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Murphy’s Laws for Overseas Disaster Response

1. You are not God. Don’t act like it. Unless you can raise the dead and turn back time, you

can’t solve all their problems. Once you’ve lost your wife, father, sister or son, your life will

never be the same. Once you’ve seen your home, your job or church destroyed, your life will

never be the same. Someone rolling around the street distributing humanitarian rations, tents

or hygiene kits is a welcome temporary relief, but a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.

2. Safety first. When crossing the line of departure, “Stop, look, listen for the sights, sounds and

scents of the immediate battlefield area.” Before responding to an accident, ensure Body

Substance Isolation (BSI) and scene safety. Flying overseas to a disaster site has the same

risks times ten. What do you know about the country? Do you speak the language? What

type of environmental challenges will you face? Do you have your shots? Is the area still at

risk for aftershocks or secondary explosions? Rushing to be the very first responder can

ensure this will be your very last response.

3. Disasters are predictable. Understand why. Disasters result when external conditions exceed

the normal capacities of a society’s response mechanisms. We know where the 10, 50 and

100 year flood levels are. We can calculate the building specifications necessary to withstand

a Category 5 hurricane or a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake. Individuals and societies choose to

build cheaper structures based on a cost-risk-benefit calculation. Think “Three Little Pigs”

times the size of the vulnerable population.

4. Disaster impacts are prejudiced. You shouldn’t be. Disaster zones are typically areas of

opportunity where risk is unevenly distributed across the social strata. The poorer you are, the

greater the risks. A disaster will impact one race, color, creed, and religion more than another.

When distributing assistance, try to concentrate on responding to needs alone.

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5. Everyone is a rock star in their own world. Treat them as such. You are a guest. Remember

to say, “Please” and “Thank you.” Don’t insult their dignity; often it’s all they have left.

Respect the elderly; they didn’t get there by being stupid or powerless. Respect the women

and children; their presence is the weathervane to your safety and security. Respect peoples’

possessions; it may be a rag doll or a torn photograph to you, but it may be a last anchor to

reality for them.

6. Do it their way. It’s more sustainable in the end. Leave your cultural baggage at home.

Understand and respect their social mores and priorities. If they want the power plant rebuilt,

don’t concentrate on advancing sexual equality. If they want you to wear a headscarf to

provide assistance, find something to cover your head. If they value feeding young men

instead of babies, resulting in infant deaths – either get more food to feed everyone; do it their

way; or move on. The idea isn’t to force them to work through our gods, but for us to work

through theirs.

7. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Completion of the emergency response phase is measured by the

return to pre-disaster conditions. For rich and privileged first responders, the “needs” of the

affected will seem endless. Use their “normal,” not yours. Figure out what was actually

damaged by the disaster and focus your efforts on repairing that. Don’t let mission creep turn

into a permanent mission.

8. Numbers are all lies, damn lies or statistics. There are no accurate numbers for the first weeks

(sometimes months) of a disaster. Numbers are paint brushes organizations use to illustrate a

need for their services. The key is not fixating on any one number, but combining all the

numbers into a coherent whole. Think expressionist pointillism.

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9. Perception is 90% of reality. Manage it. Information flows are the immediate, middle and

long-term solutions to rebuilding society. Inadequate information flows result in erroneous

cost-risk-benefit calculations, which are the root cause of disasters. Remember 9/11 or

Katrina? The information was available, but the will to collectively share and respond was

not. Continually ask yourself, “What do I know?” “Who needs to know?” and “Have I told

them?”

10. “I don’t know” is a perfectly good answer. No one knows everything during a disaster.

Admit ignorance and try to find someone who may. Begin looking for information hubs

where commonly needed information can be widely disseminated. If you are asked for the

same information three times, make a point of finding out the answer and posting it for all to

use.

11. Go ugly early. Bad news travels fast; you need to travel faster. Get the facts; implement

immediate fixes to address the cause; and develop processes to mitigate outcomes. Then

broadcast widely. If necessary, broadcast before you’ve had time to put everything in motion.

Redirect focus from finding blame to creating solutions.

12. Concentrate on the basics. Water. Sanitation. Food. Shelter. Health/Medicine. The human

needs for survival are universal. You will never get in trouble if you focus on those. You get

in trouble when you shift from needs to desires and then from desires to preferences. When

people begin refusing assistance because it’s not the right type of rice or they don’t like your

blankets, they are telling you we’re out of the emergency response phase and you can go

home. Don’t become a catering service.

13. Shoot for the 70% solution... and move on. Life, limb, loss of eyesight. Everything else is

gravy. Don’t get sucked into cleft palates or obstetric fistulas. If it’s not immediately life

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threatening, it’s not part of the emergency response. If all emergency needs have been met,

find long-term solutions for those patients and start packing to come home. Promote reliance

on local capacity.

14. Shit! Trash! 6 hours after you provide drinking water, it needs to go somewhere. 24 hours

after distributing food, it has to come out somewhere. Before you can rebuild, you need to

clear the debris. The mountains of useless donations need to be dumped or you end up with a

constipated supply chain. What are your new sewage systems? Where are your new

landfills? Prioritize the backside of providing assistance.

15. Look beyond the obvious. The squeaky wheel often gets the grease, but may not be the one

that needs it most. Airway, Breathing, Circulation. A screaming person means Airway and

Breathing are taken care of. If their face is red, their Circulation is fine. Move on to the silent

ones. Check on your underrepresented populations. Ditto for clearing bottlenecks. It may

not be a lack of helicopters, but special rotor head lubricant that’s needed. Wood alcohol

poisoning may be better solved by several cases of good liquor than a shipment of iron lungs.

The box is already broken; feel free to look outside.

16. Wholesale not retail. Logistics not tactics. If you are physically lifting boxes as part of a

human supply chain or spending time operating a forklift, you are wasting the government’s

money and stealing a job from a local hire. Captains think tactics; generals calculate logistics.

Your efforts should be improving the system of systems. If you can’t bring strategic value to

the response, stay at home and watch things unfold on CNN.

17. Good-Fast-Cheap. Make accommodations for the qualities you can’t have. Logistics 101

dictates you can have only two of the three qualities at any one time. Think through how you

leverage the limitations to your advantage. With limited airlift capacity, do you send out the

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water purification units or the anti-malaria bed nets? Do you wait for American grain to

arrive by sea or procure it locally at a higher cost? Do you spend time, effort and money

repairing the key bridge or continue to utilize helicopter airlift at 150 times the cost per ton?

Everything! Now! – will only serve to cause log jams at the airfield or seaport. Being able to

step back and conduct the orchestra will allow everyone to play in turn instead of adding to

the noise and confusion.

18. Who’s your Daddy? Never forget it. Stay on message. As an official government

representative never go off “Talking Points.” If you don’t know what they are, then don’t go

into details. “We’re here to help. Appreciate all you’re doing to highlight the needs. Please

excuse me, I have to get back to work...” The last thing you want is for a personal opinion to

contradict official policy. If you want to come back to the response with a NGO or as a

freelance volunteer, feel free to do so on your own vacation time, but don’t mix opinion with

duty. P.S. For the record, there is no “off-the-record”... ever.

19. Consistency is key. Set the bar low and measure success by how consistently you jump over

the same bar at the same time in the same way today, tomorrow, next week, and next month.

Less is more when reliably predictable. Because disasters shatter the daily rhythm of life,

providing metronomic constants people can rely on to speed the recovery to social normalcy.

20. Sustainable good is better than temporary perfect. If it can’t be sustained when you leave,

don’t start it. Avoid orchids in the desert. Think mud huts, not sandcastles. Strive for Geico

standards... so simple even a caveman can do it. Effective simplicity allows you to begin

training your local partner to take over before you leave.

21. Effectiveness, not action. Be lazily smart versus stupidly active. Maximize other peoples’

comparative advantages for overall benefit. Disaster responses are not an individual contest

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of “I am working harder than you,” but how collective actions rebuild a more resilient

community. Advertise other organizations’ contributions to that greater good and people will

flock to be your partner.

22. When you feel like you’re digging yourself into a hole... stop digging. As soon as you feel

like you are getting out of your depth, slow down and ask yourself, “Will someone expire this

instant if I don’t continue this line of efforts?” (e.g. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation) If the

answer is, “No,” stop and back out or ask for help.

23. Excited states are inefficient and unstable. If you’re not healthy, happy and sane - then you

are part of the problem. Individually, you’re not that important. The disaster response will go

on without you. Screaming about individual problems to be fixed is more often driven by

feelings of self-importance than a desire to improve the overall outcome. Concentrate on

being part of the big picture solution.

24. It’s a marathon not a sprint. Be quick but don’t rush. Pace yourself. Staying to help a week, a

month or a year might make you personally feel more validated, but the effects of any disaster

are generational. The needs will still be unmet when you leave and the community still

recovering should you decide to return years later. If you try to accomplish everything, you

will accomplish nothing. Don’t.

25. Rest when you can. Everyone has 24 hours in the day. Within the first 24 hours, begin

instituting your rest plan. If team members aren’t actively needed, force them to eat, sleep,

and double check their equipment. They’ll need to be at 100% when called to perform.

Remember to pull your people off the line before they drop below 30%. If you let them drain

to zero, they may never bounce back.

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26. It’s their disaster. Keep it that way. Don’t make the disaster your own. You may be bringing

the bulk of assistance at this particular instant, but you don't have to live with the

consequences for decades to come. Local solutions are usually best. Avoid the temptation of

enmeshing yourself too deeply into their decision making processes. They need to have

ownership of the outcomes.

27. Disaster Response On-the-Job-Training kills. If you don’t do this for a living, ask questions

of people who do. Just as disaster locations are generally predictable, so are the trajectories of

disaster responses. There are people and organizations that dedicate their entire existence to

developing the knowledge, skills, experiences and equipment necessary to be effective first

responders. Ignorance kills. If you’re confused about why, who’s doing what, where, you are

probably unaware of the action’s potential unintended consequences not to mention its

probable 2nd and 3rd order effects. The bulk of deaths and injuries have already occurred by

the time you’ve arrived. Don’t continue the destruction process by initiating uninformed

action.

28. Don’t experiment with other people’s lives. The way to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is not the time for amateur hour or “bright ideas.” Unusual applications are ok.

Unorthodox applications are acceptable. Untested ones are immoral. If you wouldn’t try it

out on your own grandmother, don't try it out on theirs.

29. Know who’s who in the zoo and who does what to whom... Disaster responses collapse the

normal social strata and information hierarchies. Just because someone is not recognizable as

powerful according to your cultural criteria (stars on their collar or hairspray and an expensive

suit) doesn’t mean that they aren’t important or influential. The quiet guy in the sweater you

push out of the briefing room may be their national Subject Matter Expert and principal

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speaker. The tired “farmer” you don’t have time for may be the district governor bringing

back critical information. Don’t feed the tigers carrots or try to pet the cobras, you will annoy

everyone and probably get yourself hurt.

