Copyright John T. Reed 2014

One of my West Point classmates just called me to ask what I think about the Shinseki mess. I told Ihim I had written a bunch about it on Facebook. But he is not a Facebook member. So for him and other non Facebook member readers of mine, here are those posts. Because they were done over time, there is some redundancy.

John T. Reed shared a link.
May 23

I am tired of hearing that Eric Shinseki is a war hero so I looked it up. Here are his medals. Those that were awarded for bravery are in ALL CAPS:
Defense Distinguished Service Medal
Army Distinguished Service Medal
Navy Distinguished Service Medal
Air Force Distinguished Service Medal
Coast Guard Distinguished Service Medal
Legion of Merit
3 BRONZE STARS WITH V DEVICE
Purple Heart
Defense Meritorious Service Medal
Meritorious Service Medal
Air Medal
Army Commendation Medal
Army Achievement Medal
National Defense Service Medal with Service star
Vietnam Service Medal
Armed Forces Service Medal
Army Service Ribbon
Army Overseas Service Ribbon
Yugoslavia service medal
Vietnam Campaign Medal
Those not in caps were what I call good bureaucrat or attendance medals. The criterion for the V device is “participation in acts of heroism involving conflict with an armed enemy”
.
The bravery medals in order of most brave to least brave are: Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross (not medal), Silver Star, Bronze Star with V device, Army Commendation medal with V device. One of his purple hearts came from stepping on a land mine.
.
I do not regard a purple heart as a bravery medal. It indicates you got injured by the enemy or by friendly forces while in contact with the enemy. Sometimes getting wounded means bravery, but it also often means the soldier in question screwed up or one of his colleagues did. At best, it is a bad luck medal or a marksmanship medal for the enemy who injured him. Those who were standing next to Shinseki when he got wounded were just as brave in the sense of being in that dangerous location, but they do not get a purple heart. If you have good luck, you get no purple heart. I quote World War II General Geroge S. Patton from the movie Patton: “Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” (Dying of wounds gets you a posthumous purple heart. I think heroism is something you do, not something that happens to you.)
.
So rather than call Shinseki a “war hero,” which I think has a rather large and transcendent meaning to laymen, let’s just accurately say he got three bronze stars with V devices in Vietnam. How many of those were handed out there? Answers.com said Bronze Star for Valor 6,215

Source: National Archives

http://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded-search.jsp?dt=1457&tf=F&cat=WR28&bc=sl
.
Does the fact that someone was awarded three bronze stars with V devices mean he earned them no question? Maybe. Maybe he earned five. Maybe he earned one. There is fog of war, subjectivity, favoritism toward officers, cronyism, paperwork, bureaucracy. The evidence appears to be in general that a great many acts of heroism were not recognized by medals—maybe most. And a great many medals have been handed out to people who either did not earn them or who did not do any more than those around them at the time who did not get medals.
.
To us vets, looking at Shinseki’s whole career, it would appear he was very good at getting his superiors to like him. That is definitely one of the most important factors in the decisions to award medals.
.
Perhaps you can gain some perspective by recalling that John Kerry was awarded two silver stars (higher than bronze stars with Vs) and three purple hearts, awards that were ferociously attacked by officers who were in his swift boat unit at the time, including the officer who took over for Kerry on his boat when his four-month tour in Vietnam ended due to his getting his third purple heart which, by Navy policy, was a ticket home.
The accurate statement is that Shinseki was awarded three bronze stars with V devices by his superiors during two tours in Vietnam. It is also accurate to question whether that has any relevance to his performance as head of the VA. His having stepped on a land mine and gotten wounded on another occasion has some relevance to his VA qualifications, but not necessarily his V devices.

John T. Reed shared a link.

