Joseph L. Galloway, "War and Peace." Q & A. 7th Annual James Bond Stockdale Lecture on Ethics and Leadership. University of San Diego

LMH: We have microphones, I believe, out in the audience for you to be able to ask questions. Lieutenant, do you? So please feel free to step forward and ask questions for Mr. Galloway.

Male: Sir, (..?) asked, undoubtedly, the experience of your father and your uncles in the war has had an effect on your career--you mentioned that it’s hard for them to speak about the war that they were in, which has undoubtedly had an effect on your journalism. My question is in light of the recent war there has been some controversy over what should be shown in light of the civilians’ bodies that were dragged about the city in Iraq. How much of that should be shown? That’s obviously an ethical issue of informing the people but on the other hand being sensitive to the remains of the (..?).

J.G.: I, you know, in editing a newspaper, in editing a news show, the one thing that you need is good judgment. The one thing you need to know is what not to show. It seems to me that no purpose was served by showing those bodies hanging from the bridge, showing those charred bodies in that, in that Humvee. There are some things that ought not be seen that the sight of does no good, serves no purpose. And so I’m disappointed in those publications that chose to run that. I’m disappointed in those television channels that chose to run the film of it. On the other hand, there are things that we do, policy wise, that don’t make sense to me. The idea that no cameras would be allowed at Dover Air Base to see the
flag-draped coffins of soldiers, Marines who have been killed in Iraq, being brought to their homeland with the greatest dignity by the Honor Guards--what’s wrong with showing that? Our government says we can’t do that--that we’re not allowed. And oh, by the way, the press, the cameras have been moved back 200 yards for many of the funerals at Arlington even when the family says it’s all right, let them come closer. These are--this is hiding somehow the truth from the American people. We do need to know that there are families behind every one of those soldiers who has died. Those images, I think, are very valuable and ought to be allowed-my opinion.

Female: Sir, in your opinion, if you were our next president in November, what would you do to bring about peace?

J.G.: Oh ma’am, that’s a very hard question and I hope someone asks that of those who are actually standing for election. What would I do? Well, I think I would define an exit strategy for the war in Iraq. We went in there without one. We went in there without planning for what would happen after the active combat phase was over. This is what the military does as a normal and routine thing, but, but were prevented from doing by decisions by politicians that there would be no need for post-war occupation, that this thing was going to go so well that our troops would be welcomed with rose petals flung into their paths, that the Iraqi army would surrender in place and we would change the patches on their arms and weed out a few of the worst of them and then they would work for us. I’m sorry. None of this happened. And then there was a need for an occupation and there was a need to organize to rebuild this country and to try to establish some government that would make more sense and would be less of a danger to all of us and, and so we’re stuck there and meanwhile our soldiers and our Marines die by twos and threes and fours and God help us, sometimes sixes and eights every day. And oh by the way, the events of these past two or three days are frightening in the extreme. The idea that suddenly the Shia who have not been a problem to us, a people who have at least remained neutral and stood beside to see what was going to development because they are the majority and democracy works for them they will inherit Iraq if, if a truly democratic election is held. They’ve stood back until now but suddenly they are erupting in violence and in violent attacks on Americans and on Iraqi police and that seems to be spreading not just to Baghdad but to elsewhere and this is of huge concern--a civil war breaks out and suddenly we’re not only in the middle of it we’re the target of it. I’ve been there and done that before and it was not amusing. So, we need an exit strategy, we need some sort of a timeline in which we can disengage there. We need to be focused not 10 percent or 20 percent but 100 percent on the global war against terrorism. We need to be going after Osama Bin Laden. It’s now been three years and we haven’t caught that bastard yet or many of those bastards and we need to do that and we need to root them out one by one, two by two, and even then I’m not sure how safe we’ll be, but we need to be focused on the main effort and we are now up to our hips in a swamp in the desert of Iraq.

J.H.: Yes. My name is Joyce Hu and I’m here at USD at the Johns Hopkins Institute of (..?) and (..?). I want to thank you for your talk, which I found very moving, and ask you a little bit--going back to the comment you made in response to the first question about the role of journalism in today’s wars, (..?) Iran (..?) of the imbedded journalist. Can you comment about the need for the American people to have the truth? And I’m wondering how the (..?) of the imbedded journalists helps us get at the truth.

