Fort Monmouth fire drills

When I arrived at Fort Monmouth in 1970, They made me executive officer (2nd in command) of Bravo Company of the school brigade.

One day, a sergeant brought me a fire drill report. It wanted the date we had a fire dill for that month and how much time it took us to empty the building and my signature. The date was already filled in. I was to add how much time it took. I said,

I don’t remember any fire drill that day.

We don’t actually do any drill, sir. We just make up the date and time.

I refused to sign it. They had to redo it with the company commander’s signature block. He made up a phony date and duration and signed it. Two months later, in early 1971, the company commander got out of the Army and I became the CO. The sergeant brought me the monthly fire drill report. I gathered my new XO and several sergeants and, perhaps for the first time in the history of Fort Monmouth, a barracks fire drill was held.

I timed it. Then, also perhaps for the first time in the history of Fort Monmouth, I filled out, signed, and submitted an honest company fire drill report. After a couple of months, a sergeant in the ante room of my office yells in the door,

Lieutenant Reed, Post Fire Marshal on line 2.

You can probably guess where this is going. And you are correct. He chewed my ass for having the slowest fire drills in the history of Fort Monmouth and took pains to point out that even my immediate predecessor got the building evacuated far faster than I did. We’re talking about evacuating a four-story barracks building in a fire drill that necessarily came as a surprise to all the occupants thereof, many of whom were in their underwear or in the shower.

With my XO, who shared my office, stifling his laughter, I adopted an Eddie Haskell personality and earnestly promised to try to do better in the future.

The U.S. military officer corps is the most corrupt, SNAFU, FUBAR organization I ever had the misfortune to be associated with in my life. They are also the organization that used the word “honor” to describe themselves more than any other I was ever associated with.

24-carat phonies and hypocrites to boot.

They probably still have my fire drill reports in their files. And until they read this, they probably still hadn’t figured out that all the company commanders and XOs at Fort Monmouth, other than yours truly, lied on those reports for generations.

Self-righteous arrogance

Notwithstanding the routine daily signing of false documents throughout the U.S. military officer corps, the typical reaction of a U.S. officer to even the slightest suggestion that such officers are not paragons of integrity is stiffed-necked, self-righteous indignation and outrage.

Here’s an example. I once overheard a captain bragging about a conversation he had with a prospective landlord. He was in uniform when he applied for an apartment near Fort Monmouth, NJ. The landlord told him what the security deposit would be and the captain angrily and indignantly responded, pointing to his captain’s bars, “There’s your security deposit right there!”

I was also a landlord at the time, although not his. Had a U.S. military officer ever tried that line with me, I would have laughed in his face. Indeed, I would probably seek additional security from such a tenant on the grounds that they tend to move to a different continent or at least a different state when they move out. That makes it harder to collect money owed. I am a nationally-known expert on rental property and the author of many books on the subject.

The officer who demanded that I sign the false arms inventory in Vietnam was a captain. The company commander who signed the false training schedules at Fort Bragg was a captain. Ernest Medina, the company commander whose men committed the My Lai massacre and who lied about it afterward, was also a captain.

Matthew Lee, SVP, Lehman Brothers

Investment bank Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008, almost taking down the entire world financial system. Matthew Lee was an SVP there before that happened. He wrote a letter to the CFinancialO and CRiskO of Lehman warning of the ethics problems that led to the bankruptcy. He was fired days later. (Wall Street Journal 3/20/10)

Two Matthew Lees have graduated from my alma mater—West Point—but neither is old enough to have worked at Lehman for 14 years as the SVP did.

The problem is where are West Point’s Matthew Lees? Where are the Army’s Matthew Lees? Where are the U.S. military’s Matthew Lees? The history of all three institutions is almost devoid of the sort of moral courage exhibited by Lee. Shame on West Point, the Army, and the U.S. military for that. And more shame on them for their stiff-necked self-righteous protestations of supreme honor whenever anyone questions their integrity or moral courage. The only thing worse than a moral coward is a moral coward who hypocritically swears he is morally courageous.

‘Orders’

In my landlord days, I did have one experience with a U.S. military officer showing how important integrity was to him. He was a Navy lieutenant assigned to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He lived in one of my employer’s apartments. He gave notice he was breaking the lease. It had a job-transfer clause that said you could get out of the lease if you were being transferred more than 40 miles away from the complex.

