Chaplains bearing arms in combat - is it ever permissible?

The Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly

A battalion-size task force of the 3d Infantry Division found itself embroiled in what was probably the bitterest fighting of the Iraq war when it entered Baghdad to take three objectives on April 7. Known for the nonce as the Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly (after the code names of the three objectives), a long and highly read-worthy account of the battle appeared in the Telegraph, which gave this account of fighting at the task force's tactical operations center:

The moment they arrived they were set upon by up to 600 fanatical, well-dug-in fighters. Supply sergeants, who never imagined they would fire their weapons in anger, found themselves shooting back for hours on end. Even the battalion chaplain, Steve Hommel, ended up shouldering an M16 rifle.

The Toronto Star adds more detail:

Chaplains aren't even issued firearms but this one, Steve Hommel, had the foresight to order his assistant to carry two M-16 rifles, just in case. And this was that case.

"He did what he felt he had to do," Maj. Denton Knapp was saying yesterday, as his platoon rested on ornate settees inside the Baath party museum in a now-secured sector command post codenamed China. "He did what was necessary to protect himself and his soldiers."

The chaplain helped kill the enemy - . . .

MSNBC cameraman Craig White was in the thick of the fighting and took compelling video of the fighting close up. White said on camera two days later that the chaplain had manned a .50-caliber machine gun during the fighting. (White said he almost picked up a rifle himself.)

The issue is this: is it permissible for chaplains to fight, even in extremis?

Regulations and policies of the US armed forces

The question is more than academic. Chaplains are specially categorized, along with medical personnel, under the Geneva Conventions. The US Army's Field Manual 16-1, Religious Support Fundamentals, states,

The Geneva and Hague Conventions give the chaplain noncombatant status, and the policy of the Chief of Chaplains forbids chaplains to bear arms. If captured, the chaplain is not a prisoner of war, but a "detained person" for the purpose of ministering to prisoners of war.

Field manuals are not law, but an Army-level policy, such as this one, has the force of law. Furthermore, Army Regulation 165-1, para. 4-3c states,

Chaplains are noncombatants and will not bear arms.

That's as clear and unambiguous statement as I have ever seen in an Army Regulation. Violating an Army Regulation is punishable under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Department of the Navy's policy is stated thus:

Chaplains are forbidden to carry weapons. (SECNAVINST 1730.7; OPNAV 1730.1, Religious Ministries in the Navy; MCO 1730.6, Command Religious Programs in the Marine Corps; and the Marine Corps Manual) This restriction arises from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that accord a special protective and noncombatant status to chaplains. Pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, chaplains are exempt from being treated and retained as prisoners of war, and they are permitted to carry out their religious duties after falling into enemy hands. To be entitled to this immunity, chaplains must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties; and they must always abstain from hostile acts. The Department of the Navy's policy is that bearing arms is incompatible with a chaplain's religious functions and spiritual duties. An individual chaplain who violates this policy endangers the noncombatant status of other chaplains. [emphasis added]

The chaplain in the Baghdad battle was an Army chaplain, not a Navy one, but it's clear that the principle is the same.

It seems unarguable that the intention of the services is that chaplains will not bear arms or use weapons in combat under any circumstances.

Provisions of the Geneva Conventions

Under the provision of Article 6 of the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions are US law, being treaties ratified by the US Senate. (See my long explanation of the legal status of treaties in relation to the Constitution.) And the Conventions state,

Members of the armed forces of a Party to a conflict (other than medical personnel and chaplains covered by Article 33 of the Third Convention) are combatants, that is to say, they have the right to participate directly in hostilities [emphasis added].

The Conventions in the cited article thereof exclude chaplains from the category of combatant, and under the provisions of the Conventions, only combatants have the right to bear arms and fight. The American armed forces do not consider this distinction academic, either, because chaplains are issued military ID cards specifically identifying them as noncombatants, which is different than cards for other personnel. And though not a legal opinion, an article in Soldiers magazine (an official publication) says, ". . . the Geneva Convention precludes chaplains from bearing arms . . . ."

