Reserve Soldiers Eager to Fight the War on Christmas

Thousands of National Guard and Army Reserve troops are frustrated that they will not be able to deploy in support of operations associated with the "War on Christmas," according to military officials.

The National Guard Bureau and the United States Army Reserve Command have both been inundated by questions about upcoming deployments. 

Many reservists (which include Guardsmen) relied on lucrative deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan for their livelihood. With deployments to Afghanistan slowing to a trickle and a large mobilization to Iraq unlikely, these soldiers are facing the prospect of real jobs in the civilian sector. 

"We have systems in place for individual Guard members to volunteer for overseas and stateside Title 10 deployments," said Lt. Col. Tiara Coley. "But we've been swamped with calls and online requests for information about deployments in the War on Christmas," she said.

Title 10 refers to the section of the U.S. Code that puts reservists in active-duty status. 

Coley said she is "a little confused" about why Guard members think they can serve in the war.

Sgt. Travis Winston, a combat engineer with the Colorado Army National Guard, said he was disappointed to learn the "War on Christmas" wasn't a real war.

"My first sergeant told me to check it out, but when I started making calls, I was told that the war was metaphorical. Must be some new type of warfare that doesn't require boots on ground," Winston said.

Winston was hoping for a deployment, mostly for the money.

"With seven years in, I could stash away like $5000 a month," he said. But if they don't let me go, I guess I'll just get a seasonal position at Costco. "Plus I really like Christmas, and I don't think we should let the terrorists take it away."

Winston is not alone. Operations officers at the National Guard Bureau say that in the past three weeks they have received over 6,000 requests for information about how to sign on for the War on Christmas. At the Reserve Command, officials didn't give a precise number, but confirmed "an unusual interest" in an operation that doesn't even exist.

"We haven't received any mobilization orders from FORSCOM (U.S. Army Forces Command) for such an operation," Coley said. "I think these soldiers are watching too much Fox News."

But Coley didn't entirely rule out a future mobilization. "If the chiefs or the president issue the order, we'll be ready," Coley said. "If there is a war that America can get behind, our soldiers will be ready to fight it."

Organizational Time Wasters—What Are They?

I'm struggling to describe a phenomenon that is acute in the military, but it must exist in many other organizations.

The realization came to me more than five years ago, while deployed to Kosovo. I found myself spending inordinate time doing tasks that merely kept me in good standing with the Army bureacracy. 

Some might be tempted to call these things maintenance or compliance tasks. But they were more wasteful than the former implied, and less a bow to outside authority or regulations than the latter suggests.

They were things like updating this or that form, verifying the accuracy of a piece of data by resubmitting several pages of data, and giving information to a new person in charge because the last person in charge has been reassigned.

A classic one is redoing an online "cyber-awareness" training module because you haven't logged into your network account for 30 days.

It has only got worse. For instance, our demobilization rituals here at Fort Dix include completing medical forms eight or nine times, all with the same information. It will clearly speed things up for the medical personnel who have to see us, dozens after dozens, but this is information that a) is simply repeated on several similar forms, and b) the military already has! A junior high drop out could come up with multiple ways to get that information replicated and delivered to the right people, all before I show up in the flesh.

You know of our travel adventures. Did you know that we did pre-deployment stuff here in New Jersey for six weeks before landing in Afghanistan? And once we got there it was at least two weeks before we were really up to speed. The flip side of that is two weeks to a month before leaving theater most units start scaling back operations in order to accomplish the daunting—and I used that word advisedly—job of major movement. So in a seven-month deployment the Army might get four and a half month's worhth of solid woork out of me.

I understand that the two things, the time-wasting tasks and the ramp-up and ramp-down time that bookend operations, are different. But they lead to the same thing: inefficiency. And it really comes down to this: Soldiers spend less and less of their time and energy doing the work the Army hired them to do, and more time and energy on simply being in compliance with broader organizational requirements.

Anyway, I'm trying to find out more about these maintenance tasks in the organizational literature. And I can't. Someone has had to come across this.

What would you call it?

The Long Road Home from Afghanistan

As we stacked hundreds of duffel bags and ruck sacks on the driveway just off Doughboy Loop, I remembered pretty vividly a group of Soldiers doing the same thing seven months earlier.

At that time, we were getting ready to head to Afghanistan, from where they were coming back. I wasn’t jealous, more excited to get into the fight. Now we’re on the other side.

We had been in transit, which for the Army means, “mostly waiting,” for more than a week. Our exit from the Afghanistan theater of operations meant some time in the Persian Gulf. The same cargo jet that took us first to Al Mubarak Air Base—the “Gateway to Kuwait”—delivered us down the road to Ali Al Salem Air Base. Total flight time of the second leg: 12 minutes.

