HQ To Marines In Afghanis​​tan: Sleep In A Hole

By David Wood

Yes, "sleep in a hole," was essentially the response of Gen. James Conway, commandant of the United States Marine Corps, when I asked him Tuesday afternoon whether he has enough "infrastructure'' to feed and house the 20,000 Marines who will be in southern Afghanistan by early summer.

"We do not,'' Conway said.

He went on to say that Marines can live comfortably in what to other people looks like a moonscape. Just recently, Conway visited a Marine in Helmand Province who was sleeping in a hole in the ground – "below the shrapnel line,'' Conway assured me.

"And he was perfectly happy,'' the commandant added with a straight face.

Now, I have lived with Marines in holes dug in the ground. Some holes are elaborate, and provide some small comfort between firefights and adequate protection from exploding mortars and rockets. But I have not noticed any Marines being "perfectly happy" in such circumstances (And even if, as Conway pointed out at a Pentagon briefing, the enemy in Afghanistan doesn't enjoy sumptuous dining halls and gyms, nor do many ordinary Afghan people.)

Conway was enjoying a modest dig at the Army and the U.S. Central Command, which has issued a directive saying no troops can be sent to Afghanistan until additional living facilities are constructed. ("That's not a description of the United States Marine Corps,'' Conway huffed.)

But his insistence that Marines can live in the dirt (and prefer it!) raises an important point about the cost of the new strategy and the "surge'' of 30,000 troops announced two weeks ago by President Obama. Most of the additional troops being sent to Afghanistan are not Marines and will not be living in the dirt.

Just at Bagram Air Field, the major U.S. air hub, contractors are just completing huge concrete apartment complexes for Air Force personnel who are vacating undesirable prefab housing. (At Bagram, the Burger King outlet home-delivers!) Most soldiers lived in less desirable circumstances, many in tents that in Afghan summers are stifling and in winter, freezing. At remote outposts, many soldiers live in what could charitably be described as plywood shacks.

Even those cost money, however, along with the pretty decent chow that most military people enjoy in Afghanistan . Thirty thousand more people is a pretty heavy and expensive footprint. In the absence of a better cost estimate, Washington is figuring on about $30 billion a year added cost for the "surge,'' but no one seems to put much credence in that number. The $30 billion is in addition to the $68 billion the administration has asked for to fund operations in Afghanistan for fiscal year 2010.

Neither figure includes the cost of what the military calls, somewhat deceptively, "life support'' for the surge reinforcements headed for Afghanistan this spring and summer. Both numbers are based on past experience, and given past experience in Afghanistan and the Pentagon's record of estimating and controlling costs, I wouldn't bet against that number growing even larger. According to Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank, it costs about $1 million to keep one troop in Afghanistan for one year. That is substantially higher than the cost in Iraq , where, at the height of the Bush administration's "surge'' in 2007, it cost $685,000 per troop per year.

Afghanistan is more expensive because it's hard to get to and hard to get around in. The equipment for a light infantry combat brigade, like the 10th Mountain Division's 1st Brigade, for example, includes vehicles and spare transmissions and tires, but also computers, medical and dental supplies and equipment, water purification equipment, cash, and thousands of other items packed in heavy steel containers and either flown in or shipped by rail to a seaport, transported by freighter to Karachi, Pakistan, and trucked over some of the world's most treacherous roads.

Fuel, according to a study cited by Harrison , costs $25 to $45 per gallon delivered – when the trucks are not hijacked by the Taliban -- and the U.S. military in Afghanistan consumes 8,000 gallons of it per troop per year. Another factor will inflate that $30 billion guesstimate: Defense Department strategists expect the Taliban to fight back this spring and summer with more IEDs and by attacking Afghan government facilities in places where there are few U.S. troops. Both tactics will increase U.S. costs. Additional aircraft will be needed for surveillance, money will be needed for costly jammers and other devices, and troops will have to be moved to the areas where the Taliban are attacking.