Some theological considerations

Clergy have accompanied military forces of Western nations for many centuries. In fact, by the end of the fourth century AD, probably 10 percent of the Roman army was Christian, a fact which made the government's final and fiercest persecution of Christians finally unsupportable, and which eased the ability of General (later Emperor) Constantine to proclaim openly his Christian faith.

Classical theology's fullest fruition came with Thomas Aquinas, who wrote extensively on the use of military force by civil authorities. According to Prof. Darrell Cole in "Good Wars," Aquinas reasoned that

. . . bishops and clerics cannot be soldiers because these occupations cannot "be fittingly exercised at the same time." Aquinas offers two reasons why. First, warlike pursuits keep clergy from their proper duties. In other words, their participation is unlawful, not because war is evil, but because warlike pursuits prevent them from doing their jobs.

(Note the Navy's requirement, above, that chaplains "must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties.") Cole continues:

Second [according to Aquinas], it is "unbecoming" for those who give the Eucharist to shed blood, even if they do so without sin (i.e., in a just war). Unlike Calvin, then, Aquinas finds the duties of clergy to be more meritorious than the duties of soldiers. However, this does not mean that, in Aquinas' view, the soldier's duties have no merit. Rather, he employs an analogy to make quite the opposite point: it is meritorious to marry but better still to remain a virgin and thus dedicate yourself wholly to spiritual concerns. Likewise, it is meritorious to fight just wars and restrain evil as a soldier, but more meritorious still to serve as a bishop who provides the Eucharist to the faithful.

Here is one root of the custom against, later the prohibition, of chaplains bearing and using arms: to wield the sword in a just cause, justly employed, was no sin, but for clergy both to wield the sword and to offer the Eucharist (Lord's Supper) meant that the chaplain had abandoned his particular calling as a disciple of Christ. Both Reformer John Calvin and Aquinas (and for that matter, Martin Luther), held that soldiering justly could be considered a form of the Christian ministry of charity. But at least in Catholic theology, the battlefield forces a choice: the same person may not offer the Eucharist in ministry and also fight as a soldier. The two ministries were not contradictory, but they were incompatible in the same person.

My own thoughts

I am a former career artilleryman, now an ordained Methodist minister. I can easily envision that were I a chaplain in an intense battle that I might want to pick up a weapon to protect the lives of American soldiers. After all, although the Conventions are clear, the enemy faced that day was notorious for having no regard for the Conventions.

I'll never face that situation as I cannot re-enter active duty as a chaplain. But I have pondered Chaplain Hommel's dilemma and have asked myself what I would have done in his shoes.

The question for me would be this: Where would my greatest duty lie? I am more than sympathetic with Aquinas' concerns about the difference between the mutually exclusive soldiers' ministry of charity and a chaplain's ministry of bread and wine, although I am not sure that other Protestant chaplains would be very worried about it. Probably as a rule all clergy would consider their greatest loyalty must lie to God and the vows of ordination they took. The moral and legal conundrum is a highly personal one that can hoist a chaplain on the horns of a dilemma: shall he permit other soldiers to die in order to preserve an Army policy or his personal sense of piety? What is the greater good?

The question is not as simple as it seems. There is a bigger picture than the 50 feet surrounding soldiers in battle (50 feet being about the "give a hoot" circle soldiers in battle tend to have). In his book, Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose told of an attack in Normandy by 101st Airborne infantry against well-emplaced Germans. Several American soldiers were shot on a narrow road, down which a German machine gun had a clear field of fire. The chaplain with the 101st men went from wounded man to another on the road, ministering to them as best he could with water, prayer, while German bullets flew down the road. The chaplain was not hit and he was awarded the DSC for this action.

But I wonder: did the Germans gunners miss him on purpose, seeing his paraments and recognizing his protected status? Ambrose does not say. But I think it is likely.

The special status of chaplains under the Conventions is intended as a measure to ameliorate the cruelty of the battlefield and captivity and allow, even in war, for the spiritual care of combatants and POWs. If this status is violated by chaplains bearing and using arms then the enemy would have reason to target all chaplains as potential combatants and deny them their status as a detained persons, rather than POWs, under the GC if captured. The GC's rules are not for the chaplains' benefit, but for the troops and POWs. The Conventions recognize that the spiritual care of POWs and soldiers in battle is an obligation of warring parties that must be respected.

