when the dust clears

The basic facts beneath the controversy are clear:

On August 14, 2009, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Joshua “Bernie” Bernard was fatally wounded in an ambush in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. In the failing evening light, an Associated Press photographer embedded with his unit, Second Battalion/Third Marine Regiment (2/3), shot a photograph of a prone and bleeding Bernard flanked by two comrades. The injured lance corporal was medevaced, but he died from his wounds at a field hospital. He was 21 years old.

Earlier that day, the photographer, Julie Jacobson, shot images of Bernard on patrol. Days later, she covered his memorial service at a Marine base. Jacobson transmitted these photos, including the image of the bloodied Bernard, to AP.

“For the second time in my life,” she says in the online slide show’s narration as the disputed photo appears on screen, “I watched a Marine lose his.”

AP sent a reporter to interview the Bernard family and discuss the photograph. The young man’s father beseeched the AP’s representative not to run the photo. AP chose to do so, along with other photos, in a story titled “Death of a Marine: A Photographer’s Journal” to clients who receive its “hosted” service. Such stories are fed automatically to newspapers, AP clients, nationwide.

Conservative and rightwing commentators—and some active and retired military—slammed AP for going against the Bernard family’s wishes and running the photo. So too did the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.

“I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard’s death has caused his family,” Gates wrote in a letter to AP’s president.

“Why your organization would purposefully defy the family’s wishes knowing full well that it will lead to more anguish is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right—but judgment and common decency.”

AP issued a written statement defending its decision.

“We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is,” Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography, stated.

AP asserts that the photographer—and the editors and executives who made the decision to run the photo—followed rules for embedded media laid down by the Pentagon. AP cites the relevant clause in the agreement to make its case:

“Casualties may be covered by embedded media as long as the service member’s identity and unit identification is protected from disclosure until [the Assistant Deputy of Defense for Public Affairs] has officially released the name. Photography from a respectful distance or from angles at which a casualty cannot be identified is permissible; however, no recording of ramp ceremonies or remains transfers is permitted.”

Writers on sites like Captain’s Journal, a conservative blog devoted to military affairs, hammered AP. [Full disclosure: contributors to the site have been critical of my Iraq reporting.]

The site’s “captain,” Herschel Smith, whose son is a Marine and “who is not a member of the armed forces,” says AP violated the embedding agreement. He implies that Bernard’s facial features are distinct enough in the photo to identify him. This would be a straight-up violation of the embedding agreement, which Jacobson would have been required to sign before linking up with 2/3.

“The AP signed a contract in order to obtain the protection of the Marines,” Smith wrote on September 6. “They violated the terms of that contract, and thus they are liars—at least, the people who made the decision to release this photo…. They blew their moral capital on a whim. They threw away their soul.”

Judge for yourself whether the photo includes enough of Lance Corporal Bernard’s face to establish his identity.

(As of September 8, “the version of the slide show that will appear on [hosted] sites will be a version of the slide show that will not include the image,” AP’s director of media relations, Paul Colford, told me on the phone. Editors may request a “secondary version” of the show with the disputed image. Several publications, AP clients, have pulled the image from their sites.)

_________________

I have told this story before, but I need to tell it again here.

Mortars started falling on Forward Operating Base Iskandariyah, Iraq, at around 1:00 PM on July 23, 2004. It was my first full day in country as an embed with First Battalion/Second Marine Regiment. Marines shoved me into the mouth of an underground bomb shelter; those inside made room for me. I could here men outside yelling, “I’m hit, I’m hit.”

When the explosions stopped, I followed Master Sergeant Allen Benjamin of Weapons Company, with whom I lived, to the Battalion Aid Station. Inside, there was barely controlled chaos. A giant of a Marine silently daubed at a river of blood dripping from his bald head. Another Marine lay on the floor in a pool of blood surrounded by Army medics and Navy corpsmen.

I raised my camera to shoot.

“What the fuck is he doing in here?” a Marine to my right exploded. I explained to him that I hadn’t taken a photo, that I was an embed and had permission to be there. Master Sergeant Benjamin came to my defense, quieting the Marine.

I stood still, not shooting, just observing. The battalion’s commanding officer entered the BAS and ordered all nonmedical personnel out. I debated staying for a moment, and then left without shooting a photo of the Marine, Lance Corporal Vincent Sullivan, 23 years old. He had a severe chest wound from shrapnel and later died.

