At one point in Chuck Hagel’s bitter confirmation hearing, on Thursday, Joe Manchin, of West Virginia—a Democrat who admitted to admiring Hagel—asked how he had ended up in Vietnam. Hagel joined the infantry in 1967, when that was a dangerous thing to do, but had been assigned to a select and secret team that was trained to use shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles and was about to be sent to Germany. “And I just decided, if I was going to be in the military, it didn’t make much sense to go to Germany,” Hagel said. So he asked to be sent to Vietnam:The office was a bit quiet. They put me in a holding room. They brought priests, rabbis, ministers, psychiatrists. All came in to examine me, thinking that I was—something was wrong, I was running away from something or I had killed somebody. After two days of testing me to see if I was O.K., they held me, which I scrubbed barracks for five days before they could cut new orders.
If Hagel was looking for an allegory for the process of being confirmed, that might be a good one—except that, on Thursday, the room got very loud, the interrogators were not going to be shaken in their belief that something was wrong with Hagel, and the menial rhetorical chores he had to perform were a lot more degraded than scrubbing barracks.
This was the sort of hearing where Senator Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma, explaining that he was “quoting right now from Iran,” cited statements of hatred for America and descriptions of Israel as “a cancerous tumor” and then asked, “Why do you think that the Iranian Foreign Ministry so strongly supports your nomination to be the secretary of defense?” (Hagel: “I have a difficult enough time with American politics, senator. I have no idea.”) John McCain, who some had thought (unrealistically, as it now appears) might come around to supporting a fellow Vietnam veteran, spent a few minutes yelling at him about his lack of enthusiasm for the Iraq surge, in a rant that reached its low point with the exclamation “Thank God for Senator Lieberman!” Mike Lee, of Utah, twisted quotes about the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma to try to get Hagel to say that terrorists had legitimate grievances—a clear attempt to get even more raw material for twisting. Lindsey Graham said that Hagel’s failure, in 2000, to sign a letter, endorsed by AIPAC, supporting Israel and condemning the Palestinians “runs chills up my spine.” It is a near miracle that his musing about what he had missed by not being sent to a comfortable base in Germany (“I mean, I had never been to Germany. My great-grandparents are from Germany. Probably a pretty good place, I thought, but I ought to go where there’s a war.”) didn’t get thrown back at him as evidence of some insidious prejudice rather than the willingness of a young man to do what he thought was his part, and to do it bravely.
The consensus this morning was that Hagel had not done so well, despite repeating, over and over, his record of support for Israel when it counted and firmness about Iran. But, except for the exceedingly precise questions having to do with bases or shipyards in a particular state, the hearing was tilted far more toward fuming, insinuation, and intellectual dishonesty than any attempt to gain real information about what Hagel might do.
At one point, Ted Cruz, the new Senator from Texas who, earlier this week, brought posters to make a point about “scary-looking guns” to the judiciary committee—he seems to have a fondness for visual aids—played a video of Hagel being interviewed by Al Jazeera and argued that because he had not chastised a caller who suggested that Israel committed war crimes, he was accusing Israel of the same. (Hagel said he wasn’t.) Cruz also asked, “Do you think it’s right that Israel was committing, quote, a “sickening slaughter,” as you said on the floor of the Senate?” As David Weigel pointed out, this question distorts the facts: Hagel had said, in the middle of the war in Lebanon, “The sickening slaughter on both sides must end, and it must end now. President Bush must call for an immediate cease-fire. This madness must stop.” (He also said, in the same speech, “The United States will remain committed to defending Israel. Our relationship with Israel is a special and historic one.”)
But what seems to bother Hagel’s enemies is not just that he used the word “sickening” in a context that included Israel, but that he seemed to treat it as a redundant modifier for slaughter—any slaughter. Hagel doesn’t like war; war, to be fair, is not very likable. One can feel sickened when people die, when bombs fall on cities and the children that live in them, even when one thinks it’s necessary. This is not to say Hagel is a pacifist, but he is clearly a skeptic about the use of force. That can serve as a valuable counterbalance when we tell ourselves, at moments of crisis, that a few neat strikes will make everything simpler.
Soon after Hagel arrived in Vietnam, he and the other men in his unit were crossing a stream when a mine exploded. The Marine Corps Times, in a piece on how Hagel would be the first enlisted man to be Secretary of Defense, quoted an interview he gave to the Library of Congress in 2002:
I had been hit with shrapnel and burnt my face up and down. Both eardrums… were blown out as well. And until we could secure the area, they couldn’t bring any choppers in to get the wounded out…
I remember [waiting for the medevac and] thinking to myself, you know, if I ever get out of all of this, I am going to do everything I can to assure that war is the last resort that we, a nation, a people, call upon to settle a dispute.…
The horror of it, the pain of it, the suffering of it—people just don’t understand it unless they’ve been through it. There’s no glory, only suffering in war.
A month after that mine went off, Hagel, who was back in action, carried his brother, also a soldier, out of a half-burnt armored personnel carrier, saving his life. In Vietnam, he got two Purple Hearts and a clutch of other medals. He may also have learned what it means to be a Secretary of Defense—if not how to survive a confirmation hearing.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Amy Davidson
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