Is this concern a higher good that must be preserved, even at the cost of a chaplain's own life? I think that Christian chaplains (I would not presume to speak for other faiths') would answer, "Yes." We would remember that, like St. Paul, we have already died with Christ and that we will also live with him. So were I a chaplain, I would not arm myself to prevent my own capture or death.

The harder question is whether the greater good is to be preserved at the expense of other soldiers' lives, whom a chaplain could save by wielding arms. Or put another way: Would the potential abandonment of the overall benefits of chaplain noncombatancy be outweighed by a chaplain using arms to save a single soldier's life? A dozen soldiers' lives? A hundred? More?

For myself, were I a chaplain, I not sure that in extremis I could allow American soldiers to die when I could protect them by using arms. I am not sure that in good faith I could maintain my personal piety at the cost of other's lives. But I also don't think the question of "is it worth it" is simple, nor is my own personal piety the only issue. If chaplains generally discard or lose their status due to their own frankly unlawful acts, that loss would be terrible not only for chaplains, but for the Army at large.

What cost in lives should the Army be prepared to accept in order to preserve that status? In policy, the US armed forces say, "any cost." A cruel fact of war is that it necessarily forces value judgments about human life. Paul Fussell, an infantry commander in World War II, wrote that the enlisted ranks are material of war whom he said must be "used up" to gain the objectives desired. (But officers have historically suffered much higher casualty rates than the ranks.) If the Army is willing to expend its soldiers' lives to take Objective Moe, it's not such a leap to be willing to expend their lives to preserve law or the ideals of Western civilization, from which the Conventions spring. If that seems heartless, it is, and I don't like it myself. But there it is.

The fundamental duty of a soldier is obey the orders he is given, even at great risk to his own life. The Army's policy and regulation are clear: chaplains may not bear or use arms. I called the US Army Chaplain Center and School April 17 and spoke to an instructor what is taught to chaplain students there about the subject. He said chaplains are taught they may not bear or use arms "under any circumstances" (his words). The grim calculus of combat is that obeying any orders in battle carries the risk of dying or seeing your soldiers die. The prohibition of chaplains fighting is really just one of many orders that might be hard to obey in battle, or cause blood to be shed that might not have been shed otherwise.

I conclude that the prohibition must be maintained, even in extremis. But I would not want to be a chaplain speaking to a child whose dead soldier-father might have lived had I picked up a rifle at a critical moment.

Sometimes all courses of action are undesirable.

Chaplains bearing arms in combat - is it ever permissible?

The Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly

A battalion-size task force of the 3d Infantry Division found itself embroiled in what was probably the bitterest fighting of the Iraq war when it entered Baghdad to take three objectives on April 7. Known for the nonce as the Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly (after the code names of the three objectives), a long and highly read-worthy account of the battle appeared in the Telegraph, which gave this account of fighting at the task force's tactical operations center:

The moment they arrived they were set upon by up to 600 fanatical, well-dug-in fighters. Supply sergeants, who never imagined they would fire their weapons in anger, found themselves shooting back for hours on end. Even the battalion chaplain, Steve Hommel, ended up shouldering an M16 rifle.

The Toronto Star adds more detail:

Chaplains aren't even issued firearms but this one, Steve Hommel, had the foresight to order his assistant to carry two M-16 rifles, just in case. And this was that case.

"He did what he felt he had to do," Maj. Denton Knapp was saying yesterday, as his platoon rested on ornate settees inside the Baath party museum in a now-secured sector command post codenamed China. "He did what was necessary to protect himself and his soldiers."

The chaplain helped kill the enemy - . . .

MSNBC cameraman Craig White was in the thick of the fighting and took compelling video of the fighting close up. White said on camera two days later that the chaplain had manned a .50-caliber machine gun during the fighting. (White said he almost picked up a rifle himself.)

The issue is this: is it permissible for chaplains to fight, even in extremis?

