A Gesture, by Richard Rosenthal

On May 16, 1946, 70 years ago to the day I write this, I was in a Quonset hut in Camp Beale, Calif., sitting beside the desk of a graying sergeant who’d lost both his legs above the knees fighting the Japanese on one of those way-out-there Pacific islands. Typewriter keys whacked a form in the roller. He was processing my Army discharge.

“I see we sent you to Oxford for a term,” he said.

“I’m grateful for that,” I said. “I’m going back on the G.I. Bill to get a degree.”

“How’d you like to join up with the Reserve, Richard? We can get you a bar [an officer’s commission]. The Army needs educated men. War’s become very sophisticated.”

“It’s also become very stupid,” I replied.

He nodded slowly. “There are those nukes now,” he conceded.

And the words spilled out of me, as if I hadn’t been pondering them for months. “I’ve become a conscientious objector, Sergeant. Can you note that in my record?”

He told me he’d be glad to do that and handed me my discharge.

Clausewitz himself said it — Carl von Clausewitz, the enduringly eminent, hard-ass 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist. Friction and fog are intrinsic to warfare. By “friction,” Clausewitz meant that in war there is a tendency for things to go very wrong. Fog, its complement, is the uncertainty in battle, which breeds bad decisions. In short, we can never predict or control what will happen in war. There will always be fuckups.

We have a ghastly example of friction and fog in last October’s U.S. air gunship assault on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The mission was to attack a Taliban compound. According to the U.S. Defense Department report, as summarized in The New York Times, the following “chain of errors” caused the mistake.

To perform an added mission, the gunship was ordered to take off over an hour earlier than planned. The crew was insufficiently briefed. A database that would have allowed them to identify the hospital as a protected site was not uploaded. Then, the satellite radio failed, further stifling the crew’s ability to receive essential information.

Taliban fighters fired a surface-to-air missile at the plane, which veered off course to evade it, confusing the plane’s targeting systems, which directed it to an open field. The crew was left to ID their target visually, for which it was hampered by vague descriptions supplied by U.S. Special Forces and the coincidence that the enemy compound and the hospital had similar visual features and were located within 400 meters of each other.

The gunship, an AC-130, opened fire on the hospital, a total of 200 rounds before the end, some from a 105-millimeter howitzer. Forty-two people, all noncombatants, were killed — 24 patients, 14 hospital staff, and 4 caretakers. The chain of errors had become a tsunami.

Death-dealing confusion also reigned among our military leaders. The hospital telephoned and pleaded with U.S. command in Afghanistan to call off the gunship. But the attack was continued in full ferocity because a U.S. general, his name redacted from the Defense Department report, ruled that since the onslaught was already under way and had been approved by Special Forces, the hospital had lost its special protection status and bore the burden, the impossible burden really, of proving that no Taliban were there. The Defense Department later admitted that no Taliban had been present.

Details of the event’s duration are confused. Depending on which version you accept, the U.S. attack lasted anywhere from a half-hour to an hour and 11 minutes. The first shots were fired at 2:08 a.m. It was 2:20 a.m. when Doctors Without Borders reported the attack to U.S. Afghanistan command and to the Defense Department in Washington, which claims the assault was called off at 2:38, 30 minutes after the first shots and 18 minutes after the department learned of it. But at 2:56 a.m., 48 minutes into the carnage, Doctors Without Borders complained the attack was continuing and did not report a cease-fire until 3:13.

Nothing occurred in the Kunduz chain of errors that is unusual in warfare. Losing one’s way while evading enemy fire, neglecting to upload a guidance device, misidentifying the enemy, maintaining a violent assault on a mistaken target are commonplace. Friction and fog. What’s new from Kunduz is the stark revelation that there is no such thing as a fail-safe system, whether our purpose is the correct identification of a target or ensuring we do not stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

All of these things, all these little oversights, miscalculations, uninformed assumptions that multiply to become whopper screwups are indeed intrinsic to war. Always have been, always will be. The difference now is not that we have developed sophisticated systems that keep us error-free and safer, but that these systems can fail us as quickly as a car, washing machine, or computer grammar check.

Hyperbole? Well, it almost happened twice that we know of: during Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” shtick in the early 1980s and before that during the Cuban nuclear missile brinkmanship in 1962. On both occasions, we were spared by the not inevitable presence of careful people in crucial positions — John Kennedy, Robert McNamara, and Nikita Khrushchev in the ’60s, and in the ’80s a Russian colonel, Stanislav Petrov, who refused to credit notice from his early warning computers that the United States had just fired five nukes at Russia from our Midwest that were 20 minutes away from obliterating much of his country. Had Colonel Petrov accepted this misinformation, there likely would have been a massive nuclear “retaliation” on the United States.

We also know of the tragic shortfalls of fail-safe systems at nuclear power plants in Japan and Russia and our near disaster in the U.S.A. at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. And then there may be other near tragic mishaps that we do not know about. Of course, we must try, and keep trying, to perfect our capability to avoid civilization-ending mistakes. But it’s a struggle that we humans are not perfect enough to win.

With the possible exception of the unnamed U.S general who refused to call off the gunship when it became likely we were destroying a hospital rather than the Taliban, I can’t find it in my heart to demand, as many do, that the soldiers who participated in the Kunduz event be charged with war crimes.

In the German Rhineland, where I served in 1945 near the end of the European war, U.S. forces did not hesitate to level towns that we’d decided, not always with certainty, were sheltering German troops who wanted to continue the war. We were much too preoccupied with our own survival to consider the small chance that some tribunal in the remote future would be assembled to look back and punish us.

With all my 70 years as an advocate for nonviolent solutions, I am still not sure that in such a time and place as Kunduz, I wouldn’t have acted as the G.I.s in the AC-130 aircrew did. Indeed, God forgive me, I might even have relished it.

Being a conscientious objector may be a futile gesture, I know, especially in these days of president-candidate trash talk diplomacy. But it is one small thing I can do, keep as a part of me and hope that somehow it will matter.

Richard Rosenthal lives in East Hampton. A collection of his work, “My Writing and Advocacy, 1943-2016,” which includes his “Guestwords” articles and Star letters to the editor, is available at the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection and at the Amagansett Library.