I told him he was not eligible to invoke that clause. He yelled at me angrily and showed me “orders” that he claimed indicated he was being transferred to Kansas City, MO. The papers did, indeed, have the word “orders” printed on them. I looked at them and said,

Lieutenant, you’re a liar. Those are separation-from-the-service orders. You are voluntarily getting out of the Navy. And when you get out you are authorized travel pay from the Philadelphia Navy Yard to Kansas City—because Kansas City is either your current “home of record” in military files or because you entered the Navy in Kansas City. No one is ordering you to go to Kansas City. Do you think you are the only person here who was ever in the military?

Turned out he was actually buying a home in our area from the same company that I managed apartment complexes for. Oh, also, a Navy lieutenant is the rank equivalent of an Army captain, the rank that is so honest that they claim they should not have to put up tenant security deposits.

General Stanley A. McChrystal gives lie to the Army’s claims to be an honorable organization

I chronicled McChrystal’s misbehavior in two articles about the cover-up of the friendly fire death in Afghanistan of Army Ranger and former NFL player Pat Tillman:

• Lessons to be learned from Pat Tillman’s death
• The Army gets away with whitewashing Pat Tillman’s death

You can read more brief versions at various Web sites including McChrystal’s Wikipedia bio.

Basically, McChrystal was the main liar in the Pat Tillman case. It was he who wrote the Silver Star citation saying falsely that Tillman was brave “in the line of devastating enemy fire.” In fact, Tillman was shot in the forehead by his own fellow Army Rangers when he relaxed and stood up thinking they had finally figured out that they were firing at an American.

It was also he who wrote the infamous cable to General Abizaid urging him to warn President Bush not to praise Tillman’s heroism because it might later come out that it was friendly fire.

Both of those are described in more detail at the above two articles of mine. But the greater issue is how the United States Army responded to McChrystal’s dishonesty in the Tillman case.

The point I make here is that the problem is the whole Army. The Army simply does not tolerate honest officers. On the contrary, they demand that officers comply with what I call O.P.U.M. That means Officially Prohibited but Unofficially Mandatory. I write about it elsewhere in this article.

In the Tillman case, officers were expected to cover up and put a positive spin on Tillman’s death. That violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not to mention morality, the Cadet Honor Code, the Cadet Prayer, the Boy Scout Oath, and any other perinent code that addresses integrity. In other words, officially, what McChrystal did in the Tillman case is prohibited. But I say that it’s really mandatory. To see if I am right, look at subsequent events.

There were five separate inquiries into the Tillman cover-up. None could get to the truth. All the officers including McChrystal stonewalled. They could not recall. General Kensinger retired and literally hid from Federal Marshals trying to serve a Congressional subpoena on him.

One of the inquiries recommended that eight officers be disciplined, including McChrystal. Not only was he not disciplined at all, on 5/11/09, he was promoted to the highest rank in the U.S. military—four-star general—and to the current most sought-after post in the entire U.S. military: Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A), that is, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan.

To any who say I unfairly tar the whole U.S. Army because of the dishonesty of a few “bad apples,” I have two words:

McChrystal’s promotion

McChrystal is what the Army wants you to be. The three guys who promoted McChrystal were General David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Commander In Chief Barack Obama. The Senate confirmed McChrystal’s appointment.

Poll

One of my West Point classmates told me he saw a poll in Army Times or some similar periodical in which 67% or some such of career Army officers admitted that they had signed false documents during their careers. I laughed and said, “And 33% are so corrupt they even lie on anonymous polls.”

Hackworth’s comment

On page 15 of Colonel David Hackworth’s book About Face, journalist Ward Just quotes Hackworth as saying about the post-World War II Army

In this new Army, no one could afford to tell the truth, make an error, or admit ignorance.

That “new Army” is the only one I was ever in.

Billy Mitchell

General Billy Mitchell was court martialed by the Army for speaking out in an act of moral courage, one very few acts of moral courage in the entire history of the U.S. military. Here are some of the charges Mitchell made in the 1925 written statement that got him court martialed:

[The Army and Navy have formed “a sort of union to perpetuate their own existence, [maintained] “propaganda agencies” [to sway public opinion. Senior officers who testified before Congress] “almost always” [gave] “incomplete, misleading or false information about aeronautics” [while] “the airmen themselves are bluffed and bulldozed so that they dare not tell the truth.”