Regulations and policies of the US armed forces

The question is more than academic. Chaplains are specially categorized, along with medical personnel, under the Geneva Conventions. The US Army's Field Manual 16-1, Religious Support Fundamentals, states,

The Geneva and Hague Conventions give the chaplain noncombatant status, and the policy of the Chief of Chaplains forbids chaplains to bear arms. If captured, the chaplain is not a prisoner of war, but a "detained person" for the purpose of ministering to prisoners of war.

Field manuals are not law, but an Army-level policy, such as this one, has the force of law. Furthermore, Army Regulation 165-1, para. 4-3c states,

Chaplains are noncombatants and will not bear arms.

That's as clear and unambiguous statement as I have ever seen in an Army Regulation. Violating an Army Regulation is punishable under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Department of the Navy's policy is stated thus:

Chaplains are forbidden to carry weapons. (SECNAVINST 1730.7; OPNAV 1730.1, Religious Ministries in the Navy; MCO 1730.6, Command Religious Programs in the Marine Corps; and the Marine Corps Manual) This restriction arises from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that accord a special protective and noncombatant status to chaplains. Pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, chaplains are exempt from being treated and retained as prisoners of war, and they are permitted to carry out their religious duties after falling into enemy hands. To be entitled to this immunity, chaplains must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties; and they must always abstain from hostile acts. The Department of the Navy's policy is that bearing arms is incompatible with a chaplain's religious functions and spiritual duties. An individual chaplain who violates this policy endangers the noncombatant status of other chaplains. [emphasis added]

The chaplain in the Baghdad battle was an Army chaplain, not a Navy one, but it's clear that the principle is the same.

It seems unarguable that the intention of the services is that chaplains will not bear arms or use weapons in combat under any circumstances.

Provisions of the Geneva Conventions

Under the provision of Article 6 of the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions are US law, being treaties ratified by the US Senate.  And the Conventions state,

Members of the armed forces of a Party to a conflict [other than medical personnel and chaplains]covered by Article 33 of the Third Convention are combatants, that is to say, they have the right to participate directly in hostilities [emphasis added].

The Conventions in the cited article thereof exclude chaplains from the category of combatant, and under the provisions of the Conventions, only combatants have the right to bear arms and fight. The American armed forces do not consider this distinction academic, either, because chaplains are issued military ID cards specifically identifying them as noncombatants, which is different than cards for other personnel. And though not a legal opinion, an article in Soldiers magazine (an official publication) says, ". . . the Geneva Convention precludes chaplains from bearing arms . . . ."

Some theological considerations

Clergy have accompanied military forces of Western nations for many centuries. In fact, by the end of the fourth century AD, probably 10 percent of the Roman army was Christian, a fact which made the government's final and fiercest persecution of Christians finally unsupportable, and which eased the ability of General (later Emperor) Constantine to proclaim openly his Christian faith.

Classical theology's fullest fruition came with Thomas Aquinas, who wrote extensively on the use of military force by civil authorities. According to Prof. Darrell Cole in "Good Wars," Aquinas reasoned that

. . . bishops and clerics cannot be soldiers because these occupations cannot "be fittingly exercised at the same time." Aquinas offers two reasons why. First, warlike pursuits keep clergy from their proper duties. In other words, their participation is unlawful, not because war is evil, but because warlike pursuits prevent them from doing their jobs.

(Note the Navy's requirement, above, that chaplains "must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties.") Cole continues:

Second [according to Aquinas], it is "unbecoming" for those who give the Eucharist to shed blood, even if they do so without sin (i.e., in a just war). Unlike Calvin, then, Aquinas finds the duties of clergy to be more meritorious than the duties of soldiers. However, this does not mean that, in Aquinas' view, the soldier's duties have no merit. Rather, he employs an analogy to make quite the opposite point: it is meritorious to marry but better still to remain a virgin and thus dedicate yourself wholly to spiritual concerns. Likewise, it is meritorious to fight just wars and restrain evil as a soldier, but more meritorious still to serve as a bishop who provides the Eucharist to the faithful.