J.G.: Oh, that’s one of my favorite topics. You know, in the wake of the last Gulf War, which was a complete disaster it was a great triumph on the one hand militarily but a disaster for public relations purposes, a disaster for the media and in a sense a disaster for the American public. At the end of that war, especially the Army commanders, they realized they had not a foot of film of the great tank victories that they had fought in won in Kuwait. No pictures no stories. They had created press pools each of them under the thumb of the Lieutenant Colonel who had the power to edit their reports to crumple them into a ball and throw them away or simply not send them and a lot of that went on and so the American people got no real view of what was happening on the battle field there. And the consequences were that they made heroes of all people of the briefing officers. General Kelly at the Pentagon, Army Brigadier General Butch Neal, the Marine in Rihad and the mother of all briefers himself, General Norm Swarzkopf. They were made heroes in lieu of the real heroes who no one saw. It was a war of briefings and gun camera film and nothing more and the military commanders realized at that moment that somehow they had outsmarted themselves--the old British saying, too clever by half, and so they changed. They changed and they began changing with Bosnia the first mention of the word imbed and the first use of the concept in small numbers, but a few, and then we come along the pendulum in military media relations swung the other way and it swung right to the current Iraq war last year when someone in the Department of Defense and the Pentagon made a decision that we will combat the lies and the propaganda of Saddam Hussein, which we know are coming in that war, we will combat those with the truth. And how do we get the truth? Send 700 imbeds out. Somebody with every American unit, every Allied unit, across the full spectrum land, air and sea and you will see yourself in real time what’s going on up there. And so we will combat lies with the truth. What a novel idea. What a brilliant strategy and it really worked. I wrote a column probably a weekend of the war and I said this media imbed thing is a win-win situation. The military wins because for the first time since Vietnam the American people have got a look at what soldiers and Marines, sailors and airmen do in a war. A hard dirty job for which there are few thanks but they got to see it and they got to see how wonderfully well-trained these men and women are and how well they did their job. And the media wins because for the first time since Vietnam they’re trusted enough to go out and be at the front lines and to travel with soldiers. I sent this column out and I immediately got an e-mail from the mother of a young Marine and she said you’ve left out the biggest winners of all; we the families of those soldiers and Marines. She said, I know which channel, which cable outfit has a reporter with my son’s battalion in Iraq and I keep that channel on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and I know the voice of the reporter that’s traveling with them and I can hear that from three bedrooms away and I can be in there like a flash to listen to it. She said, I may not see my son’s face but I know what’s happening to his battalion. I know what’s happening around his battalion and she said the terror of knowing is so much smaller than the terror of not knowing. We’re the biggest winners of all. I said, yes ma’am, you’re absolutely right. So there it is. There are three winners in this situation and I think it will be the future model for how these things are done. Hope so. You bet.

Male: Mr. Galloway, I appreciated your remarks but I agreed with everything. It’s especially poignant since today a friend of nearly 40 years called me and said that his nephew had been killed in a craft this morning. But I’d like to go back to the issue of the photographs and quote Robert E. Lee who said, it is good that war is so terrible lest we learn to like it. If we really want to stop war shouldn’t we broadcast it in all of its horrible reality?

J.G.: There are those who make that argument and there are reasons why and there are reasons why not. And for me the increase in the agony of the family who is already lost a treasured son or daughter in these days by having their bodies spread across the newspapers too much there are some lines which I am not willing to cross. I shot pictures in Vietnam, I shot pictures in landing zone x-ray that I’ve never shown, that were never published and will not be published by me, even though the bodies weren’t recognizable they were covered, still there were so many of them and it was such a, such a disheartening thing because I had seen some of those men die and I couldn’t bring myself to publish those pictures though I acknowledge that maybe the only way that you persuade people not to go to war is to absolutely horrify them with the truth of war. I’m sorry I can’t, I can’t go there. Not me personally. You may be right but I won’t give you my pictures.

Now, I know amongst all these bright-faced NROTC, ROTC cadets, you all been hammering me with questions for the last two days and now you’re all going to go silent on me? Come on.

Male: (..?), sir. You mentioned before your use of the Freedom of Information Act a few years back. Now, has the Freedom of Information Act been abolished by the passing of the Patriotic Act?

