Letters From the Pacific, From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa

By
Harold Grove Moss in Maui, Hawaii, 1943. Courtesy of Lori Neumann / mossletters.com

On December 2, 1941, an Army private named Harold Grove Moss was a week away from finishing his Morse Code training to become a radio operator. He was stationed at Camp Roberts in California. “Something seemingly a little unusual happened yesterday and that was all the Japanese boys were taken out of our battery,” he wrote that day in a letter to his parents in Minatare, Neb. But he didn’t dwell on it; he also mentioned that a homemade cake they sent “wasn’t broken a bit,” and ended with a modest Christmas list, including “a camera” and a “pair of brown civilian shoes (no two tone).” Five days later, as news of the attack on Pearl Harbor was filtering through the ranks, he wrote again.

“Dear folks,” he began,

“…Have just heard a few minutes ago that Japan has really declared war now and that we will retaliate immediately…All that goes with this war fervor is taking place all along the coast with patrols, listening posts, and ship movement orders being given…I hope, but I know it is a vain hope, that you will not worry unnecessarily and not be overly anxious about me.  Of course I will write often to tell you all I can, not knowing what will be done with the mail.”

Harold Moss in 1943, having been promoted to staff sergeant. Courtesy of Lori Neumann / mossletters.com

Much of his mail did reach its destination, and is now available to many more readers thanks to his daughter, Lori Neumann, who has transcribed and posted this and 340 more of his letters from the Pacific at mossletters.com. Alongside the letters are dozens of photos and other bits of wartime ephemera which made it back to the states — some in the letters, and some with Mr. Moss himself. He began his tour as a University of Nebraska sophomore in September 1941 and saw action in the Philippines and in Okinawa as a member of the 225th Field Artillery Battalion; his service ended Nov. 1, 1945, a few months after the Japanese surrendered.

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How We Judge Those Who Served, or Didn’t, in Vietnam

By
David Nelson in Marine Corps officer candidates' school in Quantico, Va., in August 1966. U.S. Marine Corps
Voices

The first Democratic presidential debate once again raised the issue of military service during the Vietnam War. Senator Bernie Sanders was asked how he could be commander-in-chief, given that he applied for conscientious objector status during that war. (Though his application was rejected he was not drafted and did not serve.)

But while Mr. Sanders’s college-age pacifism — his office says he is not a pacifist now — has raised questions, he is not the only candidate to avoid Vietnam: Donald Trump and a few other candidates also were old enough to serve in that war but did not, for various reasons. The one candidate who did serve in Vietnam, former Senator Jim Webb, a decorated former Marine, dropped out of the Democratic nominating race. And the only remaining veteran in the pack, Senator Lindsey Graham, who recently retired from the Air Force Reserve, was 19 when the last American troops left Vietnam.

Vietnam has always been a sort of litmus test for some voters who view a lack of military service in that war as a cause for dismay and even disdain. But should the candidates be judged so harshly?

Most of us who were old enough to have been subject to the military draft during Vietnam view questions related to the war and our draft status through our personal reactions to that war. I signed up for a Marine Corps officer training program on Oct. 21, 1965, and my thoughts after the Democratic debate have focused on my situation around that time period: What was I thinking?

As a 20-year-old growing up in Lubbock, Tex., I had few philosophical thoughts about the war. A senior in high school at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, I was keenly aware of the fear that communism might spread throughout the world, and I readily bought into the so-called domino theory that if South Vietnam fell to communist forces, other countries in the region would be next.

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Questions and Answers about Veteran Suicides

By
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Since coming back from Afghanistan in 2008, the hard-hit Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment has struggled to adjust. The battalion, known as the 2/7, lost 20 men in war. In the years since, it has lost 13 more to suicide. The battalion now has a suicide rate 14 times that for all Americans.

The New York Times asked Dr. Charles Engel, of the RAND Corporation, and two Marines who served with the battalion in Afghanistan, Arthur Karell and Keith Branch, to answer readers’ questions about the devastating effects of combat and the high suicide rate among veterans. The conversation took place on Facebook in October, moderated by Dave Philipps, a reporter for The Times who covers veterans’ affairs. Here are some of the questions and answers, which have been condensed and edited.

Q. Why were the mental health concerns of the battalion not identified following deployment? What can be done to better identify service members who are struggling?

