A bold new voice for silent soldiers

Ellis Henican

December 11, 2005

They are the last voices to be heard in the debate over Iraq - the American men and women who've actually been fighting there.

Tell me, is there any reason our soldiers shouldn't get to speak? None that I can think of. So today - and from this day forward - that wrong will be righted here.

"When I came home," Paul Rieckhoff was saying at week's end, "the guys who were dominating the national conversation on Iraq were policy wonks, four-star generals and some high-profile hosts on television and radio. Not one of them had been on the ground over there. Very few had any understanding of what it was like. That created a real vacuum.

"Who was representing this new generation of troops and veterans? Who was helping to get our point of view across?"

Well, no one was.

So Rieckhoff began the grunt work of changing that.

He is 30 years old, a stocky guy with a soldier's posture, a shaved head and a disarmingly direct way of saying what he thinks. He grew up outside Peekskill, George Pataki's hometown. After Amherst College, he tended bar and worked on Wall Street. He lives in the city now.

He served in Iraq as a first lieutenant with the 3rd Infantry Division of the Army National Guard. He spent most of 2003 and part of 2004 leading a platoon of 38 Army Reserve infantrymen, kicking in doors in Baghdad, searching for weapons and insurgents and interrogating Iraqi prisoners.

It was gritty, dangerous duty. He was happy to be home, but frustrated that so few people seemed to understand what this war was like.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan group Rieckhoff set up with a few other fresh vets, Operation Truth (www.optruth.org), now has a full-time national headquarters at 770 Broadway in Manhattan and members in all 50 states, increasingly un-shy about being heard.

"These guys, regardless of party affiliation," Rieckhoff said, "have been six months ahead of everyone else on the war. We were talking about the problems of body armor before anybody was. We knew the insurgency was getting worse before you heard anything about that. We knew what a problem post-traumatic stress disorder was becoming.

"There was a lag on all these stories. The Pentagon had a stranglehold on information. The media have been pulling back. If we aren't being heard, the story isn't being told."

This coming week, the debate in Washington will turn to torture - whether we torture, whether we should and whether we should promise not to. Congress may vote on Sen. John McCain's call to put the United States clearly on record against prisoner abuse, a declaration the Bush administration has been resisting.

The policy wonks have all weighed in by now. So why not hear from someone who knows a thing or two?

"Torturing our enemies puts guys like me at risk," Paul Rieckhoff said. "However you feel about the morality of war, if our president does not say torture is wrong, it makes my job harder as a soldier. Period.

"We talk a lot about who lied and who didn't in this debate on Iraq," he said. "We have to get to the conversation about what works and what doesn't. President Bush is a business guy. Let's talk about net loss and net gain.

"We know torture produces unreliable information. A detainee will tell you anything to make the hurt stop. And if they think we torture their guys, they're going to think it's OK to torture ours. Why not put that to rest?"

It isn't always easy, emboldening these new veterans to speak. For one thing, many of those who've fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are still in the military as reservists and national guardsmen. Many could be heading back for second or third tours.

That's true of Rieckhoff.

"I like the Army," he said. "I plan to stay in. I had drill last weekend. I have drill again in January. I'm not some crazy anti-war activist jumping on a fence throwing medals. That's not where this generation of soldiers is."

And neither political party seems to have the answers for them.

"Republicans got us into this mess," Rieckhoff said. "Democrats don't have much of a plan for getting us out. We're just guys without a party who don't think we should be stage props or window dressing anymore."

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