A Gradual Erosion of U.S. Force

Damon Wright jogged down a narrow street in a crowded neighborhood where every resident was trying, it seemed, to kill him. They leaned out of windows, ran across rooftops and burst from doorways, firing rockets and throwing bombs and sending countless bullets pinging around him. “It’s tough to accept: Why did I make it and somebody else didn’t?” says Wright, who still has the shrapnel he dug from his flak vest.

This was Somalia, Oct. 3, 1993. Wright, then a lieutenant, led a U.S. Army platoon through downtown Mogadishu in a bid to rescue a group of Rangers pinned down in an ambush. Even though the mission to Somalia became a bloody debacle, even though the Americans eventually abandoned the place to its feuding factions, this particular part of it was nothing less than heroic to the men of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. They waded into a firefight and rescued some of their own.

Now, the 10th Mountain Division--perhaps the most overworked U.S. military force of the post-Cold War era--has been chosen to take over the U.S. mission to Bosnia next year, the fourth year of a task originally scheduled for one. Yet Wright won’t be going. He got a civilian job as a chemical engineer in 1996, just weeks before he would have made captain.

“I just felt I wanted something different,” said Wright, who turns 29 today, Veterans Day.

People like Wright are one of the reasons Congress approved a $9.3-billion increase in defense spending last month, the biggest since the Reagan years. The boost came after the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, echoed what troops here have been saying for some time: A booming job market and an erosion of military benefits have pushed some of the best soldiers into the private sector. A post-Cold War reduction in forces has left more missions for fewer people, leaving behind a trail of burned-out service members and broken marriages. And skewed spending priorities have hurt the quality of training and caliber of equipment.

“A lot of guys figure if they’re not going to give us the resources, they might as well get out,” said Staff Sgt. Dave Meyer, a 12-year veteran with time in Somalia and Haiti. “Nobody wants to go to a place like Somalia and get somebody killed because they weren’t trained.”

Up here amid the crisp, autumnal beauty of northern New York, not far from the mighty surge of the St. Lawrence River, people are fixated less on impeachment and more on procurement, less on Monica and more on Milosevic, simply because their lives may depend on it. And some fear an erosion of their ability to inflict harm.

During the Senate hearings, some lawmakers said the Pentagon was using scare tactics to angle for a Cold War-sized boost in post-Cold War defense spending. And some generals blamed Congress for keeping open obsolete bases and approving pork-barrel projects to benefit their own districts, taking money away from essential training and equipment.

Yet most experts agree that there has been a sharp drop in readiness, particularly among the so-called “follow-on” troops that typically succeed a front-line force, just as the 10th Mountain intends to do in Bosnia next year, when it replaces the 1st Cavalry Division as the main U.S. force in the divided nation.

It is a mission that seems so far in the future that soldiers actually were relieved when they found out about it. Usually, tearful goodbyes come with much less warning for a unit that, in many ways, has become a microcosm of a military in transition.

Army Cites Big Increase in Operations

The forested countryside, immaculate grounds and almost elegant red-brick buildings that the 10th Mountain calls home comprise one of the world’s loveliest military installations, a pleasant retreat for 27,000 soldiers, family members and support personnel. But the pastoral grandeur belies the wear and tear on what has been the Army’s hardest-working force.

The Army says its operations are up 300% since the Berlin Wall fell, and it’s not hard to see why. Besides Somalia, soldiers from 10th Mountain have ripped open rations in the Persian Gulf, Haiti, Bosnia, Uzbekistan, Panama and the Sinai Peninsula. They aided relief efforts during Hurricane Andrew in Florida and delivered meals to people isolated by last winter’s ice storms in the Northeast. They’re spending November training in the Mojave desert.

“It’s been a fast train,” said Staff Sgt. Terry Abbott, a Somalia veteran who’s been deployed three of the last five years, a pace that cost him his first marriage. “I’m on my second family now.”

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, after touring Ft. Drum and other bases, told Congress last month that the workload is indeed wearing on the military. He agreed with the Joint Chiefs’ contention that U.S. forces could suffer heavy casualties if they had to fight two regional conflicts at once. With the potential for U.S. military action both in Kosovo and now Iraq, that scenario has rarely seemed more possible.

The 10th Mountain’s commander, Brig. Gen Lawson W. Magruder III, said his division is in taut fighting trim, though he conceded that some elements have spent more time in the field than they should have. He also said there was a scarcity of 40-millimeter ammunition and a $36-million shortfall in camp maintenance. And the ranks of NCOs have plunged 10% this year alone.