I agree that officers dare not tell the truth. That’s what I saw from 1968 to 1972 when I was in. It’s what guys like Mitchell and Hackworth saw before I was in and it is what I have seen in the media since I got out.

Mitchell depicts “airmen,” which was apparently a 1920s word for pilots, as innocent victims who were bullied into lying. I agree that they were bullied into lying, but that’s no excuse for lying.

Claiming to be an honest man who did lie, but only because he was “forced” to is akin to Bill Clinton saying he smoked marijuana but did not inhale. If you lie, you are a liar. The fact that you felt bad about it don’t mean nothing. The “airmen” who were bullied should have refused to lie and if they got retaliated against by their superiors, which is certain, so be it. That, after all, is precisely what Mitchell did. I was never in such a high position, but I also refused to lie. I got retaliated against big time, which is bullying, but I stuck to my principles.

Any military officer of any rank who lies ought to be court martialed, regardless of why he lied.

‘Counseling’

Whenever I refused to sign false documents or refused to go along with some OVUM (Officially Voluntary but Unofficially Mandatory) indignity like attendance at so-called “command-performance” parties held by superiors, I was sent to a high-ranking officer for “counseling.” Signing false documents is an example of what I call OPUM, that is, stuff that is Officially Prohibited but Unofficially Mandatory.

I found these “counseling” sessions to be comically uniform no matter where I was in the world—as if every career military officer had taken a course in how to rationalize abandoning one’s integrity and turning into a total boot licker. Here’s how they all rationalized it and tried to get me to rationalize it.

Lieutenant Reed, you can’t change the Army. It may surprise you to learn that I was unhappy about some of the same things that you are unhappy about when I was a young lieutenant. I remember the time I had tickets to an NBA playoff game and the colonel scheduled a party for the same night. I was really angry when my company commander told me I had to go to the party. I told him I wouldn’t. But I had a good CO and he counseled me like I’m counseling you and it saved my career. I went to the party. I figured I had made my point by complaining to the CO about it.

You have to bide your time, Lieutenant Reed. You can’t change things when you’re a lieutenant. You have to play the game until you reach high enough rank that you have the power to change things. You have to pick your battles. This one isn’t worth it.

Let me give you a prayer that’s helped me, Lieutenant Reed. God grant me the courage to change what I can change, the patience to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. I have friends who got out of the Army. They say it’s the same in civilian corporations. It’s the way it is everywhere.

So what do you say, Lieutenant Reed? Can we count on you to become a team player? Everyone else can’t be out of step.

When none of that worked, they would threaten me with bad efficiency reports, not getting promoted, and “things not going so easy on you.”

Here is my point-by-point response to the Army officer corps’ standard “counseling”-rationalization session.

In a 4/7/08 Newsweek story about Hillary’s sniper fire lie, Jonathan Alter says,

We know why politicians lie when they get in trouble: They think the consequences of telling the truth are too severe to bear.

Career military officers are politicians. At the lower ranks, they are like office politicians in civilian companies. As they move up, they become like the corporate politicians who maneuver and form alliances and play Machiavellian games to advance their careers. Refusing to lie when a superior wants you to ends the career of an officer. You may think that would not be allowed.

Who’s going to stop it? Your superior does not write “refused to sign false document” on your efficiency report. He just tosses in a little dig like “needs to work on loyalty” or even merely ranks you in the 97th percentile (what’s wrong with the 97th percentile?) knowing that the 97th percentile is really the 35th percentile to those in the know. (That’s the way it was done 35 years ago. No doubt the current method is different in its details, but the same in substance, that is, a seemingly innocuous compliment to the officer being rated is, in fact, the kiss of career death.)

Sheepish

At every new assignment, I got treated like a wild horse that needed to be broken. First a captain would try. Then I had to go see a major or colonel. Eventually they would send me to see a general.

Although I never had a fellow West Pointer as an immediate superior, there were some West Pointers two or more ranks above me. Once, In Vietnam, I was sent up to be “counseled” by a West Point full colonel who had already been announced as being promoted to general in the future. He had a reputation for being a “people person” so they thought maybe his nice guy approach would “straighten me out.” Call him the “lieutenant whisperer.”