Arthur Karell: The process for identifying mental health concerns consisted of one post-deployment health assessment (a questionnaire), along with two weeks of downtime leave after getting back to the States. Then the battalion immediately enters a training cycle for the next deployment. The overwhelming emphasis is on constant tactical training — longer-term considerations got crowded out. I have heard that this is now starting to change, and I hope that is actually the case. Allowing Marines and other service members more time to spend together as a cohesive unit after a combat deployment would go a long way to better identifying service members who are struggling. Finally, that there is zero information-sharing between the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration makes it impossible for health providers or volunteer organizations to have access to information that could provide indications of possible problems. Privacy is an issue, but service members should at least have the option to allow their D.O.D. service records to inform V.A. health providers.

Keith Branch: Ideally, if someone scored as “high risk” on the post-deployment assessment, he or she would be referred to on-base mental health services. From my memory, there were only a handful of service members who utilized these services — I was one of them. However, my stint in therapy lasted less than a month. First, there is an extremely prevalent negative stigma associated with seeking mental health services, especially in the combat arms occupations where weakness is not tolerated. I hope things have changed since 2009. Second, the mental health services on base had long waiting periods and the solution was to prescribe medication. I know more than a few Marines who became addicts while seeking mental health services. From my experience, many Marines do not show signs of mental health problems until they separate from the service. I think being surrounded by the people who served in combat with you provides a sense of security. However, that security is lost when service members separate and return home.

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The Specter of Addiction and Suicide Among Veterans

By
Brandon Caro in New York City in August. Boyan Penkov

As suicide attempts go, mine was of the halfhearted variety. In fact, some might even argue that it was no attempt at all. The police arrived at my Austin home following a fight I’d had in the driveway with my friend Bill, who’s also a veteran. Bill had been called over to the house by my then girlfriend because she was worried about the way I was acting.

I was wired on a cocktail of Adderall and Trazodone, and had a few drinks the night before as well. When the police arrived the following morning, a man and a woman, I asked the woman if her pistol was loaded.

“Of course it is. Why would you ask a thing like that?”

“Because I want you to shoot me in the head.”

To this day, I’m not sure why I said that. In retrospect I think it was less about wanting to die and more about expressing to another human being that I was in pain. But they were police officers, and a solicitation for suicide-by-cop, however unconvincing, was something they took very seriously.

“Right,” the male officer interjected. “We’re gonna have to bring you to the hospital.”

A minor struggle ensued outside, to the entertainment of my neighbors who observed the scene from a comfortable distance. I learned later from Bill and my now ex-girlfriend that the police entered my home and grabbed all the pharmacy bottles they could find (which numbered in the teens) and brought them to the hospital so the emergency room staff would know what I was on. They even stuck a catheter up my urethra.

They held me in observation for a day and a half, until I could get a friend to pick me up and drive me to the Austin Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic to speak to a mental health specialist. She wanted me to come in every week through the summer, but I told her I had plans to study abroad in France, so she made me promise to check back in when I returned or she would have me brought in. I came for a follow-up at the end of the summer, just because I didn’t want the police to come back to my house. I had no interest in engaging with the V.A. mental health specialists. They were way too quick to prescribe medication, and drugs were something I was trying to get away from.

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The Hard Path From Afghanistan to the Classroom

By
Staff Sgt. Ryan Blum, left, and Specialist Michael Gannon in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, in 2010. Zachary Bunch
Commentary: A Soldier Writes

A month before I started my freshman year of high school, my father was killed in a cycling accident. Overnight my mother became a single parent and our sole breadwinner. She was forced to work twelve-hour days to maintain our standard of living and consequently I was often alone in an empty house.

Like most teenagers, I rebelled. With the loss of my father came a profound loss of discipline in my life. Combined with the sudden absence of my mother who was now compelled to work long hours, the tragedy had an important tertiary effect: I stopped attending classes. Eventually, to the distress of my mother, I left high school, opting to take the G.E.D. instead. College was the last thing on my mind, because college was for savvy, affluent students who studied for SATs and graduated on a normal schedule. It wasn’t for people like me.

At 17, I would have been the ideal candidate for an ‘absentee father’ case study: misguided anger, unabashed recklessness, unclear identity. I sought challenges but had no purpose. Luckily (or unluckily) for me there was a war.

I was an Army recruiter’s dream. With my mother’s anxious signature, I was in.

Throughout most of my seven years in the military I gave little thought to the outside world. When provided the discipline, direction, and the brutish encouragement of male authority figures, I began to excel, rapidly advancing through the ranks. I was given ever-greater responsibility — making sergeant in two years. After my first three-year contract expired I enthusiastically re-enlisted for another four.

I had found my identity. I was a soldier.

Five years later everything changed during a deployment to Afghanistan in 2010.

