Rough Men, Strange Peace

using an old moment to think about a new one

Donald Downard was not a nice man.

As one of his sons, who never met him, wrote in his memoirs, “I knew one thing of Lt. Colonel Donald Ephraim Downard— that he was a bad guy and that I should not be like him. It was drilled into me and my brother, David, like a jukebox on repeat, a daily reminder that I came from spoiled stock.” Later in that book, digging into family history, the author concludes, “As it turns out, my brother and I were not the only children he had, or the only ones he walked out on.” The total: six marriages, nine abandoned children.

In the spring of 1951, Downard argued with one of those many wives in the parking lot outside the officers’ club at Fort Monroe, Virginia. He was drunk, and so was she, and he had seen her talking to another man; after he called her a bitch and a whore, she slapped his face, and he dragged her into his car by the hair. Then he drove away with her — but she wandered back into the officers’ club later that night, alone, her hair "in disarray," her dress dirty, her stockings torn, her shoes gone, her face and body bruised and scratched. The officer in charge of the club sent for a doctor, who carefully cataloged her injuries for a crowd of MPs.

The resulting court-martial was not the only one Downard would face during his army career. In this instance, the army struggled to apply the law to his offense, because he’d beaten his wife under the Articles of War — just before the adoption of the new Uniform Code of Military Justice. Trying to make sense of the moment, the court convicted him under the old law but sentenced him under the new one, a procedural choice that would eventually cause the Court of Military Appeals to discard the sentence.

Beyond the problem of the law, though, the members of the court-martial had already been disturbed by the possibility that Downard would be forced out of the army because of the conviction they delivered. Arriving at a sentence they thought they were compelled to deliver — stripping Downard of his commission and throwing him out — they recommended that the convening authority disapprove their own decision. They urgently wanted Downard to remain in uniform, despite a trial that featured detailed testimony about his long history of adultery, unpaid alimony, dishonesty, and what the Army Board of Review would delicately call “domestic irregularities.”

How could they have wanted that?

Soldiers wear a ribbon on their uniforms to represent each medal they receive; subsequent receipt of the same medal is marked with an oak leaf cluster worn on the ribbon, rather than with more of the same ribbon. Donald Downard wore the Purple Heart with four oak leaf clusters — he’d been wounded in combat five times, receiving medical treatment and immediately returning to combat. Merely shooting the man wasn’t enough to stop him from continuing to fight. Here’s the citation from Downard’s Silver Star:

The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress July 9, 1918, takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star to Lieutenant Colonel (Infantry) Donald E. Downard (ASN: 0-337997), United States Army, for gallantry in action while serving with Headquarters, 2d Battalion, 222d Infantry Regiment, 42d Infantry Division, in action on 25 April 1945, near Donauworth, Germany. In the attack on Donauworth, Colonel Downard was commanding a group of armored and infantry forces known as Task Force Downard. When the task force met heavy resistance, he mounted his infantry on the tanks and flanked the enemy by entering the town from the east. In this maneuver, Colonel Downard, disregarding his own safety, rode on the outside of the leading tank in order to control the attack and observe the tactics of the enemy. Through his outstanding courage and professional skill, Colonel Downard played a major role in the destruction of the enemy forces, the capture of the town and the subsequent crossing of the Danube River.

He instinctively led from “the outside of the leading tank,” the position of greatest danger.

Famously, Downard was present for the liberation of Dachau, and dragged the only survivor out of the train parked near the gates with over two thousand bodies stuffed into boxcars. In a moment of horror, confronted with death on a massive scale and the odor of closely packed decaying bodies, he jumped into a rail car and dug into the pile, then threw the one survivor over his shoulder and ran for help.

So in 1951, during the Korean War and the Cold War, less than two years after the first successful test of a Soviet nuclear bomb, a panel of army officers looked at a fellow officer and saw a disaster of a human being — drunk, violent, dishonest, a serial adulterer with a habit of domestic violence — but they also saw a brilliant leader, a man without fear or the tendency to hesitate in moments of savagery and horror. They saw a wreck, and saw that they needed men like that wreck on the inevitable battlefields of the very near future. Soldiers in a moment of war, emerging from another war and facing the possibility of several others, they saw the value of an uncommonly courageous warrior alongside the harm he caused in peaceful settings.

There’s also a good chance they saw a man who was understandably not at peace — who had come by a reckless and disordered personality the hard way, with what we would now call untreated PTSD. A court made up of the veterans of a war was inclined to show mercy to a well-known veteran of some of the worst combat of that war. They didn’t approve of his behavior — they voted to convict, as other officers would again at another court-martial — but they declined to discard him.

I opened several drafts of a book with this story, and got back every version with that opening quietly crossed out by an editor who hesitated to open a book we wanted to sell with somebody beating the shit out of his wife. I understood the marketing decision — imagine somebody flipping through the first pages at their local Barnes & Noble, right? — but the story said something I meant to say about the complexity of judgment and the relationship between warriors after the darkness of a war.

Donald Downard appears to have found some degree of peace, by the way, and his grave suggests that his sixth marriage stuck — after twenty years of struggle and darkness.

So.

Picture an infantry battalion in the US Army today, in a country that was at war from the late months of 2001 until August of 2021. Everybody but the noobs is a combat veteran; all the old NCOs and field-grade officers came up through this:

Try to put yourself in this position, unless you’re already in it: Imagine spending twenty years at war, in a setting of mass torture and ISIS beheadings, and then starting an instant transition to the new Biden-era military:

Twenty years of enculturation in the habits and practices of a wartime military, and then the sudden 180 into full-time proggie kulturkampf. Current top issue: Where will the troops get their abortions?

Add to this the appalling reversal of fighting for twenty years in Afghanistan and then walking away with nothing accomplished, leaving the Taliban to take over the whole country. And then add this:

Military whistleblowers: DOD's legally dubious mRNA mandate has harmed readiness, produced widespread injuries

Imagine the cultural collisions happening inside the combat arms fields today. And imagine what the American military looks like in five years. My best guess is that institutional culture doesn’t turn this hard and fast without breaking.