J.G.: It has not but what we have going on now and have had for the last three years under the Bush administration is a serious rollback, if you will, in things like the declassification effort that had begun under the Clinton administration where documents that are 20 or 30 or even 40 years old were being automatically declassified at a good rate of speed and the historians cheered this and that has been stopped in its tracks. This administration seems to have a great taste for doing things in secret and keeping secret even those things, which might ought to be better done in public. So the FOIA Act is still in effect and you can still do this but there are now select holes driven in it and new defenses against the release of information. So I decry that, it’s a step backward.

Male: In your opinion, when will we ever re-obtain the amendments that we had lost due to the Patriotic Act? Do you think that’s a possibility or have a lost those amendments forever?

J.G.: I hope we have not lost it forever. I hope we have not lost those steps forward to openness for the sake of historians and journalists and just interested people. You know, I’ve been out at the National Archives when they were releasing a new batch of Nixon tapes and you couldn’t scare the folks out there with a stick and they weren’t journalists, they were people who were generally interested and had been following this thing for years, just members of the public and they were lined up thick as fleas on a dog’s back to get their turn to go in one of the little studio booths and listen to the tapes, listen to history themselves. And I think that’s fine. This is America. We are founded on freedom not on secrecy so I don’t know when we roll this all back and when things change for the better. I guess that’s what we have elections for.

Male: My fear is that those liberties will have to be taken as they have been taken in the past.

Male: My fear is that those liberties that have been taken from us by the Patriot Act will have to be taken by force by the citizens in the future as they have been in the past. I have no further questions for you.

J.G.: I hope not by force. I hope they can be taken back by legislation and I pray that’s so.

Male: Mr. Galloway, good evening. I can’t help but think that you’ve made a great choice to come to this symposium in the name of Stockdale and of course, here with our ROTC. Most of us here have been affected greatly by this recent war that you--that we discussed, the Iraq war. One of which I got two interesting e-mails. One from my brother who celebrated his 40th birthday loading on bodies in Kuwait about ten of them and he’s a reserve Air Force Tech Sergeant that was called back. And now even though we don’t hear a lot of casualties about Air Force where they are affected by the loading up as (..?) crewmen. And the other person that I speak of was a Battalion Commander here at the ROTC unit by the name of Dave Denial, now Lieutenant Denial. And on the same day I received my e-mail from my brother about the--can you hear me okay? Do I need to speak--okay? I got this e-mail from Dave Denial, Lieutenant Denial and with it pictures, pictures of smiling Kuwaitis, or excuse me, Iraqis. It’s just unbelievable work that the public relations in the Marine Corps are doing under his guidance and leadership partly. My question is, is that we had imbedded journalists during the war, during the conflict, during the tanks attacking, do you feel that the imbedded journalists have kind of left the scene? A lot of the attention has left and therefore we’re not really seeing the work that many of the Marine officers and service members are conducting now out there and if so that is a concern because there is some great work being done, that which we did not see in Vietnam and that we did not hear about in Vietnam. Just like your comments on that.

J.G.: Well, you’re quite right. There were during the combat phase 700 plus media imbeds and they had turned up in Kuwait probably a month before the war began and they covered the war for three or four weeks, five, and then they were burned out. They were tired. CNN turned the lights off and they all went home. Not all of them of course. There remained the dedicated Press Corps in Baghdad. They go out occasionally and imbed with a unit usually for shorter now, three or four days max. And I’m sad about that because I wish there were a number--enough journalists over there that at least a couple could be with every battalion, they could be in every part of Iraq so that there is a flow of information…

…that doesn’t happen. Most of them are clustered in Baghdad. They’re chasing the daily story, the briefings, the boom-boom, the bombs, that sort of thing and so the broader aspects of what’s going on in Iraq don’t get quite the coverage they should. In fact, we’ve gone from 700 imbeds to 20 or 30 today carried on the list by the Department of Defense. So we have a lot of room for improvement. Things are getting hot they’ll all go back.

Female: Yes. As somebody from your--can you all hear me? As somebody from your generation, sir, and knowing exactly what you’re talking about because you and I are about the same age, how do you impose democracy on a people like that? I keep hearing my government say we’re going to impose this and that on people. My idea of democracy is that it’s something that it’s not imposed on you, you take it because you want it because it’s the right thing to do, it’s part of your moral fiber, it’s why my folks came here from Europe when they did. How can we as a democratic nation look ourselves in the eye in a mirror in the morning and impose democracy on people who seem to be mentally ill from they’ve been through and I don’t know how much more they can take and how much more this country can take.

