09 April 2007
Death and Dishonor
Tehran, 1979
There is death, of course, which is the Great Democrat and comes to us all in time.
There is also dishonor, which is an increasingly tenuous term in the age of Britney and Paris and Kevin Federline, or whatever his name is. Fame of any sort seems to pay the bills, and in-fame, as in “infamous” is a term of art that seems to be forgotten.
Maybe it is the fall of the West, or maybe it is some sort of cultural shift. I have not figured it out, and don't expect I will. Conflict has always been about theater, after all. Some argue that the British Empire lasted as long as it did because the spectacle of their rule was so intimidating.
Ulysses S. Grant was a proponent of sheer power as theater, and was most effective. One hundred and forty two years ago this morning, he accepted the surrender of Lee's Army after four years of increasingly industrial slaughter. He did so with blunt style, and allowed the Confederates their honor as they laid down their arms.
His terms said that surrender “will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage….and each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they reside.”
It worked out pretty well, but things are not that way today. The treatment of prisoners and their honor is part of the media wing of the spectrum of conflict. The British prisoners just released by the Iranians are a counterpoint to the anonymous hooded prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, or the hostages held by the dizzying number of non-state actors.
The Ministry of Defense in the UK has announced that the sailors and marines will be permitted to sell their stories, a novel concept for serving personnel. That has fed the fire of controversy on their conduct, as reflected in the video apologies released by their captors.
Some of the London press is expressing outrage over how the captives seemed to cooperate. A friend on mine, who served with Her Majesty's forces, will not accept my charitable interpretation that the young people should be permitted some latitude. He commented that "the British prisoners weren't kids any more than, say, the aircrew who flew torpedo-laden biplanes against battle-cruisers and Focke Wulf 190s during the Channel Dash of 1942 - and did not come back.”
He says the captured boarding team was led by a “Lieutenant of the Royal Navy and a Captain of the Royal Marine Commandos. Of such people, more is expected, in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service."
He was with the Royal Navy just before the Falklands war that held so many of us in grim fascination. He remembered one Royal Marine officer he knew, who later was captured along with his platoon on South Georgia Island. My friend said that “He gave up after his ammunition was gone, and after he had scored some good hits with a Milan anti-tank guided missile system. He was lucky the Argentines didn't shoot him out of hand, as often happens in the heat of overcoming a defended position. He was an arrogant young man. I remember at the time being somewhat surprised that he surrendered at all.”
The young men who commanded the British boarding party from HMS Cornwall considered that they had no useful alternative to death on the spot, and decided to take their chances with the dishonor part.
It worked out for them, in the end, though like many around the world, the circus made me queasy. I am not such a hypocrite to advocate the death of others for tenuous concepts like honor, and a little national humiliation, is not necessarily a bad thing. Unless it turns into a way of life, like in France.
I also do not know the specific Rules of Engagement under which they operated. The American experience in Vietnam is a case in point. The code of conduct they were expected to follow was inflexible and unchanged from World War Two: Name, rank and serial number, in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
That only works when your captor follows it. Some very brave men were exposed to endless torture to make them issue the same sort of apologies and admissions of guilt that the British made under purely mental stress.
In contrast, the torture process used by the Vietnamese to extract confessions of guilt from the American pilots broke all of them, either physically or mentally. The key to successful resistance, and to the definition of resistance and heroism,was to make the interrogators start from the beginning, each time. That is a very high bar to set, and not all were able to adhere to that standard.
After the pilots returned, there was an examination of the American Code of Conduct, and it was considered that some latitude should be permitted, and no one would be prosecuted for confessions extracted by torture. I was the survival and evasion officer in a fighter squadron not long after the war was over, and went through the training with the aircrews.
The very mild version of what captivity was going to be like was a real eye-opener, and convinced me that the real thing was filled with such incalculable horror that any alternative to capture was preferable. Honor did not have much to do with it.
In conflicts with no standard of conduct on the part of the adversary, and fewer on ours, the words “death” and “dishonor” have come together again. The Iranians have been playing the same games they played with HMS Cornwall for several months, just as their surrogates have in Lebanon.
Earlier this year, a mile or so inside the Iraqi border, Revolutionary Guards forced staged an ambush on a joint American-Iraqi patrol with the same goal as that of the raid on the Cornwall's boarding team. Overwhelming force was displayed, and the opportunity to surrender was presented. The patrol declined, shot their way out. The Americans survived, though some of the Iraqis were taken.
I am working on a project to honor a man who is missing in action from Vietnam. He was a Naval Intelligence officer assigned to the Third Coastal Zone to provide support to the riverine forces seeking to interdict and roll up the Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta.
His circumstances echo those that are happening today. During a surveillance mission, he was forced to eject with his pilot after his aircraft was shot down by ground fire.
The people who did it were waiting when they hit the ground, and there was no choice involved in his capture. According to what investigators found later, he was held in a bamboo cage for three months, and tortured repeatedly to gain access to what he knew, which was considerable.
In order to protect what was left, he broke out of his cage, but weakened as he was, drowned trying to swim a river. He had arrived at the point where death and honor crossed, and he took the option that looked best.
I won't judge anyone based on how they handle torture. I know enough to believe that “there but for fortune” and all that. Another friend, who was in the Delta at the time told me about being there in those days of uncertainty, and I take him at his word: The fear of capture was much worse than the fear of death.
American commanders in the war zones have a new code of conduct that harks back to an old tradition that co-existed with the brutal but civilized conduct of General Grant. That was the one used in the wars against the indigenous peoples of North America.
You are expected not to be taken alive, given any alternative.
Different rules and different circumstances must guide those who go in harm's way. I will not cast stones at the crew of the Cornwall. Being no hero myself, I would have to conclude that “death before dishonor” has once more become a standard, rather than a motto.
Given the opportunity to be on the scene, I might have done exactly with the sailors and Marines did, absent some formal guidance to the contrary, or closer supervision from those who should have prevented the capture from happening.
Each circumstance is unique, and at that moment in time, it worked out well for them, the goodie bags from President Ahmadenijad and the bad suits notwithstanding. But the situation is fluid, and no one should think that is the way it will happen again.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com