30. If you think you see something critically wrong that no one is addressing – ask before acting.

If the answer is “No, leave it” ask for an explanation. If the reasoning for “No” is

unsatisfactory, take it up to the next level. If the answer is still “No” move on; act and take

the heat; or quit... but don’t get mad. Emotions diminish everyone’s ability to be effective.

31. $50 a bottle of water; $10,000 per blade hour; $1,000,000 per day on station. Understanding

what’s going on... priceless. The costs of responding to a disaster are enormous. The final

cost of bottled water can increase 100 times, not only because of price gouging, but also

because of the additional costs of transportation, storage and distribution. Ditto donated

canned foods or other goods that have to be transported, sometimes thousands of miles, to

their final destination. “Victory” is not about more flights each day, but how those actions

move us past the initial emergency response phase and contribute to a sustainable post-

disaster norm. Even as you strive to improve specific processes, keep an eye on the final goal.

Rather than quantitative output of patients seen or water provided, focus on qualitative

outcomes like host nation control restored; information systems established and inter-

communal relationships improved.

32. Disaster prevention saves lives. Disaster response is just the cleanup crew. Disaster response

operations are the least effective and most expensive way to tend to the injured or provide

assistance to people in need. Folk logic says, “An ounce of prevention equals a pound of

cure.” The Art of War states, “One picul of local grain equals twenty piculs of imported

grain.” [(1:16) x (1:20) = 1:320] Thus $1 of local pre-disaster prevention equals $300 of

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overseas post-disaster response. As a first responder, you don’t save lives, but react to a

temporary acceleration in the rate of injuries and deaths that has already subsided by the time

you arrive. If you truly want to make a difference and save lives, help create a cost-risk-

benefit analysis that invests in stronger buildings, more equitable distribution of resources and

improved information flows.

33. Be in the instant; understand the continuum. Just because what you do will be

inconsequential when compared against the collective needs, doesn’t discount its value. The

patience you show a grandmother or the smile you share with a child may change their life

and possibly reshape their worldview. Do what you can, where you can, while you can, with

the people you are with. Cherish individual interactions, not the numbers.

34. Leave while they are still waving with all 5 fingers. Start planning your departure as soon as

you arrive. Set simple criteria for mission accomplishment and exceed them a little bit more

each day. Ensure that you’ve identified the people you will hand off each project to before

you start and know how it fits into the larger reconstruction and development strategy. When

you leave, wave back. If you’ve done everything correctly, you’ll have made a friend for life.

I used the nom de plume of “Dr. Hasteh Shoadam” meaning “I am tired” in Farsi, because by then I was and fired it off into the different military coordination groups I was supporting.

Months later I was gratified to read that one of the military task forces had picked it up and used the Murphy’s Laws in planning their operation to their satisfaction. Like the bulletproof glass on the G-Wagen in Iraq, I had provided a service to another American customer. But after being told time and again - “All disasters are preventable” and seeing with my own eyes how our actions create situations that require a reaction when the system fails or war when the impacted population opposes us, the most important guidance from Murphy’s Laws was Lesson 32.

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Disaster prevention saves lives. Disaster response is just the cleanup crew.

At the end of the day, I recognized Lesson 32 was monkey math or the mujahideen calculations from the University of Nebraska textbooks. But after one riot, two wars and four disasters, I believed the ratios rang true. If an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure and one pound of local grain equals twenty pounds of imported grain [(1:16) x (1:20) = 1:320]; then $1 of local pre-disaster prevention equals $300 of overseas post-disaster response. Wanting my actions to reflect my words, I walked over to the Haiti Embassy to the United States and offered to help them in any way that was useful.

I spent the next three days with the local staff, all of whom were overworked, understaffed and underpaid. After describing the normal timeline of a disaster’s birth, growth, and death, I left them to their work. My conclusion from the experience is that if you want to save lives, you start by preventing the disaster or war from ever occurring.

Doppelganger

Living and working in D.C. felt important and there always seemed to be another battle we needed to fight to push the paperwork through the bureaucracy. But despite all the people I met, there were few people who I felt I shared similar experiences with or could relate to. That was until Dr. Ali arrived in our group.

Because Dr. “Butch” Anderson, the Director of the International Health Division was trying to improve the healthcare systems in Afghanistan and Iraq, he knew we had to get local doctors who could help shape the program based on their identified needs. And after much haggling, paperwork and leveraging of personal contacts Butch was able to bring Dr. Ali, a military doctor and former Colonel in the Iraqi Republican Guard from Baghdad to our office in

Washington D.C. Dr. Ali and I moved in different work circles for the first months. But over

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time, we began working on similar projects and through those discussions, began talking about our backgrounds, life and philosophy.

After a year our team was moved to another project with another boss in another building and ended up in the same 10’ x 15’ office. As our conversations deepened, we discovered that we were both in the first Gulf War at the same time. Then after more triangulation, we calculated we were probably within 5 miles of each other during the battle for the oil fields of Al Burqan and the retaking of Kuwait International Airport. And now, here we sat, older, fatter, quieter with less than 5 feet between us and our $800 dollar orthopedic office chairs. Butch had used President

Lincoln’s strategy of destroying one’s enemies by making them friends, or at least getting their family out of a war zone and giving them a job.

My takeaway was that like the US relationship with Germany and Japan, vilified enemies during World War II and staunchest of allies during the Cold War, opponents can become friends. change. And like the US relationship with Iran under the Shah or the Soviet Union under Stalin, former partners can become vilified enemies. It’s not that the nations themselves are inherently evil, but that their words, thoughts and actions can set them with or against another from time to time.

Of course, one had to remember that hameh chiz poshteh pardeh ast, but the universal and timeless TRUTH was that ma barodar va barobar - we’re all brothers and equal. If I had been born in Iraq as a young man when Saddam was coming to power and wanted to be a good patriot, save lives and be recognized as “successful” by my extended family and community, I would be Dr.

Ali. I would have joined the Iraqi military and worked to get into the Republican Guard, the best of the best in Saddam’s Iraq. In fact, Dr. Ali was better than me in that he went to medical school and became a doctor in the Republican Guard, while I never took that step.

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But it was a trick of fate that had him born there and me born here. And then combined forces of historical momentum and bureaucratic structures that pitted me and Dr. Ali against each other resulting in a clash of systems that produced scorched earth, broken infrastructure and shattered lives. Yes, this was absolutely acquitting Dr. Ali for serving in Saddam’s Army using the Nuremberg defense of, “I was only doing what I was ordered to do.” But in countries run by dictators like Hitler or Saddam, the Nuremberg defense was held existential relevance because to oppose the norm meant being shot in the head.

The supposed difference between countries run by dictators and the United States was that we were a representative democracy and were, as Osama bin Laden pointed out, “free to choose.”

And if we, as independent, free people chose to embark on policies that destroyed the land, leveled cities and killed people, who did we have to blame? No one but ourselves.

We couldn’t say, “I didn’t know” when it was our AUMF vote that decided whether to go to war with Afghanistan and Iraq. And because the American people determined where, when and how American troops acted overseas, couldn’t avoid the shared guilt when American soldiers tortured innocent Iraqi citizens in Abu Ghraib (NPR, 2016)? We, as a democracy, had collectively made those decisions to do those things.

As these questions and answers rattled around in my brain, I kept hearing my father yelling at me, “Think!”;“YOUSTUPIDORWHAT?!?!”; and “If everyone is jumping off a bridge into a river of fire would you do it just because everyone else is?” While I had lived in a way that

I could answer, “Yes” to his question, “Did you look it up?” I was less certain I could accomplish his last mission of “Leave it better than you found it.” I too, like the officers at Nuremberg and

Dr. Ali, had drunk the Kool Aid flavored with the fruit of the poisoned tree.

I had “said” that I wanted to start Track 3 people-to-people diplomatic options with people

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living in countries like Iran so we wouldn’t have to go to war. And yet everything I “did” was trying to advance my position in the rat race. I liked to tell myself that I was immune to the MICE of money, ideology, coercion and ego. But my decision making process was riddled with their influence.

After understanding the Art of War equation for victory (“Know yourself; know your enemy”) and seeing the qualitative problem (the people of the United States were ignorant of the

Iranian people), I identified a possible solution (create Track 3 “people-to-people” diplomatic options). But instead of having faith and confidence in myself, I tried to enlist the help of USIP to do my work for me. And when that failed, I went back to the ivory tower of Fletcher to be worthy of being accepted by the system.

In many ways I can use the Nuremberg defense that I was an American and this is the way

America did things. I could say I was only following the dictates of the society I lived in. But in the United States, a government of the people, by the people, for the people, I had the ability to change that society as one of the people.

I could also say, I lacked the self-confidence and faith in myself and my abilities to accomplish my goal. And that would explain why I, like the scarecrow, lion, and tin man in the

Wizard of Oz, went on my quest to obtain an object from someone else for something I already possessed within me. But those arguments would miss another key truth that I didn’t like to admit. I was a whore who didn’t want to do something without being paid well and still needed to receive positive recognition from the people around me.

In many ways, I was just like the girl who considered sleeping with the barfly for a million dollars but was incensed with the implications of being offered only $1. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to “do good” AND still live in a nice apartment, wear nice clothes, eat

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prime ribeye steaks, drink coffee beverages tailor made to my specification. In fact, my intellectual justification had been that instead of rioting on the streets to protest Davos, I’d sit around the conference table and argue to shift 0.01% of the budget towards “development,”

“equity,” and “peace.” Uh,... and just ensure I keep making a salary of at least six figures.

Over time, I learned that by working for “the system” and subconsciously deciding to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” I lost the ability to remain impartial, neutral and independent because my actions on the ground, no matter how well intentioned I and the other

“field negros” might be, were still carrying out the orders of the “house negros” and the master on the hill. And so, by becoming an interchangeable component within the system, I lost the right to call myself “humanitarian” whenever the system I swore allegiance to was inhumane.

Private security contractor

My last real adventure was as a private security contractor of sorts for the Organization for

Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Knowing that our team was trying to develop a medical stability operations capability for Afghanistan and that there were only three countries in the world where people spoke Dari: Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, I decided to see if I could find a way to “ground truth” our course requirements in one of those countries.

Despite my long standing desire to start a Track 3 people-to-people diplomacy effort in

Iran, the option to travel there was not available in 2011. The option to go to Afghanistan was a possibility, but Butch Anderson was gone and the new organization was hesitant to pursue the issue. I also didn’t feel like trying to develop and test training curriculum in an active war zone.