I retreated for several reasons, some calculated—I didn’t want to alienate the men on my first day of a weeks-long embed—and others less so. I was intimidated, to be sure, but I was also overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation.

There was no censorship. I could have stayed, but I self-censored, which is akin to lying. At the very least, it is unwitting collusion with those who could keep the American public ignorant of the wars going in their—our—name.

That’s my view.

The day after the 2004 mortar attack, the Marine who chewed me out in the aid station, Ricky Funderburk, then 21 years old, apologized to me. “I had friends that passed away last year, but not that close. Until Vince,” Funderburk explained. He was defending Sullivan’s dignity when he yelled at me, he told me.

I called Funderburk and asked him what he thought of the Bernard photo controversy. We talked, and he promised to respond in an email.

“I think the press should respect the families wishes and not publish the pictures. I understand that people have a right to know, but there are some things that just don’t need to be published,” Funderburk wrote.

“If someone wants to know that bad what it’s like, they have two options: one is read the story and [then] picture it in their head; or join the military and go see what it’s like. If the AP wants America to know what it’s like in war, then they should go to the V.A. Hospital and talk to vets.

“You leave that place physically for what you hope will be forever, but it stays with you mentally forever. It haunts your dreams. One sound or sight can remind you of it at anytime, anywhere.

“Now, because of this picture, the other two Marines in the picture—every time they see it, they will be reminded of it and will go back to that place in their mind of such a dark time. I hate that place. All of us vets hide it the best we can, but it seems like it’s brought up too often.

“I have respect for the press, people like yourself, Brian, but I feel like they should have respect for the dead, and especially the families of the dead, and not publish the photo. Let it be in black and white letters, not colorful pictures with so much red in them. It haunts you forever!”

_________________

As much as I respect Funderburk—he is a friend now—I can’t agree with him. This is where journalist and Marine inevitably part.  His loyalty is to the mission, the Corps, and his comrades. Mine—a journalist’s—must be to the public and to history.

In the current fractured and heavily politicized news environment this may sound grandiloquent and anachronistic. Anyone with an iPhone can be a journalist, we’re told. And these days, journalism can be anything—opinionated and unsourced blogs, the entertaining propaganda, pandering, and patter of cable news.

We journalists are not certified or licensed by any authority or organization, like plumbers or surgeons. Our standards are determined to a large degree by our audience, which also judges the success or failure of our work by consuming or ignoring it.

We journalists have little in our professional quiver of arrows besides our credibility and integrity.  Forty years ago, many people paid attention to stories by a freelancer named Sy Hersh about a placed dubbed My Lai  because he backed them up with gumshoe reporting—eyewitness testimony and carefully gathered facts. Gruesome photos made by Ronald Haeberle, a U.S. Army photographer, that day in 1969 supported Hersh’s reporting, as did other news accounts. It was a different time, with fewer contending media voices and an all-consuming war (with a draft, which naturally focused public attention), but many people gave credence to the harsh, sometimes graphic, reporting and photography from Vietnam—by Gloria Emerson, Sydney Schanberg, Wallace Terry, Don McCullin, Philip Jones Griffiths, Larry Burrows, Nick Ut, and others—because the work stood up to examination and critique. The vision was ugly, but it reflected the grim reality of a conflict that consumed millions of Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.

_____________________

“People get killed in war. That’s what it’s all about,” Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, wrote to me an email. I resort to his book when I need historical perspective on current imbroglios over war coverage.

“Governments don’t like this being made obvious with photographs of their deaths. It’s considered bad for morale. So they try to censor and intimidate the media into not using them. It’s my belief that the media has been too complicit in this policy and that the more the reality of war is brought home to everybody—no matter how grueling this might be for relatives of the casualties—then the more likely it is that we’ll think twice about supporting any war.”

War is a public endeavor of the gravest importance; it is never a private matter, the comments of the Secretary of Defense notwithstanding.

Yes, each soldier and Marine is a unique individual with a history and loved ones. But abroad, on the streets of Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan, and in any of the myriad countries where U.S. troops are deployed, each service member is an instrument, often deadly, of our national power.

I believe that Ricky Funderburk, other service members who fought for this country, and their families have a right to look away from horrible—and horribly real—photos such as Jacobson’s image of Lance Corporal Bernard.