The bus ride was longer than the flight, only by time. I was glad for it, because the seats were infinitely more comfortable, and I gratefully caught a nap. When we arrived, the western sky turned from tangerine to rust, and it was officially twilight by the time we get our bunks at a place called Camp Arifjan.

It’s strange how you can imagine fairly vividly a place you’ve never been, then totally forget your imagination’s version once you experience the reality.

If Kandahar’s environs reminded me of southern Nevada, then Arifjan reminded me of an old Las Vegas suburb. There’s even a Starbucks, an indication that we were getting closer to the comforts of the Western World.

The dining hall at Arifjan was about a half mile away from our barracks. We lived in Prefabricated Concrete Buildings (PCBs) and when you walk between them, the sound of rocks reverberates between the corrugated concrete walls in a laser-like sound. I know that lasers are soundless, as long as they make Star Wars movies I’ll refer to the sound of blasters as “laser-like.”

In our warehouse barracks—mostly during sleeping hours—we were continuously interrupted as our beds were right next to the door. It happened to be the world's loudest door, and Soldiers, who are famous for being able to sleep like Rip Van Winkle on a Nyquil overdose, are for some reason getting up at 5:00 am regularly now.

There is a distinct segregation between those American Soldiers in ACUs, and those of us in multi-cams. At least so it seems. They don’t mingle in the chow hall, and as they move around in packs, they act as differently as they look. The ACU wearers are deployed, too, but haven’t been deprived of as many creature comforts, at last this time around. They seemed more relaxed than I remember Soldiers back in Afghanistan. But we were the relaxed ones at Arifjan.

On my first full day there, I took a three-hour nap. On day three, another one. I suppose part of the grand plan is getting deserved rest after a tough deployment. There was a swimming pool there, and I was able to resist for a few days. But after my last long run, I decide to take the plunge, and I didn’t regret it. Went again the next day.

Monday morning was our final wake up. I walk the 300 yards to the shower trailer and enjoy the crisp Gulf air on my walk back, a cleaner man. I put on a fresh uniform, probably the cleanest I have worn since this my OEF service began, and get ready to go back the U.S.

My last meal in CENTCOM was a disappointing Indian affair, but we did do Chili’s on our second to last night, so the food rating was net positive.

Nineteen hundred hours finally rolled around and we found ourselves listening to briefs and waiting more. Customs was easy enough, and by 10:00 we were loading several tour buses—the nice kind like the one that brought us to Arifjan eight days earlier. SSG Etheridge was my Bus Captain. I will address him as Bus Captain for the duration of our Title 10 time.

We rolled out at 11:00, driving on dirt roads and through complex security chutes. We don’t pass a single power line. Everything here, down to the standard, brightly lit Chili’s, seems to be powered by diesel generators.

Kuwaiti police cruisers and National Guard gun trucks escorted us along the wide-open highways to the international airport. In the distance—way up by bus one—the flashers pulsed and illuminated the late night dewy fog, like a distant rave celebrating our departure.

I napped, and was rudely awoken at 3:00 am by an Air Force security dude who ushered us off the bus at a security checkpoint. Dogs sniffed away at the vehicles while we waited in the “Freedom Cage.” It was getting cold, but our exhaustion made us compliant.

Bus Captain Etheridge pointed out the Atlas Air 747 aircraft being loaded up that was ours. After getting our boarding passes, we finally met up with the rest of our crew at the aerial port of departure, or “APOD.”

It took way too long for the flight crew to reconcile their list with the number of actual, living passengers they counted on the airplane, but after some painful roll calls and grade-school-style accountability measures, they got it and we were off. Half filled to Germany, where we picked up the remaining load at Ramstein Air Base.

Somewhere over the eastern Atlantic we reached the 24-hour mark from when our travel out of Kuwait began. I slept in fits and starts, eating bad airline food whenever it was presented. At 4:30 Eastern, we touched down, and two and a half hours later had our bags.

But it wasn’t until midnight that those bags made it to our new home for the next couple of weeks. Fort Dix welcomed us with the same cold drizzle that I remember on March 23.

We will go through the rigmarole that First Army has devised to keep Soldiers gainfully employed while our warfighting wanes. And we’ll experience a serious downgrade in the quality of free food. And being so close without actually seeing our families yet will be challenging.

But we are back on U.S soil. And it feels great.