That left only Tajikistan.

Luckily for me, one of my former classmates from Fudan University in China was a

Moldovan who’d made his career in the OSCE. And one day out of the blue, he emailed me and

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suggested that I apply for a job as a Tactical Trainer to create a course for Afghan Border Police in Tajikistan (OSCE, 2011). Serendipity.

The purpose of the course would be to help the Afghan Border Police detect and counter illegal movement across the Tajik-Afghan border which was a largely unguarded line on the map.

Given that Afghanistan produces roughly 85% of all the heroin and opium in the world (UNODC,

2010, p.37) which equaled 1,400 metric tons of drugs with an estimated street value of $65 billion dollars a year, stopping the flow at its source made sense. The Afghans police officers we would be training were all from provinces on the northern border of the country and would be the first line of defense in a drug war that pumped over 180 tons of heroin into the veins of Russians,

Europeans and Americans each year.

The 8-week course was a rudimentary version of the 2 month Ranger School or 3 month

Marine Infantry Officer Course courses I’d been to. We would go over basic map reading, compass use, proper radio discipline, tactical movement, use of night vision equipment and calling for fire support. In addition, we were expected to teach modules on human rights protection and the importance of gender equity in developing a comprehensive security framework. Most important for me, after the 8-week patrolling course was completed, there was an additional ten-day long field medicine course that would help me understand what was actually needed by people in the field.

Dr. Butch Anderson, the Special Forces doctor who’d created the International Health

Division, which drafted and published new policies on military support to stability operations had left. And our new boss was unconvinced that the best way to learn what we needed to teach came from those we would be instructing. Still, he said he was willing to allow me to return to my job after completing the OSCE work as long as I used up all my saved up leave hours first. As a

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workaholic who rarely got sick, I was soon in the air flying the 10,000 kilometers and nine-time zones between Washington D.C. and Dushanbe, the capitals of the two countries.

When I arrived at the nearly deserted airport at three in the morning, I was picked up by a driver who drove me through the empty streets where elderly women swept the streets with brooms designed for witches. After catching a couple hours of sleep, I was picked up by the program manager and immediately introduced to the training team, who were set up in a trailer office like the ones I’d visited in CENTCOM after 9/11, only smaller, cheaper and dustier.

Disoriented and sleep deprived, I babbled my hellos in English. Then, at the urging of the program manager and the assembled team, I stumbled through the greetings and niceties in Farsi repeating everything I’d just said a minute prior. Satisfying himself that “the dog could talk” and reassuring the team that I wasn’t going to bite; the program manager drove me back to the hotel where I slept another 18 hours before getting back up to prepare for the next day.

The next four months felt like a living classroom to teach a single simple concept.

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand,

more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the

introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who

have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do

well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the

laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in

new things until they have had a long experience of them.”

In Chapter VI of The Prince, Machiavelli nailed why the status quo dominance of the bureaucracy was so resilient to innovation and change. And my mission to create the Afghan Border Police

Tactical Trainer Course was going to teach me the timeless validity of his words.

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In my previous job as a Marine, I was responding to a situation where I was authorized to use lethal force and commanding enormous destructive power to compel opposition to obey. My five years as an OFDA Military Liaison Officer, I was responding to a natural or man-made disaster that had broken or destroyed the status quo infrastructure, paradigms and norms. In both situations all the participants knew that change was inevitable. The game became just how to manage evolution in a way that provided a marginal advantage.

In this case, there was no “need” to create the border patrol course, a tsunami of drugs cascading over the borders of Afghanistan aside. And as I imagined a number of Tajik, Russian,

Afghan, Pakistani, Iranian, Albanian, Turkish, Bulgarian, American, … stakeholders were getting a slice of profits generated from the $65 billion dollar a year industry, there were financial disincentives for the program to succeed. The more I understood the conception of our project, its designers, its opponents and observers, the more I understood what needed to be done. Be the grey man to create a MVP (minimum viable product) while keeping everyone alive.

The OSCE was created in 1975 as a mechanism for America and the West to collaborate on issues of mutual concern with the Soviet Union. It proved to be so valuable that all the stakeholders continued to fund its existence after the fall of the Soviet Union. And now in 2011, twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the OSCE still provided an important mechanism for multi-lateral coordination.

While stopping the drug trade was an issue of mutual interest for all the nations concerned, how to stop it was in dispute. If it was about stopping the production of opium and heroin at its source, then the responsibility would fall on the United States as the de facto occupying power. In fact, poppy cultivation had been banned under the Taliban and opium production had fallen to almost nothing in 2001 before soaring back to around 7,000 metric tons

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in 2009 in US military occupied Afghanistan.

Russia was interested in stopping the flow of drugs into the country, but had a long and special relationship with Tajikistan, starting when the country was formally established as a

Soviet republic in 1920. Historically being a small, impoverished republic within the Soviet

Union, Tajikistan was regarded by Russia much the same way that the United States might regard

Cuba or the Marshall Islands, “You were ours once and you’ll always be less than equal.” And with Russian military bases scattered throughout the country, the Tajik population was provided a living reminder of those former relationships.

The Europeans were interested in stopping the drug trade and willing to help. But with

Russia and the United States, both large industrial countries that had and were waging a counterinsurgency war against mujahideen in Afghanistan and a Cold War against each other, most

European countries were uninterested in stepping directly into the fray. But they would help fund some of the costs.

Given Russia’s special interests in the region, at least one of the trainers had to be

Russian. And thus, we ended up with the horse designed by a committee. As I came to understand things, a Russian and American trainer would design a patrolling course for Afghan Border

Guards in Tajikistan funded by the United States and Germany under the auspices of the OSCE to counter international drug trafficking around the world. The idea of building a tactical training to help the Afghan Border Police to stop the flow of heroin and opium around the world seemed like sewing a paper condom for a porn star, but it was a start.

Things became curiouser when I learned the Program Manager had professional fluency in

Russian, English, and Farsi as well as native fluency in the language of his citizenship, French.

He related stories about himself where he’d been in places I’d been near and there were whispers

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he was actually employed by the French intelligence services.

The local OSCE contact was similarly professionally fluent in English, Tajik and French, with native fluency in the language of his citizenship, Russian. And there were louder whispers that he was actually Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, and seconded to the OSCE for the purposes of monitoring our course. And both the French and Russian representatives were able to interact professionally in open settings. But there were tales of the two having screaming matches behind closed doors where the Russian told the Frenchman there was “no way in hell” the course would happen and the Frenchman responded in a similar fashion that it would.

Things got even more curious when a Turkish police captain was brought in to replace the

Frenchman. Then we were told that although the OSCE terms of reference hadn’t been approved formally by the Government of Tajikistan and the Afghan Border Police wouldn’t technically be allowed in the country (read their passports would be held by the Tajik authorities during their stay) but that we’d be going ahead anyway. Our primary place of operation? A Tajik military base that was not officially secret, but not on the map.

The full story is probably another dissertation or since there is little documentation that I can access, the retelling should probably be done as a humorous work of fiction. There are though, two memories that seared themselves into my brain, that I’d like to share. One story is on

“human rights. The other is the “Seven Samurai.”

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

As per the terms of the contract, the Russian trainer and I were supposed to include gender equality, human rights protection and the other philosophical elements to designing and implementing a comprehensive security framework. While I had a passing command of the

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material and some practical experience of seeing it violated, I am in no way a human rights lawyer or expert on the United Nations. Still, I’d studied at the Naval Academy and learned with the Marine Corps and USAID taught me about the subjects; so I figured I should do a pretty decent job.

It was a “class day” so we wouldn’t be humping gear or getting sweaty. Walking a couple minutes away from the barracks next to the obstacle course and under the shade of some trees, we sat down in a circle where I introduced the class. It felt like a flashback of being a Marine infantry lieutenant talking to the platoon about the laws of armed conflict.

In preparation, I had reviewed all the material we were supposed to cover and had made a checklist for myself to make sure we covered all the key points. But I really didn’t have high expectations. Many of these police officers had little to no formal schooling as I’d seen from their difficulty using geometry to solve “call for fire” problems on the map. Several probably had relatives, perhaps even close relatives who were members of the Taliban. Others, while here to learn how to thwart the flow of opium and heroin out of the country, were probably already profiting from it.

Women’s rights? Human rights? I imagined I might get the crusader mercenary’s response of “Kill them all, let God sort them out (Shrier, 2017).” Instead, I received an education on what human rights meant on the battlefield.

In 2011, the Afghan people had been in a state of continual war for over 30 years. The first decade was spent fighting the Russian bear and bringing down the Soviet Union. The second decade was spent fighting each other until the Taliban finally gained dominance throughout the country. And now the third decade was the Taliban fighting against the United States and the proxy government America had established to implement Western wishes.

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While the Afghan officers may not have had formal education, they understood intimately the universal and timeless TRUTHs associated with making and keeping the peace. They had been literally born fighting and, as such, had a deep, nuanced and sophisticated way of approaching life. It reminded me of my time in USAID when asked what we needed to do after a disaster. “Well,.... it depends.”

But more impressively, they also knew the Western standards and norms with one police officer quoting chapter and verse the United Declaration of Human Rights, while another talked about the importance of educating women because they were the ones who raised the children and determined the intellectual future of the country. The longer I listened, the more I became convinced in the idea that one ounce of local prevention was better than twenty pounds of outside foreign cure; and that the best thing the United States and every other country could do was to leave the Afghan people alone and let them start rebuilding their country according to whatever suited them best.

Seven Samurai

The last week of our course was bittersweet. Although I had deliberately kept an emotional distance from the men and interacted more with the local OSCE staff, there’s a camaraderie that you can’t avoid when you’re preparing for anything that might take your life. As we tied up loose ends, half the students flew out by plane, while those living in the border cities like Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif would drive across in the morning.

We had prepared for this eventuality and decided to host a movie night for the students who wanted to stay up late. One of the DVD’s I’d brought over from the United States was Akira

Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, a movie about out of work and disgraced warriors who banded together to free the common people from local outlaws. While the swords, language and culture

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were specific to Japan, the plot was iconic and spawned American copies in the Western genre of

The Magnificent Seven.

As everyone settled down to watch the 3 hour and 26 minute long film, I watched nervously as the students, unable to speak Japanese or read the English subtitles, struggled to bridge the cultural divide. But despite having the option to switch the disk to Rambo and any number of action movies filled with shooting and explosions, they politely kept silent and kept watching. After half an hour the room was completely silent except for the Japanese voices coming out from the tinny speakers attached to the computer. After two hours, I saw individuals doing the squirming pee pee dance before finally finding a lull in the action when they could rush off to relieve themselves and return and continue watching. They got it.