J.G.: Well, I tend to agree with you. You cannot impose democracy on a society they have to want it themselves. They have to have a desire for it and they have to be willing to suffer for it if necessary. They cannot, you know, the idea of some of the neocons in the Defense Department notably Mr. Wolfowitz that we can somehow impose Jeffersonian democracy on a place like Iraq, which has never known any of it, has never known freedom really in a thousand years, any more in the long run than we can impose democracy on what was the Soviet Union. They’re having an election but it sure smells like the old elections Brezhnev used to have. This is something that requires education, it requires a long investment of education and understanding and teaching people the benefits of it. And we, we don’t have that in Iraq. I’m not sure that we’re ever going to get there.

Female: Oh, I wanted to compliment you on what you said and I agree with you. And I wondered how you handled that people that have your opinion on radio and on TV. have been taken off and people that express your viewpoint and mine are considered dirty liberals. And I wonder how you counteract that. I find that very upsetting.

J.G.: I’m assuming that you’re talking about things like Fox News and all of those idiots on talk radio. I--I don’t characterize myself either as liberal or conservative. I try to, I try to behave as a concerned human being. And I’ll be honest with you I don’t know what I’m going to do this Election Day. I’m thinking of starting a movement to write in Harry Truman’s name. I swear to God he was the last decent president we’ve had and I’ve watched a lot of them. All we can do is hope for some voices of reason crying out in the wilderness and you can’t expect too much of that on an election year sad to say. Thank you ma’am.

Male: Good evening, sir, Mid-shipman Lewis. As we’re sitting here this evening discussing the realities of war and the way in which it effects us all in our families and our lives and those who are actually involved in the conflicts, I sit here tonight with my fellow mid-shipmen and other cadets that will one day be officers and in this day and age we will inevitably see combat, what advice would you give us as future officers to lead our people in the best way possible?

J.G.: Very good question. You will go out as officers to lead first small units and then larger ones. You will go out to lead soldiers, warriors, whatever branch you choose. You must first and foremost care for your men, your soldiers, your sailors. You take care of them and you care for them above yourself always. The sign of a great officer, the first quality is selflessness. You take care of your troops and your career will take care of itself. You don’t think about that. You care for those troops. And what does that mean? It means you see to their comforts first, always. You see that they’re fed, they’re sheltered, that they’re safe, they have water and food. And then, only then after they are all taken care of you think of yourself and this becomes a habit that is ingrained through a life of service. General Hal Moore, my best friend in life, my co-author, the leader that I know best, to this day 82 years old has been retired from military service for decades and still when he’s in a group I see. And I see him following that precept, I see him taking care of everybody else first, always. To me this is the very essence of a leader at whatever level. You go into this not for glory, not certainly for money, you go into this for love of soldiers, sailors, Marines; this is why you do it. So do it well.

Male: Sir, Officer Candidate Reeder. Speaking to that you’ve seen the hell of war up close and been involved and still done your job as you saw fit. What advice can you give to those in this room who will inevitably see the chaos and hell of war and (..?) when all the precepts that we know of have failed, what advice can you give us to keep it together to do the best we can in that situation?

J.G.: If the day comes that you find yourself in combat in that moment what will carry you through is first of all your training. You go on automatic pilot and those things kick in that you need to be doing that you have to be doing that must be done for your men to survive, your soldiers, sailors, Marines, to survive. It’ll come to you. My old friend, General Moore, he says there’s some things that you can do and you must do in any crisis, whether it’s combat or personal crisis of some sort, he says there’s one thing you do. And I saw him doing this during the battle and I didn’t understand it at the time. He looked like for maybe 20 or 30 or 40 seconds he sort of spaced out. It was all--he was beyond it somehow. And afterward, years afterward, I said, what the hell was that about? He said, ah, you know when things are really bad step back out of the chaos mentally, don’t hear it, don’t see it for just enough time to ask yourself two questions. What am I doing that I shouldn’t be doing? And what am I not doing that I ought to be doing to influence this situation in my favor? He says if you ask and answer those questions of yourself frequently enough you will begin to shape your battlefield your way. And in his case he became--he was able to get into the mind of the enemy commander. I saw him move troops into a previously undefended section of the line ten minutes ahead of the attack that was coming as though he knew it instinctively. So asking and answering those two questions are a really smart thing when things are going to hell in a hand basket all around you. The other thing, Hal Moore’s other precept of leadership, never show any sign in command that you have any doubt about the outcome of the action. You will demonstrate confidence in the success even if you know in your heart it may not come out that way don’t pollute your atmosphere by letting anyone else see those doubts, not in your voice, not in your eyes, not on the radio, confidence. A little something for you to take there.