Here is one root of the custom against, later the prohibition, of chaplains bearing and using arms: to wield the sword in a just cause, justly employed, was no sin, but for clergy both to wield the sword and to offer the Eucharist (Lord's Supper) meant that the chaplain had abandoned his particular calling as a disciple of Christ. Both Reformer John Calvin and Aquinas (and for that matter, Martin Luther), held that soldiering justly could be considered a form of the Christian ministry of charity. But at least in Catholic theology, the battlefield forces a choice: the same person may not offer the Eucharist in ministry and also fight as a soldier. The two ministries were not contradictory, but they were incompatible in the same person.

My own thoughts

I am a former career artilleryman, now an ordained Methodist minister. I can easily envision that were I a chaplain in an intense battle that I might want to pick up a weapon to protect the lives of American soldiers. After all, although the Conventions are clear, the enemy faced that day was notorious for having no regard for the Conventions.

I'll never face that situation as I cannot re-enter active duty as a chaplain. But I have pondered Chaplain Hommel's dilemma and have asked myself what I would have done in his shoes.

The question for me would be this: Where would my greatest duty lie? I am more than sympathetic with Aquinas' concerns about the difference between the mutually exclusive soldiers' ministry of charity and a chaplain's ministry of bread and wine, although I am not sure that other Protestant chaplains would be very worried about it. Probably as a rule all clergy would consider their greatest loyalty must lie to God and the vows of ordination they took. The moral and legal conundrum is a highly personal one that can hoist a chaplain on the horns of a dilemma: shall he permit other soldiers to die in order to preserve an Army policy or his personal sense of piety? What is the greater good?

The question is not as simple as it seems. There is a bigger picture than the 50 feet surrounding soldiers in battle (50 feet being about the "give a hoot" circle soldiers in battle tend to have). In his book, Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose told of an attack in Normandy by 101st Airborne infantry against well-emplaced Germans. Several American soldiers were shot on a narrow road, down which a German machine gun had a clear field of fire. The chaplain with the 101st men went from wounded man to another on the road, ministering to them as best he could with water, prayer, while German bullets flew down the road. The chaplain was not hit and he was awarded the DSC for this action.

But I wonder: did the Germans gunners miss him on purpose, seeing his paraments and recognizing his protected status? Ambrose does not say. But I think it is likely.

The special status of chaplains under the Conventions is intended as a measure to ameliorate the cruelty of the battlefield and captivity and allow, even in war, for the spiritual care of combatants and POWs. If this status is violated by chaplains bearing and using arms then the enemy would have reason to target all chaplains as potential combatants and deny them their status as a detained persons, rather than POWs, under the GC if captured. The GC's rules are not for the chaplains' benefit, but for the troops and POWs. The Conventions recognize that the spiritual care of POWs and soldiers in battle is an obligation of warring parties that must be respected.

Is this concern a higher good that must be preserved, even at the cost of a chaplain's own life? I think that Christian chaplains (I would not presume to speak for other faiths') would answer, "Yes." We would remember that, like St. Paul, we have already died with Christ and that we will also live with him. So were I a chaplain, I would not arm myself to prevent my own capture or death.

The harder question is whether the greater good is to be preserved at the expense of other soldiers' lives, whom a chaplain could save by wielding arms. Or put another way: Would the potential abandonment of the overall benefits of chaplain noncombatancy be outweighed by a chaplain using arms to save a single soldier's life? A dozen soldiers' lives? A hundred? More?

For myself, were I a chaplain, I not sure that in extremis I could allow American soldiers to die when I could protect them by using arms. I am not sure that in good faith I could maintain my personal piety at the cost of other's lives. But I also don't think the question of "is it worth it" is simple, nor is my own personal piety the only issue. If chaplains generally discard or lose their status due to their own frankly unlawful acts, that loss would be terrible not only for chaplains, but for the Army at large.

What cost in lives should the Army be prepared to accept in order to preserve that status? In policy, the US armed forces say, "any cost." A cruel fact of war is that it necessarily forces value judgments about human life. Paul Fussell, an infantry commander in World War II, wrote that the enlisted ranks are material of war whom he said must be "used up" to gain the objectives desired. (But officers have historically suffered much higher casualty rates than the ranks.) If the Army is willing to expend its soldiers' lives to take Objective Moe, it's not such a leap to be willing to expend their lives to preserve law or the ideals of Western civilization, from which the Conventions spring. If that seems heartless, it is, and I don't like it myself. But there it is.

