When military orders are too dangerous

Factual Questions
41

As a former NBC NCO, I gotta fight ignorance on this one. It is such a well told story, it may as well be one of the UL’s of the Army. First off, units do not camp out in chemically contaminated areas. The mission is to usually avoid the area altogether. If that is not possible, the unit will move through the area as quickly as possible. Generally, leadership will communicate to higher levels to determine when the unit is beyond the contaminated area, and then move further along just to be sure. S2 would be consulted to determine if the area is clear of chemical weapons. Maybe S2 does not know for sure. That is when your chemical defense team would take readings. (When I say chemical defense team, that may be your NBC NCO and the NBC OIC, or just the person trained in NBC defense.) If your company level NBC guy was absent on this mission, Common Task Training teaches all enlisted Soldiers, and presumably all Officers how to test for the presence of chemical weapons in the area. Break out a test kit, and check.

All of your Soldiers forgot to pack the test kits along with their protective equipment? Well first, you need to fault your NCO’s for not doing Pre-Combat Checks. Then you again consult with S2 and ensure the area is clear. Move until birds are flying and crickets chirping. Move until you see a squirrel climbing the tree your are resting against.
Then when you can presume the area is clear, you would have the least mission essential person take a deep breath, break the seal of his mask, and open his eyes for no more than 10 seconds. Have the provided chemical defense injections at the ready. Regardless of what you may have heard, disarming the person who will break the seal of the mask is not mentioned in the FM. If there is a chemical agent in the area, the eyes will react quickly. The Soldier will be taken out of direct sunlight and will be monitored for 10 minutes. If no reaction, a second Soldier may be told to break the seal of his mask and open his eyes.

Wait ten minutes, no reaction from the second Soldier, the first Soldier may break the seal of his mask and take a breath. Again have the defense injectors at the ready. Move the person to a shady area, and wait ten minutes. At this time the second Soldier will be instructed to break the seal and take a breath. If no reaction, the “All Clear” may be given.

I just wanted to clarify so it wouldn’t seem as though CO’s would wander through a chemically contaminated area and say, “PVT Johnson, I think this is safe, take your mask off.
PVT Johnson appears to be doing the kickin’ chicken’ well lets move 20 feet to the north, 2LT Smith, take your mask off and breathe” Repeat as needed.

SSG Schwartz

ETA: The Soldiers would have been instructed to decontaminate themselves and all their equipment before the first Soldier would be told to break the seal, lest there be some chemical agent present on the equipment that could cause harm. This process could take hours and trust me, being in full chemical defense equipment for hours will make the heartiest NCO want to volunteer to break the seal.

42

This thread reminded me of the book/movie “Fail Safe”. After a group of bombers is mistakenly ordered to attack the Soviet Union, a group of fighters is ordered to pursue the bombers and shoot them down. This involves turning on their afterburners and flying out over arctic waters. It’s a one-way trip due to limited fuel. The fighter pilots know that ditching in the arctic ocean is not survivable, effectively making it a suicide mission.

43

See: Catch-22
If a soldier willingly goes into combat, he is insane, and can be taken off of duty.
If a soldier asks to be taken off of duty for being insane, he is sane, and thus must return to duty.

Yosarrian lives.

44

On 9/11, weren’t the powers that be considering sending an unarmed F-16 to engage United 93 (i.e. ram it)?

Thanks,
Rob

45

It’s been mentioned a couple of times, but doesn’t EVERY sub movie have a scene where some hapless sailer has to enter a flooding, buring or radiation contaminated compartment to blow emergency ballast, activate the fire suppression system, fix a leak or some other action that will save the ship at the cost of the sailors life.

