Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground - Hardcover

Kaplan, Robert D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400061326 ISBN 13: 9781400061327

Publisher: Random House, 2005

Synopsis

In this landmark book, Robert D. Kaplan, veteran correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and author of Balkan Ghosts, shows how American imperialism and the Global War on Terrorism are implemented on the ground, mission by mission, in the most exotic landscapes around the world.

Given unprecedented access, Kaplan takes us from the jungles of the southern Philippines to the glacial dust bowls of Mongolia, from the forts of Afghanistan to the forests of South America–not to mention Iraq–to show us Army Special Forces, Marines, and other uniformed Americans carrying out the many facets of U.S. foreign policy: negotiating with tribal factions, storming terrorist redoubts, performing humanitarian missions and training foreign soldiers.

In Imperial Grunts, Kaplan provides an unforgettable insider’s account not only of our current involvement in world affairs, but also of where America, including the culture of its officers and enlisted men, is headed. This is the rare book that has the potential to change the way readers view the men and women of the military, war, and the global reach of American imperialism today.

As Kaplan writes, the only way to understand America’s military is “on foot, or in a Humvee, with the troops themselves, for even as elites in New York and Washington debated imperialism in grand, historical terms, individual marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors–all the cultural repositories of America’s unique experience with freedom–were interpreting policy on their own, on the ground, in dozens upon dozens of countries every week, oblivious to such faraway discussions. . . . It was their stories I wanted to tell: from the ground up, at the point of contact.”

Never before has America’s overarching military strategy been parsed so incisively and evocatively. Kaplan introduces us to lone American servicemen whose presence in obscure countries is largely unknown, and concludes with a heart-stopping portrait of marines in the first battle in Fallujah. Extraordinary in its scope, beautifully written, Imperial Grunts, the first of two volumes, combines first-rate reporting with the sensitivity and insights of an acclaimed writer steeped in history, literature, and philosophy, to deliver a masterly account of America’s global role in the twenty-first century.

• Imperial Grunts paints a vivid picture of how defense policy is implemented at the grassroots level.

• Kaplan travels throughout the world where U.S. forces are located. This is not just a book about Iraq or Afghanistan.

• Rather than debate imperialism, Kaplan relies on a keen understanding of history, philosophy, and in-the-field reporting to show how it actually works on the ground.

• Imperial Grunts escapes Washington and shows us what it’s like to live with the grunts day to day.

Praise for Imperial Grunts

“One of the most important books of the last several years. Robert Kaplan uses his prodigious energy and matchless reporting skills to takes us on to the front lines with the new warrior-diplomats who use weapons, imagination, and personal passion to protect and advance the interests of the United States. This is a generation every American should come to know.”
–Tom Brokaw

“Robert Kaplan has brilliantly captured the story of today’s U.S. military operating in far-flung places on strange missions. Imperial Grunts is the most insightful and superbly written account of soldiering in the New World Disorder to date. It is a must read for all Americans.”
–General Anthony C. Zinni, United States Marine Corps (Ret.)

“Kaplan infuses us with a sense of hope about the future. Through astonishing observations, truths, and stories, Imperial Grunts introduces a brand-new way of thinking about the enduring virtue of the American spirit.”
–George Crile, author of Charlie Wilson’s War

“No recent book so well or so vividly portrays the challenges of the modern United States military. With an impressive grasp of the complexities of military missions worldwide, Robert Kaplan exposes the reader to the world of the modern soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine. A must read for both civilian and military leaders.”
–General Barry R. McCaffrey, United States Army (Ret.), Bradley Distinguished Professor of International Security Studies, United States Military Academy

“Imperial Grunts is vintage Robert Kaplan, combining a deep appreciation of history and wonderfully vivid writing with an infectious wanderlust.”
–Max Boot, Senior Fellow, National Security Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, author of The Savage Wars of Peace


“Splendid! This is the finest work in print about today’s American fighting men and the challenges they face around the globe. Kaplan’s courage in researching this book under combat conditions is complemented by his integrity and great literary skill. Imperial Grunts simply could not be better.”
–Ralph Peters, author of Beyond Baghdad

About this title

About the Author

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the bestselling author of eleven previous books on foreign affairs and travel, including Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth, The Coming Anarchy, and Eastward to Tartary and most recently Imperial Grunts. He is currently the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Naval Academy. He lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.

