Thank you for your article. I think about the four soldiers often. Hopefully their families will know that their sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands have not been forgotten.
How can it be that someone who has spent 15 years in the military doesn't understand how it works? Here's how it works:
Officers all protect each other. They also have favorite subordinates that they will throw someone under the bus to protect. It took me maybe a month of boot camp to figure that out. I didn't stick around to be stabbed in the back.
It's too bad what happened to him, and he likely couldn't have stopped it even had he not been foolish enough to trust the system.
But there honestly isn't enough information here to base any conclusion on.
And I'd be surprised if he hasn't topedoed others like they did him.
You don't last 15 years with clean hands in the service.
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Where's the rest of the story? This is a summary.
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The Army - the Armed Forces - often distort facts, and fix responsibility for screw-ups on lower level personnel. They have all of the problems that beset any gigantic organization, plus a rigid hierarchical set up which doesn't appreciate feedback from the field. Loyalty is often measured in following the official line, but honor takes more than that. And the Army, etc, is not very comfortable with scrutiny by independent parties.
I have a feeling that had this never happened to him, Mr Van Saun would never offer public criticism of the military, either.
Should he be criticized for taking leave for the birth of his daughter? The strange nature of our current warfare, conducted without declarations of war, is unending. Many personnel are redeployed over and over. These are not teenagers or in their early 20's, and they have families. I don't see how we can expect them to carry the load of fighting these interminable battles, without providing some support of families. Granted, he did choose this role. BUT
If you cannot grant that he and his family deserved just this much support, then consider whether you want those who serve to be divorced from normal human connections. I do not.
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Sad, reminds me of Captain McVay's Court Martial after the Indianapolis was sunk. Captain McVay was railroaded by the upper Naval Command for mistakes that should have been laid at their feet. He never recovered from it, eventually taking his own life. Decades after his death, he was absolved of all charges and his rank honorably restored. The Navy gave him a career and effectively ruined it.
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I am mystified why some posts criticize the author for going home to witness childbirth while not criticizing the superior officer(s) who approved his going home. It seems another instance of higher-ups enjoying immunity.
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I served with this man in 3rd Special Forces Group. I helped him and his battalion prepare for their deployment to Africa. I also knew and served with one of the men killed in that ambush. I can tell you personally MAJ Van Saun was one of the finest and most skilled officers I've ever known. He was a future battalion commander, no doubt. He did not deserve this treatment, and he is absolutely right here. I don't blame him for being upset when the ethos of personal responsibility was thrust upon him but not applied to the command echelon who actually planned, approved, and executed the operation.
Also, for those couple comments about him going home for the birth of his child, go easy. You weren't there. This wasn't Vietnam, it wasn't even Afghanistan. It was an area which, for US forces, had been relatively uneventful for years and it was not a declared combat zone. He would have never gone back, even temporarily as he did, if he had any reason to think his Soldiers were likely to face the danger he himself had already faced in actual combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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@Kaffee
With all due respect, I still disagree with his returning home. It might have been a quiet area but over a ten day period a lot can, and did, change. Back home, is a long way from Africa and his troops.
Since he had combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, his experiences would have been invaluable to his troops. It didn't do any good to be thousands of miles away when they needed him.
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@C Neil Gomer First, thank you for your service in Vietnam. My hat's off to the work you and your fellow warriors did in that theater. To respond to your points, certainly MAJ Van Saun's article shows how much guilt he felt by not being there. That will happen any time a commander isn't on scene when something happens.
The ultimate truth, however, is that they weren't left in the lurch by him going home. That decision would not have been made in a vacuum. He would have consulted with his superior commanders, the ones whose extensive combat experience he would have relied upon when he left theater. Top to bottom, there was no shortage of combat experience on that rotation. And at any rate, if him being home at the time was something his leadership or the Army thought contributed at all to what happened, it would have been in his reprimand, but it wasn't.