After the movie finished and the closing credits rolled, Dod Mohammad, our Afghan liaison officer approached me. Although only a Lieutenant, Dod Mohammad had been a mujahideen fighting the Soviets as a teenager and had finally come up through the ranks to earn a commission as an officer in the newly formed Afghan Army.

“This is us…. This is us” he said, poking the case of the DVD. And when he asked me if he could bring the DVD home with him, I couldn’t have been more honored to give it.

Divine message

There was one final act before I left Washington D.C.

I briefed my boss on what I’d learned in Tajikistan after returning and offered to try to incorporate my findings into the work the team was doing. My boss was noncommittal and was instead more focused on getting me to help support another project in AFRICOM that was completely disconnected with our medical stability operations effort. Because of my experiences with OFDA and designing the JHOC, he wanted me to help provide instruction on military

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support to civilian authorities in disaster response operations at the Kofi Annan International

Peacekeeping Training Center (KAIPTC). The effort was part of DoD’s Partnering Integrated

Logistics Operations Tactics Course (PILOT) and hoped to build collaborative partnerships between the African national military starting with a basic standard in vocabulary and understanding of terms.

It was my first visit to Africa and I was honored to be selected to help pilot the program.

After flying to Ghana and delivering my portion of the lectures, the American liaison officer to

KAIPTC wrote to my boss that this is exactly the type of support that they needed. He said that he would be recommending our center should be tasked to support the mission and asked if I could be identified as one of the primary instructors. Mission accomplished. Or so I thought.

In Kotoka International Airport, I reconnected with my boss and the other members of the center who’d been on a separate mission in the country. As we rested in the lounge, I nibbled on snacks while my boss enjoyed the bar and talked animatedly. As the boarding call announcement came over the loudspeakers, we gathered our carry-on bags and began walking down the hallways towards the security checkpoint and boarding gates.

I still don’t remember the context or what I might have done to provoke it; but at some point, my boss, who was walking alongside me, reached over and slapped me in the back of the head. He then followed his actions with the observation, “Well that was kind of stupid, wasn’t it?”

Emotionally, I felt like I was back in the trenches of 29 Palms. The world went white and my memories of what happened next are missing. I don’t remember anything until several hours later, when my seatbelt was secured low and tight across my waist and the plane was headed home.

A little slap from your boss shouldn’t mean anything. I mean in the big scheme of all we

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were working on and damage we were working to heal, it should have been inconsequential. But like a supersaturated solution that has dissolved more solid than its equilibrium solubility, things that had been held in metastability began to precipitate out.

I think the thing that killed me was the casual ease with which he disrespected me. It brought up all the things I’d been swallowing down up to the surface. Every past slight and imagined insult was tallied and my “Little Engine That Could” attitude of FIDO (Fuck It, Drive

On) molded into FTS (Fuck That Shit). By the time we landed, I had made the decision to drop my papers.

I did my best to remain professional and compartment my feelings from my work. After I reported the incident to the HR representative, they asked me if I wanted to press charges. Not interested. I just wanted to put a mark on the wall in case he ever does that again with someone else in the future. And then I asked to begin my separation process.

Making virtues of realities

Like the experience of not getting into sniper school and Force Reconnaissance in the

Marine Corps or being denied an upgraded security clearance by the CIA, I look back on the slap in the back of the head as a sort of divine intervention or message from the universe to back up, turn around and get off the road all together. And while it may sound like sour grapes, I think having “failed” in the terms of the Marine Corps, USAID and the medical stability operations team, were the best thing that ever happened to me. And while I didn’t think so at the time, I now believe I am better off as a person because of it.

Had I been allowed to go to sniper school and join Force Recon in 1992, chances are I would have been like Mike Spann, riding into the Castle of War on horseback. If not, I would have been providing Mike overwatch through a sniper rifle scope or overhead by controlling an

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armed reconnaissance drone. And through that work, I would have personally been responsible for directly killing many, many people.

In 2021, instead of finishing this dissertation, I would be enjoying a military retirement and the “thank you for your service” from people who had no idea what I did in their name. But my sleep would be filled with nightmares of all the people I’d killed. Or if I wasn’t lucky in war, like Mike Spann, I’d be dead.

If I had gotten my TS-SCI clearance and continued working in USAID, I might well have become a senior leader in the bureaucracy. This is if I didn’t decide to finally make the move to become a member of the clandestine service. I might still write overly long reports like the one you’re reading now, as some of the declassified material reads like rambling journal entries. But my identity would be a facade to everyone I met and perhaps even to myself.

Instead, I sleep soundly at night knowing I did the best I could in the manner I knew how.

Maybe more importantly, what you see is what you get, even if it’s not that impressive.

When I left the center, I tried to leave in a way that very few people knew what had happened and those who did weren’t impacted by the ripples. I don’t think my boss ever knew, as he offered to write me an outstanding recommendation to anyone who asked. Several years later, we shared a nice dinner when he visited Hawaii, so maybe things turned out alright.

He wasn’t a bad or inherently evil person. He just had a lapse in judgement and so was blind to what he was doing, its potential butterfly effect. “Well, that was kind of stupid, wasn’t it?”

The aftermath wasn’t about revenge or justice. The slap was the world’s way of telling me that I just wasn’t suited to the system. It was time for me to leave.

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Stage 4: Being someone

I thought about it, and I now know what I should do with my life.

In many ways it’s premature to assign my commitment to a personal identity to the end of

Phase 4 and my decision to leave U.S. Government service, because exactly who I am and what I believe is tested and renegotiated with every interaction I have and every breath I take. But after

“failing” at being any one of the pre-programmed identities with the Marine Corps, USAID and

DoD contractor system, I realized that I was living in a self-defeating manner if I claimed to want to stop wars by establishing Track 3 people-to-people diplomacy initiatives while getting paid to implement Track 1 (government-to-government) strategies using the formal, status quo, national assets of the state.

Figure 6

Marcia Identity Development Stage 4

Note. The figure reflects my Stage 4 state of “Identity Achievement” characterized by High

Commitment and High Exploration. Figure adapted from Socio-Emotional Development website

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describing James Marcia’s ” Ego Identity Statuses.” Retrieved from https://socioemotional.weebly.com/james-marcia.html.

It took the combined twenty years of Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4 periods from 19 to 47 years of age to battle test my assumptions, theories and beliefs into a collection of “truths” that held true in every situation I found myself within. And while going through one riot, two wars and four disasters, was instrumental in recognizing the gaps between theory and practice, words and deeds; it was doing something about the, “Hey wait a second, that doesn’t seem right” pebble in the shoe twinges of conscience that hit when incongruities surfaced. And if I hadn’t continually asked myself: “Who are you?”, “Where do you come from?”, “What are you doing here?”, “Why did you decide to do that?”, “Where are you going?”, and How will you get there? in different situations with different people around the world, I might have surrendered to a life of quiet desperation and moral somnambulism knowing that something was not quite right but ignoring my suspicions and drugging my discomfort because the society around me seemed content. And while my parents are not academics or educators by trade, their initial guidance of “Think!”,

“Fake it till you make it”, “Leave things better than you found them”, and “Never give up” helped me find the center point of the VENN diagram where I could live in a way that was consistent with my theoretical ideals.

Non sibi sed patriae redux

What I never heard my parents question or discuss was what to do when the country you swore allegiance to felt no parental obligation to keep you safe or even alive. The concept of non sibi sed patriae or “not for self, but for the fatherland” was one of concentric circles or of

Matryoshka dolls where my identity was enveloped by my identity with my family, enveloped by my family’s identity within the community, nested within my community’s identity within the

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State. But seeing the alacrity with which the State was ready to send us untrained and unprotected into war zones or ease with which I was cast aside despite risking my life to help “the system” succeed.

And if “the system” responded to my objections with the barfly’s response “We established what you are with the first question. Now we’re just haggling over the price,” “the system” would be right.

Marcia’s Maslow’s

The biggest cognitive dissonance I tried to swallow was the assumption that there is any relation between social (economic, political, legal) status and morality. There are rich people who are good. There are poor people who are good. There are rich people who are bad. There are poor people who are bad.

Yes, like KSM probably read in Chowan University Bible study, I had learned that it is

“easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24)" and "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money (Matthew 6:24).”

But it wasn’t that money itself was evil. Otherwise, why would the Church institute the practice of tithing to collect up 10% of one’s efforts to redistribute the wealth to the poor? Rather it was “the love of money is the root of all evil (Timothy 6:10)” and like the Israelites dancing around the golden calf instead of listening to God which cost them 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. And with only a short amount of time with which to live, living to make money diverted time, effort and attention to learning to be good.

My challenge is that I’d been raised with the expectation that I should be “successful.”

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And in the second generation immigrant logic the methodology for achieving success was the first generation protocol of shut up, work harder, and be honest. But my parents never questioned the materialistic capitalist society’s definition of success as measured by possessing “more.” More money, more food, more square footage, more … even when it exceeded an individual’s healthy levels of consumption.

Over time, as I swam further and further upstream, I began to see the leadership’s self- interested decision making in American foreign policies that were weakening the United States

Constitution and, more importantly, the soul of the nation. The philosophical challenge I never tried to wrestle with directly was how to be successful within the positivist top-down “system”

(and receive the material comforts and social accolades it promised) while simultaneously remaining true to my stated goal of building constructivist, democratic, bottom up foreign policies conceived and implemented for the public weal.

It wasn’t until the system itself rejected me that I learned to swim alone again. And even that process of reimagining my identity and “self” wouldn’t have been possible without the protective chrysalis my parents provided by allowing me to live off their generosity. More than humbling, the experience brought renewed appreciation for the morality of the tribe that protected and cared for its own, even when that individual failed to provide anything of value.

The Marcia’s Maslow’s alluded to is the difference in physiological needs of individuals and the artificial material wants and desires created by a self-referential identity. The universal

Maslow’s needs are standard across every race, religion, color, class, ethnicity, or other distinction used to separate humanity. According to the SPHERE Handbook (2018), which

Western governments, NGO’s and experts wrote, those minimums are 2,100 kCal of food and 15 liters of water per person per day with 3.5 square meters of covered space to sleep at night. This

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means that as soon as those are met, as long as there is a community the individual can live within, there is no reason that an individual cannot begin to achieve the “self-actualization” that

Maslow talked about in his “Theory of Human Motivations” (1943). If more was needed, how can you explain the timeless and universal TRUTH’s individuals like Buddha, Socrates and Christ were able to reach with no more than sandals, robes and some people to talk with.