Reviews

Robert D. Kaplan is a traveler, he insists, not a journalist -- or if he is a journalist, his heroes are the great battlefield correspondents of World War II, not the self-consciously skeptical, hair-styled anchors of the evening news. He has now written a book about several years of visiting with the troops at the far corners of the American Empire, and -- like Richard Tregaskis in Guadalcanal Diary or, better yet, Ernie Pyle -- he identifies keenly and unabashedly with the troops. The author's note at the end of the book sums it up: "Rarely have I so thoroughly enjoyed the company of a group of people as much as I have Americans in uniform." Not the generals, mind you, but the sergeants and captains who are the rough-hewn centurions working in the hard -- sometimes beautiful but more often simply unlovely and dangerous -- margins of the developed world.

Kaplan has his loathings too. He notes more than once how much he despises the academic, journalistic, diplomatic and wonkish elites. Staying at a Comfort Suites outside Camp Pendleton, Calif., on the coast between San Diego and Los Angeles, he cheerfully munches prepackaged muffins and drinks bad coffee with Marines and contractors. "In its own small and sterile way," Kaplan writes, "the morning ritual underscored how far removed the policy nomenklatura in Washington and New York -- in its cocoon of fine restaurants and theoretical discussions -- was from the frugal necessities of those who actually manned and maintained the Empire." And he takes on many of the other dislikes of the men (he encounters very few American women in this book) with whom he lives: diplomats, bureaucrats, most Army general officers, lumbering regular-army units, and all REMFs (an acronym unfit for printing in a family newspaper whose first letters stand for "rear echelon").

After a while, these sentiments begin to look more like a chip on the shoulder than an argument; they are, in any event, a distraction from the purpose of the book, which is to depict elements of the U.S. Army (Special Forces soldiers, above all) and some units in the Marine Corps in the front lines of the awkwardly named "global war on terror." Kaplan devotes separate chapters to his visits to Yemen, Colombia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Iraq, introducing each trip with potted history and anthropology.

The soldiers, many of them from the U.S. Special Operations Command, are mostly trainers and liaisons with local forces -- developing local capabilities to fight insurgents and often chafing to get into the fight themselves. In other places (as in Mongolia), they are simply building cooperative relationships with militaries interested in being tied to the United States. These troops are quite different, for the most part, from the soldiers of line units of the so-called Big Army -- the army that tends to think of thousands of soldiers rather than dozens, of fortified bases rather than inconspicuous huts, and of soldiers dressed and equipped to uniform standards rather than the raffish and individualistic kit of the Special Forces.

As befits such a global tour, Kaplan is a very good travel writer indeed. He superbly describes bazaars and rainforests, brothels and junkyards, hootches and bases, M-4 carbines and M-240 machine guns, heat and dust. He captures in a few pages what it takes to train a moderately competent sergeant or plan an assault on Fallujah.

He is also an acute observer of soldiers. His is a picture of perhaps the most experienced and able military the United States has ever had, led by junior and mid-level officers and NCOs who are versatile, self-reliant and quick-witted. It is also a military that is culturally distinct from the stateside groups that make policy -- the latte-swilling cultural elites at whom Kaplan periodically thumbs his nose. His aversion to that elite sometimes leads to silliness, as when he denounces the "bent toward pacifism" of New England, going back to the War of 1812. The notion of such a tradition would have surprised the sailors who manned the broadsides of the USS Constitution, the soldiers from the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment who held the left end of the line at Gettysburg or the Boston Irish Marines who fought in Fallujah.

If Kaplan's history is sometimes shaky, though, his contemporary sociology is not. American soldiers are, as he insists, predominantly working- or lower-middle-class folk, the products (with the exception of West Point and Annapolis) of state schools and part-time degree programs. He describes the culture of guns and NASCAR, chewing tobacco and Budweiser, and writes affectionately of the "oldest, simplest virtues: unblinking courage and straightforwardness, which was both revealed and obscured by the profane language they used." More than once, he comments on the power of evangelical Christianity in the American officer corps and the rise of a religiously devout segment of the military -- the Church Militant in battle-dress uniforms. This last is a subtext worth a book in itself, for it gives the American military great strengths but also, perhaps, some limitations, particularly in a conflict saturated with religion.

Kaplan also captures the tremendous versatility of these men -- grunts who have seen the world and can, from first-hand experience, compare the quality of Nepalese mercenaries and Afghan militias, Singaporean officers and Colombian militias. They often lack formal expertise in the countries in which they operate, but they get by with a cheerful eagerness to plunge into unfamiliar cultures, a willingness to speak difficult languages badly and an ever-optimistic spirit. These Special Forces troops (and remember, this is not Big Army, the world of armored divisions and paratroop brigades) are indeed intensely admirable people. Occasionally, Kaplan romanticizes them, but not always. "One shouldn't expect soldiers to be interesting," he writes. "War is work, and like all work it is for the literal minded." As a tough paratrooper colonel friend of mine (and a very interesting man) once put it, "War is a lot like plumbing. The pipes all have to fit for something to happen." What Kaplan does not do is reflect on the implications of having the plumbers serve so frequently as the effective end of U.S. foreign policy. All too often, America's face abroad is not the diplomat in the expensive suit but the Special Forces grunt in trainer's fatigues.