May 24

In writing about my incessant battles with my Army superiors after I graduated from West Point, I often use the phrase “play the game.” I was ordered to “play the game” by career officers who said THEY had to “play the game” and who the heck did I think I was that I was exempt and did NOT have to “play the game.” An honest man? A self-respecting man who refuses to kiss ass, like going to your damned “command performance” parties?
.
“The game” is lying and kissing your superiors’ asses. I called it OPUM (http://www.johntreed.com/militaryhonor.html) and OVUM (http://www.johntreed.com/OVUM.html) This VA scandal sounds like the exact same thing and it is run by the exact same people. VA head Eric Shinseki was the Chief of Staff of the Army. And here is a quote from a WSJ story about the scandal on 5/24/14:
.
“Earlier this month, the VA placed a nurse at the Cheyenne, WY VA Medical Center on leave after USA Today obtained a 2013 email in which he admitted to manipulating appointment dates to ensure they met the 14-day deadlines.
.
“‘Yes, it is gaming the system a bit,’ the nurse wrote in the June 19, 2013, email that was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. ‘But you have to know the rules of the game you are playing, and when we exceed the 14 day measure, the front office gets very upset, which doesn’t help us’.”
.
I heard on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Report (Fox News) today that the VA is the second biggest employer in the federal government after the active-duty military with over 300,000 employees. Since we are currently reducing the size of the Army to 450,000, it appears we are heading for a point where we are paying more people to HELP, or neglect actually, former soldiers than we HAVE current soldiers. The number of employees in the Department of Agriculture exceeded the number of farmers in the US decades ago, so don’t expect the government to be embarrassed by the VA employees outnumbering the active-duty military some day.
.
Also, note the reason why the Democrats, via socialist (literally) senator Bernie Sanders, just stopped a bill that would enable the VA head to fire bad employees. The Democrats are the party of UNIONS, especially government unions. The VA employees are heavily unionized. So the Democrats will take care of our veterans, but they will make sure the VA unions are taken care of FIRST and if there’s not enough to take care of both the vets and the VA unions, the UNIONS GET PRIORITY.
.
Note the last phrase in the Cheyenne nurse’s email: “which doesn’t help us.” Playing games with the wait time reports doesn’t help vets. but it does help “us” meaning the union members. And unions always take care of “us” above all else.

Like · · Share

  • Mark Vandendyke Coming to a regular, non-VA hospital near you, very soon. Thank Obamacare for that.

  • Russ Lamarre · Friends with Mark Vandendyke

    Vets no doubt can't file a class action lawsuit... But I remember a spouse winning a case against the Bragg hospital back in the mid '90's.

  • John T. Reed Vets can vote out the incumbents, but they need to be as tightly organized and disciplined about it as the unions who work, or fail to work, in the VA hospitals. One item on Fox News said that the cardiologists in a private hospital in Phoenix see 8 times as many patients per month as the cardiologists at the Phoenix VA hospital. So fire the retired-in-place VA doctors and give the vets vouchers to go to the private hospitals.
    .
    If you want something done, give it to a busy man—or someone who gets paid by performance, not for breathing like government employees. (President John F. Kennedy’s widow got 14/24s of his pay for the day he was assassinated at 2PM Eastern Time. He was a government employee and literally got paid for breathing and his pay stopped when his breathing did.)

  • Russ Lamarre · Friends with Mark Vandendyke

    Let us hope they do.

  • Mark Vandendyke Ever notice the spin about all the pressure coming from the Iraq and Afghanistan vets burdening the system? The takeaway is since Bush started those wars, he's responsible for the situation now. A) Obama has been CINC for a while now; B) WW2, Korea and Vietnam vets are older, more numerous and require more frequent care on average and C) IIRC, let's not forget Clinton changed the regs to allow any veteran to use the VA. Before that you had to be retired or suffer a service connected injury.

  • Russ Lamarre · Friends with Mark Vandendyke

    All I've noticed is that the only time any pol talked about it up until
    recently - was during an election year to pander to vets. Bet the number crunchers NEVER calculated the true cost of a massive standing Army... So
    now the vets have to pay for the miscalculation. Sort of like a

    distributed Detroit... Sad.

  • John T. Reed If the Dems want to try to pass a law excluding vets of Bush II wars, which Dems voted for, from the VA benefits, let them try. Until they do, deliver the benefits. Again, the best way to do that is vouchers, not over 300,000 Democrat union members running hopelessly dysfunctional VA hospitals.