The challenge was Marcia’s search for self where an individual might be told by society and believe that their identity required the possession of this salary and rank or attainment of that degree and job title to be “the best that they could be.” And when the possession and attainment of those man made things came at the cost of other humans’ 2,100 kCal of food, 15 liters of water and 3.5 square meters of cover, the system no longer served humanity. And when the system was destructive of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” then as Thomas Jefferson, Martin

Luther, and Osama bin Laden pointed out, it deserved to be the target of attack. And if the system remained unrepentant and unreformed despite being shown the error of its ways, then the rest of humanity was justified in working towards its destruction.

But the longer I looked at my critique of “the system” and “master on the hill,” the more I realized that these were macrocosms of my own individual struggle with developing a coherent identity. All the criticisms I was levelling against “the system” also applied to myself. And I,

Airborne Ranger Marine, who’d push through on one MRE and 3 hours of sleep a day couldn’t achieve self-actualization when fed to obesity and given 8 hours sleep a night, when would I be able to? The challenge wasn’t for me to try and change “the system” or anyone or anything outside of myself. My challenge, like the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow and Tinman, was to find those truths within myself that aligned with the universal and timeless TRUTHs that remained untouched as governments and empires rose and fell.

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Armed with an identity of nobody within the system, I was putting aside the “little struggle” or Jihad Asghar against the forms of ideas and beginning the “great struggle” or Jihad

Akbar of cultivating the holy within. And that began with accepting that sometimes you have to fail in the society you live within in order to survive with your self-determined identity intact.

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Chapter 5

Conclusions

So, from an autoethnographic perspective, what were the critical turning points in my life that led me to develop Pacific ALLIES as a means of existential education with potential to prepare next generation leaders for the climate change challenges they will face in the 21st

Century?

The most obvious answer might seem to be my participation in the Rodney King riots, first Gulf War, invasion of Iraq or various disasters around the world, like the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. And to be sure, being in situations where people were being killed or rebuilding their lives in the wake of nature’s destruction forced me to reassess the minimum food, water and shelter people need to survive. But seeing people as targets on the other side of my rifle sights or survivors reaching out for the rations we were delivering didn’t necessarily have to result in the conclusions I came up with. Certainly, others went through more traumatic experiences than I did who have no interest in changing the status quo.

Upon deeper reflection, I think being in wars and disasters were the final exams that tested what I believed I was learning in the tea houses and hidden trails at the fingertips of America’s diplomatic reach. There, self-actualization was enjoyed as the feeling of peace, health, and community with other people instead of the promoted consumer grasping for individual wealth, fame and power in the United States. And when states of self-actualization seemed more comfortable with “others” who America labelled “enemies,” it made me question what the term really meant and the reason for that enmity. The deeper I dug for root causes, the more I appreciated my parents’ imprint on my morals, values and how those set me thinking about existential education.

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My father’s “YOUSTUPIDORWHAT?” can only be understood in retrospect as loving encouragement now that I’m a father myself. His pithy guidance of “Think!”, “Did you look it up?” and “If everyone is jumping off a bridge into a river of fire are you going to follow?” are gems of wisdom that I plan to share with my children when they’re older. Finally, his living example and ceaseless reminders to “Leave things better than you found them” was my hitherto unrecognized motivation for getting my commanding officer relieved in the Gulf War and creating programs like the Joint Humanitarian Operations Course and Pacific ALLIES.

My mother’s calculated devil may care “My way” attitude would make Frank Sinatra proud. As the polar opposite to my father’s legalistic, positivist, self-sacrificing approach, she taught me to “Fake it till you make it” and “Dance outside the box” because the walls aren’t really there. Watching my mother “Prove everyone wrong” and “Have fun doing it” encouraged a rebellion in me that became strategic, thoughtful and disciplined when merged with my father’s straight lines.

My parents’ contrasting approaches and shared admonition to never, never, never give up became hardwired into my understanding of how I should interact with the world. Over time, their sayings and examples became a subconscious operating system that forced me to find my own answers when I saw life equations that didn’t seem to balance out. Our triennial family moves became living laboratories for practicing Bacon’s scientific method (1620) of observe - theorize - test - repeat and allowed me to compare emerging personal beliefs against the shifting boundaries and goalposts each temporary community set for normal, deviant and successful.

Had I never left Hawaii or the United States, I would not be writing this dissertation because I never would have recognized any need. Going back to my beginnings, the reason I began to think in terms of existential education was the realization that my childhood hadn’t been

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designed to enhance my chances of survival let alone empower my individual self-actualization to enjoy a long, healthy and self-content life. Instead, the further I stepped away from my uniform and the social trappings government service conferred, the clearer it became that I had been skillfully trained to kill on command and sacrifice myself to maintain the United States’ status quo position in the world without ever wondering who my supposed enemies were or questioning why they might oppose to our American way of life. In the exact opposite spirit of what an existential education should accomplish, my military dependent schooling rewarded me for believing it was an honor to die defending America’s legacy of privilege against an ever increasing storm of political, economic, social, racial, religious, and environmental change.

These epiphanies never came as divine revelations telling me to bring God’s word to the world. Rather, my path to enlightenment resembled the doubting process of paradigm shift where

I actively disbelieved any evidence contrary to my adolescent indoctrination until I could no longer deny the obvious. But the tipping point for obviousness required stepping outside the commonalities of everyday American life and into the commonalities of everyday Romanian,

Belgian, Croatian, Greek, Cuban, Pakistani, Chinese, and Iranian life. And only after comparing my subconscious Americentric Venn diagram of universal values against my overseas hosts’

Second World and Third World truths could I begin to imagine that something was not quite right.

In this, the EdD process and autoethnographic methodology have become a kind of psychological autotherapy through the unpacking of intellectual joys and emotional traumas that

I’d compartmentalized in the instant and promised myself to get back to in the future. Only with the distance of time am I able to reexamine past anomalies affirmatively and find a place for them in my expanding world view. From the egg’s transition to larva to chrysalis to moth, there were at

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least four different stages that I had to pass through in order to arrive at my present perception and frame of mind.

Stage 1 (Ages: 0-18 years old) consisted of my growth to adulthood. Covering eighteen years of my life from military dependent to midshipman at the Naval Academy. It was during this time that I learned the values of my parents and the military community we lived in.

Stage 2 (Ages: 19-27 years old) was my introduction to military service and shaping an officer of Marines. Those years taught me the value of strength, honor, discipline, endurance and self-sacrifice. And in the absence of counterevidence, my surroundings reinforced a self- referential outlook that viewed everything the United States did as good and everything that was

American as ideal.

Stage 3 (Ages: 28-32 years old) consisted of my six-year “Alice in Wonderland” walkabout beyond the edge of the American empire and living in the camps of our enemies. This period started with my tour through post-Cold War Europe and continued through my studying

Mandarin in Shanghai at Fudan University and Farsi at the University of Tehran. After meeting

America’s “enemies” face to face and realizing those individuals wanted the same “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” that Americans were supposedly fighting for, I imagined that there might be a way to bring my newfound knowledge home to improve world peace.

Stage 4 (Ages 33-47) encompassed the period of my fourteen-year apprenticeship in

Washington D.C.’s “Idols of the Theater” dance academy. While I failed to master the most difficult poses, I was introduced to the skills, mindset and character necessary to succeed in the bureaucracy of the most powerful nation on Earth. Perhaps the most relevant lesson from an existential education perspective was realizing that there is no “man behind the curtain,” no great

Wizard of Oz with superior moral character and overarching vision of how to guide the United

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States into the 21st Century. And the realization that there is no moral ascendancy associated with man-made titles brought the revelation that decisions made in Washington D.C. or in any man-made system are not intrinsically more ethical, valid or sane than those made by anyone anywhere else.

None of these lessons came through formal instruction or even in a logical sequence.

Rather, I needed to stumble through each of these phases to develop my ability to see the ever- present signs and patterns that I’d been unable to recognize before. Thus, my goal in creating

Pacific ALLIES became to help next generation leaders:

1. See the different models for self-actualization in the 21st century

2. Explore the current validity of the historical logic that brought America to this point

3. Seek their own path to truth

My belief was that the best way to do that was to help the Pacific ALLIES participants recognize their own starting assumptions about identity, society and life and then test them against other cultures with vastly different backgrounds, values and priorities. The hope was to recreate the immersive learning environments that I’d discovered after leaving the military. And by making friends with “others'' in high contrast, low risk environments, the participants could come to the same conclusions that I did or at least know there were alternative views that worked equally well for other people around the world. Then hopefully they would be able to see the discontinuities of prepackaged Americentric logic and over time, create their own truths based on their personal experiences and observations in Kwajalein.

In order to replicate the bottom up and inside out transformation strategy used in the

JHOC that had improved interagency relationships between DoD and USAID, Pacific ALLIES was tailored to expose students to new ideas before they picked a career path and began running

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the rat race. After reading the West Point study “Ebeye 2023” conducted by cadets and thinking back to my own First Class Summer Cruise at the Naval Academy the Tufts University IGL Joint

Research Project format, I realized we could make Pacific ALLIES an opportunity for students to walk on the other side of the railroad tracks without risking their life or losing their security clearance.

Instead of adopting the rigid task-conditions-standards format of military training, Pacific

ALLIES participants were encouraged to explore the aspect of climate change and Kwajalein

Atoll they found most compelling. And without being able to provide them all the time, resources or knowledge they needed; my hope was to expose Pacific ALLIES to the “fog of war” where critical decisions have to be made without complete knowledge of the situation or ability to control outcomes and force them to apply the Marine Corps mantra of “improvise, adapt and overcome.” The philosophical goal was to stress the students’ classroom answers and textbook solutions beyond their breaking points, encourage them to identify the cognitive biases driven by false assumptions of the status quo and finally create their own new theories about how things worked based upon personal experiences and observations.

For the civilian students, the experience would hopefully provide a deep dive into a subject and region they could follow up on after graduation. For Service Academy cadets and midshipmen who still had another five years of service before finishing their military commitment, living with the Marshallese would hopefully teach them to defend the United States

Constitution in a more thoughtful, humanistic and sustainable manner. And finally, for our

Marshallese hosts, I hoped to create an opportunity for Ebeye youths to create lasting friendships with American youths in ways that expanded their vision of the world and place within it.

Of course, just as the Marine Corps teaches, “no plan survives crossing the line of

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departure” my plans began changing the instant I began putting things into effect. The chief challenge was that the development of new academic programs are normally accompanied by an official mandate, institutional authority, dedicated personnel and funding, none of which I had.

All these challenges were negotiated under the overarching uncertainty of working with a military still trying to figure out if it was official policy to consider climate change a national security threat or not.

