The Shreveport Times January 17, 2005
Tragedies of war may become all too common
Tragedies may become common for communities, observers warn.
By John Andrew Prime
As the nation's military relies more heavily on state National Guard and military reserves, incidents in which several soldiers from the same community are killed at the same time may become more common.
"If the bulk of any unit is composed of people from the same area, such as the Ark-La-Tex, and if they are put in harm's way, then the odds of people coming from the area being killed in larger numbers has to go up," said Shreveport historian and military author Gary Joiner. "It's pure probability."
Louisiana was brutally introduced to this Jan. 6 when a roadside bomb destroyed a Bradley armored fighting vehicle, killing all seven soldiers within. Six were from the 2/156th Infantry (Mechanized) Battalion, part of the 4,000-member 256th enhanced Separate Brigade that deployed to Iraq in October for a year's service.
Three of the soldiers were from Houma, a town of about 30,000 in LaFourche Parish. The soldiers' remains were returned to the state last week for burial with full military honors.
Four days later, another Bradley fell victim to a terrorist's bomb, and two central Louisiana soldiers, members of the brigade's 3rd Battalion, were killed, and several were injured.
Repeated nationally as more National Guard units are thrown into the fray, these losses could have an impact disproportionate to their numbers, said John Pike, founder of the Web-based GlobalSecurity.Org, created in 2000 to provide nonpartisan information on military, political and terrorism-related issues.
"The affected communities are going to be deeply traumatized," he said, citing his hometown, Springfield, Tenn.
"L Troop, 278th Cavalry is from there," he said. "They haven't had anybody hurt, but there's a whole big bunch of soldiers gone from there, and only 15,000 people in the town."
Even though the community had a big going-away for its soldiers, life has returned to normal for many of the people there.
"That is part of the problem," said Pike, who worked for nearly two decades with the Federation of American Scientists and is a current member of the Council on Foreign Relations. "We still haven't figured out whether we are at war."
Losing several soldiers at once brings war, with all its ugliness, home.
"That would be a wake-up," Pike said.
The tragedy that struck Houma also touched Bossier City. On Dec. 16, Sgt. Craig Nelson of Bossier City was injured when the Humvee he was in was hit by a roadside bomb.
Several soldiers in the vehicle with him at the time were injured. Since they were from his unit, they too were from this area, and some had even gone to school with Nelson, who died Dec. 29 after he was transferred to stateside military hospitals.
Some families feel the benefits of camaraderie, shared training and common experiences outweigh the risks of drawing manpower from specific regions.
Shreveporter Robert McLeod has two sons in the 1/156th Armor Battalion, and a third son, who has already served a hitch overseas, is about to head back into harm's way. "They've trained together for six years, and they've been trained well," he said of his sons Timothy, 24, in Charlie Company, Andrew, 25, in Bravo Company, and Robert Jr., 26, who will head later this year to Fort Leonard Wood and Fort Knox for retraining before heading overseas. "As far as I'm concerned, that's still a positive thing."
Still, he said attending services for Nelson "struck me hard" and that his heart went out to the families of the south Louisiana soldiers killed in recent attacks.
"That's quite a load," he said.
About 120,000 citizen-soldiers and airmen like the McLeod brothers are currently deployed all over the world, and the National Guard and reserves will soon make up a full 50 percent of the combat force in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Department of Defense.
"We're being used as an operational force both here at home and abroad," Army Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told CNN last week. "This operational tempo has left the Guard short in several respects, with recruiting falling short of goals and equipment wearing out quicker than planned."
Pike was more blunt.
"This war is going to break the Guard," he warns. "(Leaders) are going to have to rethink what the Guard does, because people are not going to want to join it. This war in Iraq will go on at least two more years to get Iraqi security forces set up, and American forces are going to have to make up the difference in the meantime. ... Joining the Guard will be seen as a ticket to Iraq and people will say 'I'm not going to do it.' The community calamity element is just a part of it."
Such tragedy has touched American communities and families before.
"The nation addressed this on the family level during World War II when the five Sullivan brothers were killed on the USS Juneau," Joiner said. "That tragedy struck home because so many hundreds of thousands of families had sons and brothers and fathers in combat."
That tragedy -- five sons from one family killed at once -- led to more rigorous enforcement of regulations that forbade siblings from serving in the same units or on the same ships.
"Clustered losses are notorious for causing morale problems," said Milton Finley, also a military historian and head of the social sciences department at LSU-Shreveport. "Probably the best example is in the 'Pals' concept tried by the British in World War I. You were allowed to enlist, train and fight beside men from your own village or neighborhood. The result was that in some villages in Britain there were no young men left by the end of the war -- all had been killed. The 'Pals' idea was never used again."
Art Bergeron, a former Louisiana state historian who now works on the staff of the prestigious U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., said the U.S. Army learned from the bloody losses of World War I and earlier conflicts.
"The army did attempt to get away from having siblings from serving in combat zones and forming units from various areas rather than a single town or county," Bergeron said. "A fellow in my unit in 'Nam got to go home early because his brother had received assignment to a unit in another part of the country."
Joiner said the use of state National Guard units makes the risk of future tragedies almost a certainty.
"Those guys from Houma may not have been directly related, but they obviously knew each other and probably went to school together," Joiner said. "The same thing could happen to Shreveport, Bossier City, Natchitoches -- you pick the town.
"Odds are during a protracted time of combat, you're going to see these happen, and I see (the war) going on for a long time."
© Copyright 2005, The Shreveport Times