But the American public has a right to know what our fighting men and women are doing in our name, and what is happening to them. And as citizens, we have a responsibility to look, even when it shocks and discomfits us.

Ends

On a warm January day last year in Jacksonville, North Carolina, a 27-year-old U.S. Marine walked unsteadily down a carpeted hallway at Peak Performance Physical Therapy, his eyes fixed on a sign taped to a door at the far end. A young woman guided him. A few steps from the door, he staggered and lost his balance, listing toward the wall to his left. With the help of the woman, an upbeat and sturdy therapist, he righted himself and kept going.

This is Staff Sergeant David Marino’s last exercise in a humbling routine designed to counteract the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury—impaired balance and coordination, memory loss—which he sustained in two roadside bombings in Iraq. There’s no treatment to reverse the initial brain damage caused by TBI, according to the National Institutes of Health, but some service members suffering from the condition have shown improvement after physical and occupational therapy. That’s why Marino’s here.

Still a Marine, though not the kind he used to be—an infantryman, a combat leader—Marino was on limited duty because of his injuries. His new status: “combat injured Marine,” commonly known as a “wounded warrior.”

Between 2004 and 2006, David Marino served two tours in Iraq leading men on patrols, escort missions, and “hard-hits”—raids to capture suspected bomb makers and resistance fighters. Though trained for combat, Marino spent most of his time interacting with civilians, questioning, negotiating, and mediating, as part of his larger mission: finding an elusive enemy that hides among ordinary citizens.

More often than not, that enemy found the Marines first.

In 2004, a tremendous improvised explosive device—IED—killed Marino’s best friend, Sergeant Jayton Patterson. Patterson had left his Humvee to inspect a bomb crater in the road.

“Jayton had walked up to the hole, and he was standing on three IEDs,” Marino recalled. Distant attackers detonated the bomb with a remote control.

“I kind of lost it, to tell you the truth. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. My body made sounds and weeps and cries that a grown man shouldn’t make.” Marino served out the rest of the tour by forcing himself to forget.

In 2006, Marino led a platoon of 40 Marines and several Iraqi soldiers through dozens of missions in Anbar province, one of Iraq’s most violent places at that time. Marino saved lives—and he took some, too. Commanders referred to him as a “Marine’s Marine,” perhaps the highest compliment one Marine can pay another.

Marino came home with a severely damaged knee and back. He was in no condition to resume the grueling training cycle of a combat Marine, so he was given a limited duty assignment—a desk job—on base and started treatment for his knee. Other problems began popping up.

“I started forgetting phone calls,” Marino recalled. “Having a conversation and then five minutes later having no idea what we’re talking about.”

Marino quietly left that job and was given a less demanding one, Family Readiness Officer, by his old unit, which deployed to Iraq without him in 2007. As a “FRSNO,” Marino was a liaison between deployed Marines and family members, “making sure they get what they need while their husbands are forward deployed,” he said.

Other troubling problems began to surface.

“It all came out, and it was overwhelming—the PTSD, the memories. I started drinking a lot,” Marino told me in 2008. “Thoughts of suicide. I’m not going to lie. It affects everybody different, and I thought I’d be stronger than that.”

“I finally came forward and told the doctor what was going on, and they got me over at the Wounded Warrior Battalion.”

In 2004, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Maxwell, a senior officer in Marino’s old unit, returned from Iraq severely wounded. An exploding mortar had driven shrapnel into the left side of his brain. His injuries were grave, but the isolation from fellow Marines was even more debilitating.

So Maxwell created a support group for Marines too injured to return to regular duty and set up barracks where they could heal together. This ad hoc assembly of injured Marines has grown into the Wounded Warrior Regiment, with battalions on both the east and west coasts.

Being assigned to Wounded Warrior, however, is no guarantee a Marine will be allowed to stay in the Corps. As an “expeditionary force” that deploys routinely—and when dispatched by the President—the Marine Corps has a limited number of jobs for combat injured Marines. To get such a slot, one must first earn “permanent limited duty status.” The Corps’ stated policy is to retain as many combat injured Marines as is feasible. In practice, staying in as a wounded Marine is tremendously difficult. (The U.S. Army has an even more complicated retention process for wounded soldiers.)

It was hard for Marino to accept that he would never deploy again as a combat Marine. But leaving the Corps was unthinkable.