46

Well, obviously, SSG Schwarz, I wouldn’t say…“I think we’re out of it, take your mask off.” I wasn’t going to go through the full procedure in detail, as it didn’t relate to the comment I was responding to. Calling the part I was referencing an urban legend, though, isn’t really accurate, as you confirmed exactly what I was talking about in your procedure list. I was more concerned as a commander with being in a chemical weapons attack, and having to move forward to continue the fight. In our current situation, the dangers of advancing long distances in MOPP-4 in 115 degree heat are almost as bad as the attack itself, so you would want to get out of your gear as soon as you safely could…I was not talking about camping out or moving into a contaminated area. Obviously, ideally, you would want to make it to a confirmed safe area, and do a full decon, but there are situations where you’d need to use the little decon packs and undress on the battlefield just to continue the mission…it’s in these situations that I was envisioning the biggest fear of that part of the procedure.

That choice with the least mission essential person IS there, and that’s the part that always struck me. I understand the reason for it, and even though you would only do it after there is every indication that the area is clear, there are some toxins that could kill even due to short exposure times. And waiting for a moving animal may not be an option if you’re in the middle of the desert in 115 degree heat.

Obviously, the chance of death isn’t great when you would start the demasking procedures, but the morale loss on the picked soldier is still there…you’ve just been told you don’t matter. I always had a problem with that.

47

Is that a frag?

48

During the Korean War the The Gloustcershire Regiment and accompanying British units were ordered to hold their position in the face of a major N.Korean assault at the Imjin river to cover the safe withdrawal of American forces.

It is a certainty that they knew what their fate would be.

They carried on fighting after being surrounded and all of them were killed or captured.

They received a Presidential unit citation from the then P.O.T.U.S. inspite of not being U.S. forces.

49

I love this one (from here):

50

Thanks, Rick. I attempted a search, but was unable to come up with his name.

I was intending to go through the descriptions of WWII submarine losses and/or Medal of Honor recipients to find his name, but you beat me to it.

51

Echoes of “Go tell the Spartans . . .”

52

Jman, I can see that you are an officer that truly cares about his troops, and I will admit that picking the least mission essential person to break the seal of the mask must be an experience that most people will not want to go through. What I was trying to get at is that the selected person is not told to unmask and breathe the air. You and I know the procedures involved, but more than Soldiers read this board, and even some Soldiers who read the SDMB may not realize that the person is first instructed to break the seal without breathing and that there is medication immediately available. Yes, a blood agent could kill within minutes of breathing it, or a nerve agent, but the selected Soldier is not told to breathe. There will be a reaction and relatively quickly if there is a chemical agent in the area.

When the person is under the belief that he/she is non-mission essential and that the risk has not been minimized to an acceptable level, that is when there becomes a problem with the demasking procedures. This also provides an exampel of the risk matrix being used. How many heat casualties will be acceptable vs. how many deaths do to chemical agents vs. how essential is the mission and this route.

I understand that I am hijacking the thread, but in this case, I really want to add the clarification. I phrased my first response more tongue-in-cheek than I should have, but the area is tested, discovered to be safe, the unit in question is the first in the area and the boundaries are not known.

I hope we are on the same page, Sir.

SSG Schwartz

53

First of all…<<salutes>>

Second of all, as a former enlisted man in the Artillery arm of the Army, and the son of a general officer, I commend your moral quandry. That type of empathy is EXACTLY the reason why the US volunteer military is superior to conscript militaries, because ethical questions like this always come into play vis a vis your chemical agent scenario (if you’re a good officer…there’s self-aggrandizing, non-caring morons in command positions too).

I liked your allusion at the company level to a “family”, because in my experience, as the unit sizes extend to battallion level and above, the officer(s) in charge tends to “dehumanize” his (their) own soldiers, often out of necessity. God bless captains! Just enough rank and experience to matter and make sound decisions, but not enough to let it get to their heads!

