Historian Reflects On War and Valor
And a Son's Death

Andrew Bacevich Opposed Iraq Conflict
but, in Grief, He Still Believes in Serving

GREG JAFFE / Wall Street Journal 26may2007

WALPOLE, Mass. — In late 2004, with the Iraq war raging, Andrew Bacevich's son told him that he was joining the Army.

Mr. Bacevich's son didn't fit the profile of a typical soldier. First Lt. Andrew Bacevich spent his teenage years in affluent Boston and Washington, D.C., suburbs. His father was a professor at Boston University and a prominent conservative critic of the war, writing in some of the country's largest newspapers that the pre-emptive conflict was immoral, unnecessary and almost certain to lead to defeat.

But the father was also a retired colonel and Vietnam veteran. He had argued that it was essential that the children of America's lawmakers, professors, journalists and lawyers serve in the defense of the nation. Too often, the affluent and well-educated treat national defense as a job they can contract out to the same people who bused their tables and mowed their lawns, he wrote in his 2005 book "The New American Militarism." That made it too easy for the president to take the nation to war in the first place, and left too few people willing to hold the commander in chief accountable when things went awry, he warned.

So the elder Mr. Bacevich didn't discourage his son from becoming an Army officer. Rather, he helped him.

On May 13, Lt. Bacevich, age 27, was killed by a suicide bomber near Balad, a small Sunni town north of Baghdad.

"Should I have said to my son, 'I don't want you to join the Army'?" the father, who is 59, asks himself quietly today. It is a question that he says likely will dog him for years to come.

Mr. Bacevich, who served in Vietnam from 1970-1971, and his son shared the same square jaw and confident smile. They also shared an "ironic kinship," he says. "In the long military history of the U.S., which has featured many victories and glorious moments, my son and I managed to pick the two wars that stand out for all the wrong reasons," he says.

Mr. Bacevich grew up in Illinois and attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His parents both served in World War II, but neither pushed him to go to West Point. "Military service seemed to be a worthy thing to do — that was the milieu in which I grew up," he says.

He fought in Vietnam and stayed in the Army through the painful rebuilding stretch that followed, serving in tank units and earning a graduate degree from Princeton in history. He and his wife also have three daughters. After 23 years, he retired as a colonel. Mr. Bacevich, who says he registered as an independent, voted for George W. Bush in 2000 but not in 2004.

His son, Andy, who spent his early childhood on Army bases, signed up for the Army ROTC at Boston University. "I think he wanted to do what his dad had done," Mr. Bacevich says. After his second year of ROTC, Andy applied to go to Army jump school over the summer to learn to be a paratrooper. A routine Army medical screening found that he had had childhood asthma, which disqualified him from serving in the military. Mr. Bacevich took his son to Massachusetts General Hospital for a test that his son hoped would show that the effects of the disease had disappeared. Andy failed it.

He finished Boston University and went to work for his state senator, and then for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. In 2004, the Army, which was having trouble finding soldiers to fight in Iraq, loosened its standards to allow recruits with mild asthma. Andy enlisted, went through basic training and was accepted into the Army's Officer Candidate School. Mr. Bacevich says he was "inordinately proud" of the fact that his son got his commission by rising through the enlisted ranks and Officer Candidate School. "It was the hard way," he says.

Andy was initially assigned to the field artillery branch, which fires big cannons. But he wanted to be a tank officer, as his dad had been. So Mr. Bacevich called a friend who was a serving general and asked whether it would be possible to move his son. "It happened," Mr. Bacevich says. "Andy drove off in his new black Mustang to the armor school in Fort Knox, Ky."

In October 2006, Andy was sent to Iraq as a platoon leader responsible for the lives of 15 soldiers. Around that time, Mr. Bacevich pondered the value of life in Iraq. An Iraqi civilian killed mistakenly by U.S. forces merits a payment from the Pentagon of just $2,500 to his or her family, he wrote in the Washington Post. The family of a U.S. soldier killed in action typically receives about $400,000, he noted. "In launching a war advertised as a high-minded expression of U.S. idealism, we have wandered into a swamp of moral ambiguity," he wrote.

He never mentioned his son in his writings and asked reporters quoting him in stories not to write about his son, either. "I didn't want to burden him with my political baggage. My son had an enormous responsibility and a tremendously difficult job," he says. When his son called home from Iraq, he often sounded exhausted, Mr. Bacevich says. In February, he spent a two-week leave with his family. He seemed physically drained.

When his son was back in Iraq, Mr. Bacevich emailed him nearly every day with news about his family and Boston sports teams. "I wanted him to know that whatever the stresses he was enduring there was a normal life to which we hoped he would return," Mr. Bacevich says. At the same time, he railed in public even more loudly against the war. "The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times on May 9. "We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off."

Then, on Mother's Day, Andy and his men stopped a suspicious van and ordered the men inside to get out. One of them fired a shot at Andy, who shot back, according to an email to Mr. Bacevich from Andy's company commander. A second man from the van began walking toward Andy and two of his soldiers. The man blew himself up, killing Andy and badly wounding a second U.S. soldier.

Today, Mr. Bacevich finds some solace in small things. His son was out in front sharing the risk with his soldiers when he died. "I would not want to make more of it than it deserves. But, yeah, my kid was doing the right thing, and it took bravery," Mr. Bacevich says.

One of Andy's soldiers recently emailed Mr. Bacevich a photo of Andy that he had taken a few hours before Andy was killed. Mr. Bacevich has studied it for clues about his son. In the picture, Andy is not smiling, but he doesn't look unhappy. "There's a confidence and a maturity that I think suggests that in a peculiar way he found satisfaction in the service he was performing," Mr. Bacevich says.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bacevich was sitting on his back porch when the Army casualty assistance officer assigned to help his family handed him a survivor's benefit check for $100,000. For a widow with children, such checks are a lifesaver. But Mr. Bacevich doesn't need the money. "I felt sick to my stomach," he says. "The inadequacy of it just strikes you."

As a historian and former soldier, he takes clear-cut lessons from the check, his son's death and the broader war. "When you use force, the unintended consequences that result are so large and the surprises so enormous that it really reaffirms the ancient wisdom to which we once adhered — namely, to see force as something to be used only as a last resort." In the future, he says, historians will wonder how a country such as the U.S. ever came to see military force as "such a flexible, efficient, cost-effective and supposedly useful instrument."

For a father, the lessons are far less clear-cut. When he was writing against the war, which was often, he told himself he was doing the best he could to end the conflict.

Should he have told his son not to volunteer for such a war? "I believe in service to country. I believe soldiering is an honorable profession. There is no clear right and wrong here," he says. "What I tried to do was inadequate."

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