Taking Lincoln's name in vain: Why Admiral Mullen was wrong to write that all soldiers' deaths are meaningful

By Jim Gourley


Best Defense combat culture columnist

"That these dead
shall not have died in vain." So went the closing lines of Abraham Lincoln's
renowned Gettysburg Address and the opening of Admiral Mike Mullen's op-ed in the Washington
Post the other day arguing that no servicemember, either in time of war or
peace, ever dies in vain. "How could it be," he asks, "that in a
democracy -- a free society -- men and women may risk their lives to defend
that freedom and lose those lives in vain?" He never entertains any
theories, immediately denying his own proposition. "It cannot be so."

For a man who so presciently observed that America's debt posed its greatest national
security threat, this obtuse, absolutist argument signifies an egregiously
myopic perspective on the meaning of death in warfare to the leaders and the
led. Mullen uses the image of bereaved family members he's spoken with to prop
up his thesis that the fundamental nature of a soldier's service defines that
of their death. He even quotes Walt Whitman that a soldier "has yielded up
his young life at the very outset" in service to his nation.

In other words, a
meaningful and honorable death in uniform is assured as soon as you raise your
right hand, like some clause in your cell phone contract. He reinforces this
argument with platitudes about the tragic nature of all war and the non sequitur comparison to Civil War
soldiers dying from lack of modern medical care. Just because they expired of
simple infection doesn't mean their deaths were less purposeful, he says. In
this he is correct, but only because how a person dies has nothing to do with
why a person dies.

It would be
altogether convenient for any commander to lead with this mindset, and this is
why Mullen's argument does such disservice to military leadership. To say that
every servicemember dies "because they were fighting for freedom" is
a wholesale dismissal of a commander's obligation to the care and welfare of his
or her subordinates. Mullen glosses over the layers of faulty strategy, failed
systems, and poor decisions that highlight culpability at the highest levels of
military leadership in cases such as Wanat and veteran suicide. For him, it is
simpler to lump them together with all the other deaths and assess them in
aggregate and from a distance. "In war, as in any other facet of life,
there are losses more difficult to reconcile -- those caused by accident,
faulty judgment, treachery or carelessness. There are losses wholly
preventable, even as there are losses wholly necessary. Neither is to be
pitied. Neither lacks honor. There is no ‘good' death in war."

Again, half-truths
are Mullen's allies. No one would argue that an unpreventable death is better
than a preventable one. But Mullen's rhetorical sleight of hand here decouples
the sense of loss from the sense of duty. Just because a person died honorably
and we all feel sad doesn't remove the fact that they didn't have to die and
some of us are to blame. It was this philosophy that shielded General
McChrystal from accusations of falsifying
records in order to keep
Pat Tillman's name from being dragged through the mud. There are dozens more
such cases. This is why Mullen's ideas are anathema to leadership. The more
honorable a soldier's death, the more easily we can absolve commanders of
responsibility. The result is a leadership structure that regards the spilling
of blood about as well as it accounts the expenditure of the
country's treasure.

Mullen thus closes
by taking his rationale to its ultimate, strategic conclusion. "Let us
take comfort in the knowledge that, whatever the outcome in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the precious blood these young people shed for that future shall
not -- cannot -- have been shed in vain." This is nothing short of obscene. For years, congressmen, senators,
and generals have argued that "we must finish the job" in order to
ensure those servicemembers did not die in vain. Lincoln himself made the same
appeal to the crowd gathered at Gettysburg. But Mullen plows ahead in what
seems complete ignorance of Lincoln's intent. He hastens us to believe that,
regardless of the result, dying in vain was never possible. The Lord's truth is
marching on, even if Johnny never comes marching home. Glory, hallelujah.

Mullen proposes that
so long as the casus belli is draped
in the same red, white, and blue as the soldiers' coffins, then its valor is as
secure as their own. The last decade has proven the contrary. In either case,
looking underneath offers a mortifying encounter with the realities of war. The
hubris and poor strategic thinking of our military and political leaders in the
Iraqi invasion is well documented. The speed at which strategic commanders have
changed objectives and measures of success in Afghanistan is matched only by
how quickly we seem to fail to meet them. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines,
agents of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and even civilians
have died in our wars. Some of them have died by the enemy's hand, some by
their comrade's, some by their own, and others by that of fate.

But they have all
died in campaigns that, however virtuous, were mismanaged to the point of
failing to achieve their ultimate objectives. It is disturbing enough that the
highest ranks in contemporary military leadership have created an atmosphere
that allows commanders to write off billions of dollars wasted on weapons
systems and war efforts without fear of accountability. The emergence of a
culture that can avoid deep reflection of its culpability in spent lives based
on pretenses of virtue, and then go so far as to codify it as Mullen has done,
is truly horrifying.  

Jim Gourley is an author , journalist , and former military intelligence officer.