One of our missions was to facilitate the opening of schools in Kunduz Province. That April, in an effort to intimidate girls from attending, the Taliban attacked the schools with poison gas. It didn’t work. The girls continued to walk to class despite the threat.

As a teenager, I had taken for granted the opportunity to have an education not because an armed insurgency prevented me, but because of my own ambivalence. In Afghanistan, a country plagued with incessant violence, the decision to go to school was often one of life or death. For me, it was a luxury I had wasted. And I regretted it.

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The Women of the Army Rangers’ Cultural Support Teams

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Lt. Ashley White in marksmanship training during Cultural Support Team training for deployment. U.S.Army photo by SSG. Russell Lee Klika

Two women have now earned the Army’s elite Ranger designation. A third is in the final phase of Ranger School, the humidity-soaked “swamp phase” that ends later this month.

In the wake of this history making, Ranger School is now officially opened to women. And now Navy leaders say they are on track to open their arduous basic underwater demolition/SEAL training course to “anybody who can meet the gender non-specific standards” early next year.

Yet in this case the schoolhouse lags behind the battlefield. Women have served, taken fire and sacrificed their lives alongside the Army Rangers of the 75th Ranger Regiment for years.

I had no idea of this fact when, in 2012, a Marine told me about First Lt. Ashley White and her band of teammates who had been recruited for Ranger and SEAL combat missions a year earlier. They were part of what would come to be called cultural support teams, or C.S.T.s, a benign name for a groundbreaking concept.

Ms. White at Kent State ROTC. Courtesy

“What about the combat ban?” I asked, full of disbelief since I had not heard about this story despite having reported from Afghanistan for years.

Her response was the equivalent of my mother-in-law’s frequently issued “bless her heart,” a verbal pat on the head offered to those clueless souls  lacking in awareness of just how much they do not know.

“Just check it out; you’ll see,” she said.

I did. And with each interview I finished, I realized that I had stumbled across a community of women recruited to “become part of history” and to join combat operations back in 2011, first by the United States Special Operations Command and then by the Army Special Operations Command. All while the combat ban remained very much in place. These soldiers and service members (not all were Army) could be there, legally, despite the ban on women in ground combat because they were “attached” to special operations teams, just not “assigned” to them.

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The Cost of Lower Standards for Women in Marine Recruitment

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The recent success of two female officers, both West Point graduates, in passing the Army’s grueling Ranger School has bolstered arguments for the full integration of women into the military’s front-line combat units. In becoming the first women to receive the coveted Ranger tab, the two officers proved that women can handle not just the physical challenges but also the psychological and leadership tests posed by the nine-week course.

Their graduation could not have come at a more important moment: In September, the heads of each armed services branch must tell Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter which positions and units they believe they can integrate and provide evidence for why any other position should remain closed.

The author at Al-Taqqaddam Air Field, Iraq, in 2007. Kyleanne Hunter

As that deadline looms, the Marine Corps is dealing with its own gender-related controversy. In June, Lt. Col. Kate Germano was removed from her position as commander of the Fourth Battalion at Parris Island, the Marines’ all-female boot camp. During her time as commander, Colonel Germano asserted that the Marines’ setting lower standards for women than men led to an underlying sexism in the ranks, one that systematically kept women from reaching their full potential.

It is noteworthy that most of the reports and commentary about Colonel Germano’s case have been written by men. Some pieces have been sympathetic to her situation, including one by Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine Corps officer, who used her case to give an honest and objective look at the systemic problems acting as barriers for women in the Marines. He argued that an institutionalized “hyper-masculinity” is a greater barrier than physical standards to the full integration of women into all military positions. It is a point that needs deeper discussion.

To add breadth and depth to this conversation, and to take it beyond Colonel Germano’s case, I believe it is time to speak out about my experiences. The more women who are willing to speak about the way in which the ingrained hyper-masculinity hinders progress toward integrated forces, the closer we will come to an honest conversation about the true hurdles to gender integration.

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Before ISIS, a Resonant Image of a Captured Flag in Iraq

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Commentary: A Soldier Writes

Wars often produce iconic images that capture the naked truths of the struggle. Five Marines raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. A South Vietnamese general calmly fires a pistol into the head of a suspected Vietcong militant during the Tet offensive. A Huey evacuates Americans from a roof in Saigon in the spring of 1975.

Lt. Col. Rod Coffey and the insurgent flag his unit captured in Diyala Province, Iraq, in 2008. The same banner would eventually be used by the Islamic State.