Kaplan sometimes asserts and sometimes tries to argue for the inevitability of an American Empire. And here, in his strategic analysis -- an enterprise that he thinks is usually done by sissy elitists -- his views are less certain. While the tone of Imperial Grunts is generally as optimistic as that of the can-do sergeants and majors he describes, a more somber tone occasionally intrudes when he considers the vastness of their nation-building mission: "The task that the U.S. appeared to have in both Yemen and Colombia was similar. And it was similarly impossible: to make countries out of places that were never meant to be countries." Indeed, the most successful stories that he has to offer are also the most limited: the maverick lieutenant colonel who has learned how to fit in with the Mongolian military, the major who thought that the post-Sept. 11 training mission in the Philippines was to develop Westernized officers in that country's military and make some useful contacts among its elites.

The most ambitious mission -- the attempt to bring order to Iraq -- is the most frustrating. Kaplan acknowledges why, in a passage that unfortunately he does not extend: "In a world where nineteenth-century-style colonialism was simply impractical and where the very spread of democracy for which America struggled meant that it could no longer operate with impunity, an approach that merged humanitarianism with intelligence gathering, in order to achieve low-cost partial victories, was what imperialism demanded in the early twenty-first century." Not much of an empire, a British viceroy would probably think, and rightly so. In fact, the United States exercises a kind of uneven hegemony in the world, sometimes exerting overpowering force, sometimes tripping on the incoherence of its aims, often stumbling over the complexity of its bureaucracy, usually interested not in ruling territory but in fending off misfortune.

Kaplan has made a career of bravely covering the ungoverned parts of this world. Until Sept. 11, 2001, when the consequences of allowing al Qaeda its Afghan base became clear, most Americans did not think they had to care very much about them; some would argue that we still should not. But chaos exercises its compulsions even upon reluctant imperialists. There are many instruments of national power other than the military, some of which Kaplan unfairly ignores -- think of the diplomats and activists who helped secure the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, for instance. Nor should one be as comfortable as he is with having the military assume foreign-policy-making roles; plumbers should not be architects. But for better or worse, the grunts Kaplan describes so brilliantly will be out there representing America in the chaotic zones of a dangerous world, and to understand them one is well advised to read this book.

Reviewed by Eliot A. Cohen
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

America is no less an imperial power than Britain and Rome in their times, claims veteran journalist Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, etc.)—one that is backed by the same sort of enforcers. To illustrate, he travels to seven nations and describes how American troops are, if not ruling the world, working to persuade it to follow our lead. The author joins elite units (generally marines or special forces) sent to shore up friendly governments, win people's hearts, train security forces and defeat terrorism—an increasingly vague term that includes narco-guerrillas, local warlords, unruly tribes and criminal gangs. Living among working soldiers, Kaplan makes no secret of his admiration for their camaraderie, practicality and rational if politically incorrect views. All roll their eyes when our leaders proclaim that defeating terrorism requires democratic governments; according to Kaplan, they believe this is nonsense in Colombia, Kenya, Yemen and the Philippines—all democracies. Forbidden to fight in these countries, Americans are building infrastructure and gathering intelligence as they instruct local units, hoping American-trained leaders will eventually rise to positions of authority. Military buffs will prefer the chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan, where the soldiers are slugging it out. Stabilizing all these nations may take decades, these men and women say—except in Iraq, where it may take longer. (On sale Sept. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

America bears the burdens of a civilizing empire, like it or not, Kaplan argues in this tour of élite Special Forces and Marine outposts in remote and hostile places. The invariably buff, commonsensical soldiers he encounters hold forth in a stirring vernacular of acronym-laced profanity, and, together, constitute an admirable portrait of America's volunteer, working-class warrior caste. Yet their stories compete with Kaplan's attempts to romanticize the Bush Administration's claims on global power. "As I traveled from continent to continent," he writes, "my most recurring image would be one that Remington himself might have painted: singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes." The troubled military missions that Kaplan observes in Colombia, the Philippines, Djibouti, Afghanistan, and Iraq hardly seem the stuff of manifest destiny. An alternative to Kaplan's view is offered by a National Guardsman he encounters in Afghanistan: "We're like tourists with guns."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