The fundamental duty of a soldier is obey the orders he is given, even at great risk to his own life. The Army's policy and regulation are clear: chaplains may not bear or use arms. I called the US Army Chaplain Center and School April 17 and spoke to an instructor what is taught to chaplain students there about the subject. He said chaplains are taught they may not bear or use arms "under any circumstances" (his words). The grim calculus of combat is that obeying any orders in battle carries the risk of dying or seeing your soldiers die. The prohibition of chaplains fighting is really just one of many orders that might be hard to obey in battle, or cause blood to be shed that might not have been shed otherwise.

I conclude that the prohibition must be maintained, even in extremis. But I would not want to be a chaplain speaking to a child whose dead soldier-father might have lived had I picked up a rifle at a critical moment.

Sometimes all courses of action are undesirable.

Firebase Four-Papa-One, Korean DMZ, 1978

I talked about the Korean DMZ and the Joint Security Area in a different post. Just outside the DMZ during my tour in Korea (77-78) was an artillery firebase called 4P1, pronounced Four-Papa-One. Because the DMZ runs north-south in that part of the country, 4P1 was actually east of the DMZ.

I spent my Korea tour as a lieutenant assigned C Battery, 1st Battalion, 38th Field Artillery, whose motto was "Steel Behind the Rock." "Steel" referred to artillery fire, "the Rock" was the 38th Infantry Regiment, which earned the nickname Rock of the Marne for its heroic defense near the Marne River in France in 1918. My battery's standing mission in Korea was to provide artillery fire for the 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry. We were all part of the 2d US Infantry Division, which is still stationed in South Korea.

In 1978, 4P1 was the only combat firebase in the Army. The division's artillery units took turns rotating through duty at 4P1. My battalion's turn came up in the summer of 1978. There were five batteries in the battalion, three of which were firing batteries with howitzers. Each of those three spent 35 days there. We went up with our six 105mm howitzers in late May, commanded by Capt. Bill Brophy, an outstanding officer. (Bill retired in 1999 as a colonel and is now a vice president of Usibelli Coal Mines, Inc., in Alaska.)

I was the battery fire direction officer (FDO), in charge of the fire direction center, FDC. (Yes, I know, you didn't sign up for an acronym lesson, but that's what the military uses.) We also had three lieutenants as forward observers (you guessed it, "FOs"). Our FOs went to duty inside the DMZ.

There were two guard posts inside the DMZ. One was called GP Ouelette, so close to the boundary line with North Korea you could have spit on communist soil. The other GP was maybe 400 meters further away; I don't recall its name. Under the terms of the armistice, only military police are allowed inside the DMZ. So we had two infantry military police detachments inside the DMZ, one detachment at each of two guard posts. Each was at least of platoon strength and very heavily armed. Every time I went to Ouelette I became a military policeman, too, complete with arm brassard, rifle locked and loaded the whole time.

M102A1 105mm howitzer

Our guns fired projectiles weighing 35 pounds with a maximum range of 11 kilometers. A 105mm high-explosive projectile had a casualty radius of 30 meters. Our six guns could fire a total of 180 rounds the first three minutes of a fire mission, then for weapon-safety reasons, had to drop to three rounds per gun per minute for sustained firing. The guns were arranged in the open in a pattern we called a "lazy W,"with 25 meters spacing between guns laterally, and alternating front to rear about 15 meters.

My FDC was inside an underground bunker at one end of the gun line, about 30 meters up a rise. The FDC served as the operations center for the battery, with our bunks at the far end. We had radios to talk to the division command post-forward, which had a secure line to the main division command post in the south. We also had radio to the infantry operations center at Camp Liberty Bell, just outside the DMZ, where an infantry battalion was stationed at high alert. We had a radio to each guard post to talk to our observers and we had field phones to Capt. Brophy's ready room, each of the guns and the executive officer's battle station. We were up and running 24/7. Our main job was calculating ballistic firing solutions for the guns.