If as a veteran of a prior war you're trying to understand how could a commander leave his troops to go home for the birth of his son, the answer is really both because we've been at war so long and because we weren't at war in Niger. Especially in SF, there isn't a big population of greenhorns or draftees that need battlefield guidance. Today the U.S. military is composed of a battle-hardened yet over-strained force who's long carried the burden for a little under 99% of the US population. So, respecting your own personal experience, I nonetheless give MAJ Van Saun the benefit of the doubt.
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@C Neil Gomer Yeah hindsight is always 20-20, isn’t it?
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By Africa Command, do your mean USAFRICOM at Kelley Barracks in Germany (DoD unified command) , US Army Africa in Italy or some other headquarters?
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Mr Van Saun was not involved in the decision that directly led to an impromptu and ill-prepared mission. He does not deserve the blame here. I hope those who were involved did get scrutinized and reprimanded.
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@mainliner Sadly, Trump's new head of the Defense department and new Chair of the Joint Chief of Staff have ruled against that, with the new Chair having close ties to one of the immune higher ups. Mattis had ordered a fair assessment of the role of the higher ups.
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A trillion dollars per year is what We The People pay for this.
Over 900 military bases around the world.
Ike was right: the military industrial complex now owns all of us, and Death is the result. Our country is no longer a shining beacon, it is a colluding grift, with Death a mere byproduct. The strategic way every state is in thrall to The Complex ensures continued Congressional support for more Death.
Only a wholesale examination and reform of the entire military will help us.
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OK, I thought about this for a while and have to comment. I am a Vietnam veteran and I cannot believe a commanding officer left his troops, in a combat zone, for ten days because his wife was having a baby! Come on! What kind of commanding officer is this?
What kind of army is this?
As a former enlisted man, this is the way I feel.
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@C Neil Gomer It was not a combat zone. It apparently is often considered no -risk for a commander to leave with well trained troops and officers in place. Surely his superiors considered all of this. Several writers stated that VietNam was not comparable to the forever wars of the past almost 20 yrs. There was no fighting in Niger at that time.
Can someone tell me why we are in Niger? What vital interest of the USA are we protecting? How many other countries are like this—can’t we just get out? Insanity.
Also, I question the wisdom that allows modern military to phone home and go home while they are in combat. Is this really a good idea? A firefight @ 0500 and then discussing the banalities of life with a spouse @ 1600? It seems to me that focus is somehow lost. Even worse is going home in the midst of a combat deployment.
Is this really a good idea?
Should this policy be changed?
Let’s hear from the warriors on this.
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@John Galt
I'm sure most people would agree having a child is not one of the banalties of life.
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@ John galt- oil- black gold. The usual reason we put our men and woman in harms way.
It may be that a the letter of reprimand was not warranted. The author of this article left out a fact that the editor should be forgiven for not catching.
The commander of each unit is responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen.
This is a consequential form of responsibility that is not ambiguous.
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@Joe Mcmullen But why then was his commander not punished?
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Sadly, anyone who has ever served in the military understands that when mistakes result in death, the military will always scapegoat a low ranking service member in order to protect the senior officers. It has been true for as long as there have beeb militaries.
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@Smokey The Long Gray Line closes ranks for senior officers, colonel and above. It's the club. And it is ruthless.
Why has there not been a Benghazi-style hearing on this tragedy? Why do Americans' preventable deaths only matter if Democrats can be blamed?
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I served many years as an enlisted soldier. And the saying was that a foul substance rolls downhill, and, I was the target of that substance as someone needed to be blamed.
I was blamed for an incident that I had absolutely no control over.
I did make to retirement and have never looked back. And many that I considered as friends were no longer.
It is sad that we the taxpayer fund the expense of training our officer corps in the service academies and put trust in those cadets to become effective leaders.
But, the military leadership needs to find someone to blame. And the ring knockers found Mr. Van Saun.
Perhaps Mr. Van Saun was not part of the ring knocker club, so therefore, expendable?
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@Dan
You’re right about st Ff rlling dwnhill....not just in the military, but perhaps especially there.
But he was a ringknocker (short bio at the end of the article). They’ll eat there own to keep climbing the ladder.