A perfect illustration of these moral issues is something that my Dad went through on his second tour of Vietnam. He was a “military intelligence” officer on his first tour ( I know, the oxymoronic nature of that title never ceases to amuse me), but he was an engineer by trade and USMA graduation, and on his second tour he was assigned as a company commander of Combat-Heavy Engineers (apropos motto: "First In Last Out).
Anyway, as he describes it, they were conducting troop movement operations in or near hostile forces and they were in a compromised position while doing so, moving through a valley while the enemy held the higher ground and were beginning to pick apart the battallion with relative impunity.

So Dad had to call for close air upon the enemy position, KNOWING that it was likely that some of his guys would get fragged in doing so, and they did. This is the only Vietnam story he will really talk about. As a company commander, he felt a personal attachment to each and every member of his company, and he had to order the imminent death by air of a few to spare the whole.

He’s 67 now, and I think he still suffers from that. He had to look at their faces as they were zipped into bodybags, knowing that it was he that gave the order that got them killed, indirectly.

I am hijacking this thread I guess, but ultimately, obeying orders, even if they seem suicidal can actually save lives in the big picture, and good soldiers will lay it down if asked, without question. To do otherwise disrupts the whole chain of command and renders an effective military fighting force useless.

And from personal experience, there were several times I would have gladly pulled that goddamn gas mask off my face just to breathe some cold air, contaminated or not. Hell, I or many other likely would have volunteered to be the guinea pig, rendering the “reducing someone to a feeling of mission expendability” meaningless. Just to get that fucking shit off my face.

I swear I would be the first to die in a chemical attack. MOPP gear is SO hot and cumbersome. Especially when doing PT in it!

:slight_smile:

54

I’m unclear about why this would be the case. Firstly, all accounts I have read suggest that fighter jets were dispatched, but with weapons (missiles?). Second, I can’t think of any reason why ramming the civil jet would offer any advantage over simply shooting it down. At the most basic level, I’d suggest that pilots (civil and military) are generally trained to avoid hitting things, whereas missiles are presumably designed to hit things.

Perhaps I could see an order like “Pilot, stop that 757 even if you have to ram it”, but that isn’t quite the same thing.

55

I missed that post. There’s simply no way that in light of the confusion of that day that we would resort to kamikaze tactics, when technology can kill or disable a commercial airplane much more easily and without the loss of pilot or aircraft.

56

That was my feeling - why on Earth would anyone suggest that using an F16 as a missile would be more useful than using an actual missile? I can’t imagine that civil airliners could do much to avoid an attack by fighter planes.

57

Like nothing at all. Fighters would likely engage from beyond visual range with missiles. Fighters struggle to avoid missiles with all their speed and agility and countermeasures; an airliner would be a big fat sitting target in comparison.

And using an F-16 as a kamikaze bomber is just silly for several reasons.
[ul]
[li]First, the aircraft on ready alert (even before 9-11) had live weapons on them, usually at least AIM-9 and AIM-120 as well as 20mm Vulcan cannons; any of the above would be more than enough to knock down an airliner. [/li][li]Second, we didn’t have a whole lot of ready alert fighters on site at the time; I think it was something like 2 or 3 elements of 2 each for the first hour after 9am EDT for the whole East Coast. Why would you waste 1 or more of them taking out airliners? At the very least, we needed them to maintain air traffic control and manage the planes still in the air; we certainly didn’t have resources to throw away for several hours until the next group of aircraft were armed and loaded and ready to take off which from experience I know takes at least a couple of hours from cold to ready to go.[/li][li]Third, we didn’t know if the threat was contained or not with the 4 airliners down; there was every chance more aircraft had been hijacked. Why would you sacrifice your defenders if you didn’t know that the threat was over? The air was still full of commercial planes, if you’ll recall - it took nearly 4 hours to get them all on the ground. [/li][li]And finally, you don’t spend your forces in suicidal attacks unless you have no other options; we had lots of other options.[/li][/ul]

58

We’re on the same page, and it’s always great to get detailed information from an obviously quite knowledgeable NBC NCO. BTW, I’m a civilian now…no need for ‘sir’ anymore. :slight_smile: