It was an exchange that spoke volumes. A National Guard soldier wanted his Defense Secretary to explain to him why troops in Iraq don’t have the resources they need.
Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that is comprised mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly three years after the war in Iraq.
“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.
Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.
“We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north,” Wilson said after asking again.
Rumsfeld replied that, “You go to war with the Army you have,” not the one you might want.
We later learned that Wilson had conferred with a local reporter before challenging the Pentagon chief about his policies. To the right, this was an example of bias and journalism-gone-awry. As conservatives saw it, this reporter was exploiting some soldier, feeding him controversial questions, so as to publicly embarrass Rumsfeld.
On its face, this argument was pretty weak. The point of the controversy had almost nothing to do with the question itself and everything to do with Rumsfeld’s arrogant and callous response to troops whose lives are in danger.
But, as it turns out, the right’s complaints about journalistic interference were wrong anyway.
As Time reported last week (via Mark Kleiman), the reporter didn’t plant the question with Wilson; the reporter encouraged Wilson to go easier on Rumsfeld.
In his first public account of last week’s controversy, Spc. Thomas Wilson says that he came up with the now famous armor question for Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld on his own, without the help of oft-criticized reporter Edward Lee Pitts. And he adds, “If this is my 15 minutes of fame, I hope it saves a life.”
The account appears in next week’s edition of Time magazine.
Wilson, who serves with Tennessee’s 278th Regiment in the National Guard, tells Time that he befriended Pitts, an embed for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, at California’s Fort Irwin, where his unit trained. Later, in Kuwait, after Pitts learned that only soldiers could ask questions at the upcoming town hall meeting with Rumsfeld in Kuwait, he urged Wilson to come up with some “intelligent questions.”
After his convoy arrived at Camp Arijan in Kuwait, Wilson found hundreds of fully armored vehicles promised to another unit months down the road. Wilson says he asked if the 278th could use them in the meantime, and was told no. That inspired his question about the shortage of armor, which he showed to Pitts.
The reporter, far from being the protagonist, suggested that he find “a less brash way of asking the question,” but Wilson “told him no, that I wanted to make my point very clear.”
Wilson says he also came up with three alternate questions on his own.
Now, I’m sure all of those conservative bloggers who went apoplectic about journalistic interference will be issuing prompt clarifications, right? We’re waiting.