John T. Reed

May 27

One of the mysteries to me about the VA scandal is heads of veterans organizations talking as if they were PR employees of VA head Eric Shinseki. O’Reilly or some other Fox News anchor was getting extremely frustrated listenning to their excuse-making for Shinseki last week.
.
Why are these guys not the sworn enemies of any one or organization that has presided over the VA’s neglect of their members? Senator Burr (R-NC) attacked them for their failure to call for Shinseki’s resignation. They fired back that their staff has 47 combat deployments among them. What the hell is the relevance of that? Although I thank them for revealing so starkly that they think the U.S. military and veterans are immune to criticism because they once received combat pay.
.
Burr thinks the leaders of the veterans organizations are more interested in preserving their own jobs and staying friends with VA bosses than fighting for their members. What perverse incentive makes sucking up to a VA that is neglecting your members and supporting their enemies a way to keep your job at the VFW and other similar organizations? It sounds like Shinseki has the authority to fire the heads of the VFW and such, and the members of those organizations do not. How could that be?

1Like · · Share

  • Mark Christoph For which he was fired anyway after the landing at, Inchon.

  • Timothy C Brosnan MacArthur did a brilliant job of routing the North Koreans, but then he let his ego get the best of him-he blew off reports from the field in October 1950, that the marines were no longer engaging North Koreans, but Chinese. The Chinese intervention caught us off guard as a result. MacArthur's mistake though, was criticizing president Truman in public, after his requests for atomic bombs, and strikes in Manchuria were denied. He should have resigned first, then went public. MacArthur went much farther than Shinseki did in that regard.

  • Mark Christoph Yeah, MacArthur actually tried to win.

  • Timothy C Brosnan Absolutely, because he actually did win against the Japanese in 1945. He said there is no substitute for victory. Looks like when MacArthur was fired, that idea went with him.

John T. Reed shared a link.

May 28

Today’s WSJ has an op-ed titled “Doctors’ War Stories From VA hospitals.” Sounds just like my Army experience in the early 1970s.
.
Administrators made 3PM closing time in a San Diego VA hospital. That reduced needed surgeries. When doctors started speeding up the cleaning of the operating room in between by doing it themselves, they were reprimanded. The unions wanted to work less than a day’s work for a day’s pay and such Stakhanovite behavior made the lazy unions look bad.
.
In a St. Louis VA hospital, union workers routinely said they could not find patient records requested by doctors but never bothered to look. The doctors started getting them themselves. They were ordered to “stand down” by VA workers.
.
In Vietnam, I was an assistant platoon leader—a nonexistent job. Out of a sense of duty and boredom I asked the platoon leader if I could try to get the parts we had requisitioned that never came. “Great!” he said
.
First I made sure our paperwork had been submitted correctly. Half had not. I fixed it. But zero parts arrived during the number of days they were supposed to. Regs said to submit Form _____ follow-up. I did.
.
Higher HQ said no follow-ups are allowed. I said they are REQUIRED by regs. They said the reg had been changed. Let me see a copy. We don’t have one. Then fill my requisitions. No. Get a copy from USARV (the U.S. pentagon of Vietnam). So I went there looking for the regs library. A major saw me and asked if he could help me. I asked where the regs library was. Why? When I answered, he chewed me out for going outside the chain of command. When I got back to my unit, the battalion commander did the same. They told me the only reason I was not getting court martialed is that I hod told the platoon leader I was going over to USARV to look for the reg.
.
I said, “Sir, you guys can play all the games you want but we still need those parts.” He asked if any were urgent. “Yes, sir. Any minute ow the four-star corps commander Julian J. Ewell will not be able to use his radios because all the handsets are worn out but one and that one is rapidly going out because we have to keep moving it from radio to radio and attaching it puts extra wear on the pins.”
.
He got us a half dozen hand sets. How? He went outside the chain of command. “Thank you, sir, what about the less urgent parts?” He told me to “stand down” on the matter.
.
The U.S. government is a piece of crap organization where people do not bother to do their jobs because they can get away with it. And if you try to do things right, they will punish you and stop you. That is the VA. That is the U.S. Army officer corps. That is the whole federal government—and state and local are not much better.
.
Shinseki and Obama say they are mad as hell. They are lying, or maybe they are mad as hell about being caught. I’m also mad as hell that I was defrauded into thinking I was going into a good organization—The Army—when I entered West Point at age 17. But the lifers have a special word to describe MY “mad as hell.” They say I’m “bitter,” where the word is intended to mean you need not pay any attention to me.
.
They somehow have convinced themselves that the sort of incompetence and neglect that is the only permissible behavior in the government is morally and psychological superior to being “bitter.” I put their “God grant me the courage to change what I can change…etc. ” rationalizations on display in a table in my article http://www.johntreed.com/militaryhonor.html
.
The people of the various countries of the world, including North Korea and the U.S. have the governments they deserve. If the number of bitter people increases, like the widows of dead vets, maybe we will get actual change and justice, like firing the union VA employees and giving vouchers to the disabled vets.

