Former Capt. Swenson will be awarded MOH

[Max V.]

Originally Posted by SOTB

Damn.When I was in, I never saw a situation where units were denied support. I'm not about to state that it never happened or would never happen -- just that I never once saw it.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I'm a civvie in a strange situation. I have people working for me that are armed, I'm in a war zone, and I am not a mil guy nor on any fixed contract with fixed rules -- and beholden to no one. I have had the opportunity on more than one occasion to respond to mil units needing support and fortunately, everything worked out OK. Still, when we went in -- it never dawned on me not to. This has nothing to do with being a badass -- I simply didn't even have the possibility of refusing assisting in my BHG -- call it stupidity or whatever.

Granted, having no rules isn't a great way to run a war -- but I certainly would not have wanted to be on the opposite end of the extreme and in the situation that Capt Swenson and his men were....

I think part of the problem was we were fighting a war that had no clear measurable objectives. A lot of commanders failed to grasp the importance of taking the fight to the enemy and killing as many of those motherfuckers as possible(which experts are now saying is a key part of making COIN work - but I'm not claiming to be an expert). They started seeing it as a two-way live fire JRTC rotation. Emphasis was placed on safety and OERs instead of war fighting. Reflective belts are a good example. Another would be that under 4-4 we had to wear eye protection anytime we were outside of a building. So in a warzone, we had to put on safety glasses to go take a piss at 3 AM - even if we were on a secure FOB.

I think that mentality had a trickle down effect, and it caused a lot of officers(and senior NCOs) to focus too much on "the rules" and not enough on fighting a war. That mentality then pervaded down to the platoon level in some cases, and that was it.


I didn't get a chance to work with too many other platoons downrange, but I know that had it been any of the three rifle platoons in my company we would have went in. The officers were pretty squared away and a lot of the NCOs were on their second or third deployments and were short timers. If they wanted to bring us up on UCMJ for disobeying a chickenshit order in order to help out fellow Americans in a dire situation then so be it. And like you said, it's not about being a badass - it's just incomprehensible that you would do anything else. When I heard that the mounted platoon didn't move in one of the first things I thought of was, "How the fuck do you live with yourself after that?" I'd rather die trying than live with the shame.