An experienced military journalist has created this worthwhile portrait of American ground troops, mostly in elite units, working with the armed forces of other countries to fight terrorism, to be sure, but actually doing a job once done by the Roman legions. Whether the American troops will enjoy Roman-like success in Kenya, Colombia, and the Philippines, to say nothing of Iraq and Afghanistan, is something about which the soldiers may be more realistic than Kaplan, who otherwise skillfully and knowledgeably presents the soldiers' divergent backgrounds and very high levels of technical skill. Kaplan also elicits the soldiers' personal hopes and nightmares and their frequent empathy for the people they are, at considerable risk to life and limb, trying to help. In all, this is one of a number of group portraits of the U.S. armed forces that make it plain that their authors, whatever they may think of the policies behind particular troop deployments, are anything but hostile to the troops themselves. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

CENTCOM

YEMEN, WINTER 2002

With Notes On Colombia

“Yemen was vast. And it was only one small country. . . . How to manage such an imperium?”


In November 1934, when the British traveler and Arabist Freya Stark journeyed to Yemen to explore the broad oasis of the Wadi Hadhramaut, the most helpful person she encountered was the French aesthete and business tycoon Antonin Besse, whose Aden-based trading empire stretched from Abyssinia to East Asia. Besse, dressed in a white dinner jacket with creased white shorts, served excellent wine at dinner, and was described as “a Merchant in the style of the Arabian Nights or the Renaissance.”1 In December 2002, when I went to Yemen, the most helpful person I encountered was Bob Adolph, a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Special Forces, who was the United Nations security officer for Yemen.

Adolph, whose military career had taken him all over the world, had the chest of a bodybuilder and a bluff, bulldog face under wire-rim glasses and a creased ball cap. I spotted him on the other side of passport control, waiting in the dusky warehouse under fluorescent lights that functioned as the Sana‘a airport.

Because of their own al-Qaeda problem, the Yemenis were suspicious of anyone with a Pakistani visa inside his passport. I was pulled over by a man smoking a cigarette and wearing a torn sweater and slippers. Adolph, seeing that I was making no progress, ambled over to him, speaking in bad but passable Arabic, gritting his teeth each time he made a point. Others were also haggling with customs and passport officers. It was a typical third world scene: confusion and a cacophony of negotiation in place of fixed standards.

After more of Adolph’s pleading, I got back my passport. We headed for the parking lot. It was 2 a.m. Two beggar boys grabbed my bags and put them in the Land Cruiser. Adolph slipped them half a dollar in riyals. I was relaxed. The Arab world, while afflicted by political violence, had little or no common crime. In this sense, Islam had risen to the challenge of urbanization and modern life, and was a full-fledged success.

“This is the most democratic state in Arabia. For that reason it’s the most dangerous and unstable,” Adolph said, explaining that when Western-style democracy replaced absolute dictatorship in places with high unemployment rates and weak, corrupt institutions, the result was often a security vacuum that groups like al-Qaeda could take advantage of. “I’ve drawn up multiple evacuation plans for the U.N. staff here, updating calling-tree lists,” he went on. “If the place goes down during the night, I can have all our people in Asmara the next day in time for brunch at the InterContinental there. The trick is to keep doing favors for people in the army, the police, and the tribes, and never call them in, until you need them to get your people out.”

He veered to avoid another head-on. “Notice the way people drive here, you’ve got ten-year-olds propped up on phone books driving Granddad around town. Forget about rules and licenses. Keep all of your cash in different pockets. Despite all of the guns, ready cash always gives you more power in Yemen than a gun. Everybody in this country is a businessman, and a good one.” His tone was commanding, didactic.

It was the last night of Ramadan. Though a few hours before dawn, the streets were noisy and crowded, and gaily strung with lights. Sana‘a resembled a fairy-tale vision of Arabia, with basalt and mudbrick buildings festooned with colored glass fretwork and gypsum friezes. I recalled my first visit to Yemen in 1986.

Back then, the diplomats and other area specialists had assured me that with the discovery of oil in significant amounts, the Yemeni government would soon have the financial wherewithal to extend its power into the countryside, ending the feudal chaos. The opposite had occurred. To placate the sheikhs, the government bribed them with the newfound wealth, so oil revenues strengthened the medieval periphery rather than the modernizing capital. Kidnappings of foreign tourists erupted in the mid-1990s, as the sheikhs got greedy and sought to further blackmail the government. The government also had to compete with wealthy Wahabi extremists from Saudi Arabia and with al-Qaeda, who sometimes had more money with which to influence local Yemeni tribal leaders. With al-Qaeda targeting oil vessels off the Yemeni coast, maritime insurance rates had gone up, reducing sea traffic and consequently the amount of money from oil exports, so the regime had less money for bribes. The foreign community feared that a new wave of kidnappings might lie ahead.