John T. Reed

May 29

High heat to “fix” the VA. They won’t fix it. They will only pretend to fix it. They can’t fix it. They are the government. The government is a centrally-planned Soviet style socialist mechanism. Socialism does not work. You can’t fix it with a new head guy or new paperwork requirements. You can only fix it by going to a free market approach: vouchers so vets can get needed care at civilian hospitals.
.
If you let them “fix” this, the same scandal will erupt in another few years. Hell, Obama was campaigning on fixing this scandal in 2007! They will not fix it; they will only pretend to fix it. They could not fix this if their lives depended on it. They don’t know how to run an efficient hospital system. They are unionized government bureaucrats. Their incentives, absent temporary episodes of getting caught, are all to maximize their pay and benefits and minimize their workload.
.
The only fix is to fire the government as the health care provider, which is also needed with regard to Obama care. We have separation of church and state. We need separation of health care and state. Those of us who can afford it will soon be going abroad for non-emergency medical care; and those who can’t, including the vets, will “get” their health care from a bureaucracy that doesn’t return their phone calls.

7Like · · Share

  • Ayali Stein It's a sad state of affairs in this country today. We have a pathetic president whose answer to everything is "government" , without hearing the question. With all the scandals so far under this regime, will any scandal bring down this presidency?! Will Obama ever be held accountable for anything?...Well, we all know the answer to that one...

  • John T. Reed The half-black president will be allowed, like disgraced generals, to retire. It is impossible for him to be tarnished by scandal in the minds of the media or average American. He is the first black president, and therefore immune from impeachment. He would have to get caught with a “smoking gun” (like a tape recording) of him trying to overthrow the U.S. government to be impeached. The lies he has told and his predictable incompetence will never be enough to get him punished as long as he is the first black president.

John T. Reed shared a link.

