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

Thank you Dr. Hinman for that kind introduction and welcome. It’s a real pleasure to be here with you this evening. I flew in from Washington, D.C., and there were a couple of news stories that may not have made it out here and so I shall tell you about them. The other evening up on Capitol Hill a very distinguished looking gentleman, silver hair and a $3,000 Italian suit was walking along the boulevard and another fellow jumped out of an alley and stuck a pistol in his ribs and said, give me your money, and the guy drew himself up and grew highly indignant and he said, you can’t do this to me I’m a congressman, and the guy said, okay. Give me my money. And the other story had to do with a decision, little known, by the Supreme Court of the United States and they held that Washington, D.C., would not be allowed to have a nativity scene this coming Christmas. And it was not for reasons of separation of church and state, it was that after a lengthy search they could not find three wise men or a virgin in that town, but they did have enough asses to fill every stable in the country.

I am deeply honored and humbled to be here this evening at an event named for Admiral James Stockdale. How fitting that this lecture series on leadership and ethics is named for him. If you looked up those two words, leadership and ethics, in the dictionary they could be simply defined by a photograph of Admiral Stockdale. Leadership can be demonstrated in every walk of life in every day life and so it is with ethics as well. But Jim Stockdale was able to be both a superb leader and to live ethically, not only in his every day life but while he was a prisoner in the hands of the enemies of the United States. Being a prisoner, one thinks, is to be helpless without power to resist, without power to lead, without any opportunity to live ethically and being able to live at all is in the hands of your enemy. In the most brutal of circumstances in the face of relentless physical and mental torture, James Stockdale provided an example of both leadership and ethics for his fellow prisoners; the men under his command. He provided an example for all or us how to persevere, how to triumph in the face of adversity. He’s one of my heroes and he certainly should be one of yours as well.

When I was asked what I would like to talk about this evening I chose the topic war and peace, although in my 62 years of life there has been far more war than peace. I was born three weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1941. My first memories are of men in uniform and of growing up a small child in houses full of frightened women. My father and six of his brothers were in service in World War II. Four of my mother’s brothers also served. My mother and I lived on an allotment from my dad’s army pay. We got $17.50 a month. My dad kept $3.50 a month for his needs. We lived between his mother’s home and her mother’s home in two tiny central Texas communities. Those houses were full of aunts and cousins. The women kept a nervous eye out the window for the telegraph boy who would bring bad news. I never forgot that experience. Because of a war I was nearly 5 years old before I actually met my father and all of my uncles. They were of a generation, which did not talk much if at all, about their experiences at war, at least not to those they loved and not to anyone who had not experienced it as well.

My life has been wrapped up in America’s wars and the wars of other nations for over 40 years in my role as a journalist, as a war correspondent, as an author. I know war as intimately as anyone can and I hate it. It is perhaps man’s most horrifying and inhuman pursuit. War is a confession of failure. It signals of failure of political and diplomatic leadership when some more sensible means of conflict resolution cannot be found short of sending 19-year-old boys out with rifles to kill other 19-year-old boys with rifles. Why do we send our children out to kill each other? Better we should send our Congress out with rifles to fight their Parliament. Better yet, send our President out to fight theirs hand-to-hand, man-to-man. Ulysses S. Grant in his later years said this, there is always some way to prevent the drawing of the sword, but political leaders have a hard time figuring out that other way. Though I know war and its ways very well I do not understand it. I do not understand the fascination that it holds for those who have never seen it. Why is it that the first sound a little boy learns to make on the playground is the sound of a gun firing? Little girls never bother learning that sound, they know better instinctively. I do not by any of this mean to say that there are no just wars. The one my father and his brothers fought in, World War II was thrust upon us by evil men bent on conquering and enslaving or wiping out entire nations and people. The alternative to fighting and winning that war was surrender of civilization to barbarous leaders. There are wars that must be fought in defense of civilization. There are wars where you must fight because it is better to die on your feet resisting than to live on your knees as a slave. Those wars are rare. There was just one in the 20th century, the Second World War, the bloodiest war in the history of mankind. Sixty million human beings perished before it was over. All the rest of them could’ve been prevented or avoided by more skilled political leadership, smarter diplomacy, less chest beating, less machismo. In that category I certainly include Korea, where a misstatement by the Secretary of State led the communists to believe we would stand back and let them take over South Korea. Then there is Vietnam where we intervened disastrously in civil war and wound up fighting the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Vietnam came as close to destroying America as it did Vietnam and we still live today with the consequences of that war. It is many years past the end of it, an issue in a presidential race in America in the year 2004.

