Journalism in Washington, D.C., is all about scoops and access to the senior policymakers. To survive and prosper as a member of the Fourth Estate in the Beltway, you need to knock on doors, cultivate sources in the bowels of the bureaucracy, get a revelatory quote from an influence peddler, or maybe even land an exclusive interview with the president of the United States himself.
Some of the most memorable and emotionally touching stories published over the years, however, are the work of reporters and correspondents who focus on the people whose lives are impacted by the decisions made in the Situation Room. This is especially the case on matters of war and peace, where ordinary soldiers like Spc. Robert Soto from the Bronx (who enlisted at the ripe young age of 19) deploy to the unforgiving peaks and valleys of Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley on the orders of the generals back at headquarters. Soto, along with his brothers-in-arms 2nd Lt. Justin Smith, Staff Sgt. Nathan Cox, Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Wright, and Pfc. Richard Dewater, are the protagonists of a remarkable piece by C.J. Chivers in the Aug. 8 edition of the New York Times Magazine. And it was remarkable not only for the action-packed combat scenes and the highly detailed descriptions of what these men went through during their deployment in Eastern Afghanistan, but also for Chivers’ focus on the grunts in the field fighting the war rather than the high-ranking officials in the Pentagon seeking to sell it.
The whole article is well worth a read. Chivers captures the complications, heartache, death, and sweat of war in a country that few Americans understand and even fewer have paid attention to after nearly 17 years of failed promises of progress, thousands of U.S. casualties, and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. But just as important, you should read it to get an understanding of just how wide the divide is between the intellectuals back in Washington who set the strategy and the dedicated and brave recruits who are tasked with implementing it — however foolish, hopeless, or delusional those strategies turn out to be.
As Chivers writes, “Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it.”
Reading the full feature, it’s difficult not to come away with the conclusion that D.C. is a hub of unaccountability. Bad decisions are made to increase the U.S. presence by tens of thousands of additional troops; policymakers devote tens of billions of dollars into reconstruction projects that are siphoned off by predatory corruption or are spent on short-term projects that are reduced to a pile of ash as soon as U.S. soldiers withdraw; and forward operating bases are established in places that are so remote (like Korengal Valley) that the troops stationed there can only be resupplied by air. Men die, the strategy fails, the war goes on, and lives are impacted forever.
The policymakers who put their names on the policy hardly pay for their mistakes. If there are mistakes, those at the top chalk it up to bad information from the intelligence community, to bureaucratic malfeasance, or to shoddy implementation further down the chain of command. In those instances where a policy decision goes so horribly wrong or the war proves to be far tougher than the cakewalk officials confidently believed, the architects of the policy are either forced into a promotion (think Paul Wolfowitz going to the World Bank), asked to submit their resignation (think Donald Rumsfeld in November 2006, when Iraq was imploding into a cauldron of sectarian violence), or move back into their old jobs at a Washington think tank (think John Bolton at the American Enterprise Institute after his tenure as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a job for which he couldn’t get Senate confirmation).
While those at the top move on with their lives, the soldiers on the front line are asked, and expected, to risk their own. Unfortunately, many soldiers pay for the poor judgments made in the Beltway. We should all thank C.J. Chivers for bringing this sad reality to light.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