But he said training is still tough, and more units conduct more sophisticated live-fire training than they did a few years ago. “We’re a much more lethal force than we were in 1992-93,” he said.

Yet veterans of past missions said the amount of training with live ammunition has in fact plunged in recent years, a bad omen for a light-infantry force expected to pop up in places quickly.

“You can train with blanks all you want. It’s essentially laser tag,” said Staff Sgt. Steve Horn, 28, a 10-year veteran who fought in Mogadishu. “We had more capability then. We don’t do enough live-fire training to throw a battalion into a mission like that.”

Live-ammo training in recent months has been good, but probably was low before that because of a flurry of missions, said Lt. Col. David Bongi, commander of the division’s 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, the division’s busiest unit.

Yet even a perception among junior officers and NCOs that they’re being shortchanged on training is having a “corrosive” effect on readiness, said John Hillen, defense analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations. “Readiness stinks,” he said.

Many soldiers said pay, which the Defense Department says is generally 14% below private sector counterparts, and a cut in retirement benefits--to 40% of salary from 50% after 20 years of service--have hurt morale and prompted some people to leave earlier.

Not only that, some of the more seasoned soldiers here think the newest recruits are strictly bottom of the barrel, a Nintendo generation of kids who can barely break 20 push-ups, dribble a basketball or jog without jiggling. The state of fitness is so flabby that the Army last month proposed easing physical requirements for its youngest soldiers--including shaving a minute off the requirement for the two-mile run.

Maj. Shelly Stellwagen, an Army spokeswoman in Washington, said the new standards, slated to go into effect Oct. 1, were delayed while the brass sifts through heavy feedback from officers in the field.

A sheepish Spc. Kevin Nusser, 20, conceded that PT--physical training--was pretty tough. “I just got smoked when I first came in here,” he said.

Magruder seemed taken aback by the complaints. He conceded that younger people in general may not be as physically fit these days. And some older personnel are finding opportunities elsewhere. “Some officers don’t even need to float a resume,” Magruder said. “The headhunters come get them.”

Headhunters like Harry Wilson, who has been recruiting officers for the private sector for 26 years, have never seen a labor force so willing to be raided.

“That market is just phenomenal,” said Wilson, a partner in Military Recruiting Institute, a nationwide employment agency with offices in Houston and Atlanta. “Nobody wants to work for an organization that is limping, and the military is limping.”

Wilson said junior officers with college degrees in particular are being snapped up by companies such as Kraft, Michelin, Coca-Cola Co. and major accounting firms like Ernst & Young and Arthur Andersen, the latter of which has hired 90 service people in the last year. A former Naval officer and Persian Gulf veteran hired by Ernst & Young, Dennis Basara, said he’s recruited a dozen other officers in the last year.

As a result of the brain drain, the military is increasingly giving more responsibility to less-experienced officers. Bongi said he has lieutenants performing captain’s duties, albeit more slowly and less effectively.

Quantifying “readiness” is hard even for the military. Last March, the General Accounting Office said that the Department of Defense’s quarterly reports to Congress are so vague they are virtually useless.

Nevertheless, the Navy said aviation crashes are up 80%, likely because of less money for training, and it has 18,000 vacant seagoing positions. It’s missed its recruiting goal this year for the first time in the 25-year history of the volunteer army. The Air Force said it is short 700 pilots, who are bolting to the airlines despite $60,000 reenlistment bonuses. The Army said it is leaking mechanics, military police officers, noncommissioned officers and experienced junior officers.

The post-Cold War reduction in the armed forces--from 2.1 million to 1.4 million--has disguised some retention problems, said Sgt. Maj. Jerome Pionk, the Army’s retention policy expert. Though Army reenlistment rates have remained stable overall, specific categories are eroding. The retention rate of mid-career Army officers like Damon Wright--those with between three and 10 years--dropped to 70% from 75% between 1993 to 1997.

During the drawdown, Pionk said, troops were trimmed without commensurate cuts in bases and command structures, leaving skeletal forces at places like Ft. Riley, Kan., where units have been short 25% of their sergeants, 34% of their mechanics and have more tanks than crews to drive them.

Pionk said a recent survey he conducted of people leaving the Army found that the biggest reason was too many deployments, followed by the cut in retirement benefits. Pionk said his son, an Army captain, is deluged with job offers. “He’s going to get out,” he said.