“I don’t feel like I’m anybody when I go home. It’s home here with the Marines. It’s 10 years of my life in the Marine Corps. I love the Marine Corps. I don’t want to get out.”

To stay in, Marino submitted to a months-long series of medical evaluations by the Corps—this on top of the seemingly endless surgeries and therapy, both physical and psychological. He solicited letters of support from former comrades and commanders. They attested to his exemplary service—and to his ability to continue to contribute to the Marine Corps, even with his injuries.

At the end of 2008, Marino won his bureaucratic battle and was granted permanent limited duty status. He landed a job with the east coast Wounded Warrior Battalion. Nearly 24 hours a day, he connected with and counseled injured Marines by phone, email, and in person.

“The motto is ‘Pay It Forward,’” Marino says of Wounded Warrior. “So as you’re getting treated and you’re helping yourself heal…you find something else inside of you to help you recover, which is helping someone else.”

Most Marines “don’t want pity,” Marino says. “They don’t want someone to say, ‘I’m so sorry this happened to you.’ They don’t want that. They want to be like, Yeah, it happened to me. It’s alright. I’ll deal with it. I got help from people that love me, and I’ll move on from it and I’ll be a better person because of it.”

Recently, Marino was promoted from staff sergeant to gunnery sergeant, and he’s settling in to a new assignment with Wounded Warrior in California.

Still, there are constant reminders that the Corps is still very much a warfighter’s institution. Timothy Maxwell, the founder of Wounded Warrior, left the Marine Corps in early July after 22 years.

“I’ve decided it’s time to go because a year ago I went for surgery to pull out a piece of shrapnel near my brain stem,” Maxwell announced at his June retirement ceremony at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

“It crippled me on my right side. Now I can’t represent the Marine Corps like I should,” Maxwell told well-wishers.

“Marines are known for looking good in their uniform and when I can’t look good in my cammies, it’s time to go.”

A portly, middle-aged white man in a purple polo shirt, conservative slacks, and a white baseball cap strides to a lectern positioned improbably on the side of a narrow dirt road. Behind him, there is a grass field dotted with brown dirt patches and ersatz shed-like structures.

The man faces several dozen people seated on bleachers, which are shielded from the strong Virginia sun. They talk softly, politely, in anticipation of the event to come.

The man fiddles with the lectern’s microphone, stuffs plastic foam plugs into each ear, and then glances down at his wristwatch.

A sizable BOOM ruptures the calm. Even the man flinches, and he knew what was coming. A trail of black smoke drifts toward him and dissipates magically, just inches from his head, like a perfectly planned Hollywood special effect.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon,” the man says into the microphone. “Now that I have your attention…” And indeed he did.

There were dozens more explosions during the three-day Force Protection Equipment Demonstration held in May at Marine Corps Base Quantico. U.S. Marine explosive experts detonated charges around and under traffic barriers, laminated windows set in steel frames, wall panels—objects engineered to mitigate the deadly blast effects from exploding bombs and other weapons.

The observers in the stands were a mix of vendors and potential buyers. Among the latter were representatives of all branches of the armed services as well as local, state, and Federal emergency management officials.

After the final detonation, sellers and shoppers streamed across the field to inspect the damage to the various products—Hesco Bastions, “BABS” ballistic absorption barriers, bright orange Yodock barricades, and many others. Intense, jargon-laden conversations ensued about fragmentation and standoff distances and were continued later in the day at the exposition’s main site, the Stafford County Regional Airport.

——————–

“There are five ways of attacking with fire. The first is to burn soldiers in their camp,” the military strategist Sun Zi wrote centuries ago with brutal clarity.

Contemporary military commanders (and politicians) talk about “taking the fight to the enemy.” “Force protection” is what you need when your adversary brings the fight to you.

The Pentagon defines force protection as “actions taken to prevent or mitigate hostile actions against Department of Defense personnel (to include family members), resources, facilities, and critical information.”

That working definition sets the parameters for the biannual Force Protection Equipment Demonstration—no tanks, fighter aircraft, or missiles. “FPED” is about comparatively dull protective systems—blast-resistant materials, surveillance cameras, explosives detection devices, robotic vehicles, night-vision gear, and unmanned aerial vehicles. That said, there are lethal items on display, such as remotely operated machine guns, but FPED’s focus is defense rather than offense.