For al-Qaeda, Yemen was a conveniently chaotic, culturally sympathetic country in the heart of Arabia, so much more desirable than far-afield, non-Arab Afghanistan. It might just be a matter of chipping away at the regime.

In downtown Sana‘a, I noticed that people were not wearing the cheap Westernized polyesters that signify the breakdown of tribal identities under the pressure cooker of urbanization. They still wore white thobes with checkered keffiyahs or Kashmiri shawls, with the men sporting jambiyas (ornamental curved daggers) in the middle of their belts.

“It’s tribal everything,” another U.S. military source would explain to me. “The ministries are fiefdoms for the various tribes. It’s a world of stovepipe bureaucracies. All the information flows to the top and none of it is shared along the way, so that only [President Ali Abdullah] Saleh knows what is going on. As for the furious demands from the Americans to fight bin Laden, we Americans are just another crazy tribe that Saleh holds close to his chest, and balances against the others. Same with al-Qaeda. Saleh has to appease and do favors for everyone to stay in power.” Yeah, I thought, whichever dog is closest to biting him, he feeds.

Adolph told me that the Yemeni government controlled only about 50 percent of the country. A high-ranking Western diplomat in Yemen would hotly dispute that claim, telling me that Saleh controlled “all the main roads, oil fields, and pipelines,” which, I countered, was less than 50 percent of the country. “Well,” the diplomat huffed, “he controls what he needs to control.” If that was the case, I thought, then why was there such a problem with al-Qaeda in Yemen at the time of my visit? The difference between Adolph and this diplomat was not in their facts, or even in their perceptions, it would turn out. Rather, like the Marine lieutenant colonel I had met briefly at Camp Pendleton, Adolph didn’t know how to be subtle, or how to dissemble. He was brutally, refreshingly direct. Dealing with him saved time.

Inside the galloping Land Cruiser, Adolph knocked off the most recent security “incidents” in the country. His apartment building had been the scene of a gun battle between the son of a highly placed sheikh and government forces, with four people “KIA” (killed in action). Several more had been killed during a firefight between the al-Haima and Bani Mattar tribes outside Sana‘a. Two bombs had exploded near the homes of government officials in the capital. In nearby Ma’rib there had been an attempt to assassinate the regional governor, Abdullah Ali al-Nassi, when tribesmen blocked the road and opened fire on his vehicle. The reasons for all this violence remained murky. As for al-Jawf and other areas on the Saudi frontier, there had been so many bombings and gun battles that Adolph hadn’t bothered to investigate or keep count. All this was a prelude to the assassination of a leading Yemeni politician and the murder of three American missionaries.

Adolph, trained as a hostage negotiator by Great Britain’s New Scotland Yard, told me what to do in case I was kidnapped: “Don’t protest. Be submissive. Show them pictures of your family to establish a relationship. After the first few hours, ask to see the sheikh. If they take you to meet him, it’s all right. It’s an authorized kidnapping, for the sake of convincing the authorities to give the tribe a new road or water well. They’ll tell you the negotiations should be completed in a few days; figure two months. Foreigners have been known to gain weight in the course of being held hostage in Yemen. Each family in the village will host you for a while, to divide the cost of your food. But if they don’t take you to see the sheikh the first day, start to worry. Then it may be an unauthorized kidnapping, and it’s okay to think of ways to escape.”

He slowed the vehicle as we got closer to his apartment in a wealthy area of Sana‘a where many expatriates lived. High walls, armed guards, and concertina wire were everywhere: the paraphernalia of paranoia.



I was headed for Injun Country, Adolph told me. He meant the desert wastes of northern Yemen abutting the Saudi border, a border that the Yemeni government was attempting to demarcate, even as local tribesmen were blowing up the new border markers. The next day I had an appointment with a sheikh who could provide me with guards and a guide, a sheikh for whom Adolph had done favors.

Sheikh Abdulkarim bin ali Murshed, forty, looked older than he was: something not uncommon in a country where extreme poverty and a high birthrate literally sped up time. Well over half of the people in Yemen hadn’t been born when I had first visited sixteen years before. From his father, Sheikh Murshed had inherited control of one hundred thousand Khawlan tribesmen who lived east of Sana‘a. They were part of the Bakil tribal confede...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400061326
• ISBN 13: 9781400061327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448