The Rise and Fall of Major Jim Gant (Updated: Now a Book Review Twofer)
The Rise and Fall of Major Jim Gant by Joseph Collins, War on the Rocks Book Review
Whether you are interested in an unusual love story or in how the United States fights protracted wars, Ann Scott Tyson’s American Spartan is an important book. It artfully tells the story of the author and her now-husband, Major Jim Gant, a tough warrior-hero-thinker, who not only was one of the authors of the theory of Village Stability Operations in Afghanistan but became a pioneer practitioner, living among the Afghans in Konar Province for nearly two years. In the end, the Taliban tried very hard to kill him, and none other than Osama bin Laden identified Gant and his 2009 article, “One Tribe at a Time,” as a threat to the global jihad, at least according to the author. In the estimation of General David Petraeus and others, Major Jim Gant was the “perfect counterinsurgent.”
Major Gant, however, was also a psychologically wounded warrior and not fit for combat. A multi-tour combat veteran, he had severe and apparently untreated PTSD before his final deployment, the result of too much close combat on previous tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. How long can one ride on the hood of a Humvee, drawing sniper fire and scouting for and finding IEDs? He was well into drug and alcohol dependence before he deployed. His condition became worse as his tour progressed. Indeed, he increasingly became the centerpiece of battles against his twin demons: the Taliban and his superior officers. His attitude about war and warfare went off the deep end, and he imagined himself a reincarnated Spartan…
‘American Spartan’: Book Review by Gary Anderson, Washington Times
… I greatly admire anyone who can accomplish a dangerous mission without getting his people killed. In this, Maj. Gant performed brilliantly. His Village Stability Operations efforts harkened back to the original roots of the Green Berets by living with and fighting side by side with the Afghan tribesmen, particularly their “malik” (leader).
Maj. Gant appeared to be on his way to great things in the special operations community, but somewhere along the way, things were going badly off the track. A combination of years of combat stress and probably traumatic brain injury had caused him to lose his moral compass…
I know people are tired of reading reviews of this book. However, this one is worth reading as it is the most balanced objective review and analysis of Jim Gant’s story.
Dave—you might not like the following comment but after this following paragraph taken from the article one must ask the current SF senior leadership—do you really really want to make the shift to UW because in fact true UW demands if it is to be successful a totally different mindset other than the current one in USASF.
USASF can recreate itself in the UW world, teach UW, train UW, and act UW–but it takes a particular mindset if a UW team to be successful at UW and if one looks between the lines of Jim himself he was in fact in the tactical zone needed for a functional UW program to be successful—but when the rest of the organization is just going through the motions to reach the end of a deployment, trying to protect itself from outsiders, or just going through the motions of “thinking they are in UW” one must ask itself as an organization why are we taking tax payers money and for what if we cannot protect one of our own?
I inherently remember the critical comments being made by many who were in USASF that totally rejected his article “One Tribe at a Time” in 2009 as being a failed piece of intellectualism—and those were the mild comments.
Many of those comments were not particularly friendly and some questioned his motivation and thought processes concerning the article.
Just a side comment —Jim had reached out to me during that debate as I seemed to be next to Jim about the only one who defended it as I recognized the CIDG program hidden in the article and the potential it had when he wrote about it.
Now everyone is trying to recreate the boat from 2009 and claim it is a roaring success of some kind.
This paragraph actually scares a former SF vet because it was the same exact mindset —but on the part of the regular Army —that tore apart SF after the VN war—so was USASF really protecting one of their own and or at least trying to help one of their own or— where they far more into protecting the institution? In my former SF days the institution was only as successful as the personnel who drove the success—people were the key and that seems to be missing in all the articles being written about Jim.
That is the core question to be asked as taken from the paragraph.
The resulting investigation reveals the steamy side of being a “perfect counterinsurgent”: whiskey bottles, pills, and a cozy container-for-two in the middle of an Afghan village. Gant’s case appeared headed for a general court martial, but was wisely downgraded to non-judicial punishment.
This is the core question—- “Still fighting a ghost from the end of the Vietnam War, his superiors wanted to protect the Special Forces Regiment from the reputation of being a rogue outfit.”