There were 125 prearranged targets inside North Korea and the DMZ for which we had to recalculate firing data four times per day. Weather has great effect on artillery ballistics, and four times per day a "metro" section, not part of our unit, flew weather balloons that collected weather data and radioed it back to the ground. These data were converted into a very lengthy numeric voice message which was radioed to us. Receiving metro messages was very exacting and time consuming. Fortunately, 4P1's bunker had an electronic artillery computer called the Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer (FADAC, of course, pronounced fay-dack), but only my FDC sergeant, Sgt. Gosinski, and I had been trained on it. Without it we could not possibly have manually recalculated data for 125 targets four times per day. Sometimes, we got the weather data on punch-hole tape, which FADAC could read.

The permissible response time for fire missions was very short. The guns were laid on a target inside the DMZ, which we could have shot within seconds of receiving the radio call for fire. To keep us on our toes, the division had a practice mission called, "speedball do not load." At any time of day or night, no matter the weather, a division-staff officer could direct an FO to radio a call for fire to us - but obviously not to be shot. The stopwatch was ticking, and excuses were not accepted!

A breath away from war

To distinguish these missions from real missions, the call for fire was slightly changed. The FO would call us and say, "adjust fire, speedball do not load, over." That way we knew it was a practice mission. As I recall, though, we only had three minutes to report ready to fire, except that we did not actually load a round into the howitzer.

We'd flip a light switch by the radio that started a siren above the bunker. Across the fire base, every cannon crewman and battery NCOs sprinted to their guns if they weren't already there. Meantime, the FO completed the target information, we computed the firing data and read it on the field phone to the guns.

After just a few days we in the FDC could tell right away when the FO had a SDNL mission because of the stress in his voice.

So one afternoon the radio comes to life and I could tell it was a SDNL mission. But instead of saying, "Adjust fire, speedball do not load, over," he said, "Fire for effect, at my command, over." That was a real call for fire. I hit the siren.

There had been a breach of the MDL by a platoon of 40-50 North Korean troops. They had crossed to our side of the DMZ. On the division radio network I heard the infantry military police on patrol inside the DMZ being ordered to set up an ambush and kill them. Capt. Brophy was off site in his jeep. I called him on the radio and gave him a code phrase to return immediately.

We quickly computed firing data. I directed the mission be fired with three rounds per gun (18 total) of high-explosive rounds, using impact-detonating fuzes instead of air burst fuzes. Sgt. Gosinski sent the firing data to the guns. Some gun chiefs were a little confused about whether this mission was practice or real - the ones who were Vietnam vets weren't confused! I briefed the XO by field phone and he got the gun chiefs straightened out. Each crew loaded a high-explosive round and placed two more, ready to fire, in the ready rack. Things were very tense. The battery commander came in and I briefed him, then he went to the gun line.

I don't know how long we stayed ready to fire, probably 20 minutes. Then the FO called. My FDC soldiers were wide eyed when they heard him. I probably was, too! We knew that 4P1 could get hit by more than 600 North Korean artillery rounds within 10 minutes. We would have been atomized in such a barrage.

"End of mission," said the FO.

The enemy had crossed back over the line before they reached the ambush. So they lived to see another day, and so did we.

Why we cannot use nukes

I originally wrote this in November 2002 as the war with Iraq loomed and have reposted it here using the same date. It was in response to calls from various quarters, including at least one US Representative, that President Bush announce he would unleash America's WMD arsenal in response to WMD use by Saddam's forces. Here is the original text with no changes except I have removed now-dead internet links. 

This was my original title: Why the US cannot retaliate against Iraq if Iraq uses WMDs

I have noted that before the Gulf War, the US warned Iraq that its use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons would result in atomic retaliation by America, a threat that was credible then and helped prevent Saddam from ordering their use.

In the potential war against Iraq now, though, we cannot make a credible threat of WMD (meaning, atomic) retaliation against Iraq. Here's why.

The US has no biological weapons. For at least 30 years, US policy on bioweapons has been "no use" under any circumstances. US bioweapon research has been done to only to develop defensive measures.

