GIs come up short on armor, answers

BY CAROL MARIN
SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST


Oh, great. Someone is now going to "sit down" with Spec. Thomas Wilson to, in the inimitable words of Donald Rumsfeld, "find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know."

Wilson is the Tennessee National Guardsman in Kuwait who stood up to the secretary of defense on Wednesday asking why he and his comrades were forced to scour garbage dumps for discarded, rusted metal that they could bolt onto their insufficiently armored vehicles as they prepare to head into the war in Iraq.

Rumsfeld, according to one account in the New York Times, was "seemingly caught off guard by the pointed questioning."

Armor problem? What armor problem?

Recommendation to Rumsfeld: go to Google on your computer and punch in two words, "Iraq" and "armor" and start reading the 472,000 results. Many of them speak specifically to a shortage of both vehicle and body armor for our troops. And the dates on some of those articles? They reach back for well over a year.

Wilson's questions clearly resonated with his fellow soldiers. There were 2,300 of them crammed into an air hangar, and many clapped and cheered. That discombobulated Rumsfeld who, like a cranky professor before an unruly class, sought to silence them saying, "Now, settle down, settle down." And then he dared to plead old age. "Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning, and I'm gathering my thoughts here."

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Jay Leno opted for the former, pointing out Wednesday night on "The Tonight Show" that while Rumsfeld told the troops that armor doesn't always offer protection, "Then he got into his armored car and left."

Next week some members of Congress will travel to Iraq. One of them will be U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-10th) of Illinois, who serves some of the same North Shore district that then-congressman Donald Rumsfeld did in the 1960s.

Back in 2002, Rumsfeld scolded Kirk during a hearing when the issue was whether Saddam Hussein would really allow meaningful weapons inspections. Rumsfeld didn't bother to notice that Kirk was actually agreeing with him.

What, I wondered, did Kirk think of the bristling exchange between Rumsfeld and the soldier from Tennessee?

"Wilson should be given a medal and promoted," said the congressman by cellphone Thursday. "That showed real cojones. Leaders don't need to hear what they want to hear, they need to hear what they need to hear."

I couldn't agree more. But what's wrong with their hearing that they hadn't heard all this before? It's as though, in the conduct of this war, its principal strategists are impervious to information even from their own loyalists.

The outrage is that we went into Iraq unprepared and unwilling to answer the most basic of questions: What will it cost? What is the timetable? What is the exit strategy?

We tore down a statue Saddam and watched the president stride across the deck of an aircraft carrier proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." Tell that to Wilson and the 150,000 troops trying to deal with an insurgency that has no front line. We are learning as we go. And as a record number of soldiers died last month.

From Kuwait on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld moved on to India on Thursday as he and the Pentagon tried to manage the story of troop criticism voiced by Specialist Wilson.

That's when Rumsfeld, as far as I'm concerned, only made it worse. "I don't know what the facts are," he declared.

Isn't he the guy who runs the Pentagon?

"But somebody's certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know. And that's a good thing."

Isn't that last line what Martha Stewart used to say?

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