A clarifying moment

USS Abraham Lincoln: Military Times

There’s a phrase people use to describe their inability to take in the incredible firehose of shit that floods our lives every day: I can’t wrap my head around it. The phrase sums up in a way that perhaps nothing else can two aspects of our modern lives – as everything has become more complicated and hard to understand, the way our leaders have chosen to deal with uncomfortable situations is to lie about them, thus adding to the confusion and discombobulation.

My job as a writer is to figure things out and write down what I find. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I cover politics and wars and frequently both at the same time. The stories I write seek to find truths when none seem to be there by sifting through conflicting accounts of who did what and when and why and to whom.

Lately, I’ve been trying to answer questions about the insane war Donald Trump decided to wage on Iran. Didn’t anyone think about how pissed off the Iranians would be when their religious leader and most of his family and the top officials of the government were killed on the first day? Why didn’t anyone add up the amount of munitions we had and make an estimate of how long they would last? Why didn’t anyone think that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and strangle the world’s oil shipping in and out of the Persian Gulf? Why were U.S. bases in the Middle East so poorly defended from Iranian attack after the war started? Who planned, or did anyone do any planning at all, for the economic fall-out from this war?

The way that the Trump administration has attempted to answer these questions and others is to flat-out deny what they suggest and lie about their consequences. But even when you get answers to difficult questions, new ones always arise. Today, one of the questions is, why is the United States so far behind when it comes to drone warfare? The Pentagon just announced it would begin flooding drone manufacturers with orders and loans intended to step up the number of drones made in this country. Today, the White House imposed 100 percent tariffs on imported drones with military capabilities. The President’s sons are major investors in several companies associated with drones, AI, and defense manufacturing. Their investments thus increased in value exponentially.

See how complicated these things get? Each decision has consequences; those consequences develop more consequences; shortages cause gas prices to go up. Down the line, as the war goes on and on, profits are made, and certain people with foreknowledge of what will happen in the war and at the Pentagon get richer and richer.

Meanwhile, soldiers, sailors, airmen and women, and Marines are out there on the front lines of this war as it starts and stops with ceasefires and new attacks and another ceasefire, and more attacks.

The big story today is about the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that has been at sea for over nine months without a port call. Stories have been published about sailors on the Lincoln attempting suicide by jumping off the ship. So far, no one has succeeded, but the stories themselves emphasize the seriousness of what is happening to the sailors and Marines who have been at sea for so long without relief.

More stories from families of sailors on the Lincoln describe food shortages that have caused meals to be missed, spoiled and rotten food, broken toilets, lack of hot water, mold and mildew in areas where sailors and Marines are quartered, lack of essential personal items like toothpaste and soap and deodorant…the list goes on.

What has happened on the USS Abraham Lincoln is our clarifying moment. Everything that has gone wrong on that ship is the responsibility of failed leadership that goes right to the top. We have a president who in a time of war is obsessed with erecting monuments to himself, putting his name on buildings, putting marble and gold leaf all over the White House, punishing people he considers enemies, enriching himself and his family, and playing golf at public expense.

Everyone in the military sees this. Everyone knows what Trump’s inattention to the war and to them represents. He had fired generals and admirals who have experience and replaced them with ideologues who swear loyalty to him and not to the Constitution. Leadership at a basic level, especially in the military, is a copycat business. Trump doesn’t care about people in the military, so the leaders beneath him don’t care. That is why sailors and soldiers and airwomen and men and Marines are suffering.

I know I have written about this before, but it bears repeating. The military is different from civilian life in all kinds of ways, but perhaps the biggest way it’s different is that there is no profit motive in the military. They don’t pay you more if you do your job well. You do your job because it is your duty. Everyone is dependent on each other. You keep things clean and neat because everyone lives close together, often in the Navy, in very close proximity on both submarines and surface ships. You do your job well, because if you don’t, someone else is going to suffer, and somebody will have to come along after you and do the job you didn’t do right in the first place.

That’s what is happening on the USS Lincoln. The leaders of that ship are in charge of making sure toilets work and showers have hot water and are free of mold. There is no excuse if they aren’t, because sailors are there not only to use the facilities, but to clean them and make sure they work. They can’t do this if they lack cleaning and repair supplies. Leaders are in charge of ordering enough food for the 5,000 souls who live and work on the Lincoln. Leaders are in charge of ensuring that each sailor has enough to eat and gets enough rest and has all the necessities of life such as toothpaste and shaving cream and soap and the necessities of the lives of the females on board. Periods don’t wait for resupply of sanitary napkins. They happen every month whether the sailor is at sea or on land.

Food is so important in the military it bears special mention. It was Napoleon who was supposed to have said that an army marches on its stomach. You could say in turn that a navy sails on its stomach. When I was growing up as an army brat, the son of an army officer and the grandson of a famous general, I was told over and over again how important food is in the military. My grandfather had a saying about it. I remember being at dinner in his house with retired generals and civilian officials such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms sitting down the table from him. Grandpa would hear someone say something about war that he found wrong or even stupid, and he would bang on the table and say, “It’s simple. First, you feed ‘em, then you put a roof over their heads, then you train ‘em, then you pay ‘em, and only then can you send them off to war. But first, you feed ‘em.”

I heard him say those exact words again and again. When I got in the army and became a platoon leader and was assigned as mess officer, in charge of the mess hall, I found it, to put it bluntly, a mess. I decided to follow grandpa’s orders. I made sure the mess hall was mopped and every surface was cleaned after every meal. I ordered the cooks to change the lard in the deep fat fryers every day, and to use different fryers for meat, fish, and potatoes. The coffee was terrible. I was told that the ancient coffee maker, a huge cylindrical machine with pipes coming out and going back into it strange angles, was to blame and couldn’t be cleaned. I told the cooks to disassemble it and ream out every pipe and remove every scrap of scale and other buildup and reassemble it. The coffee went from bad to good overnight. I put in the first salad bar in any mess hall in the Army. We had to build it using 2 by 4’s and welded tin, but we got it done, and there was fresh salad with two or three kinds of dressing every day, and it was made spotless every night. We rerouted gas lines to move two griddles from the back of the kitchen to the serving line, so soldiers could order their eggs cooked any way they wanted in the morning, and fresh meat like chicken and hamburger was cooked the way they wanted.

The morale of the cooks went up. The morale of the whole company went up. Six months later, we won best mess hall in the whole division. Soldiers from other companies and officers from other battalions and brigades came to eat at our company mess hall. So did the commanding general.

Grandpa was right. If you feed ‘em and respect ‘em and treat ‘em right, soldiers honor you with their respect and their service.

There is absolutely zero reason the Abraham Lincoln can’t be run the way grandpa said. Here is the reason that the USS Lincoln is in so much trouble as a combat vessel: The president, the commander in chief, doesn’t care. He thinks people in the military are suckers and he treats them that way. He is wrong. Everyone in our military, and the sailors and Marines on that vessel deserve to be treated with respect and honor. That isn’t happening, and it’s why the U.S. military has lost the war Trump started with Iran.