Sighned,
A former ROTC officer (who had many West Point friends and colleagues)
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Marine infantry here , Sir you were done wrong , the generals were more concerned with covering their tails than finding the truth , and most importantly taking care of their men . Your integrity is intact . God bless you
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No one who has ever watched a movie or read a book about the military should trust them. In the same way that boards of directors of corporations are made up of Hunter Bidens, military leadership is made of people who were promoted based on family or business connections. For three years, Congress has been investigating collusion but they never investigated Colin Powell's testimony that he had incontrovertible proof that the Iraqis has weapons of mass distruction, a claim which proved false. American soldiers are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq but we have no clear plan for winning the war againt the Taliban and Isis. Donald Trump, bring our soldiers home.
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Why didn’t you mention any of the Trump children in your rant ? And then you ask Donald Trump to bring our soldiers home ? The bone spur draft dodger who could not serve his country because he was too busy driving around New York at the time in his Cadillac with DJT vanity plates ? Guess those bone spurs did not bother him when he stepped on the gas or brake pedals.
For the record I was in An Khe, South Vietnam when the sound of mortar rounds being walked into our base camp signaled the beginning of the Tet offensive in 1968.
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@Michael Green
Um, have you served in the military?
Perhaps at the flag level things such as connections count, but at the company-division levels, you’re theory is nonsense. The military is a meritocracy, and your next OER can get you out of the service in a hurry unless the grade is high.
Sorry but again, lyou have no idea what tou are tlking about. The military is far from perfect but the leadership at those levels I mentioned are good, often great.
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@John Taylor "Why didn’t you mention any of the Trump children in your rant ?"
Probably for the same reason he didn't mention that both Clintons and obama had the opportunity to serve in the military but didn't.
Get over yourself
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The 1915-1916 Galipoli campaign was a larger amphibious operation than the world had ever seen up to that point. Everything that could be done wrong was done wrong, not once but several times. The greatest minds of the United States Marine Corps studied these horrible mistakes for over a decade. From these studies we developed our amphibious warfare capabilities that gave us great victories in World War II and Korea.
The defeat in Chad was a brief operation, but the violations of military principles were numerous and terrible. These violations were made not by the troops on the ground, but by Africa Command and the administration itself. We have not studied these wrong actions to learn from them - instead, Heel Spur's administration has lied and covered up. These catastrophic mistakes are likely to be repeated, and at a larger scale, not just by Africa Command, but by other Commands who have grown slovenly under our less than military civilian leadership. A dull rusty sword is a dangerous weapon to he who wields it.
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Churchill was wholey responsible the death of many ANZAC troops to his arrogance and refusal to listen to the advise of others. While briefly demoted, he was never court Marshalled or excoriated before the nation. In his book he claimed that the sailors and soldiers had failed him.
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@Smokey
The errors were mainly systemic at Gallipoli. Every time a British general went ashore, the boat was overloaded with the commanding officers of his subordinate commands, many in popinjay hats and all with unit banners unfurled. The Turks tended to fire on such boats. As shown in the film Galipoli, officers did not synchronize watches, with repeated disastrous consequences. Back then were generally inaccurate. Worse, this was before times were standardized to a time zone, so every village in the Levant big enough to have a clock had its own concept of how many minutes past the hour it was. Worst of all, watches would be set to different times, such as Cairo, Jerusalem and Afghanistan. You would think that the first time an artillery barrage lifted over half an hour too early (letting defenders shoot your advancing troops) or too late (landing on your advancing troops) someone would decide to synchronize watches. But as one British general said, a gentleman does not tell any other gentleman to what time he should set his watch. Supplies were NEVER combat loaded, so when a unit came ashore nobody knew where its ammunition was. I could recount other examples, but the point is this. An amphibious operation requires development of amphibious doctrine, and that units be extensively trained (for generations, preferably) in such procedures. That's why there is a United States Marine Corps.
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@Smokey
Early in the Galipoli Campaign (May 1915) Churchill was publicly sacked from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty. He sought, publicly, lesser posts and was denied them. He enlisted as a common soldier in the Army, on the Western Front, in the Grenadier Guards. Some months later the Royal Scots Fusiliers gave him a commission as a lieutenant colonel, several of their lieutenant colonels having recently been killed in combat.
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