The Fayetteville Observer April 21, 2012
Photo gaffe raises doubts about the 4th Brigade Combat Team's preparedness
By John Ramsey
The pictures speak for themselves: young paratroopers posing with the bodies and dismembered parts of dead insurgents in Afghanistan.
The photos, published in the Los Angeles Times this week, elicited quick condemnation from the Pentagon, the White House and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Military officials have been conducting a criminal investigation since the Times showed them the photos last month
But the photos - reportedly taken around February 2010 by soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team - reflect only an instant, with no hint of everything that happened before or after.
Military experts say there's no excusing the soldiers' behavior, which appears to violate the rules of war. But they say taking a closer look at the circumstances of the deployment may help explain the soldiers' actions.
The 3,500 men and women of 4th BCT, typically a combat unit, flew to Afghanistan in August 2009 with a different kind of mission: spread across an area the size of North Carolina and South Carolina and mold the notoriously inept Afghan police force into something like beat cops.
On this deployment, they would focus more on making friends than killing enemies, a role traditionally played by Special Forces but increasingly done at the time by regular forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bert Puckett was a command sergeant major in the 4th Brigade Combat Team as it trained for its new mission. He would be swept out of his job because some of his soldiers put racist and sexist pictures in daily command briefings. Before that, Puckett spent 25 years in the Army. He is a former Ranger who parachuted into Panama during the 1989 Operation Just Cause. In 2007, Puckett was senior enlisted adviser to the Afghan National Army.
He remembers the meetings with the combat team's commanders - arguments, he said, about how to succeed and how to even define success. The phrase most often used among commanders to describe their mission was "pushing Jell-O uphill," he said.
"Young leaders were placed in a position that they weren't necessarily prepared for," Puckett said. "It takes 2 1/2to 3 years to make an SF soldier, and we're just gonna do with an infantry brigade?"
Capt. Christopher Foreman, an 82nd Airborne Division spokesman, was a company commander in the 4th Brigade during part of the deployment. He said he rejects any suggestion that paratroopers were not prepared for their mission as "patently false."
In today's Army, Foreman said, many of the troops deploying have already been to war at least once.
"Months before our mission or our deployment, we're already trained up, we're more than trained up for a multitude of missions," he said. "I think they were 100 percent ready."
The paratrooper who provided the L.A. Times with the photos said he did so to help expose "a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops."
The brigade lost 35 men, mostly to roadside bombs or suicide bombs.
More controversy
The pictures sparked the third wave of negative publicity from the brigade's year in Afghanistan.
Col. Brian Drinkwine, then the brigade commander, made the rare move of firing a lieutenant colonel battalion commander and his command sergeant major in the middle of the deployment. The official reason was for racist and sexist posters inserted into daily briefings by soldiers in Lt. Col. Frank Jenio's battalion.
At least one other battalion commander said the firing was retaliation for a dispute between the Drinkwine and Jenio families. Soon after, Drinkwine's wife was barred from any contact with 4th Brigade soldiers or their family members.
Michael O'Hanlon, a national security and defense policy expert with the Brookings Institution, said he has heard concerns from people in the organization leading the NATO operation in Afghanistan about a lack of discipline and command problems in an 82nd Airborne Division unit around the timeframe that 4th Brigade was deployed, but he could not remember if the concerns were specifically about that brigade.
O'Hanlon said he has no sympathy for the soldiers' behavior in the photo controversy, but there could be lessons for the Army to learn from the situation.
At that time, the Army was still learning on the job how best to train Iraqis and Afghans to protect their own countries.
"If you had a command environment that was already a little bit lacking in proper discipline and then on top of that was trying to do a mission it didn't really understand ... or even feel properly motivated to do, then you could have these problems compound each other," O'Hanlon said.
Toss in the fact that the soldiers were spread across such a large area, increasing the reliance on noncommissioned officers and other lower-ranking soldiers to do the right thing. While the overwhelming majority of them do an outstanding job, O'Hanlon said, the fraction who misbehave sometimes won't have someone to correct them immediately.
John Pike, a military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, said some soldiers have misbehaved like this in every war and it was probably more prevalent in past conflicts. The difference is that today every soldier has a camera in his pocket, he said.
A quick Google search can turn up black-and-white images of U.S. troops posing next to dead Vietnamese soldiers.
Soldiers act out at war because of the stress of having to kill and avoid being killed, Pike said.
The soldiers in the photos were sent to get iris scans, photos and fingerprints from at least one suicide bomber and three insurgents who killed themselves when they accidentally detonated a roadside bomb, the L.A. Times reported.
The mental toll of sorting through body parts and the fact that insurgents were attempting to kill the soldiers or their buddies make the situation a little easier to understand, Pike said.
"You take the combination of combat with the enemy and doing something that's outside my lane - well, that's going to produce more stress, more misbehavior than you might have hoped for," Pike said. "If those troops were being stressed outside their lane, if they were going through more than they bargained for and if the chain of command had more than they bargained for, then you can understand how this might arrive."
© Copyright 2012, The Fayetteville Observer