But with my father’s “YOUSTUPIDORWHAT?....Think!”; my mother’s “Fake it till you make it” and their combined never, never, never give up I began to find my way. The Marine

Corps encouragements of “FIDO” and “Improvise, adapt and overcome” pushed me to rely on the maneuver warfare decision making process leading me to initiate my incomplete plans with vigor now rather than waiting to attempt committee approved plans timidly later.

To that end, I began a campaign of conceptual guerrilla warfare against any bureaucratic resistance to the creation of Pacific ALLIES. Intelligence preparation of the battlefield included identifying hard points of opposition, mapping the chain of command’s value models and then developing approaches that worked within the opposition’s cognitive biases and affect heuristics.

My goal was never to challenge another person’s beliefs using my gods but to show how Pacific

ALLIES supported the worship of their gods and beliefs. Reaching back to the Aikido philosophy of finding a shared path by merging spirits and Lincoln’s strategy of destroying enemies by making them friends; we were usually able to “win with aloha” and bring Pacific ALLIES to life by a merging of breath.

The key to the process was developing a modified information collection - processing - analysis - integration - reattack intelligence strategy from my Marine Corps Intelligence School days. Using the experiences gained from living overseas as an adult and moving every three years

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growing up, I had learned to code switch linguistically, culturally and physically depending on who I was communicating with, what we were discussing and where we physically were.

Recognizing we were all like the five blind men with an incomplete grasp of what the entire elephant looked like, I’d use our conversations to figure out what part of the elephant they were holding and attempt to build a shared narrative from their perspective.

It was here that my serial career failures actually helped open doors and give shape to

Pacific ALLIES as a living, breathing, thing. Having lived as a student overseas, I could sit in rapt attention as elders would “talk story” for hours, making no attempt to answer the questions I asked, because I knew that listening respectfully was their first test of community compatibility.

The years spent in USAID had taught me the jargon of humanitarian assistance and I could translate our education initiative into terms of “building community sustainability and human resilience in the face of slow onset disasters.” Finally, the decades being programmed for military service allowed me to snap back into sitting up straight, crafting bulleted PowerPoint slides and saying “Yes Sir” without looking like I was trying.

Like someone pulling together a band or more appropriately organizing a multi-genre music festival, I was always trying to find out what the community cared about most and then work to address their issues first. The only community I was completely ignorant of was the discipline I was trying to get a degree in, education. And thus, my strategy of choice was to simply tell the truth, “I’m the idiot in the room. I know nothing about education, and I need all the help I can get.” As luck would have it, I was delighted to discover that educating the ignorant was what delighted educators the most.

But even with all the help, I made mistakes. Lots of them. Continually. To paraphrase

Makarenko’s observations on creating Gorky Colony in The Road to Life (pg75):

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I am just an ordinary mortal, with an endless number of shortcomings. I don’t even

really know my own business: my working day is crammed with error, diffident

movements, confused thinking. And ahead was impenetrable mist, through which I

could only make out, with the utmost difficulty, the vague outlines of our future

pedagogical work. Every step I took could have been criticized from any point of

view, for my every step was unplanned…. There was only one point as to which

no doubt ever arose, my firm resolve never to throw up the work, but to carry it to

some sort of conclusion, even if that conclusion should be failure. (p.75)

So, in 2017, after three years of planning, I launched Pacific ALLIES. And somehow, we muddled through.

Pacific ALLIES Year 1

Summer 2017 was a debacle in many ways. With help from the Coast Guard Academy,

Naval Academy and Tufts University, we were able to identify and physically transport one Coast

Guard Academy cadet, two Naval Academy midshipmen and one Tufts student to Kwajalein

Atoll. But that was about the extent of our success.

We were unable to coordinate all the Pacific ALLIES participants arriving at the same time or demand any level of commitment to the program. The result was each person arrived on a separate date and stayed for a different amount of time. And the bulk of our time, effort and resources were spent in negotiating the administrative clearances and travel arrangements.

But there were small successes gained from the exercise. We were beginning to learn how the administrative systems of the Service Academies, Pacific Command, USAG-KA, and

KALGOV worked and who the key decision makers were. We began to realize the participants needed between three to four weeks on the ground before becoming immersed in the local culture.

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We also figured out we needed to house the students and cadets on Ebeye with the Marshallese rather than on USAG-KA with the American military service members and contractors. But the biggest discovery that changed everything was finding out that the Marshallese were starting an

Ebeye Spartan Summer Camp designed to revive the study of local traditional knowledge and inspire Marshallese high school students to continue studying during the summer.

The impact of this discovery expanded the focus of Pacific ALLIES from simply providing American students an opportunity to study the climate change impacts on United States national security by immersing themselves in a foreign culture to helping create an experiential service learning program that supported the local Marshallese leadership's goals. And after receiving enough positive feedback from all the stakeholders that the first summer’s results were worth the pain and expense, we stepped back and began planning for the next year.

For me, I was just happy to survive. The simultaneous demands of being a new student in our University of Hawaii’s EdD cohort, learning how to be a father of our four month old son, and coordinating all the Pacific ALLIES’ logistics to include picking up and dropping off students at the airport at 3am almost did me in. At one point during the summer, I suffered a dizzy spell that lasted two and a half days, which luckily coincided with a weekend.

I suppose the only mentionable highpoint that summer was being asked to write a letter of recommendation for Nate Bermel, one of the star performers that year. Although I declined several times saying, he would be better off getting someone with an official title and list of degrees after their name; he persisted saying that his experiences in Kwajalein were a memorable part of his undergraduate studies. It was nice when Nate called me to let me know he’d been selected as the Naval Academy’s Rhodes Scholar the following year.

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Pacific ALLIES Year 2

Summer 2018 was slightly more successful only because we had a better idea of what challenges lay ahead. While we weren’t able to ensure everyone came in and left at the same time, we had developed a notional 6-week summer internship built around the idea of a SCUBA dive plan process. Plan the dive, dive the plan, review the dive.

In our optimal scenario, Pacific ALLIES students would arrive in Hawaii and spend one week meeting with the local stakeholders like the University of Hawaii, Pacific Command,

Pacific Disaster Center, Center for Excellence in Disaster Management, and Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies to hear their different perspectives of US-Marshallese relationships. After flying to Ebeye, the Pacific ALLIES would spend their four week internship supporting the Ebeye

Spartan Summer Camp, working to integrate their personal research design into the Marshallese program as much as possible. After the Ebeye Spartan Summer Camp concluded, the Pacific

ALLIES participants would return to Hawaii for a “decompression” week where they reported back to the various stakeholders what they’d seen and learned.

Because Pacific ALLIES still remained unfunded and relied on the participants’ ability to pay for much of their transportation, we could not demand when they arrived and how long they stayed. That summer we had three official Pacific ALLIES participants: one cadet from Coast

Guard Academy, one midshipman from the Naval Academy and one student from Whitman

College. And even though the Naval Academy midshipman had to return early to train the incoming class of plebes or freshmen, we were able to implement a modified 6-week format with the Coast Guard Academy cadet and Whitman College student.

Being the first year of officially attempting a service learning approach, we didn’t know how the Coast Guard Academy cadet and Whitman College student would integrate themselves

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into the different programs of the Ebeye Spartan Summer Camp. But as hoped, the students gravitated towards topics they were familiar with and found ways to contribute in areas they could have the most impact. The Coast Guard Academy cadet who was a competitive college swimmer studying Marine and Environmental Science helped the Marine Science instructor for the Ebeye

Spartan Summer Camp in both water safety and class implementation; while the Whitman

College student focused on Environmental Studies and Sociology helped teach English, Math and

Environmental Science classes.

Unbeknownst to me, the Whitman College student was one of the “crazy passionates” that we hoped Pacific ALLIES would eventually attract. Skye had started working at twelve years old as a self-described nanny for a family with three children. At fourteen, she started working at the local burger restaurant and as a freshman joined her high school’s environmental club. By her sophomore year Skye was participating in a cultural exchange program coordinated by World

Savvy and the Department of Education in Bangladesh. During her Junior and Senior years of high school Skye enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s Post-Secondary Enrollment Option program earning 58 college credits by the time she graduated from high school while still working in a bike repair shop and teaching kids how to ski during the winter.

Taking the immersion concept to heart, Skye came a month early to Ebeye and became the live-in nanny for the Ebeye City Manager before the other participants arrived. Once the camp began, in addition to teaching classes, she became the unofficial Spartan Camp den mother, taking on everything from getting the Marshallese students up in the morning, helping serve food, getting the students to the different classes, making supply runs to town and finally monitoring lights out as everyone went to sleep. When the Ebeye Spartan Summer Camp had their graduation ceremony, the Kwajalein Assistant Commissioner for Education personally thanked Skye and

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presented her a check as a token of the community’s appreciation for all that she had done for the

Ebeye Spartan Summer Camp participants.

Like Nate’s acceptance to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, I had nothing to do with Skye’s exemplary performance on Ebeye. But their achievements and the Marshallese community’s positive response seemed to confirm that the open format of Pacific ALLIES allowed the students to “self-actualize” their potential while increasing the program’s potential beyond the limits of what I could possibly have imagined. Essentially, we had been able to take the Marine Corps’ mission type orders of identifying an objective, in this case developing an experiential service learning process, and succeeded by letting the participants work with the stakeholders to achieve it.

Pacific ALLIES Year 3

Summer 2019 became a turning point for Pacific ALLIES on several fronts as friends and enemies of the Pacific ALLIES program began to make themselves visible. And as this was our third time through the system, we understood better the touchpoints and pitfalls of each relationship. Perhaps most importantly, with two summers completed, those still undecided about the program realized we would probably succeed again and stopped passively resisting us.

This historical momentum worked to our advantage when the military rotation system moved opponents in key positions to new jobs. As incoming administrators were shown the way things worked, Pacific ALLIES was introduced as a part of the existing ecosystem. And with the continuous changes we were making to improve our processes, we were given a second chance to make a first impression.

Of course, this didn’t solve all our problems. There were still individuals who actively hated what we were doing or more accurately hated what they thought we were doing. In general,

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it seemed as if their opposition could be broken down into four specific objections to our work: process, time, money, and pride. And all of those criticisms were justified.

The Pacific ALLIES process of building as you go and adjusting on the fly didn’t fit nicely into the status quo processes and timelines. Often the time required to address one Pacific

ALLIES request might be equal to the effort needed to respond to three, five or ten other officially sanctioned standard program requests. And the lack of funding for the Pacific ALLIES meant that there would be no overtime pay or financial incentive to do the extra work. Lastly, if

Pacific ALLIES became more successful than their own programs, some individuals seemed to worry that it might diminish access to future funding, even if that was not our intent.