18 hours ago

Today’s WSJ says Shinseki stepped on a land mine while searching for an enemy cache. Another account said it was during a ferocious firefight. One does not search for caches during a firefight. I do not know which account is correct, or if either is, but they both cannot be.
.
In a prior post, I said stepping on a mine can be dopey if you had time to take extreme care. If he was searching for a cache, he had time. It is standard military practice for soldiers to booby trap their long-term positions like caches, tunnel complexes, base camps—when it becomes clear the enemy is about to overrun them. Some booby traps can be created from scratch in seconds as you flee, namely, pulling the pin on a grenade and placing it under a heavy object like an ammo can. The weight of the object keeps the spring-loaded spoon from flipping off. That spoon flipping off starts the timer in the grenade and it explodes about 4 seconds later.
.
We were trained briefly in that at West Point. When I saw the movie Platoon, I almost yelled “No!” in the crowded theater when an American soldier who was exploring an enemy position they had just overrun reached for an enemy ammo can on a table. Sure enough, the can had a grenade under it and both the guys arms were blown off.
.
Shinseki lost half his foot so he stepped on a small mine; he was not picking up anything with a grenade under it. Burying a pressure mine like that takes more time and is consistent with a cache which is long-term, unmanned storage for enemy food and military materiel.
.
I would need more details to know for sure but it appears thus far that Shinseki’s purple heart for that wound should have an “ISU” device that I wrote about at http://www.johntreed.com/woundedwarriors.html ISU stands for “I screwed up” as the reason for the wound—which is not what most people think of when they hear he is a “war hero with two purple hearts.”
.
So we have moved some distance from Shinseki being called a “war hero” to saying, precisely, he got 3 bronze stars with V devices, and two purple hearts, one of which was for stepping on a mine at the location of an enemy cache—arguably an avoidable injury in a situation where great care could have and should have been taken.
.
The WSJ also said his other purple heart was for an “injury,” not a wound. Not sure what that means.
.
The conventional wisdom on Shinseki has been that he is a great leader as a result of graduating from West Point and spending 38 years as an Army officer culminating in his reaching the top position in the whole army: Chief of Staff. Zat so? So explain why he appears to be, and apparently was, a waste of space as VA head, a mere civilian, health-care management job with fewer subordinates far from any war zone.
.
The explanation is he spent his entire life from teenager to age 56 or so in a military bureaucracy. That bureaucracy’s job was to win our wars. They won none during Shinseki’s being in that organization. This is the military equivalent of a large corporation that goes bankrupt—sort of a Chapter 11 reorganization that they corporation never emerges from. That is not allowed in the for-profit world, but the U.S. military can lose wars ad infinitum as long as they look the part and talk a good game. That is all Shinseki has ever shown competence at.
.
Speaking as one WP grad, not for any other WP grads, Shinseki was an olive drab empty suit, a minority who advanced by affirmative action and by refraining from pissing any superiors off—except for Rumsfeld who was pissed by Shinseki telling Congress 300,000 troops would be required for the war in Iraq. That was also the end of his military career. He did what WP grads would characterize as “having a good career.” Unfortunately, winning wars is not required to meet that standard. It should be the only criterion.
.
As with many career U.S. military officers before him, he got put in a high civilian position where something actually had to get done—caring for veterans—and since he had never in his life had a job where something actually had to be done, he fell flat on his face. Arguably, some other notable West Point career Army guys like Wes Clark and Al Dunlap (Sunbeam) and Robert McDonald (P&G) also flopped as civilian corporate CEOs. If West Point is such a great leadership school, and being a four-star general is such great evidence of leadership competence, how come you can’t name any successful “West Point grad who spent 20 or more years in the Army” CEOs? There are something like 45,000 living West Point grads. Can it be true that zero of them went from general to successful business CEO? I think it is. So maybe there need to be some changes made in the curriculum there. Don’t hold your breath.
.
The four most prominent West Pointers of late are Shinseki, Petraeus, basketball Coach K at Duke (was in the class behind me) and Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed (I was his platoon sergeant for his first month at West Point). That’s two disgraces—add McChrystal if you want another—one fabulous basketball coach (he played for Bobby Knight and later coached under him which I think is the source of his success, not West Point training) and one Democrat senator who never drew combat pay. Not what you would expect given West Point’s claims and rep.
.
Unfortunately, West Point is 212 years of tradition unbroken by progress. Their “business model” there seems to be to keep putting about Grant and Lee and MacArthur and Eisenhower on the cover of the alumni magazine and hope no one notices they were all born in the 1800s.

Like · · Share

  • Mark Christoph There was an episode of M*A*S*H where Frank Burns gets his purple heart - and Hawkeye questions what it is for.
    Burns: Don't you remember that mortar attack? I took a shell fragment.
    Hawkeye: That was an EGG SHELL fragment.

    Sounds like one of John Kerry's purple hearts when he threw a grenade into a food cache and got hit by flying rice.

  • Mark Vandendyke Great piece. I think since then boobytraps are more or less considered illegal, I think under the Hague convention (I know, Charlie didn't bother to read it, of course). Anyone setting up a booby trap in IRQ or AFG would probably be courtmartialed right quick.