Female: Good evening, sir, Mid-shipman Rice. Throughout your career you gained very rare first-hand perspective of military use. You were put in hard situations and had to make very hard choices. Throughout that career have you observed a change in the ethics demonstrated by our military leaders? And if so, what do you think is the cause of that change?

J.G.: Good leaders have good ethics always going back to the first that I saw personally. I don’t think that ethics have changed. I like to think that they are a constant amongst those who lead soldiers in combat, Marines in combat, sailors in combat. It is not always true. There are those who are flawed. There are those whose ethics have holes in them and I have seen them. And that’s true of human beings and it’s as true today as it was then. I don’t think we have come to a magical time in our history where every serving officer in all of the branches of service is truly ethical, truly honest, truly has great character and integrity. There will always be failures. If it weren’t for those failures we wouldn’t have a Judge Advocate General’s Court and Court Marshals. And so, I can’t say that really I’ve seen any great change. I have seen a change in the quality of enlisted soldiers and sailors and Marines. They have--they are more sophisticated than were the ones in 1965 or certainly the ones in 1950 or 1945. They are better educated. They certainly are more worldly and they, it may be fairly said, probably have some better grasp of ethics and morals because in today’s all volunteer force if you screw up badly enough you’re on your way back to Topeka. So they behave better. I’ve seen in the first Gulf War, not that there were a lot of places to get in trouble over there, but you would have had a far greater number of casualties, shall we say, on the average Memorial Day Weekend at Fort Stewart, Georgia than you had in that whole run up to the Persian Gulf War. Guys who were working 18 and 20 hours a day to keep the tanks and the planes and the helicopters running. No booze. That’s an interesting part of our new idea of deployment is there’s nothing to drink out there. And that’s all right too. I hope I gave you enough to answer your question.

Male: Yes, sir. Good evening, sir, Mid-shipman Garcia. In class today when you spoke to us you made brief mention of some of the, some of the lessons learned you think that America, as a society, took on in Vietnam and I’m wondering if you could highlight a couple of those most important ones and see how we can apply those (..?) of (..?).

J.G.: Well, what’d I tell you Mid-shipman? Well, we did learn some things in Vietnam. We learned them the hard way. We paid a terrible price for them and I suppose we should carry them with us. The first and foremost of them it seems to me is do not go to war with some society that you do not know intimately, that you have not studied, that you do not have a number of linguists who can speak their language. Don’t go pick a fight with somebody you haven’t measured. And in Vietnam we picked a fight with a people who have been fighting for 1500 years, fighting to expel foreign invaders, mostly the Chinese. And, you know, out of all of the people in that whole part of the world we picked out the ones with the most bark on them and started a fight with them without understanding their society, without understanding that their whole society was built on warriors. Damn, if I’m going to start a fight with somebody I’d rather get a wimp and we go pick the biggest, meanest guy on the block and a people who do not know surrender, do not know give up, who would have the Chinese come in and take their country and hold it for 600 years but always held in their heart the idea of driving them out. And so they would. I, I, I--we were in Hanoi doing interviews and we were waiting around for some interviews with the Vietnamese generals. We went down to the Museum of Natural History in Hanoi and there I saw something and it would have been as long as this wall over here and it was a timeline of Vietnamese history by year and it was a map at the same time. Here’s China, here’s Vietnam and you would see these arrows come down and they would stay there for a while and then in a few hundred years they would be driven out. And there would be sometimes a period as short as three years of blessed independence in Vietnam bought at a high price and then bang, here would come the Chinese. And these came in waves and they were large long waves and then we get down to the French experience. And it was represented by about, hm, 12, 14 inches in this map. And then we come to the American experience and it was represented in this as about 2 inches. Don’t pick fights with people you don’t know. You’re going to get surprised. Lesson number one. Thank you.