When he asked for my side of the story, I generally told him what I described above. He became pensive, looked down at his lap, and quietly admitted that he had done some things that were wrong in his career, like sign false documents, because he felt he had no choice. I seemed to have reminded him of his idealistic youth at West Point. He spoke sheepishly about having sold out.

Then he caught himself and got back on message pursuing the goal of trying to impress the other officers by being the one who finally got me to “play the game.” I declined.

The problem wasn’t whether the approach to me was hard ass or nice guy. It was the underlying behavior of signing false documents and putting up with bullying regarding joining officers clubs I didn’t want to join, buying below-market-interest-rate savings bonds I didn’t want to buy, etc. The brass had a repertoire that included both good cop and bad cop and they repeatedly tried each with me. But they were utterly incapable of any deviation from the substance of lying and bullying. That is the description of a profoundly corrupt organization.

Beyond their comprehension

That West Point colonel was an exception. With all the others, non-West Pointers, concepts of integrity and right and wrong seemed beyond their comprehension. Partly it was because they were not very bright. Partly it was because people to whom such things were important got out of the military as soon as they could, leaving only those for whom integrity and right were foreign, trivial, or irrelevant notions. Or maybe they were inclined to be honest when they entered the military, but they had become numb to and fully rationalized the immorality of the daily lying. Whatever the cause, you cannot have an intelligent discussion about integrity with the vast majority of career military officers. I have also observed some civilian bureaucracies up close. All bureaucracies have certain lies they must tell routinely. And all the lifelong employees of such bureaucracies have disabled that portion of their consciences in order to live with themselves. There is no talking to them, no reasoning with them.

One major told me the U.S. courts were totally corrupt and the wealthy always got off and the poor were always convicted. I said quietly, “Well, I’m not that cynical, sir.” He went nuts. Basically, he was bright enough to know the word “cynical” was a bad thing, although I doubt he knew what it meant. He also knew he outranked me and felt that precluded all criticism of him utterly without regard to the merit of the criticism. My attitude was that it would be fun for him to try to court martial me for the statement, but he just blew himself out ranting and raving and it was forgotten.

As you can see in the above “counseling” script, the rest treated me as if I was just one of the two percent who had not yet gotten the word about the way it was in the Army. In the spirit of the Soviet Union that the U.S. military so closely resembles in many ways, they would sometimes suggest that my refusal to sign false documents or attend “command performance” parties indicated some sort of psychiatric defect.

If you tried to debate whether lying was wrong, they would dismiss the discussion as childlike, unrelated to the real world. But mainly, these men had spent their entire adult lives lying. They knew nothing else and believed everyone did it both inside the military and outside, notwithstanding the fact that they had never been outside. The Army was their way of life. The people outside the Army were regarded as enemies. They believed that routine lies like signing false documents were just another way we in the Army protected ourselves from the undisciplined, unworthy civilians who did not and could not understand our superior perspective.

Here is a quote from Adam Galinsky, a Northwestern Universiy business school professor who studies power and influence inside companies:

Once you’ve been in the water long enough you no longer perceive you’re in the water. Water is the norm. This is why newcomers are important. They can see the good and the bad of a culture for the first time.

I was a newcomer to the Army. The Army only promotes from within thereby maximizing their “inability to perceive the water” problem.

Trivial matters

Readers may regard the anecdotes above as mildly interesting, but trivial because rifle serial numbers and vehicle status are not that important in the grand scheme of things. They would be more impressed if I had refused to sign a document covering up an atrocity or something like that.

In corrupt organizations, whether it be Enron, the NY Police Department during the time that Frank Serpico was an officer, the Mafia, or the U.S. military, newcomers are tested before they are “trusted.” As Al Pacino said over and over in The Recruit, “Everything’s a test.”

Relatively new NYPD officers like Serpico, also played by Al Pacino, were invited to accept small bribes to show they were “one of us” before they were permitted knowledge about bigger stuff. Mafia wannabes are required to commit crimes confirmed by Mafia guys before they are allowed into the inner circle.

This has two purposes:

• to identify and screen out any “boy scouts” or undercover agents who are squeamish about corruption

• to get something on everyone so no one can later change his mind and snitch

Signing false documents is a court martial offense. It violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If you sign a false document, you both gain entry to the “club” and you put yourself in a position where you cannot get out because if you ever go over to the media or authorities, they can trot out the false documents they know you signed to discredit and court martial you.