  • Dave Hatcher Dear John - Shinseki's allgov bio says that - he was first wounded in April 1966 from shrapnel from a mortar round hitting him in the shoulder and chest. Five months later, a helicopter crash left him with a broken jaw and broken arm. In April 1970, during his second tour of duty in Vietnam, Shinseki stepped on a land mine which blew off part of his right foot.. . . He was awarded two Purple Hearts and three Bronze Stars while serving in Vietnam. If when first wounded, he was an artillery forward observer, as some reports state, then unlikely he would have been searching for arms caches - outside his MOS and mission-essential duties. If as artillery forward observer he was caught in a firefight, again that would have been unusual for a forward observer. Same with the helicopter crash, in that he still presumably was a forward observer. None of the three incidents indicates any ferocious firefight unless the land mine incident occurred during same. I do not see the "V" device designation for the Bronze Stars, but that may well have been. I am with you in having to conclude, absent convincing evidence to the contrary, that he was the beneficiary of leadership positions more out of his ethnicity than any real demonstrated combat command. His infamous black beret decision as C of Staff came back to haunt him. His testimony in 2003 when he said "hundreds of thousands of troops" would be needed in Iraq - without any supporting analytical justification (I watched the testimony on C-SPAN) showed extremely poor staff preparation for the hearings. Wolfowitz directly contradicted him the following day. Whoever was right, not the issue. That Shinseki stayed on instead of resigning right then showed a lack of courage in his convictions. His performances as VA Secretary in Congress and other public fora leave a similar impression that he really has been out of his league for a long, time. He just does not inspire confidence in public.

  • Mark Christoph If being a forward observer meant regular duty as a crew member on the helicopter, that would explain the air medals. Chopper pilots and gunners got them for missions in Vietnam, but I think it was one for every 35 flights into a combat area. For Air Force pilots I think it was like 25, but I could be wrong. I flew a hazardous mission when I was in (non-combat) and we got them for every 25 missions. But you are right, a forward observer is not going to be on the ground looking for weapons caches, he's not going to step off that chopper (or aircraft, Army observers also flew on Air Force O-2s with the Air Force forward air controllers).

  • Dave Hatcher Not sure about air medals but no one is refuting such an award, nor the Purple Hearts or even the Bronze Stars. I earned the AM just for being in choppers sufficient number of hours for that. Also earned two Bronze Stars, but neither with V device since I was never near a "ferocious firefight" - just sniped at a couple of times.

  • Mark Christoph I was in before giving out Bronze Stars as brownie points became SOP. I work on an Army post and I swear half the people here have them now.

  • Mark Vandendyke Since at least the first Gulf War, the Bronze Star (without the V device) has been essentially an ARCOM given out under combat conditions.

  • Mark Christoph Typically you don't get an Air Medal for just flying hours. Your flying hours must have been in a designated combat zone or some other specific condition. I flew with guys who had as many as 5,000 flying hours and no Air Medals. As for the Bronze Star, you are probably correct, I knew a guy who got one for sitting in a C-141 while they unloaded it at Grenada - he did absolutely nothing but sit on a plane for an hour while they unloaded it.

  • Mark Vandendyke I've heard of Air Force personnel getting Bronze Stars while serving stateside. They were talking about something similar for drone pilots up until about a year ago. Bravery for bravely flying a remote controlled bird. Uh huh.... http://www.post-gazette.com/.../Prop.../stories/201304160232

    www.post-gazette.com

    A proposed medal honoring the contributions of drone pilots was scaled back Mond... See More

  • John T. Reed In my article on military medals, I noted my dad said that one day the word came down that ALL the officers in his battalion would get the bronze star. That was in WW II in Europe. He was the battery clerk, the job made famous by Radar O’Reilly, so he would be in the line of communication that would see that order. In other words, they have been handing out bronzestars like advertising brochures for a long time.

  • John T. Reed With regard to how Shinseki got wounded, tere appear to be a lot of versions. I got one from the Wall Strete Journal and noe from Wikipedia. Yeah, I know that Wikipedia is often wrong. Their write-up about me is a bit odd in what it emphasizes and leaves out. But they won’t let me change it. They do however let people correct things like Shinseki’s .write-up.