Being new, small and weak, Pacific ALLIES relied on others for survival and had no reason to attack or cause offence to anyone else. Like the first mammal that evolved alongside the dinosaurs, Juramaia sinensis or “skinny shrew,” our success was defined by survival. And as survival amongst giants sometimes meant being invisible, with every success we achieved, we let the T. Rex apex predators take the lead, get the glory and eat a bigger slice of the pie.

Our goal was the same as any insurgent army, emerging paradigm shift or grassroots movement, to survive. That meant living to show the value we brought to our surrounding community and becoming one with the environment we operated in.

Over the course of those first two years, we were able to introduce the Mayor of

Kwajalein Atoll, the Assistant Commissioner for Education and Ebeye City Manager to Hawaii

State Governor Ige, members of Honolulu Mayor Caldwell’s staff, members of the Hawaii State

Legislature, and dozens of professors and researchers at the University of Hawaii, with whom we introduced the climate change impacts of sea level rise on the Marshall Islands and potential implications on Hawaii through forced migration. In meetings with PREL, Oahu Economic

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Development Board and Shriners Children’s Hospital, we helped identify telemedicine programs, cultural preservation and educational resources designed for Pacific Island use that could be leveraged by the Marshallese in Kwajalein. And through discussions with Pacific Command and the Friends of the National World War II Memorial, we were able to set up commemorations of the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Kwajalein both in Washington D.C. and Ebeye, Kwajalein

Atoll.

In preparing for our third cohort of Pacific ALLIES, we reached out to Dr. Eric

Rasmussen, CEO of Infinitum Humanitarian Systems (IHS), who helped communities at risk from disasters to minimize their vulnerabilities. Dr. Rasmussen had been our interagency team doctor during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and I had worked with him again in Banda Aceh during the 2004 tsunami to transfer unclassified information from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham

Lincoln to the UN humanitarian information team. With his extensive experience working in disasters and refugee camps around the world, Dr. Rasmussen was fascinated by the range and complexity of the challenges facing the Marshallese and committed to helping them after visiting

Ebeye in March of 2019.

Wanting to expand Marshallese relationships with other nations, we reached out to LCDR

Shanzhi Thia, an officer in the Singapore Navy who’d been the ALLIES Student Director while studying at Tufts University. An early supporter of creating Pacific ALLIES, LCDR Thia recognized the similarity between the national security challenges sea level rise posed to

Singapore and the Marshall Islands as well as the potential for developing a mutually beneficial partnership in the areas of climate change research, information management and next generation leadership development. Together we worked to get Singaporean Cadet Yixin Ye to be Pacific

ALLIES first non-American participant.

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By May of 2019, we had solidified our lineup for our third cohort. Pacific ALLIES would consist of two cadets from the Coast Guard Academy, Singapore cadet Yixin Ye, and Skye

Goedert, who would join us after graduation. More exciting was the work that we would be attempting.

Dr. Rasmussen had contacts at Google Earth who had already updated old satellite imagery of Ebeye City before the summer started. But the Google Earth team had never completed a Street View map that allowed the world to see what the Ebeye looked like from the ground level. Carrying a 360 degree camera on a backpack, the Pacific ALLIES participants would work with the Ebeye Summer Spartan Camp students to complete the first Street View map in Kwajalein.

After talking with Marshallese leaders in Ebeye, Dr. Rasmussen recognized that the

Marshallese had no verifiable statistics on how many Marshallese lived on Ebeye or what their health status, educational background and demographic breakdown were. Working with his software development team, he put together a Coastal Community Human Security Survey or

CCHSS phone application that the Pacific ALLIES and Ebeye Spartan Summer Camp participants would beta test together. The final goal was to provide KALGOV an in-house tool that they could use at will to assess the pulse and temperature of their community’s health.

Finally, Dr. Rasmussen decided it was necessary to document our efforts and flew in

Lorenzo Moscia, an award winning war photographer who’d accompanied him to disasters and refugee camps in the past. Lorenzo’s mission was to help put a human face on the climate change challenges facing the Marshall Islands. And having previously done a documentary on the Rapa

Nui on Easter Island and worked with Greenpeace to document microplastic pollution in the

Mediterranean, Lorenzo was a perfect fit.

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With our additional partners and resources, we accomplished all our objectives. The

Pacific ALLIES participants and Ebeye Spartan Summer Camp students mapped the length and breadth of Ebeye helping to create the first Google Earth Street View map of Ebeye and possibly the entire country. Together the American and Marshallese student teams visited nearly 200 of the estimated 1,000 Marshallese homes. The CCHSS phone app provided the triple benefit of helping the Marshallese students develop census taking skills, teaching the American cadets how to mentor younger colleagues despite language and cultural differences, and building an appreciation for the iterative processes required in computer software development. As we muddled through,

Lorenzo Moscia took thousands of photographs of the Pacific ALLIES and Ebeye Spartan

Summer students, Kwajalein officials and Marshallese people laughing, playing, and working together along the way.

After the Ebeye Summer Spartan Camp concluded and the Pacific ALLIES participants returned to Hawaii, the team was invited to brief Major General Vares-Lum and a dozen of senior officers at Indo-Pacific Command. With a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and master’s degree in

Education from the University of Hawaii, Major General Vares-Lum applauded the experiential service learning approach of Pacific ALLIES. And as the first female of Native Hawaiian ancestry in the Army to reach the rank of Major General, she praised the cross-cultural approach noting,

"The fantastic work these cadets and midshipmen did this summer is going to greatly help the government of Kwajalein as well as reinforce USINDOPACOM's commitment to maintain relationships with our allies and partners in the Oceania region."

The final vote of confidence came from the Marshallese themselves when the KALGOV council voted to allocate $50,000 of their scant resources to support Pacific ALLIES that year.

While everyone recognized we still have a long way to go, it was an enormous compliment to

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know that the people of Ebeye believed Pacific ALLIES was worth supporting. We were finally evolving from invasive to indigenous.

What I learned

The hubris of self-importance is believing your medicine is good for other people’s ailments.

As I finish the dissertation, I have come to the twilight realization that Pacific ALLIES was perhaps not created as an experiential service learning curriculum to help next generation leaders understand the impacts on climate change on national security; but rather it was a subconscious effort to replicate the unbounded chaos of the riot, wars and disasters I’d participated in to test the validity of my emerging education beliefs. This involved finding a situation that fit my narrative for reality and then inserting myself into the storyline where I could make a positive difference. My starting assumptions being the world needs fixing, disasters are predictable, and I am uniquely qualified to help. Looking back at myself six years ago before I ever started Pacific ALLIES, I might offer the following observations:

1. The world may need fixing. If you watch the news or read all the climate change reports

you’d be crazy not to be terrified of the future. But can you ever fix a system that you’re

part of by pretending that you’re an objective researcher on the outside looking in? The

most you can do is completely understand and control yourself and on most days even that

is impossible. If the world needs fixing, the best thing you can do is to start with yourself.

2. Disasters are predictable. But the root causes of disasters are not action or inaction, but

rather the thoughts that separate “Us” from “Them” that allow imbalances to grow in the

first place. In order to prevent the occurrence of disasters, we have to disbelieve the

imaginary divide between the “Me” and the “We” of everyone and everything that is.

Only when our personal self-actualization is coterminal with humanity's self-actualization

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will the rate of planetary climate change slow to allow everyone to adapt and survive.

3. You may be unique, but your ability to help as an outsider is limited. If you were unable to

change the Marine Corps, USAID or the United States Government, what makes you

imagine that you will be successful with Indo-Pacific Command, the University of Hawaii

or Marshallese? As a separate individual, you can do nothing. The most impact you can

possibly have is by sharing your love, energy, and perspectives as an integral part of the

whole to nurture regenerative evolution.

In this way, the EdD and dissertation process has become my own existential education to make sense of how to survive in the world with the people I’m surrounded by as the climate changes.

Thus, the autoethnographic methodology helped me see my educational history in an entirely new light.

Stage 1 (Ages: 0-18 years old) my existential education came from how my parents had survived as children living through World War II and growing up as Japanese Americans in the

Territory of Hawaii. Their lessons of survival were to assimilate and embrace the standards of the victorious nation, which made complete sense for their time and place. But the relevance of those lessons changed as Japan became an ally to the United States throughout the Cold War.

Stage 2 (Ages: 19-27 years old) military’s existential education was focused on sacrificing everything for the survival of the group. This required self-negation, a complete commitment to service that included giving up one’s personal relationships, dreams and, if necessary, one’s life. I embraced all these conditions wholeheartedly until I could see that self-sacrificing service was limiting my personal development and unnecessarily risking my life.

Stage 3 (Ages: 28-32 years old) was the first time I began to understand the concept of existential education in a personal way. Living in places where Americans could disappear

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without a trace and Maslow's physiological requirements were not always assured; I realized that what I learned about my environment and how I interacted with the community populating it determined if I remained healthy, happy and alive or not. And by being in communities that accepted my “otherness” yet still nurtured my development, I began to appreciate the richness of communities that embraced diversity, as well as the civility and patience required to create them.

Stage 4 (Ages 33-47) showed me that when an existential education is developed within a protected enclave, the solutions generated have less to do with the physiological needs of communities on the ground and more to do with the political hierarchies in the board rooms. And as Americans were deployed with tools and solutions generated to showcase the effectiveness of their organization rather than meet the needs of the communities they were sent to serve, the predictable results were waste, anger, and distrust that decreased the safety and security of all.

The ongoing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan despite 6,700 American service member deaths and $1.6 trillion dollars spent are only two examples of this phenomena.

But the greatest irony in all these revelations is that the people I was trying to educate and help through creating Pacific ALLIES, the American participants and our Marshallese hosts, ended up educating and helping me the most. My initial perception of what the next generation was needed was based on my own recollection of what I knew as a Naval Academy midshipman in 1987. I imagined that I needed to find an example of future climate change challenges to

American national security and then create a way for the Pacific ALLIES participants to build an existential education based on their immersion in the local environment. Little did I realize how much more advanced today’s students are in terms of self-confidence, education and adaptability than I was at their age.

While I might have floundered in finding my way forward, the students, cadets and

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midshipmen reached out to our Marshallese partners and jumped right in. I remember receiving emails from cadets telling me how they’d managed to get a guided tour of the military base or been able to join meetings between KALGOV and a visiting World Bank delegation; all leaving me thinking, that’s exactly the kind of initiative we need them to take. But when the Pacific

ALLIES gave their final presentation to senior officials at PACOM, I sat in amazement as the midshipmen included video taken from the military helicopter ride they’d managed to finagle for themselves. All of those experiences were more than I could have provided and required initiative

I was still developing.