It’s hard to get a handle on the exact amount the Defense Department spends on force protection. The 2010 Defense budget request submitted to Congress allots $15.2 billion in additional funds for force protection measures overseas. This includes money for body armor and blast-resistant vehicles for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it doesn’t represent the undoubtedly staggering cost of incorporating mandatory force protection into all new construction and renovation of government facilities where DoD personnel will live or work.

It’s safe to say that the sums devoted to force protection have grown quite large over the years, which explains why many of the biggest defense contractors—Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, SAIC, General Dynamics, Honeywell, L-3 Communications—attended the equipment expo.

One example: Hesco Bastion Ltd., makers of the wire mesh and cloth barriers that are ubiquitous around U.S. bases and installations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been doing business with the DoD since 1989, according to the U.S. government’s Central Contractor Registration. In September 2007, the Defense Logistics Agency awarded Hesco a $710 million contract for barriers to be used by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. In December of that year, Hesco got another $195 million contract for defensive walls. An $800 million contract from the DLA followed in 2008. Other U.S. government departments as well as individual states also purchase products from Hesco.

The company’s owner, Jimmy Heselden, is a former coal miner from Yorkshire, England, who now ranks 261 out of 2000 on the Times of London’s list of wealthiest Britons and Irish, with roughly $398 million. Of course, the heads of major U.S. defense contractors do quite well, too. Ronald Sugar, CEO of Northrop Grumman, which displayed its robotic vehicles and physical security systems at FPED, had a base salary of $1.5 million in 2008. His total calculated compensation, however, was $17 million, which includes options, restricted stock awards, and other goodies.

——————–

FPED’s roots are in a deadly terrorist attack—but not September 11. On June 25, 1996, a late-model car pulled into the parking lot of Khobar Towers, housing for international troops working with the Saudi Arabian National Guard, in Dharan. The driver flashed his headlights, a signal to a fuel truck to roll into the lot.

A trio of American security officers watched, according to investigation reports, and immediately put two and two together: truck bomb. They started evacuating the building and managed to alert residents on the top three floors of the eight-story building when the bomb detonated.

The massive explosion ripped open the building’s north wall. Nineteen airmen from the 4404th Wing (Provisional) of the U.S. Air Force were killed. Five hundred others were injured.

The Khobar Towers bombing was not a bolt from the blue. Just a few months earlier, a car bomb at a U.S. military training center in Riyadh had killed five Americans and two Indians who worked there.

But the brazen and grievous Khobar attack riveted U.S. policymakers, senior military commanders, and the American public. A task force investigating the bombing led by a former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command issued a report that stated, “There are no published Department of Defense physical security standards for force protection of fixed facilities…. Force protection requirements had not been given high priority for funding.” In other words, steps could have—and should have—been taken beforehand that most likely would have limited casualties, even if the attack couldn’t have been prevented.

Talk turned to action at a speed rarely seen in Washington. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, green-lighted FPED, an equipment exposition where companies and inventors, great and small, would demonstrate protective equipment for troops and installations. If ordered by a service, the contractor was required to deliver the system within 90 days of the expo. This need for speed put the focus on “COTS”—commercial off-the-shelf technology—and not systems extruded from the glacially slow and costly defense procurement system.

——————–

I attended the second FPED in 1999. I was a staff writer at Fortune, recently hired and hunting for a beat to call my own. I had covered the military as a photojournalist and dealt with defense attachés as Beijing correspondent for US News. As a result, I had a Rolodex full of military contacts.

But I also had a profound interest in how policymakers use military force—or threats of force—to achieve political objectives. On the one hand, elected officials proved to be averse to the prospect of American casualties and the possibility of a foreign intervention devolving into a Vietnamish quagmire. (Polls show that American voters don’t like quagmires.) Yet many of these same officials easily became besotted with the notion that military force can be used with scalpel-like precision to achieve positive outcomes in foreign lands. As Madeleine Albright put it so famously in a debate about the conflict in the Balkans to General Colin Powell, who quoted her in his memoirs, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

“I thought I would have an aneurysm,” Powell wrote. “American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global gameboard.” Would that the he had remembered his words years later as he dutifully beat the Iraq war drum before the U.N. Security Council.