  • John T. Reed For laymen, an artillery forward observer as Shinseki was initially in Vietnam was typically a lieutenant with a radio and a pair of binoculars who is assigned to an artillery battery but attached to an infantry or armor company or battalion. The infantry or armor unit is miles away from the artillery unit but within the range of their guns. When the inf/Arm commander needs help from the artillery, he tells the FO to “destroy that position over there.”
    .
    The FO then calls on the radio and gives his artillery unit the coordinates of the target. They fire several single shots at it and the FO tells them how much they missed by and in which direction. After 3 to 5 such shots, they usually hit the target at which time the FO says “Fire for effect.” That means you are now on target so hit it hard with all your guns using the appropriate type of ammo.
    .
    All of us cadets at West Point were trained to do that at Wes Point. I also did it in the 101st Airborne division during a 30-day internship there while I was a cadet. It is an important, dangerous job, but it involves no command. Searching for an enemy cache should not be done by an FO unless for some weird reason they did not have enough people without his help.
    .
    In my first simulated combat training at West Point when I was a new cadet, I was a squad leader and we attacked an enemy machine gun nest on top of a hill. We drove them off, because they were scripted to do that. When we arrived at the nest, we looked at the stuff they had left behind as if we were shoppers at a garage sale. West Pointer reading this, like Dave Hatcher, will know what happened next.
    .
    The enemy we drove off counterattacked wiping us out. I got my ass chewed for shooting my rifle during the attack. You are the squad leader Mr. Reed. You don’t shoot except in an emergency. You direct the shooting and movement of your squad. You also do not turn into combat tourists when you take the objective. You should have immediately set your men up in a defensive perimeter around the objective after you arrived there. One guy can inspect the enemy position you took to look for intelligence information. He needs to look out for booby traps.
    .
    In my defense, they did not teach us any of that before they made me squad leader. We had only been there for a month or so at the time. Their teaching method was to let you screw up then chew you out for not figuring it all out before you arrived at West Point. Must have worked because I still remember it. My point is that Shinseki should not have been engaged in combat tourism and it is a good way to get a purples heart that you should not be bragging about. Whether that’s what he was doing, I can’t tell. But I can assure you that many Vietnam purple heart recipients get their wound while engaging in combat tourism.

  • John T. Reed Regrading Hatcher’s point about Shinseki not inspiring confidence, we learned at West Point that you have to have a command voice and a command presence. They taught the voice. Presence we learned from many excellent examples among the upper classmen. What is command presence? Actor George C. Scott in the movie Patton and Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermey in the movie Full Metal Jacket.
    .
    Now can you picture Shinseki being cast in either of those roles in a movie? When we had command-voice instruction at West Point, the grading form listed different size units as to how loud we were. My grading officer added a new category to describe my voice—squad—which is a mere ten guys. Later, in 1971 on Armed Forces Day, I was the adjutant a a parade in honor of the commander of the first Army (Northeast region). During the first half of that parade, I commanded about 2,000 men. So I learned the command-voice deal.
    .
    What would Shinseki’s voice grade? Fire team from what I saw. That’s half a squad. And he was the commander of ALL the commanders in the U.S. Army worldwide. Shinseki has less command presence than the late PBS children’s TV whisperer Mr. Rogers (Fred McFeely Rogers) who never served in the military. If Hollywood cast Shinseki it would be as some Sphinx-like head of an Asian crime gang. Or maybe in a “Barney Fife” (The Andy Griffith Show) type role. Sample dialog. “We’d better go, Barney. You got your bullet?”
    .
    Shinseki “played the game” in the Army officer corps for 38 years. Indeed he WON the game I call the “30-year, marathon, single-elimination, suck-up tournament.” The phrase “playing the game” in the Army means, in part, signing false documents and presiding over the signing of false documents—typically every weekday. So I reject the pro forma not-speak-ill-of-the-“dead” comments that Shinseki was an “honorable man.” It would be hard for an honorable man to make major let alone 4-star general.
    .
    Also, I think he shows what happens when you pick leaders based solely on how they got rated by their SUPERIORS, whom they were FOLLOWING. Such as system raises good followers to the top, not good leaders. The Army has talked about 360º feedback, basing promotions partly on ratings by subordinates, but don’t hold your breath. And don’t tell me the raters made an effort to observe how Shinseki led. That’s like a shoe salesman who refuses to take feedback from the customer about how the shoe fits claiming he "observed" how it fit.
    .
    Another way to evaluate leaders is to see how their team does in competition or at accomplishing a mission. We have not won a war since 1945 and there is not much else to evaluate with regard to “warriors” or their commanders. The first time Shinseki ever had a job where he actually had to get a job done was the VA. Q.E.D.