Remembering Fallujah Part 4: The Aftermath of Victory

his is the final part in a four-part series commemorating the Second Battle of Fallujah, which took place in November, 2004. Read Remembering Fallujah Part 3: Urban Combat Is Hell.

Chaplain Ric Brown knew when he first enlisted that he’d probably go to war. He didn’t realize he’d be in the most savage urban battle U.S. forces had seen in a generation.

Photo by 1LT Kimberly Snow

Ten years ago this month, the American-led task force that smothered the city of Fallujah to retake it from insurgents had mostly accomplished its mission. Operation Phantom Fury had begun by the end of the first week of November. Within a month the Marines, Soldiers, and Iraqi troops had secured every corner of the city that its previous masters had described as the “cemetery for Americans.” 

Brown was there from the beginning. 

Ten years later, the toll is both easier and more difficult to measure. 

Launched on November 7, Operation Phantom Fury achieved its objectives rather quickly. The Regimental Combat Teams swept through the city and exterminated most of the remaining insurgents within a week. By November 14, the Marines-led task force occupied Fallujah.

By then, as Marines conducted final clearing operations in the eastern part of the city, a message had been painted in black on the infamous green trestle bridge:

This is for the Americans of Blackwater murdered here in 2004
Semper Fidelis 3/5 Dark Horse

The Americans had won, but it came with a price. Brown lost four of his Soldiers in the battle, 19 during his tour.

“Six months after getting back from Iraq I’m in church one day and it hits me like a ton of bricks that I lost those guys, I lost my best friend who’s a sergeant major,” recalls Brown. 

Families and friends of nearly 100 American troops would go through the same process. 

Besides the deeply personal effect the heroic loss of service members has, there were institutional and political repercussions for the military. 

Immediately, the result was a candid and sobering reevaluation of the Iraq campaign. Politically, support began to deteriorate for the war at home. 

In June 2005, a New York Times columnist declared, “The All-volunteer Army isn’t working.” 

“The problem now,” Bob Herbert argued, “is that most Americans have had plenty of time to digest the images of people being blown up in Baghdad and mutilated in Fallujah.” 

Fallujah, and similarly terrible battles in Iraq, made continuing to fight the war nearly impossible without reinstituting a draft, according to the author. 

Meanwhile, the Army looked at innovative ways to win with the Soldiers it had.

During the Second Battle of Fallujah, then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus served as the first commander of the NATO Training Mission-Iraq and the Multi-National Security Transition Command, charged with developing Iraqi security forces. Within a year he would assume command of the Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he would, along with Marine Lt. Gen. James Amos, supervise the authorship of a revised counterinsurgency field manual.  

The new field manual would be released and adopted theater-wide by February 2006. 

In the medium-term, updated COIN doctrine and a troop surge would help Petraeus, named commander of all coalition forces in Iraq in early 2007, turn the tide against the Iraqi insurgency. 

For the next few years, U.S. service members continued the fight in Iraq and surged against a growing insurgency in Afghanistan. It has been the longest sustained period of combat for America’s Armed Forces. The volunteers have proven up to the task, after all. They had outlasted the naysayers. 

Now, exactly ten years after that landmark battle in Iraq and three years after all U.S. forces withdrew from the country, the military is reducing its presence in the other major theater of the War on Terror. 

When I first met Chaplain Brown in Kandahar, I wondered about the parallels between Iraq and Afghanistan. As security deteriorated in the former, what would happen in the latter once we withdrew? 

Brown didn’t have an answer. 

Given that Fallujah was under the control of the same type of thugs who had gone against the Marines and Soldiers in 2004, I asked him if the men of Phantom Fury died in vain.

“No,” he replied without hesitation. “Their sacrifice wasn’t meaningless because they did what they were sent there to do.”

Indeed, with a hard-won victory in Fallujah, their legacy is a more powerful and resilient force. To suggest that the U.S. military can’t fight with volunteers now sounds absurd. 

Brown, too, is more resilient, and he continues to help his Soldiers, who are far away from combat. Now serving at a division level, he reminds himself that there are Soldiers outside the wire who have it worse. He tries not to lose sight of who is fighting. 

Before his men went into Fallujah, he took aside a squad leader and prayed,  “Lord, give this young man the strength and wisdom to protect his soldiers. Give him the courage and conviction to deliver them from the unknown. Give him the faith and guidance to know your path, Lord. Give him the perseverance to stay on it.” (From House to House: An Epic Memoir of War) 

I asked him what he would pray for the young Soldiers ending their mission in Afghanistan. 

“About the same thing," he replied. "It is about the leaders leading their Soldiers and giving their Soldiers confidence. It’s about having the strength and faith and assurance to give it, to pass it on.”