Fifteen years ago, Brian Mast was running on the treadmill at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s gym when he looked up at the TV in disbelief. Smoke was pouring out of a gaping hole in the World Trade Center’s north tower. At first, he thought he was watching a fictional show. “Then I saw the second plane hit and said, ‘Wow, this is real. We’re under attack.’ ”
The events of that day would change Mast’s life forever. Already a reservist on 9/11, Mast spent most of the next decade on active duty in the U.S. Army, eventually training to be a bomb technician before deploying to Afghanistan under Joint Special Operations Command. On a mission in pursuit of a high-value target in 2010, Mast was hit by an improvised explosive device. He lost both of his legs just above the knee and his left index finger. But he never lost his determination.
“I did physical therapy all day, every day,” Mast says of his time at Walter Reed hospital. “For now, for me, there’s very little I can’t do.”
That’s something of an understatement. Since sustaining injuries in Afghanistan, Mast has worked in three federal agencies, finished his college degree at Harvard’s extension program, and volunteered in a logistical role with the Israeli military. Now 36, he is the father of three children between the ages of 1 and 6 with his wife, Brianna.
This year, Mast took on another job: running for Congress. On August 30, he won the Republican primary in Florida’s 18th Congressional District, a swing seat just north of Palm Beach. In an election with a record number of voters dissatisfied with both major presidential nominees, Mast’s candidacy may serve as a much-needed bright spot for many Americans.
Another piece of good news is that Mast isn’t alone. Several other members of what Dean Barnett dubbed the “9/11 Generation” in these pages have been elected to Congress in recent years. Republican Iraq and Afghanistan veterans Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton, Dan Sullivan, and Mark Kirk joined the Senate, and Democratic veterans Tulsi Gabbard, Tammy Duckworth, and Seth Moulton, among others, entered the House. More are running in 2016.
“The same kind of sense of public service that draws people into the military is also drawing them to run for office in both parties at the local, state, and federal level in a way that’s great for the country,” Kori Schake, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, told reporters at a recent event discussing Warriors and Citizens, a book of essays on civil-military relations that Schake edited with retired Marine Corps general Jim Mattis.
Polling conducted for the book identified two significant problems: broad public ignorance about the military and social separation from it. “They don’t know if the U.S. Army is 60,000 men or 6 million,” Mattis said. “They don’t even know military people, there’s so few.”
The hope that more veterans in Congress might help close the civil-military gap or at least offer a different perspective from the nonveteran political class is not without basis. Republican congressman and Iraq war veteran Duncan Hunter of California has been a lonely voice in Congress raising concerns about the integration of women into infantry units. Democratic congresswoman and Iraq war veteran Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has spoken out against Barack Obama’s and John Kerry’s refusal to identify our enemy as radical Islam.
What’s more troubling than the public’s ignorance of military affairs, say Schake and Mattis, is the lack of strategic thinking among government officials outside the military and intelligence agencies. But Mattis cautioned that although having political leaders with military experience is “helpful in many ways, it’s not critical. It’s not a ticket to some kind of certainty on strategic thinking either.”
“I think it was Abe Lincoln who said the only thing he fought before being president was mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes won in the Black Hawk War,” Mattis said before pointing to Franklin Roosevelt as another exemplary leader who had never seen combat. “I think what we’re looking for is critical thinking and historically informed people who can put it in a strategic context.”
What have Republican veterans of the 9/11 Generation learned from 15 years of America’s strategy—or lack thereof—in the war against Islamist terrorism? “The biggest mistake that came out of Iraq was a premature withdrawal,” says Brian Mast. He believes ISIS “could’ve been defeated by a small expeditionary force early on,” but now crushing its 20,000-man army will require a large coalition of perhaps 60,000 troops. “Groups like that are so evil they have to be erased,” he declares. “It requires an all-out commitment.”
Mike Gallagher, a 32-year-old Iraq war veteran running for Congress in Wisconsin, is similarly dismayed that “we flushed all of those hard-won gains down the drain.” Gallagher graduated from Princeton in 2006 and served two tours as a Marine intelligence officer in Anbar Province in 2007 and 2008, spending most of his time running interrogations and source operations. “By the end of my second deployment, we were passing out books and soccer balls and school supplies and walking around without our helmets,” Gallagher says. As a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gallagher returned to Iraq in 2015 and was stunned to discover that the town where he had been deployed had been taken over by ISIS. “That was unthinkable in 2008 given how much progress was made.”
Gallagher, who was Scott Walker’s top foreign policy adviser during the governor’s presidential campaign, emphasizes that standing up Arab allies in the region is the key to victory but declines to speculate on how many American troops might be necessary. Asked if the 2003 invasion was a mistake, Gallagher shares some candid thoughts: “I think knowing what we know now, yeah, it was an intelligence failure,” as well as a failure to plan for “all the subsequent things that would happen after we invaded the country. It was an analytical failure to see the consequences of upending the balance of power in the Middle East.”
“But that’s hindsight,” he continues. “That’s 20/20. Everyone in both parties supported the invasion. I’m not sure how helpful it is to play the blame game. I do hope we learn from it. At the very least, I hope that we learn that Clausewitz was right: In war, everything is simple, but the simple is difficult. So we should be very circumspect when we deploy young men and women abroad, we should have a clear plan for victory, and we should be mindful of the unintended consequences of our actions. But that shouldn’t be a recipe for doing nothing.”
“When Obama gets up there and says we’re war-weary,” Gallagher adds, “I think: No, we’re weary of politicians losing the wars that we’ve fought for them.”
Voters haven’t had a strong preference for candidates who are veterans for at least a generation (just ask John McCain, John Kerry, and George H. W. Bush). That trend may continue in 2016. In Republican-leaning Missouri, the GOP’s 42-year-old gubernatorial candidate Eric Greitens, who deployed four times as a Navy SEAL, is trailing his Democratic opponent Chris Koster by 7 points in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. In the state’s Senate race, 35-year-old Democrat Jason Kander, who was an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, is trailing incumbent Republican Roy Blunt by 5 points in the RCP average. Public polls haven’t been conducted for the seats Gallagher and Mast are pursuing, but in a normal year they might be seen as favorites in districts with a slight Republican tilt.
This year is anything but normal, of course. Whether Donald Trump will take down Republicans like Gallagher and Mast in toss-up races remains anyone’s guess. Polls have fluctuated for a year between a Hillary Clinton blowout and a slim Clinton victory. Both presidential candidates remain unprecedentedly unpopular. In the Green Bay district where Gallagher is running, retiring incumbent Republican Reid Ribble said that Trump is an untrustworthy racist he couldn’t support. But Gallagher backs the GOP nominee.
Asked if Trump has the temperament to be commander in chief, Gallagher replies: “I wrote my Ph.D. on presidential decision-making. The idea that there should be a baseline temperament for the presidency is historically inaccurate. We have had men in that office incredibly lacking in the morality department, men quick to anger. Even men that I admire like Eisenhower had enormous tempers.”
Mast even suggests Trump’s unpredictability would be an asset. “If Donald Trump is giving people around the country this much pause about what he might do as commander in chief, then he gives every world leader a much greater deal of pause.”
But how does a wounded veteran get past the fact that Trump, a draft-dodger, disparaged POWs and a Gold Star family? “For me it’s still an easy decision between somebody who said a few things that I don’t like and somebody who has done things that I absolutely abhor,” Mast says. “As service members, we live by a certain ethos. We don’t leave our men behind. . . . Simply by virtue of Hillary leaving a number of Americans behind in Benghazi, it’s not even a question.”
John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