In all areas of knowledge about climate change, the Marshall Islands or United States military strategy in the Pacific region, I was usually half a step or, more appropriately, a mouse click ahead of the Pacific ALLIES participants. But while I normally knew more about most of the issues because I’d been studying the Marshall Islands since 2014, the midshipmen, students and cadets would always find new initiatives, reports and research papers I’d never heard about before. In this way, they kept refreshing our collective understanding of the climate change stakeholders and national security issues we needed to consider.

Lastly, their willingness to become a part of the local community was a key reason for

Pacific ALLIES was a success. Rather than hang out on the military base’s exclusive beaches and air-conditioned rooms, the Pacific ALLIES participants went out of their way to spend as much time as possible living, working, eating and sleeping alongside their Marshallese peers. And while complete immersion sometimes resulted in them having to take antibiotics or deal with challenges like hair lice, they would always tell me after it happened, “I’m good. It was no problem. You don’t need to worry.”

Most impressively, each of the Pacific ALLIES possessed an empathy for the Marshallese

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and innate ability to sense the injustice of the situation. Without me ever having to say a word, every single one of them immediately grasped the unequal relationships between the Marshallese on Ebeye and the Americans on USAG-KA. And understanding their personal ability to rectify that imbalance in some small way, they threw themselves wholeheartedly into supporting the

Marshallese students participating in the Ebeye Summer Spartan Camp.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t worried. Each summer started with low-grade terror about what might go wrong, accompanied by continual second guessing of the safety nets we’d put in place. And I would have worried myself to death if it weren’t for the complete support we received from our Marshallese counterparts. Even though these were young Americans from the same nation that had failed to live up to its obligations in the UN Trusteeship, our hosts treated the Pacific ALLIES participants as family members and honored guests. Remembering the military’s 67 nuclear tests and the United States’ 75 years of failed promises to improve the

Marshallese education and healthcare infrastructure, I was humbled by the Marshallese capacity for forgiveness.

Despite the fact that the Americans had disappointed and betrayed the Marshallese time after time, it was almost as if they had adopted the same perspective as the Iranians: “We’re all equal and brothers” and “Politics are a bastard.” In that, the Marshallese were able to separate the

Americans they were dealing with today with the Americans who had injured their parents and grandparents in the past. Being decent humans, the Marshallese treated the American as they would like to be treated themselves.

The depth of their generosity was reflected by the fact that here they were in Ebeye, pushed off the main island of Kwajalein and living as second class citizens in their own country.

Yet with an average per capita GDP of $3,430 USD and living in households that regularly

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sheltered more than 13 people, the Marshallese were hosting Americans who had an average per capita GDP of $62,790 USD and an average household size of 2.6 people. The more I worked with our Marshallese partners, the more they taught me it’s not that humanity doesn't have enough resources to take care of everyone’s needs in a climate changed world, it's that the individuals and countries in power don’t care enough to share.

When I first expressed my concerns about climate change with the Marshallese in tons of

Greenland ice melt contributing to millimeters of sea level rise each year, parts per million increases in CO2 emissions over the last three decades that were accelerating coral bleaching or the potential of changing El Nino patterns to increase drought and storms, stressing the atolls’ freshwater lens; I thought at first they didn’t understand me. I thought maybe I didn’t frame the concepts clearly enough; maybe there’s a language barrier; maybe the science is too esoteric; maybe, maybe, maybe. Later as we’d eat a meal together, wait for the USAG-KA ferry boat or enjoy a lull in the activities of the day, they would each come by and individually console me saying, “Look, Marshallese is what Marshallese do.”

“Sure, the islands are going to disappear,” they would tell me. But we’re warriors and voyagers. How do you think we got here? We found these specks of land in the middle of the ocean without maps or navigation tools. We’ll find new homes in other parts of the world, and we’ll make them Marshallese by how we treat each other and those around us.

I still shake my head in amazement when I think of their concern with my distress.

“They” were the ones in danger. But they were living on a different plane of reality.

While climate changes are an existential threat that many of them are deeply concerned with, it is a still distant storm that will be addressed the same way that the basic needs are being dealt with today; Jepilpin ke ejukaan, the Marshallese national motto, “Accomplishment through

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joint effort.” The most important thing is living, working and sharing today in a way that would allow them to weather that storm as a cohesive unit.

That was perhaps the final lesson the Marshallese taught me about the climate change impacts on national security through Pacific ALLIES. The question wasn’t about the per capita quantity of resources available but the individual’s values regarding community life. In that, the real question became, “How can we become our best selves by sharing what we have and serving each other?”

So what next?

As I write these last pages, the United States is in an increasing state of turmoil. After failing to coordinate a national response to the COVID-19 outbreak there are over 580,000

American deaths in the United States representing roughly 17% of the total global death toll.

Cities across the United States have erupted with citizens marching under the slogan, “Black

Lives Matter” after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, was videotaped taking 8 minutes and

46 seconds to strangle a black man, George Floyd, to death over a $20-dollar dispute. Finally, in the midst of all these challenges, the traditions of political civility associated with America’s democracy are being challenged by a polarizing demagoguery that is splitting up families, fracturing communities and alienating longtime allies.

I had sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic. And the underlying intent of the Founding Fathers seemed strikingly similar to what the Marshallese had been teaching me these past five years.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish

Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general

Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and

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establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (CITE)

While I had initially thought I was establishing Pacific ALLIES in the Marshall Islands so that the next generation leaders of America would have a preview of the social, economic and political stresses the United States will face as a result of climate change in the 21st Century, I now realize that perhaps it wasn’t necessary. The wolf is here, scratching on the door. As climate changes multiply the stresses on the United States’ aging infrastructure and Maslow’s basic needs of food, water, shelter, healthcare, and education are not met; more American families and civil society will be ripped apart along racial, gender, religious, sexual preference, educational and economic fault lines. The United States’ national security challenge in the face of climate change is not about preventing a foreign military force from physically invading Washington D.C. but maintaining an equitable and enlightened democracy in the midst of increasing chaos.

As we look to our rapidly approaching climate changed future, the most pressing existential education question we face is how we decide to define individual self-actualization within the self-actualization of the greater community we live in and the environment we rely on.

For the purposes of protecting democracy in America, how “We the people of the United States” collectively decide to answer that question of how we want to live with each other is perhaps the greatest challenge facing educators in the United States today.

Failing to survive

For me, the choice was clear. Philosophical and physiological endosymbiosis of the individual within our community, the community within our nation, the nation within our species and the species within our planet. But I couldn’t get “there” as long as I was reaping the benefits and privileges of a military industrial complex that provided luxuries to the few at the expense of impoverishing the many.

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After investing nearly forty years of my life to achieve the American Dream, I began to realize I was sleepwalking through life. Eight years ago, I was a single man working in

Washington D.C., helping create military health policy, living alone in a spacious apartment, and making ~ $100,000 dollars a year. By the Cold War standards my parents had given me, I was a success.

Today, I am a husband and new father of two, living in my parent’s house, still studying in school, working two part time jobs, and making just enough to break the poverty line. In comparison to my high school friends, college classmates and current work colleagues, I am a failure. But somehow, I sleep better at night.

My wife, from Tajikistan in Central Asia tells me, “That’s ok, honey. I didn’t marry you for your money.” She reminds me that being an American is not a birthright and has nothing to do with where you were born, the passport you carry or how many generations you’ve lived in the country. Rather to her, being American is an obligation to live in a way that embodies equality, freedom, and justice for all.

Growing up in the high Pamir Mountains without indoor plumbing and sometimes socks or shoes, she doesn’t recognize the Spiderman comic book reference, “With great power comes great responsibility.” But as a member of an isolated ethnic and religious minority that survived a civil war and is discriminated against by the national majority, she is fully aware of Lord Acton’s quote, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Watching her stuff three extra-large suitcases with dresses, children’s clothes, toys, makeup, medicine and books for her extended family in preparation for our 11,309-mile journey to her home; I’m reminded of her outlook on “stuff.” If you have it, use it. If you’re not using it, share it. If they don’t return it, then emotionally gift it. Her living lesson being possessions,

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privilege or power are not necessarily to be avoided, but rather that any excess that is not immediately needed should be openly shared with all. And I think the Iranians and Marshallese would agree.

As my wife and I look at our four year-old son Matthew (named after my favorite book in the Bible) and two year-old daughter Sophia (named for the quality we hope she will possess), we wonder about the world we’re leaving behind for them. And if America’s homelessness, incarceration rates, lack of universal healthcare, and failing education system are any indicators, the 30-year-long post-Cold War era of United States dominance as the sole hyperpower in a unipolar world is already over. By 2050, when Matthew and Sophia are entering their 30’s, the

United States is projected to drop to third place in the world in terms of national GDP.

To be sure, I’m terrified of how I’ll take care of my family, what kind of job I can get, and where we’ll find the money to pay for our children’s schooling and upkeep until then. But as my wife gently reminds me, she had humble beginnings but speaks four languages more than I do and managed to get her master’s degree along the way. “We’ll figure it out,” she says.

And as I look back on what I actually can remember about my parents’ childhood guidance, I think, “I can do that.” I look forward to asking, “YOUSTUPIDORWHAT?” when my children do something I told them not to and “Think!” when they try things that I didn’t think to warn them about. But I realize that an existential education goes beyond the spoken lessons every loving parent gives their child: work hard, be a good person, share with others, and thank God for the life you’ve been given.

Existential education cannot be taught with wordy philosophies like, “Do what you can, where you are and who you’re with for as long as you are able” or “Ensure your efforts accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest period of time.” Rather

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existential education is transformational action requiring the interchange of one’s self with the community and environment in a way that makes everything greater.

In the end, the Marshallese and cadets didn’t need me. I needed the journey and was changed by who I was trying to change. Autoethnography taught me that the first step in teaching was learning more about myself. And Pacific ALLIES taught me that we all grow the most by committing to learn together.

The greatest relief was discovering that there is no “right” answer. And by recognizing that Life is imperfect primarily in our understanding of reality, everyone is released from the requirement of being “perfect” or knowing all the answers. Rather our acknowledged lack of perfect knowledge invites continuous exploration, improvement and adaptation of what we think we know and how we know it. And through the process of actively listening, we begin to unleash the creative potential of emptiness.

As I watch my sleeping children, I want to tell them, “Existential education isn’t a set of facts, numbers or equations but questions of character that you answer daily.” Can you remain healthy, happy and kind despite the environmental, social, political and economic changes around you? Will you be willing to fail in the eyes of others to ensure your own personal ideals survive?

And when responding to questions like, “How are you living your ideals?” I know that answers can never be given with the words coming out of your mouth, but rather the movements of your hands and direction of your feet. And then, I kiss them good night.

As an accidental educator, I look forward to learning how we do that together in the years that we have left.

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