All these costs are reasonably straightforward. More worrisome are the less visible costs that are inexorably swelling the defense budget.

America 's professional army is acclaimed as the world's best, and that doesn't come cheap. The Pentagon has managed to attract and keep good people by offering terrific benefits, including enlistment bonuses, high quality health care, and a lifetime pension after only 20 years of service (pension payments are kept off the Pentagon's books and hidden elsewhere in the U.S. budget). Military health care costs over $47 billion a year, nearly 10 percent of the Pentagon's base budget, Harrison figures. He projects that the military health care bill will nearly double every ten years. Another less visible cost is for replacing the equipment that's gotten busted or worn out in combat over the past eight years. A lot of it has simply become obsolete, like the thinly-armored Humvees originally sent to Iraq . Equipment that still works is being shipped from Iraq direct to Afghanistan , rather than being shipped home to be refurbished.

Many of these costs are put off from year to year and never funded. For the Marine Corps alone, the backlog of unfunded equipment needs is $15 billion. "It's started to reach a little bit of crisis proportions,'' Conway said Tuesday.

All of this budget analysis, and all other discussions of defense spending, is based on unreliable data, according to the Government Accountability Office, the independent fiscal watchdog agency of Congress. The GAO has been at the Pentagon's throat for two decades trying to get it to clean up what the GAO delicately calls "management weakness'' in figuring out how much it is spending and what it's getting for the money. In part, because of high turnover at the Pentagon, financial management problems have never been fixed. The upshot is the defense budget goes up, Congress cuts where it's the easiest, and the troops often come out on the short end.

This fall, the GAO examined the Pentagon's own oversight agency, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). It found widespread violations of GAGAS, which are Generally Accepted Government Accounting Standards. GAO gumshoes looked at 14 DCAA audits and 62 pricing reports and found that each one smelled.

For example, the GAO and the Pentagon's inspector general's office uncovered a case in which a DCAA auditor, examining a major Pentagon contract, came across irregularities and was pressured to ignore them. A DCAA bureaucrat ordered his auditors to overlook the problems and the contractor was paid over $100 million on the contract. No indication of who squealed, but the incident is already subject of a criminal investigation. Maybe the perps should be sent to Afghanistan to live in a hole.

That statement is a misnomer, despite the Commandant's "claims".

http://w​​​​ww.defense.​gov​/bi​os/​bi​ograph​ydetai​l.​aspx​?b​iography​i​d=114

The General is a man well worth his salt and he may have been misrepresented without regard to his men on that quote. I've never met a fellow Marine comfortable with living in a hole in the ground, enlisted or Officer. I didn't do it and I don't think any other Marine is his right mind would. They'd prefer to take an enemy stronghold and move into the enemy's quarters while figuring out how to assault the enemy from inside his own territory. I'm out of circulation now, but the Commandant's words wouldn't sit well with the members of my unit if he ordered them to dig a pit, then live out of it. I believe that one was designed to try to demoralize Gyrenes in the Middle East. Fuck you very much mainstream media. Marines are fighting men, not meant to sit around in a hole. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. Should necessity dictate, the good reporter filing that story would be amazed at the Corps ability to do all three. I think it was a quote taken out of context. My Commandant would never order men and women under his command to do something like that if he weren't prepared to do the same, in fact, if he weren't already doing said himself.

The Commandant of the Corps is a man experienced in warfare and understands the 300,000 personnel under his command. Moreover, he knows he has the love and respect of every single US Marine and cares about every single Marine serving under him.

