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n 2001 I wrote on these pages of a crisis facing the Marine Corps Reserve—the struggle to balance Corps, civilian job, and family grew more difficult with each increase in rank and responsibility—not to mention family.1 Believing reservists to be dutybound to pur- sue tactical competence, leadership, and military occupa- tional specialty expertise with the same passion as the day we first took the oath, and despite being a junior lieutenant colonel who had seen more action at that point as a New York City homicide prosecutor than as a Marine, I had the nerve to suggest the (admittedly simple) answer. Make the pillars of martial excellence—professional military education, physical fitness, and military bearing—a part of the fabric of everyday life, not just after the kids go to bed, when things are slow at work, or while on duty, but every waking mo- ment. You are, Aristotle observed 2,500 years ago, what you repeatedly do.2 Weeks later, 11 September 2001 (9/11) changed the par- adigm. Of the 2,973 people from 70 countries murdered,3 23 were friends—New York City cops who entered the tow- ers and never came out. Police officer (and Air Force re- servist) Jerome Dominguez, number 16 on my speed dial, refused to leave, radioing, “People still need help.” I evacu- ated my pregnant wife and two children from our apartment near the towers, as my 3-year-old watched people jump to their deaths to escape the flames. Mobilized within days, I spent the next 4-plus years on active duty, with multiple tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa.4 Current Crisis Now back in the same apartment overlooking ground zero and at the same job fighting crime, I still believe in what I wrote pre-9/11. But I was so focused on trying to be the best officer of Marines I could—thinking tactically, instead of strategically—that I missed the gathering storms—the grow- ing split between the military and civilian worlds, each eye- ing the other with skepticism and distrust; the culture war of red and blue staters unable to find common ground; and a country riven by an ever-widening chasm. Comforting as it may be to believe, this rift exists not only in the “liberal media” or on college campuses. And, although veteran status is no guarantor of a successful commander in chief, nor its absence necessarily a harbinger of an adminis- tration’s misuse of the Nation’s military, it is worth noting The Gathering Storm Will we be at odds among ourselves? by Col Matthew Bogdanos, USMCR 70 <a href="http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette">www.mca-marines.org/gazette</a> M a r i n e C o r p s G a z e t t e • M a y 2 0 0 9 FEATURE I >Col Bogdanos, currently the Senior Advi- sor, Joint Interagency Operations, Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned, is a New York City homicide prosecutor. He was mo- bilized with U.S. Central Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force to Afghanistan in 2001 and to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Col Bogdanos is the author of Thieves of Bagh- dad (Bloomsbury USA, 2005). In 2005 he received a National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. Photo: We have to be able to communicate to a nation bereft of military experience. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
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FEATURE
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www.mca-marines.org/gazette