Outside the Beltway

Officer’s Death Brings New Attention to Iraq War Problems

James Joyner · Tuesday, January 30, 2007 · 4 comments

A story on A3 of today’s WaPo by Jonathan Weisman and Ann Scott Tyson demonstrates the old adage that a single death is a tragedy while a million deaths is a statistic.

Just before Christmas, an Army captain named Brian Freeman cornered Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) at a Baghdad helicopter landing zone. The war was going badly, he told them. Troops were stretched so thin they were doing tasks they never dreamed of, let alone trained for.

Freeman, 31, took a short holiday leave to see his 14-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son, returned to his base in Karbala, Iraq, and less than two weeks ago died in a hail of bullets and grenades. Insurgents, dressed in U.S. military uniforms, speaking English and driving black American SUVs, got through a checkpoint and attacked, kidnapped four soldiers and later shot them. Freeman died in the assault, the fifth casualty of the brazen attack.

The death of the West Point graduate — a star athlete from Temecula, Calif., who ran bobsleds and skeletons with Winter Olympians — has radicalized Dodd, energized Kerry and girded the ever-more confrontational stance of Democrats in the Senate. Freeman’s death has reverberated on the Senate floor, in committee deliberations and on television talk shows.

The death of a single man, who they just happened to meet, shouldn’t have much impact on the public policy decision-making of thoughtful men who have as much access to big picture impact as Dodd and Kerry. They’re only human, though.

Freeman’s case is especially tragic in its illustration of the caveat to the idea that only “volunteers” are fighting and dying in Iraq.

Freeman had served out his five-year active-duty tour well before he was sent to Iraq. He graduated from West Point in 1999, then in 2002 was accepted into the Army World Class Athlete Program, training with the U.S. bobsled and skeleton teams in Lake Placid, N.Y. “It’s no exaggeration, he was definitely one of the nicest guys in the start house,” said Steve Peters, a team official.

In 2004, eager to get on with his career and family life, Freeman moved into the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), a pool of trained soldiers not assigned to any unit, to serve out the rest of his eight-year mandatory obligation.

He was in California with a civilian job, a 1-year-old son named Gunnar and another baby on the way in the fall of 2005 when a shortage of officers prompted a large call-up by the IRR of West Point graduates from the classes of 1998 and later — many of whom had only a few months of service left.

“He was an augmentee, who happened to be called up to fill a slot,” said Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Edmond, a full-time staff member at the 412th Civil Affairs Battalion in Whitehall, Ohio, which Freeman was called to join. “It’s almost to fill a void,” he said, commenting on the Army’s deepening manpower shortage, especially in the reserve, which requires it to cobble together units with people from across the country.

Charlotte Freeman, Freeman’s wife, recalled her husband’s shock upon receiving an Army telegram ordering him back to active duty. “He walked into the house and was totally white,” she said yesterday. “He had moved on” from the Army.

Freeman had received a world class education on the taxpayer and, like all who volunteer for military service, was on the hook for eight years. In most cases, though, that’s a mere technicality. I left active duty in 1992 and never put a uniform on again. Since 9/11, though, many have been involuntarily recalled.

Just after Christmas in 2005, he grew so concerned about his pending deployment — and his lack of qualifications to be a civil affairs officer — that he anxiously contacted a reporter for The Washington Post.

Maj. Tony Nichols, who commanded a tank company that Freeman served in during his active duty, said Freeman “would have gone with a tank crew . . . in a heartbeat” but felt uneasy going with an unfamiliar civil affairs team.

[…]

Late last year, Freeman approached the senators at Landing Zone Washington, in Baghdad’s Green Zone, “almost out of the shadows,” Dodd recalled. Even though he felt nervous, he told his wife later, he delivered his message with urgency. Soldiers were being deployed to do missions that they were utterly untrained to do; Freeman, for example, an armor officer, had been sent to help foster democracy and rebuild an Iraqi civil society. State Department personnel who could do those jobs were restricted in their travel off military bases by regional security officers who said it was unsafe for them to venture out. “Senator, it’s nuts over here,” Dodd quoted Freeman as saying.

Unfortunately, we have a Leviathan force being used as a SysAdmin force. Then again, we turned combat arms officers into de facto civil affairs officers with a reasonable degree of success in the aftermath of World War II, most without the benefit of a West Point education. Meeting the “needs of the Army” often means muddling through and Freeman was much better prepared for that than most.