My response to Mr. David Wood is this: try it. Hell, if a scrawy little female civilian reporter like Paula Zahn can survive the Corps, you should be able to do the same. Badmouth my Commandant by misquoting him, you badmouth the USMC. I think it's piss-poor taste to say something like that without giving the American public the whole story. It might have given your stupid little news story some scandalous points, but for the American families with Marines in the field, you're stirring up a bunch of unnecessary shit you should keep your mouth shut about. I've found this guy's e-mail address on the Net and I encourage other Marines to send this clown a message too:

http://w​​​ww.baltimoresu​n.c​om/​about/ba​l-davi​dwood-​bi​o,0,46101​2.story

He may have built an impressive bio, but that does not excuse his "artistic license" to denegrate an illustrious Marine Officer and try to paint him as a callous man relegating his Marines to sleeping in water-filled ditches. It's crap like this that paints a bad picture for good men and women whom do a dirty job, especially the Commandant's, while trying to make a few political points for themselves. What kind of message does that send to the families back here who spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying about their sons, daughters, husbands, wives and family members. Speaking for myself, if the General was quoted as saying this, he was miquoted and the sonofabitch printing it should be ashamed of himself for saying it!

If this reporter's bio is any indication, he knew what it was to serve. If he lost track of that, it's nobody's goddamn fault but his own. Marines are Marines, if he was one of our own, he should know that.

Another thing while I'm still smoldering, where is President Obama's brilliant idea on shifting the Global War on Terrorism from Iraq to Afghanistan? Was this not going to be the true battleground on our "man-made catastrophe"? Our "Global Contingency Operation"? What the hell happened to the War? Is Al-Queda not still out there trying their damndest to kill American fighting men and women? For that matter, isn't Al-Queda out there trying to kill Americans, period? Are we not still losing good Americans day after day? Where the fuck are the CBS News reports and their macabre counter on how many casualties we are taking since 2001? What happened? Have these things just gone away now that we have Osama (shit, I meant Obama, how does that damn S keep slipping in there? Guess I should have torn it off the keyboard like the Clinton staffers did with the W when they left the White House) in charge of the First Domestic Racial Reich? That one may have been a little over the top, but I don't really care.Think about it, folks, we now have "czars" in control of most of our Nation's (our Republic's, not democracy's. A Democracy is something France started during the days of the guillotine. Hasn't it worked well?) domestic affairs? Weren't "czars" the governmental offices of past failed attempts at National control? Doesn't the Office of a Czar imply control without accountability? Should this be happening in the Land of the Free?

What the hell is going to happen since I said it? Am I going to be the first American Indian shook down for saying the politically incorrect? Better yet, I could be the next Joe the Plumber! Remember that guy? He was exposed as not having a plumber's license even though he was starting a plumbing business and had the cahonis to ask Candidate Obama about his tax plan on small-business. He should be ostracized! He should be ridden out of town on a rail! He should be tarred and feathered! We wasted how many taxpayer dollars investigating this guy because of what?? He asked a question? He asked a question! You know, I've worked for a lot of trucking companies whose owners couldn't even drive a truck! Did that make them unqualified to own a trucking company? Nope, just made them the man with the money.

These jackoffs should get a clue.

Anyway, covering a lot of ground and getting carried away again. Sorry.

CJ

There are holes and there are holes. "Let them sleep in holes" or "Let them eat cake". The second was French media political propaganda but still today we attribute it to Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution.. The first seems like something a Marine officer would say. Sounds tough!Doesn't every officer want to be Chesty Puller?

Let them sleep in holes is certainly my experience, and I never saw love from US Marine officers. More mucho than brains and sometimes I felt they had missed the game of cowboys and indians because few young ones knew much about war. It seems over history we USMC are more about justifying our existence by spending less, than concern for the grunts needs. In combat in Vietnam I noticed the men in the towns had new rifles and jungle boots while myself a grunt 0341 later a Forward Observer WIA 6 times, had an orange rusty M-14 and size 10 rough out boots (Korea equipment), I wore a size 9. The nice thing about frequent trips to C med in Danang is I discovered new boots. As soon as I could walk I would shuttle myself outside to the trash cans where I found boots that rocketted office pogs had on when they bought the farm. All shiney and new! So the wasteful Navy Doctors and Corpsman were my suppy angels as they tossed them in the trash.