John T. Reed shared a link.

13 hours ago

Gotta kick out of my wife tonight. She put the 5/29/14 Wall Street Journal on my chair. Why? “Those cadets look like slobs!” she said.
.
Apparently, my wife was born too soon preventing her from being who she really was meant to be: A West Point tac officer. Those are the officers who discipline cadets for appearance lapses and other infractions. You can see the photo if you Google "Obama speak at West Point graduation" and click on “Images.” The graduating seniors are wearing full dress gray over white under arms as for graduation. “As for graduation” means they are wearing white hats which are only worn with full dress gray on graduation day and only by seniors. My wife had no complaint about them.
.
The other three classes however, who all have to march up to the graduation in the football stadium and stay until it is over, were wearing Sierra with white gloves. In almost all the photos of that day, they are all saluting Obama.That is gray tropical worsted trousers with a white, open-collar, short-sleeve shirt. She said their shirts and trousers were all wrinkled. She’s pissed!
.
She did not meet me until 1972, four years after I graduated from West Point. But we went to West Point several times in the early 1970s. At that time, she was impressed with the cadets. I am not sure but it appears that they now use a different shirt fabric, something loose and clingy, and they have decided they want the cuff on the trousers to be in the current style which breaks on the front of the ankle then goes down lower alongside the ankle with lots of wrinkles caused by the break..
.
When we were cadets, and for some years thereafter when my wife first visited there, the sierra shirt was pure cotton with heavy starch. Plus we had to have a dress off. That is, the excess shirt width around the waist was folded back at the sides and kept against the back with a tight belt. The effect was that the shirt seemed custom fit and snug at the waist. Because it was cotton with heavy starch, there were essentially no wrinkles. Also, the vast majority of us were quite fit then and our belt was horizontal. Many current cadets have a bit of a pot and their belt is tilted down at the front displaced by the pot.
.
Our trouser cuffs did not break at all. Where they hit the shoe in front was the bottom of the cuff and then the bottom line of the cuff was parallel to the ground all the way to the back. And those tropical worsted trou were very wrinkle-resistant.
.
You can see cadets of the mid sixties in a recruiting film made there then. I am actually in it. The only scenes of us wearing Sierra I believe were of the first day swearing in. Since we had only been cadets for a couple of hours then, we may not have gotten it right. But were are wearing class shirts in may scenes, If you pay attention, you will see that dress off with those black shirts. You can see the current cadets by just looking at the photo I said to find above. The sixties recruiting film is on YouTube via my article about it at http://www.johntreed.com/West-Point-recruiting-film-from-when-I-was-a-cadet.html
.
The pertinent classic expression among West Pointers is “The Corps has” which is short for “The Corps of Cadets [student body] has gone to hell since I graduated” or in my wife’s case, “since my husband graduated.”

Like · · Share

  • Geoff Lin likes this.

  • John T. Reed I just looked at that YouTube. You can see a great picture of the New Cadets of the class of 1971—Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Islands class and indeed, his New Cadet company which I was a senior in. It is at 8:23 into the film on the clock. You will see no wrinkles in THOSE sierra shirts back then when men were men and women were glad of it.
    .
    I am one of the senior cadets wearing dress gray over white in that scene, although I am in the platoon just outside the frame to the right or left. Future Senator Reed is one of the New Cadets in the white shirts, also just out of the from to the right or left.
    .
    In a Russian class scene that starts at 10:12, I am the plebe on the right.
    .
    There is another scene of New Cadets wearing the Sierra uniform at 20:17. Again, tight dress-offs, heavy starch, far fewer wrinkles than in the Obama visit photos.

  • Ben Weeks All you do is talk about the good old days, grandpa!

  • John T. Reed I’d love to respond but my granddaughter is about to arrive for the weekend. Have a good life, Ben.


John T. Reed