The fate of the Village Stability Operations also hung in the balance. They believed strongly that Special Operations did not mean special ethics or legal shortcuts.
This paragraph to me as a former VN SF vet depicts just how this current SF senior leadership never seems to understand the massively successful history of the 5th SFGA—if they had then why was there no thoughts given to the CIDG program in say 2003 or say 2004 —but in 2009 it was being rejected out right as not being capable of brining success to AFG when Jim released his article.
Was the current SF senior leadership more worried by the “rouge past of the 5th” than say true “success” in an UW environment—come on.
A second core question also arises and this one is more serious—where was the senior leadership when a Silver Star recipient was mentally and physically struggling after the large number of deployments?
USASF in the mid 70s also threw out SF members (who had served with me in VN) who were struggling with PTSD, drugs, and alcohol– but that was because the entire Army had no support programs in place for soldiers/or their families and it was a true waste of great soldiers because of it—but in 2010-2013— what we had no programs in place?
By the way one of those thrown out in 1971 was a MoH winner from my team —a medic who had been seriously wounded in a major firefight and could not shake the pain killers after recovery and who later died in a motorcycle accident riding high in California-what a waste.
So maybe there are some of us old line UW SF veterans that better understand Jim and the environment he was in than does the current USASF senior leadership. Again it goes to the question protect the person or the institution?
Or maybe some of us old line UW types believe USASF senior leadership simply cannot make the transition to true UW as practiced by USASF until 1979 because of their mindset as reflected in the handling of Jim.
It was important in the old SF days to protect your people and senior leaders did that by leading from the front and often working together with the teams—do not know how many times in Company A 10th in Bad Toelz the European Commander would swim with us the long long miles that combat swimmers put in the pool in a day or he would ski at the front of a team for hours on end on a cross county ski trip–but he led from the front, motivated all,and shared his thinking. He knew the strength of the teams and when they were hurting or even slacking–and he knew that for the entire Company A.
Trust and loyalty. But again this generation of SF is not that of the 60/70s.
Where was that interest in Jim’s condition? Where attempts made privately with him—one never hears about it if it was in fact attempted.
Punishing someone for trying something when the war is basically lost sounds strange to me. Guess every failure needs in the end a scapegoat.
I have to disagree with a fundamental premise of Gant’s philosophy – that it is useful or even feasible to pick sides in tribal disputes. These disputes usually have a long history of which outsiders are unaware, and the pro-government vs. anti-government orientations of these groups are almost purely transactional and usually transitory at best. Combine an innate cunning with years of experience dealing with foreign soldiers and any tribal elder in Afghanistan can spin a tale that tells us what we want to hear. If one wants to see a good example of how picking sides ends up badly, I would point to the current Provincial Chief of Police in Kandahar.
Not sure why a Lieutenant had to be the one who brought MAJ Gant down…
I have difficulty with Mr. Anderson’s book review. While the language of the review has the same readability for which he praises the book; it is shrill and emotional. I felt I was reading a journal entry of one who was expressing betrayal as opposed to someone really interested why MAJ Gant went off the rails.
Was it Hubris, really, that felled MAJ Gant? Was MAJ Gant just a rogue in-waiting? Or was it TBI? Could it be the multiple tours, combined with the stresses of staff and field-grade command in the combat environments which was fostering undefined and broad end-states? Was it all of the above? And why did “we” allow this to happen?
Maybe MAJ Gant’s situation points out to us that the Military, perhaps, isn’t really suited to the conduct of the long war which is UW, or UW-like (anyone willing to look at the VSO program as long term FID/IDAD?) Maybe it is true that DOD can only be in a limited and supporting role of UW; supporting those who aren’t constrained? Maybe we have too many “crossed arrow wearers” that really don’t believe in the prosecution of a UW campaign that can’t be fit into a defined time-line. (Maybe UW is one of those doctrinal anomalies that Thomas P.M. Barnett describes as “we really don’t want to do this…”?) Perhaps, there were too many eager to allow MAJ Gant enough rope to hang himself.
In any case, in the end “we” failed him. Again, why was it a lieutenant?