When I talk of failed political and diplomatic leadership and the impact it has on war I would like to illustrate that point with the results of some research my good friend General Hal Moore and I did for our book, We Were Soldiers Once and Young. We used the Freedom of Information Act to get all of the documents we could out of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that had anything to do with the battle we were researching and we came upon an incredible document. Literally, an incredible document and I don’t think anyone had seen it to that point. When this battle was fought in November of 1965, in that week, 500 Americans died and it was a shock when that news went back to Washington, D.C. To that point, the death and dying in Vietnam by Americans had been by twos and threes and fours during the war of the advisors. Now, it was clearly something different happening. And President Johnson sent an urgent message to Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, who was then doing a mission with NATO in Brussels and he ordered him to go to Saigon immediately and find out what the hell was going on out there. Well, McNamara went and he was briefed by Colonel Moore and he was briefed by the Brigade Commander and the Division Commander and by Ambassador Lodge and by General Wes Mooreland and then he got on his plane to fly home and he wrote this memo on the plane dated 30 November 1965. And the memo says, we have come to a decision point in this war. The enemy has not only met our escalation of the war it has exceeded it. And so I think we have two alternatives, we can arrange whatever diplomatic cover there is to be had and get out of this place or two, we can give General Wes Mooreland the 200,000 more soldiers that he wants in which case by early 1967 we will have 500,000 American troops on the ground in Vietnam. They will be dying at the rate of 1,000 a month and all we can possibly achieve is a military stalemate at a much higher level of violence. Well, that’s a pretty remarkable document given the date and the time. Two weeks later, President Johnson summoned the wise men to a meeting in the White House and he walked in the Cabinet Room where they were gathered and he had that memo in his hands and he shook it at Secretary McNamara and he said, Bob, you mean to tell me no matter what I do I can’t win this war? And McNamara looked at him and said, Yes sir, that’s correct. And these, supposedly the wisest men in our government and the old bulls who had been in government and were served as advisors, sat down and they debated the situation for two days and then voted unanimously for option two. They never--I interviewed several people, McGeorge Bundy among others, and he said, oh, we never seriously considered or debated option one-we all knew that it was impossible for us to leave-that it would have had great serious effects on our relations with the rest of the world especially our allies who would think us untrustworthy. And so we all voted for continuing and escalating a war that the ultimate bean counter himself, Robert Strange McNamara, aptly named, knew we couldn’t win mathematically or any other way you want to slice it. It’s a very curious moment in American history. That would have been a wonderful opportunity to stop the Vietnam War. Had it stopped then there would only be 1,100 names on the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., not the 58,235 that are carved on that black granite. I cannot look at the march of those names on that memorial without tears. Tears not just for my beloved friends and comrades who were forever 20 or 21 years old, but for the national tragedy those names represent. I look and I wonder what could they have become, all of them, if they had just been allowed to serve our nation by their lives instead of with them. Was there among them one who might have gone on to be a doctor and researcher who found the cure for cancer? Or one who might have led a pioneering mission into space? They are all of them national treasures, unfinished, unrealized. I weep for all that is lost and wasted in war. I weep for the lives that have been altered forever by the experience of combat. Or in the case of widows and orphans and families, lives that have been shattered by the death of one beloved soldier. That is a wound that time never heals. It is an open hole in a child’s heart where a father was supposed to live and never will. To anyone who speaks of the glory of war, the exhilaration of victory I say, ask that child who gave a father for your glory was it worth it? Ask that mother and father if their only son’s life was worth your glory.

We are today embarked on two wars. We are again a nation at war. One of those wars, the global war on terrorism was forced on us by the events of September 11th, 2001. Just as at Pearl Harbor we were attacked on our soil. Three thousand Americans perished in the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon and in a farm field in Pennsylvania. A people who seek the destruction of our way of life and our place in the world brought war home to America for the first time since Pearl Harbor. We have no choice but to fight that war and it is my belief that we will be fighting that war for many years to come, perhaps even for the lifetime of the youngest person in this audience tonight.

Simultaneously, we are fighting another war in Iraq. A war we should never have begun. We turned away from the real war that threatens our existence to pursue the overthrow of a dictator, no doubt odious, but a dictator who was no threat to our national security, was no threat even to the smallest of his neighbors. Our political leadership turned away from the main event, the global war on terrorism, and diverted 90 percent of our strength and our assets into what was merely a sideshow. Two wars, one that it is imperative we fight and win, another merely optional, but we are in Iraq. We have invested to date the lives of over 600 of our soldiers in one year’s time. We have invested 100 billion dollars of our national treasure in that same period. We have tied down the bulk of our armed forces in the occupation of Iraq and do not now have the capability of fighting another war in say, Korea. We have clutched that tar baby to our bosom and now we have no choice but to pursue that war, continue the occupation of a sullen and angry people who kill our soldiers and civilians and dance with joy on their corpses. This is the situation we are in today and now we are moving into the middle of a presidential election year when if anything, our political leadership becomes even shakier and more prone to mistakes.

I said that I would be speaking of war and peace. I’ve spoken much of war and little of peace and yet how desirable peace is to those who have known war close up. I yearn for the blessings of peace for my children and their children and all the children. I would love nothing more than to have etched on my tombstone, he was the last war correspondent. But until the day comes--’til that day comes, we Americans who live in the richest and most powerful nation in the world, until we are willing to invest as much in the instruments of peace as we are in the instruments of war, I fear we will never know peace and will know much too much of war. What do I mean by investing in the instruments of peace? It’s simple. We must invest in the education of all our children and all children everywhere. We must invest in the health and welfare of our children and all God’s children everywhere. We must wage a world war on poverty and hopelessness with as least as much money and vigor as we wage war, real war, on our enemies because poverty and hopelessness are also our enemies. They are the real enemies of peace. They breed teenage suicide bombers on the West Bank, they breed bomb makers and bomb throwers in Iraq, they breed people who rejoice at the sight of dead Americans and dance on their bodies in the streets of Fallujah. We have a choice. We can prepare to kill all those people or we can lead an effort to give them hope and food and education and the belief that there is a place in this world for them too. So long as there are children who go to bed hungry in America tonight, so long as there are children who go to bed hungry anywhere in the world tonight, we are not safe. The world is not safe and there will be no peace. I listen hard to the words of our political leaders and those who would be our political leaders for some sign they understand these truths that they too can see the root causes of war and are willing to fight as hard for peace. I listen but I don’t hear them saying the right words. I pray for wisdom for them. I pray for peace for all of us. I pray for peace with all the fervor that only a man who has held a dying soldier in his arms and watched the life fade from his eyes can muster. I hate war. I love the warriors. They are our children and we send them out to fight and die in our name and under our flag. I support them even when I know the war they fight is wrong. I will always support them because while war is not noble the soldiers are.

I wish Jim Stockdale were here this evening to talk to us. He’s much smarter than I am. He is made of steel that has been tempered in the hottest flames of all and he is strong and wise and good. I’m just an old correspondent who has seen too much of war and too little of peace. In the end, all I can do is ask God’s blessings on our soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who are doing dangerous duty around the world tonight and ask His blessings on our nation and our people and on all peoples.