As far as accomoda​tions my best was the plywood huts with tin roofs at Phu Bai airstrip but they had no sand bag protection and I went to the ammo bunker one day and there was no ammunition so I had to go to the field with no ammunition a few times. The failure of some officer?

I did not spend much time in these accomoda​tions my unit 2/9 had to handle everything just south of Phu Bai to the DMZ ,ocean to Laos, so I was a busy boy.

Most of the time I had no hole. What I would have given for a hole. Somewhere around Danang I choppered in and looking down there were a zillion ants, but they were not ants they were VC and NVA and did we have a party that night after they firing some hellos our way we ended at our accomoda​tions middle of dry rice paddy. I was told to dig but it was like concrete and those GI e-tools, what a joke. So a 4" hole up against a 6" dike. Hole, I awoke up with holes, Holes all over my back and special little hole thru my big toe, that got me a ride out. My hole partner not so lucky. He got a hole thru his head and his brains were left in his helmet and that was left on the field to be picked up my another comrade who told me he was ordered to clean up the mess afterward. we must not have a untidy battlefield said the Captain. The Lt that ordered us to set the mortar up in palin view instead of the available depression, thus my wholle squad was KIA or WIA and the gun blown in half was KIA himself and got a Silver Star. For what? he and the Captain should have been court martialed! We took 40% casualties. Not a half mile away was an abandoned fort with protection and pungi stick perimeter and we got overrun here. We marched thru it to the field.

My favorite hole way the length of my cot and had ammo box furniture and a poncho roof on 4 poles. I did really like that hole. You could of left me there the whole war, because it was mine and I was alone. I got C-rats every day and I got one coke-a-cola and one beer. I traded the beer for the warm soda. I really did like it. I never had it so good anywhere else.

Christma​s 1966 was one of my worse holes but a hole was better than the usual sleeping on a ambush literally in the prone with head on rifle laying in the grass, which was my usual. I was the FO so I slept on ambushes (did not need to be awake until the shooting started) and for one month in the DMZ area I patrolled each day, returned to camp and picked up another platoon and went on ambush, then patrolled, returned to base, picked up a fresh platoon. For a solid month. They were short FO's, I was told. I was on this blocking force and it was a couple of days before Christmas and raining cats and dogs. The first night we cheated. All piled into a native hut and called each other to pretend we were in the dirt so the loving officers would think we were in the poring rain. Then we slept in a depression next night and then we entered the valley to be blocked and dug in. It was Xmas eve, Dug it barely big enough to stuff myself and radioman in. Tight. rifles, radio and packs could not fit. As we tried to sleep the water poured in and we had to bail and finally get out. Filled right to the top with brown water. Merry Christmas. But it was as no contact with the enemy. They had more sense than to be out in the rain. I know because when we did kill them I noticed they were dry and we were wet from the rain earlier.

Officer give a crap? I never met one. Staff Sargents gave a shit. I gave a shit when I was leading men, but never saw an officer that gave a shit except figuring out ways to get bogus purple hearts and other medals at the cost of throwing away lives.

Biter? No, it is just the way it was, I deal with it. I followed orders, did my time. Was in USMC, USN, USAR, Fed afterward...so I took order when they were looking and did it my way when they weren't.

I later ran the show myself, elsewhere, and I said, "This time we do it my way" more comfort, less casualties, no mucho and the job got done.

Fellow Marine,

I feel for you. Vietnam was the worst hellhole any serviceman wouldn't want to be in. I defend my Commandant because he's all we have left to believe in.

Things have become different now and we have you guys to thank for it. I'm sorry for your pain, Gyrene, and I wish I could make it up to you. All I can offer you is the thanks from the bottom of my heart and the faith of the Marines like me who carry on what you've done and, anytime you need a home, point yourself to Aberdeen MS. Ask for Jackson, I'm here.