So after I was tested with signing less important documents and “failed,” I was generally assigned to be the assistant to some officer who was not authorized to have an assistant. I was also a platoon leader, XO, and company commander, but only in situations where that position was not required to sign false documents—like being XO and CO of a training company.

False documents are generally signed by the most junior officer (arms inventories), the battalion motor officer, and the company commander in line (fighting or potential fighting units) companies. I was the company commander of a 400-man, Advanced Individual Training company. I did not have to sign training schedules because my guys spent all day every day in formal Army schools. I was not responsible for training them, only for feeding, housing, and disciplining them. My company had no motor vehicles or motor pool.

Option to escape

In his 2008 book The Logic of Life, Tim Harford uses a slightly different phrase describing the uncorrupt in corrupt organizations with a similar meaning.

Your option to escape means you can’t be relied upon.

I have seen this phenomenon in a number of different organizational situations that I and my family members have experienced throughout our lives. Organizations like employees who are dependent upon the organization. Thy fear independent employees.

For example, I was rejected for the first civilian job I applied for: a real estate agent at a prestigious firm. They had an application that, to a large extent, was designed to determine how independent you were. The woman who interviewed me was unhappy, and said so, about my West Point education, significant savings account, the fact that I already owned rental property, and had no wife and kids to support. She frankly told me that the best salesmen were over a financial barrel, had nowhere else to turn, and had to hustle to pay their many bills. In other words, things I thought should be considered virtues were, instead, considered unattractive—simply because they put me in a position where I was able to resist the boss’s demands.

When I coached high school sports, the administrators often expressed a preference for teacher coaches. They were uncomfortable with so-called “off-campus” coaches like me because we were more inclined to stand up to them. Teachers had to behave or else they could be fired from their coaching job, but stuck in a tenured teacher position that was extremely hard to replicate at another school because schools prefer to hire new teachers out of college (they are cheaper). Teachers could also be assigned to teach less desirable courses if the administrators wanted to put pressure on them. With us off-campus coaches, the administrators had virtually no leverage. They want leverage over you. So do military colonels and higher ranks. If you refuse to join their practice of signing false documents, you have options that they no longer have, like turning them in and testifying against them.

All of which means the first time you refuse to sign a false document as a military officer, you are in really big trouble.

There is a similar mind set within the military officer’s corps. They have to go along to get along. They’re stuck in the military career. If you do not also have to go along to get along, either because you’re rich or because you simply have integrity and self confidence to survive as an honest man (once you get out of the military), your superiors will regard you as a potential threat and “untrustworthy.”

The only possible important atrocity I ever heard about was not something I was required to sign a document or take any other official action about. When I spent the night at a fire base 5 kilometers from the Cambodia border in Loc Ninh, the battery was blasting away with their cannons for much of the night.

Me: “What are you guys shooting at?”

Lieutenant: “H&I.”

Me: “Harassment and interdiction?”

Lt.: “Yeah. But we can’t call it that any more.”

Me: “Why not?”

Lt.: “Word came down from higher. No more H&I.”

Me: “So what do you call it now?”

Lt.: “Confirmed targets. We say they are confirmed bunkers and stuff like that. We make it up. We have to call the RVNs and get permission to make sure there’s no civilians in the area, but they don’t even check.”

Me: “How do you know that?”

Lt.: “They give instant approval of everything we ask. They don’t look at a map or ask anyone.”

Me: “Do you shoot fewer rounds now because of the new rule?”

Lt.: “God no! They keep charts of how many rounds each battalion shoots each night at corps headquarters. The battalion commander doesn’t want our line on the bar graph to be any lower than anyone else’s.”

I was just the communications platoon leader of that battalion so I had no occasion to be involved in target selection or reporting on what was being shot at. Were any civilians being hurt by those rounds? I don’t know. I was never shown a map or anything that indicated where they were firing or what was there. That was the base where I drove through the North Vietnamese ambush to get there once. It was “Indian country.” We did not wander around getting to know the neighborhood.

Important stuff

There is plenty of public evidence of the military lying about important stuff. Many of the other articles at this military Web site tell about various such incidents from My Lai to Pat Tillman to V.I.P. demo deaths, and so forth.