US policy on chemical weapons is "no first use." We have stated that we reserve the right to retaliate in kind against an enemy who uses chemical weapons against us. It is an empty reservation because the US does not have the means to deliver chemical weapons nor the stocks of chemical weapons to be delivered in the first place. I was trained both as a nuclear and chemical target analyst, and the chemical-weapons systems we trained to employ have not been in US inventory since the mid-1950s. There simply were, and are, no newer systems, so we used the only data available, despite the fact that we didn't have them anymore. The quantity of chemical weapons required to achieve significant casualties against enemy forces is simply enormous, and the US has never made the huge investment in infrastructure and manning that is required to maintain the capability. And not least, American military commanders despise chemical warfare anyway, with a revulsion for it that dated back to World War I.

US policy on atomic weapons is that we reserve the right to use them as the situation warrants. Successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, specifically rejected declaring "no first use" of nuclear weapons.

The US Army's artillery used to be able to do this.
No longer, thank God.

All this means that the only WMD that the US can retaliate with is atomic. But there are technical constraints in using them, too. First, the arsenal of US nuclear weapons has shrunk dramatically since September 1992, when President George H.W. Bush denuclearized the US Army, which had a lock on small-yield atomic warheads. Since then, the Army has had none. Even the smallest Air Force warheads are many kilotons in design yield. Neither the Navy nor Marines ever stocked tactical warheads.

So unless G. W. Bush decides that truly massive atomic retaliation is called for, we really have nothing to A-bomb Iraq with. That's the technical side of why we cannot retaliate in kind against Iraq. But those are not the only reasons.

British Prime Minister John Major's claims to the contrary, allied threats to use WMDs as retaliation cannot be a decent bluff. We are not making war against the Iraqi people, whom we have already declared are in need of liberation, not conquest. To nuke Iraqi civilians as retaliation for an act of Saddam's madness would make no sense at all and would be the most immoral thing I can imagine.

Using atomic weapons against Iraq would accrue to the US no strategic or tactical benefit. Tactically, conventional weapons are now so destructive that nukes are not even necessary just to destroy enemy formations and installations. The idea that we would nuke cities is repulsive: our objective is not to destroy Iraq but to liberate its people from murderous repression.

Military historian T. R. Fehrenbach wrote in This Kind of War, "You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, to protect it, to keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud. The object of warfare . . . is not to destroy the land and people, unless you have gone wholly mad."

There is no military situation imaginable that would even remotely justify American use of atomic weapons.

The political consequences of using atomic weapons would be enormously destructive to America's alliances and coalitions. NATO always accepted, very reluctantly, the potential use of nuclear weapons if invading Soviet forces threatened the actual survival of a NATO member state. For America to use nuclear weapons against Iraq would engender such harsh reactions from our NATO allies that the alliance would probably dissolve. Now, some may argue that NATO may as well dissolve, but if so, it should be done for the right reasons, and nuking Iraq isn't one of them.

Other nations around the world would run away from alignment with America as fast as they could. Our forces based overseas would likely be ejected by their host nations. American efforts to promote democracy in Asia, Africa and South America would lose all credibility. American citizens abroad would be subjected to the rule of the mob in many countries. No longer would America be a "shining city on a hill" for the rest of the world to emulate.

Morally, using atomic weapons against Iraq fails every test of just war theory. Because they can achieve no legitimate military purpose, they could do nothing except destroy for destruction's own sake. Yet destruction for its own sake is exactly what bin Laden's terrorists did on Sept. 11. Such nihilism can never be a just end of war. Atomic weapons inherently cannot be used in a way that discriminates between military personnel and innocent civilians.

Potential downwind effects could kill or make ill infants, adults, the elderly, the helpless, livestock and crops and would likely extend into neighboring countries. Iraqis and surrounding peoples would be thrown into panic, creating the worst refugee crisis in history. All these results would be morally bankrupt. They could never be excused and would never be forgiven.

Anyone who calls for using nuclear weapons against Iraq, even in retaliation, abandons the finest principles of America's ideals and hopes. Proposing their use might scratch a jingoistic itch for overwhelming force and quick results. But such calls must not prevail. Nuclear weapons would be militarily useless. Their use would start a rapid decline of America's greatness on the world stage and would be a true crime against humanity, irredeemably immoral.