Letter #10 to Friends and Family: Papa was a Rolling Stone

In pondering the fate of General Stanley McChrystal, I giggle with the memory of a top-40s song from the early 1970s “On the Cover of the Rolling Stone”. General McChrystal has done certain things that make me shudder like trying to shame allies into sending more troops, falsifying reports of Pat Tillman’s death in 2004 and, drawn from this article, looking the other way on torture.

Any one of these things may have been grounds for dismissal. But this Rolling Stone article? I do not think so. General McChrystal is not breaking orders but indulging an ego fed on sleep deprivation and asceticism. The General’s behavior seems to say, non-verbally, “See I am a hard-guy and, every day, I make the tough decisions – like not eating – that make America the kick-ass nietzschean über-nation that wins wars against all odds.”

This quaint arrogance has enabled General McChrystal to take the heat of pursuing a strategy fraught with risk. Most mere mortals (e.g., me) would never be able to manage this type of awful responsibility. Awful in its intensity. Awful in its relentlessness. Awful in its consequences. So the man deserves some credit for his transparency – even when he appears to be blatantly impolitic.

Instinctively, I felt dread when confronted by colleagues with this fracas in the fishbowl of modern media-made warfare. What drove General McChrystal and his rottweiler retinue to make such remarks? Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks put my feelings vividly in the article itself: "I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird [helicopter], and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they're all f**ked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're f**king losing this thing."

And things are not going well among the allies, either. If anything, General McChrystal’s candor, at times ill-advised, has made him a lightning rod for anger boiling over against the United States of America from Afghans and, at least German, allies alike. Sensitivities run very high these days when German officers, proud of their professionalism, uncharacteristically lash out at the arrogance of the U.S. Army in my presence. And many are quite accurate. Behind my impassive manner amid all of this heat-lightning lurks a thought taken from a lesson taught long ago.

First the thought: we may be preparing to exit Afghanistan. President Obama has decided upon yet another strategic review of this war; scheduled in December, a month after the Congressional elections. That sounds to me like the Administration expects a popular repudiation of the Afghan policy in November. This review will simply sanction the popular will. Don’t get me wrong: I support the time-line. Reason has to put limits on open-ended policies. Eighteen months – the timeline identified by President Obama in late 2009 – to get it right or get out still seems reasonable to me.

Which brings this letter to a lesson still alive in my mind from my Choate days. In May of 1975, I had a heated discussion with a Choate History teacher, Tom Generous. Saigon had fallen; punks in Phnom Penh had hijacked the S.S. Mayaguez. At dinner, I asked Mr Generous why so many people disliked the United States when we sought only to bring liberty to downtrodden people around the world.

Well, ‘T.G.’ – a Viet Nam Navy veteran – had a field day over dessert. Mr Generous shot right back, “What do you think of when you see a swastika?” I said, “Why the Nazis of course.” He asked me if that was a positive image. I said of course not.

Mr Generous then instructed me, in effect, “Ned, think about what the stars-and-stripes mean to people who have seen their families burned by napalm from U.S. jet-fighters. Or what about those people who find out their elected leader has been overthrown by the U.S. government? What do these people think of when they see the stars-&-stripes?”

These were, as they remain today, hard questions from a well-intentioned, highly intelligent and deeply patriotic man. Mr Generous got me thinking hard that evening thirty-five years ago, or as hard as my polluted fifth-form brain could at the time. Suddenly, with the quiet cues of defeat beginning to surface here in Afghanistan, they have me thinking again, some thirty-five years later.