All of this concerted complaining in recent weeks had an effect: The appropriations bill approved by Congress contains nearly $2 billion for Bosnia operations--which means units won’t have to dip into their own budgets at the expense of other things--and $1.3 billion for readiness, including various enlistment bonuses and a 3.6% pay hike. A Defense Department spokesman called it a “down payment” on dealing with readiness.

Yet Congress refused to reinstate the 20-year, 50% retirement rate, which likely will be addressed next year. For some people, though, it’s too late.

Capt. Michael Kelly was on track to make major ahead of his peers after an eight-year career as a helicopter pilot, which included hair-raising missions to Haiti and Somalia. Most recently he was with the 3rd Infantry at Ft. Stewart, Ga., which the Pentagon says is so strapped it hasn’t had the money to train at the battalion level in two years.

Kelly decided to get out after his wife got pregnant last year and now works as an information systems consultant for Ernst & Young in Cleveland. Kelly said the downsizing of U.S. military forces has left service personnel with too many missions away from home.

“People get fed up,” he said. “All the people I respect are leaving or are already gone.”

A Mission That Went Horribly Awry

When he was considering college during the peaceful days of the Cold War, Damon Wright, a native of Grand Island, N.Y., looked at ROTC more as a financing source than a career option, particularly since he wanted to attend a costly engineering school.

He graduated in 1992 from Clarkson College and was commissioned as a lieutenant with the 10th Mountain’s 2-14--short for 2nd Battalion, 14th Regiment--which fought in Vietnam, Korea and Nazi Germany, wrested Guam from Spain, battled Confederates in Virginia and Indians in Montana, though it got to Little Big Horn too late to help Custer.

Wright and the rest of the 2-14 were assigned to Somalia at a time when the humanitarian mission had collapsed into a hunt for an intransigent warlord, a mission that went horribly awry when the Rangers were ambushed.

Meyer remembered coming to an intersection, taking a left and running into “every war movie you’d ever seen.” Bombs went off, rockets whizzed by, bullets from every direction bounced off buildings and skipped across the road. Soldiers today grope for words to describe the sheer quantity of carnage, the stunning density of sound that surrounded them, the apocalyptic image of burning barricades of tires and the Doppler whir of choppers rising and falling, looking for something to kill.

Because he was an M-60 gunner, Spc. Jim Guelzow’s job was to blast away down alleys and side streets while the rest of the platoon crossed intersections. He looked through his night scope, fired his 23-pound machine gun and watched his targets fly backward, squirm in the dirt, finally lie still. He only had a split second to decide: Was that running woman carrying ammo? Or just her kid?

“There was a couple of times I thought I shouldn’t have hit something I did,” Guelzow said, recalling the 30 or so people he’s sure he mowed down. By the time the battle ended 15 hours later, 18 Americans were dead and scores wounded. Hundreds of Somalis died. A few days later, President Clinton announced he was pulling troops out of Somalia.

During a welcoming ceremony back at Ft. Drum, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan told the weary 2-14 that they wouldn’t be sent anywhere for at least a year. Nine months later, Wright was leading his platoon to Haiti on a peacekeeping mission so frustrating, he said, that his troops weren’t even allowed to lock and load their rifles during a raid on a militia headquarters, though they did anyway.

When he came back to Ft. Drum, Wright said, money was tight, ammo was rationed and live-fire training curtailed. His wife was getting ready to graduate from law school. Rather than face getting shipped out again, he took his discharge. “We both decided that we didn’t want that lifestyle,” Elizabeth Wright said.

He works in Buffalo, not too far from Guelzo, who also decided not to reenlist and now works as a mechanical designer.

Both are watching where their old unit goes next. Though the division as a whole takes over the Bosnia mission next year, the 2-14 is coming off a nine-month supporting stint in Bosnia that lasted twice as long as it was supposed to.

One common casualty of such heavy-duty deployment is the collapse of families, soldiers say. Sgt. Stan Seidel said his wife left him last month. “Bosnia did us in,” he said.

E-5 Scott Hartman, who fought in Somalia with Wright and Guelzow, got out last year after nine years because he was staring at an assignment to Korea after stints in Germany, Haiti and the Sinai. Now he’s a Bell Atlantic telephone repairman in Lebanon, Pa., making almost twice what he made in the army. He doesn’t miss the old days.

“You’re constantly in the field,” said Hartman, who blames his deployments for the breakup of his first marriage in 1996. “At the drop of a hat you’re in some Third World country fighting over who knows what.”

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.