[From the diaries by susanhu.]
“One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.” …is how the Los Angeles Times article on the death of Col. Westhusing begins. The rest is a sad journey through one man’s life and death – from his early idealism about the military and its conduct, to his quite swift (relatively) disillusionment once he arrived in Iraq.
Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army’s leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.
So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.
In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.
There are questions about his death, both overt and between the lines of this article… but there seems to be little dispute as to Westhusing’s disgust and distress over the changes he saw in the military he obviously loved, faults and all. In reading the article, you get the impression that, to the last, his concern was for the culture of the military, for the men and women he helped train, the code of honor he obviously believed was more than just words and the ethical considerations involved not only in any war/conflict… but in this one especially.
(more on the flip)
A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.
How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?
….
Cadets are taught to value duty, honor and country, and are drilled in West Point’s strict moral code: A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal — or tolerate those who do.Westhusing embraced it. He was selected as honor captain for the entire academy his senior year. Col. Tim Trainor, a classmate and currently a West Point professor, said Westhusing was strict but sympathetic to cadets’ problems. He remembered him as “introspective.”
….
In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military.“Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge,” he wrote in the opening pages
…..
But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty.
A few months later, he was dead. By his own hand, the investigation showed. So, what happened?
Westhusing’s task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.
…..
[I]n May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.
….
Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset.“He was sick of money-grubbing contractors,” the official recounted. Westhusing said that “he had not come over to Iraq for this.”
Most of the [apparent suicide] letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.
“I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied,” it says. “I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
Hopefully, this will be just the beginning of not only questions about the death of Colonel Westhusing, but about the use of contractors, what limits – if any – there are on them, and the direction of the military in the future. This is something that we’ll all need to answer, whether we are military personnel or affiliated, or otherwise… because stuffing genies back into bottles is a pretty difficult thing to do. And the genie of war for open profit is well and truly out.
Oh, and the title of this post? That came from here…
A psychologist reviewed Westhusing’s e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the “most difficult and probably most painful stressor.”
She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
“Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited,” wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. “He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses.”
Silly man, doing the right thing is for suckers, don’t ya know. Ye gods.