One image from our experience in the United States Army during the Iraq war stands out. It is a photograph of our squadron commander, then Lt. Col. Rod Coffey, holding a captured flag. The flag is now the widely known black banner of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. The photograph was taken by one of Colonel Coffey’s soldiers in March 2008 after American forces completely defeated insurgents in a portion of Diyala Province. Colonel Coffey stands with the flag in his right hand, his trademark cigar dangling in his left and the look of a man resolved to defeat militants whose barbarism today is ever so disturbingly documented by the media.

The flag is not unique to the Islamic State. Variations of the black banner adorned with the declaration of faith known as the shahada are used by other Islamic extremists. However, there is little doubt in our minds that the enemy our unit fought and defeated that winter would eventually become part of the Islamic State. Our unit found the flag near a mass grave site and an insurgent training camp.

Our unit — Third Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment — then spent several days assisting Iraqi families in properly burying their dead. This was one of the many actions Colonel Coffey and our unit embraced to build trust with the Iraqis who had previously lived under the tyranny of the militant Islamists. Once sufficiently powerful American forces were in place to allow the people of Iraq to defy the extremists, Colonel Coffey worked closely with the senior sheikhs and political leaders to maintain the peace. He often told his men that the greatest weapon they wielded in the fight was decency.

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Reactions to Article About Gender Integration in the Marine Corps

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Lt. Col. Kate Germano, who took command of the Marine Corps’ all-women boot camp, was fired on June 30. The Corps said her Marines had been mistreated; she said her ability to command had been undermined. Department of Defense

Earlier this week, The Times asked readers what they thought of Lt. Col. Kate Germano’s article arguing parity for men and women who enlist in the Marines Corps, and what could be done to improve gender integration. Colonel Germano, who served at the all-women boot camp in Parris Island in South Carolina, wrote that women face “lower expectations for accountability” and that “high standards should be demanded of all recruits and Marines.”

About 350 people responded, most of them in favor of equal standards and expectations of training for Marines, but others believed that women cannot meet the physical demands required of a Marine when placed in conflict. Here are selections from the comments, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Continue to pave the way for women

I graduated from Parris Island in 1976 and was one of the first female Marines allowed into the Avionics MOS. Though I was only one of two females in the entire squadron, I not only pulled my weight, but felt I made great strides for the female Marines to come behind me. I’m glad to see that nearly 40 years later, someone else is carrying that banner!
—Sarge56, Texas

Lowering expectations lowers performance

I am a 1986 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and have trained with women throughout my military career. They took the same classes and tests, and were expected to score as well or better than us, their male counterparts. There were a a few rare exceptions to the absolute meritocracy, all involving the upper body strength in specific physical strength tests. No bias, just a simple fact. I was privileged to study with and train alongside women who were every bit as capable and had the scores to prove it. I concur with Lt. Col Germano, lowering expectations lowers performance.
—Nelson, SLC, Utah

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Lt. Col. Kate Germano on the Marines and Women

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Female Marine recruits on the rifle range during boot camp at the Recruit Training Depot at Parris Island, S.C. Scott Olson/Getty Images

For decades the Marine Corps has tolerated, even encouraged, lower performance from the young women who enlist in its ranks, an insidious gender bias that begins with the way women are treated immediately after they sign up and continues through their training at boot camp. The results are predictable – female Marines risk being less confident and less fully accepted than their male counterparts, because the Corps has failed them from the outset.

That is the position of Lt. Col. Kate Germano, an active-duty Marine officer who commanded both a Marine recruiting station in San Diego and a segregated all-female training battalion at Parris Island, the Corps’ boot camp in South Carolina. Colonel Germano presented this argument in a draft article, “When Did It Become an Insult to Train Like a Girl?” that she wrote early this year and in which she argued for tougher standards and higher expectations, or, in her words, a movement toward “radical change.”

The article, which does not address full integration into combat roles but details institutional patterns that Colonel Germano suggests ensure female Marines will not be fully respected by their male peers, had been slated for publication in September in the monthly Marine Corps Gazette, a private publication that serves as the Corps’ de facto professional journal. Then matters grew complicated.

Colonel Germano was relieved of command at Parris Island in June under circumstances that remain contentious, setting off a controversy about whether she was being punished for what the Corps calls an abusive leadership style, or for forcefully expressing her views about the how the Corps trains and integrates women into its male-dominated ranks.

Soon after she was relieved, the editor of the Gazette, John Keenan, who is also a former Marine colonel, dropped Colonel Germano’s article from the journal’s publication lineup. Her arguments taking the Corps to task for what she depicted as a record of double standards and complacency stood not to reach Marines’ eyes, including such passages as this:

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