This seeming schizophrenia—military intervention good, body bags bad—was hardly unique to the Clinton era, but it seemed particularly pronounced. America’s bloody departure from Somalia was still fresh in the collective national memory, as was the president’s decision not to intervene in the Rwandan genocide. The brutal wars raging in the former Yugoslavia were headline news. On top of all this was the charged atmosphere in Washington. Bill Clinton’s very Clintonness—his lack of military service, penchant for micromanagement, and tendency toward vacillation and compromise—amplified all debates over the use of military force.

Senior military commanders were stuck in a bind. Their “superb military” was increasingly being injected into all manner of volatile, sometimes deadly, “military operations other than war”—peacekeeping, peace enforcement, “forward presence activities,” crisis response, exclusion zone enforcement, and so on. And yet commanders were told to avoid American casualties at all costs. Force protection naturally ascended to a top slot on the list of military priorities.

Many in the military hated (and still hate) being used as global cops. Such missions, they said, degraded their warfighting capability. Some defense analysts believed force protection itself was being overemphasized to the detriment of accomplishing the mission.

“In its mission statement, the brigade responsible for one-fourth of Kosovo lists its foremost objective as ‘self-protection,’” Charles Hyde, a U.S Air Force major, wrote in 2000.

“Force-protection fetishism was on full display during the Kosovo crisis of 1999,” wrote Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy, doctrine, and airpower at the U.S. Air War College, in 2000. “American behavior during that crisis reflected a desperate unwillingness to place  the satisfaction of U.S. armed intervention’s political objective ahead of the safety of its military instrument.”

It’s hard these days to find someone who speaks publicly of “force-protection fetishism,” but such thinking is now embedded in our policy. September 11 changed everything. The tremendous loss of life and the national wound it caused made the military sacrosanct, its missions inherently right and justified, even if we didn’t—and still don’t—understand the rationale behind them. The enormous protests against the Iraq War notwithstanding, our collective ability to consider the consequences of our global engagements was diminished or destroyed by our pain—and its exploitation by the Bush administration. Now, the deployment of troops whose primary job is, arguably, to protect themselves—there are still 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, just not in cities—barely raises American eyebrows.
Fundamentally, the schizophrenia that has characterized the American approach to military intervention hasn’t been examined or treated. Rather, it has been accepted as a chronic condition, which we medicate with distractions and struggle to ignore.

——————–

Getting vendors to talk to me at FPED in 2009 was as easy as it was ten years earlier. After all, they had products to flog.

A young man in wraparound shades bent a hinged, plastic device shaped like a rifle into an L. He then stepped behind a piece of cardboard taped to a tent pole and aimed the business end of his “weapon” over the pretend wall at me, the putative bad guy for his demo. The “shooter” was demonstrating Corner Shot, a contraption made from “high-impact polymer” that can be fitted with a firearm and a tiny camera. The bendy joint in the middle allows the user to fire around a corner, protected. Nifty, and more than a little scary in a Terminator sort of way. The Israeli military, which Corner Shot was designed for, swears by it, he assured me.

After a ballistics demonstration in 1999, retired Army colonel and defense analyst John Alexander patiently answered my questions and discussed current events in Kosovo. In separate conversations, a Navy lieutenant involved in fleet security at Naval Station Norfolk and an Army staff sergeant who served as a military policeman at West Point walked me through the history of force protection.

“What this show does,” a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel told me then, is “assist in identifying a 60, 70, or 80 percent solution, which might not fully protect soldiers in the field but certainly provides a stopgap—immediate protection for your force. An 80 percent solution is better than nothing. We certainly look for a 100 percent solution through traditional acquisition.”

Ten years later, uniformed military personnel—and even prior military—were decidedly less open to conversation. Captain Mark Ruiz spoke warily about his reasons for coming. “I work for the Florida National Guard Force Protection office in St. Augustine, and I’m here to see the equipment and the force protection demonstrations, like the blast protection—the windows and the barriers and all that stuff.” His commanders dispatched him to FPED to observe and report back, he said.

“I can’t talk about that,” deputy project manager for the Army’s force protection systems (and a former soldier) John Moneyhun replied when I asked about the value of the biggest contracts inked after FPED. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.”

Interview rejections came one after another, from soldiers, Marines, and airmen, over my two full days at the event.

“Hmmm, “a British officer wearing a flight suit murmured when I requested a brief interview.

“How about, No!” he barked at me before storming away.

end