Patricia Kilday Hart
Army of One
With an unpopular war overseas and an embarrassing scandal at home, the military turned to an outsider to shape its future. For Pete Geren, it’s the mission of a lifetime.
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At Walter Reed, Geren brought in Brigadier General Michael S. Tucker as a “bureaucracy buster.” Before, outpatients with head injuries struggled to make and remember their own appointments. Now soldiers are assigned to “warrior transition units,” with a specific doctor, squad leader, and case manager. “There is full accountability now,” Tucker said. “Soldiers need a mission. Their mission is to heal, which means taking their medications as prescribed, going to treatment and appointments. It is their job.”
Tucker, who receives a daily e-mail tracking complaints made to the new hotline, gives Geren regular updates on the hospital’s progress. “We are righting a lot of wrongs,” Tucker said. “Walter Reed was a great opportunity to look at ourselves.”
I caught up with Geren in December for the Army-Navy football game, joining him on a bus entourage that began with a breakfast for patients at Walter Reed before heading to the stadium, in Baltimore. At the hospital, he and his wife, Beckie, spoke to each soldier personally. Most did not recognize the Secretary of the Army until he introduced himself, asking in his soft-spoken manner, “How are they treating you here?” The youthful soldiers seemed too awestruck to voice concerns—if they had any—but they also seemed genuinely impressed by Geren’s visit. Later, I remembered his comment on constantly hammering your priorities. Even on game day, you make time for Walter Reed.
Geren also focused his attention on the contracting scandal, in which Army officers received kickbacks from bidders. He named a task force to take immediate action on current contracting, and he asked former Under Secretary of Defense Jacques Gansler to lead a commission to identify flaws in how the Army goes about spending its billions. Its final report offered what Geren called “a blunt and comprehensive assessment” of Army procedures.
But there’s another key issue he believes could have the biggest impact on his legacy. He hopes to eradicate the cynical adage “If the Army had wanted you to have a family, it would have issued you one.” At his arrival ceremony, Geren elevated the issue by making it the central theme of his remarks to the crowd of Pentagon and Capitol dignitaries and foreign emissaries. With the full pomp and circumstance of the military on display—and the Old Guard of the 3rd United States Infantry Regiment and the Fife and Drum Corps performing—Geren promised to provide “soldiers and families a quality of life that is commensurate with their service.”
“I didn’t appreciate until I came to the Pentagon the extraordinary sacrifices families make,” he told me later. “For children, every day your mom or dad is gone, you are worried about their personal safety.”
September 11 gave him as intimate an understanding of combat as one can have, short of actually going to war. Scenes of the disaster are etched into his memory. A soldier in a bloody uniform, typing away on a computer late that night; paramedics with the glow of flames reflecting on their faces, with rows and rows of stretchers behind them.
“As a civilian, you don’t really think about what soldiers do,” he said. “They run into burning buildings. They run toward the sound of gunfire.”
When I interviewed Geren at his Virginia home on a cold and rainy December evening, he was in a reflective mood. Earlier in the day, he had signed a condolence letter to a widower with three young children. “I am touched personally by what these families are going through,” he said. “We’re facing something we haven’t faced before, with multiple deployments creating single-parent families.”
Shortly after he became Secretary, he began exploring how the Army as an institution could assist families. The more people he spoke with, the more he became convinced of how critical it was. “It is a readiness issue,” he said. “You can’t have a ready force without caring for the families.”
Demographics support that opinion. Today’s Army is older, more likely to be married, and more educated than it was twenty years ago. But the length of the war has severely strained its all-volunteer force. Deployments last fifteen months, up from the usual twelve, with only twelve months at home before the next tour.
The Army desperately needs recruits, and research confirms what common sense might suggest—that decisions on whether to stay with or leave the Army are driven by a spouse’s happiness. “When confronted with this fact situation, the support systems just have to change,” he said. “We are really in uncharted waters. We have never asked so much of our families.”
These ruminations prompted Geren and Army chief of staff George Casey to write a formal document, called the Army Family Covenant. The plan, which has been signed at bases around the world to emphasize its importance, was accompanied by $1.4 billion in spending on services for families, like day care and youth programs.
I had my doubts that Pentagon leaders could issue a proclamation in Washington and actually change culturally imbedded behavior. But Geren’s focus has already prompted some commanding officers to find ways to make the Army more family-friendly. Fort Leavenworth’s commanding officer, Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, told me that a young soldier studying at the base’s Command and General Staff College asked him if class times could be delayed to allow families the chance to walk their children to school.
When Caldwell first raised the issue with administrators, they balked. He ordered the change anyway. “When I got the usual institutional resistance, I said, ‘You all go back and figure out how to make this happen, because it sounds like too good of an idea,’ ” said Caldwell, who has three elementary-age children himself. “I just spent thirteen months away from them and missed thirteen months of their lives. We ask a lot of our families. I know how challenging and hard it is.” Caldwell also ordered college faculty not to assign weekend homework so students could focus on their families.
The tweaks in schedule may seem small, but their significance has been magnified by the Army’s lengthy, repeated tours of duty. “We’re sending a message: This is the year to spend time with your kids,” Caldwell said. Geren’s commitment, he said, had prompted a change in his thinking. “My feeling was, I’ve been empowered by the Secretary of the Army to figure out how to improve the quality of the lives of our families.”
In mid-December, Geren took a trip that seemed to encapsulate the transformation of the Army. Visiting El Paso’s Fort Bliss for an Army Family Covenant signing ceremony, Geren held an impromptu town hall meeting with families. A woman asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “When will the duration of deployments be reduced back to twelve months?”
Geren paused and said he wished he knew a specific date, but he didn’t. He assured her that shortening deployments is the Army’s highest priority. The Army hopes to expand its troop numbers by 75,000 in the next five years, which is a sure way to reduce the burden on the current ranks. In that light, the Army Family Covenant, as a method of recruiting and retaining soldiers, will become an integral part of the Army’s future. Once again, my old friend’s common sense will have a lasting impact.
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