Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to 800 or more soldiers and the civilian audience at a Landon Lecture at Kansas State University Monday.
Gen. Dempsey directed his speech to the soldiers who filled the upper seats and were scattered throughout the rest of McCain Auditorium and included the ROTC of the university as well as large contingents from Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth. While the nominal subject was the relationship between the nation and its veterans, Dempsey dwelt at length on the qualities that combat soldiers possess and the war environment to which they must adapt.
A soldier must have courage, he said, and illustrated by telling of a man whose job it was to drop from Blackhawk helicopters suspended by a thin steel cable to rescue people in trouble on the ground.
The soldier he had interviewed had picked up 12 soldiers, one by one, who were pinned down by the enemy on a cliff. He and they were under fire throughout the mission. His cable was hit twice by machine gun bullets and still held him. Four of the rescued soldiers died in his arms from wounds.
That, Gen. Dempsey said, showed courage.
He continued telling his military audience — and the rest of us — the qualities of character men and women in the military must possess, illustrating each attribute with another specific example drawn from men and women he knew or had knowledge of and went from there to say each generation of Americans defines its veterans.
It is up to today’s Americans to define the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they return to civilian life, he said.
“We should have a national dialogue on how best to accomplish this,” he said.
He said soldiers sometimes find that returning to the United States and civilian life can be more difficult than war, itself. In combat, he pointed out, the mission is clear. Back home, that one clear mission is traded for the need to make decisions without number.
The soldier, he said, lives at “Mach 4” speed and can find it difficult to slow down and adjust to a much less ordered life.
The nation, he said, needs to work with the veterans as they come back from combat experience.
“This isn’t something the nation should do for veterans,” he emphasized, “it should be done for the nation.”
Touching other topics, Gen. Dempsey said the level of violence around the world had dropped significantly. The chances of war between major nations has never been lower in our lifetimes, he said. But the chances of violent acts by individual groups of terrorists occurring have increased exponentially, he added.
Today’s military, he said, is organized in massive units, which can oppose the forces of a major nation, but can be devolved into smaller units to fight terrorism, or be aggregated quickly to fight another major war should that be necessary.
He also remarked the military, along with the rest of the federal government, will adjust to tighter budgets made inevitable by the deficit and massive national debt.
