Dear Mr. DiRita

... a fond farewell from Joe Galloway to Donald Rumsfeld, c/o E&P. [emphasis added is mine]. NEW YORK Joe Galloway the fabled war correspondent, now reporting on military affairs for Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, retires next week after more than four decades in journalism, during which he covered numerous foreign wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, and was one of the rare civilians awarded a Bronze Star for bravery. Not surprisingly, he is going out with a bang. A series of combative and revealing emails between Galloway and chief Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita concerning Donald Rumsfeld’s management of the military and the Iraq war have surfaced which cut to the heart of the country’s current trauma. Retired General Barry McCafferty, a familiar figure nowadays as a cable news commentator, urged Galloway to release the emails, calling them “the most powerful stuff hands down I have ever read about this war. ...this exchange ought to be your going away gift to the capital.” It all began on April 26, with a typically toughminded Galloway column. It profiled retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who commanded both the Marine War College at Quantico, Va., and the National War College in Washington before retiring in 1997. Galloway recalled that Van Riper had told an interviewer in October 2004 that the military got the lessons all wrong after World War II and that mistake resulted in two disasters -- Korea and Vietnam. "My great fear is we're off to something very similar to what happened after World War II, that is getting it completely wrong again," Van Riper said of Iraq. But Van Riper saved his strongest criticism for the Pentagon boss. "Mr. Rumsfeld has failed 360 degrees in the job. He is incompetent," Van Riper concluded. "Any military man who made the mistakes he has made, tactically and strategically, would be relieved on the spot." Two days later, Rumsfeld's top spokesman, DiRita, fired off a reply to his friend Galloway (original spelling and typography retained in all emails that follow): “Let's at least be honest about this: there is a lot of change taking place, and that change forces people to re-examine the way we have always done things,” he wrote. “That is bumpy, and that can make people anxious. ... Van Riper has never even met the secretary to my knowledge. For him to make such sweeping comments as he did in your piece is just irresponsible. “You're just becoming a johnny one-note and it's only a couple of steps from that to curmudgeon!!” -- Galloway replied in an email: “i've always understood that the guy in charge takes the fall for everything that goes wrong on his watch. this is why the u.s. navy courtmartials the captain of any ship that is involved in an accident or is sunk for whatever reason….Last I knew Mr. Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense. He has the ultimate responsibility….” -- DiRita responded: "I think your columns have been representative of a school of thought within military circles that I don't believe is particularly widespread. The army is so much more capable and suitable for the nation's needs that it was 5 or 10 years ago. To my mind, the voices your columns represent missed the forest for the trees.” -- On May 3, Galloway sent this missive (the exchanges that follow apparently all come from that day): “The army you describe as ‘so much more capable’ than it was 5 or 10 years ago is, in fact, very nearly broken. another three years of the careful attention of your boss ought to just about finish it off. this is not the word from your anonymous officers; this is from my own observations in the field in iraq and at home on our bases and in the military schools and colleges. “you can sit there all day telling me that pigs can fly, with or without lipstick, and i am not going to believe it. seemingly the reverse is also true. one of us is dead wrong and i have a good hunch that it would be you. you go flying blind through that forest and you are going to find those trees for sure. “whether or not paul van riper has ever met Secretary Rumsfeld is not at issue. one does not have to be a personal acquaintance to find that a public figure's policies and conduct of his office are wanting. Secretary Rumsfeld spent a good number of years as the CEO of various large corporations. He knows about being responsible for the bottom line in that line of work. So too is he responsible in his current line of work; actually even more so given the stakes involved. So grasp that concept harder, friend Larry. Urge your boss to step up to the plate and admit it when he's gotten it wrong at least as quickly as he steps up to run those famous victory laps with Gen Meyer back in the spring of '03.” -- DiRita answered quickly: “Time will tell. The army is faster, more agile, more deployable, more lethal….The army of 2000 could not have sustained rotational deployments indefinitely. Retention is above 100 percent in units that have frequently deployed. Would all those soldiers be rushing to join a ‘broken’ army? Do you really believe we were better off with tens of thousands of soldiers in fixed garrisons, essentially non-deployable, in germany and korea? I appreciate your depth of feeling. What bugs me though is your implication that rumsfeld doesn't care about it as much as you do.” -- But, of course, Galloway was not done, noting that the army “is grinding up the equipment and the troops inexorably. recruiting can barely, or hardly, or not, bring in the 80,000 a year needed to maintain a steady state in the active army enlisted ranks....and that is WITH the high retention rates in the brigades. and neither figure addresses the hemorraging of captains and majors who are voting with their feet in order to maintain some semblance of a family life and a future without war in it…. “so far it is the willingness of these young men and women to serve, and to deploy multiple times, and to work grueling and dangerous 18 hour days 7 days a week that is the glue holding things together. all the cheap fixes have been used; all the one-time-only gains so beloved of legislators trying to balance a budget and get out of town. the question is what sort of an army are your bosses going to leave behind as their legacy in 2009? one that is trained, ready and well equipped to fight the hundred-year war with islam that seems to have begun with a vengeance on your watch? "or will they leave town and head into a golden retirement as that army collapses for lack of manpower, lack of money to repair and replace all the equipment chewed up by iraq and afghanistan, lack of money to apply to fixing those problems because billions were squandered on weapons systems that are a ridiculous legacy of a Cold War era long gone. ... “you say i blame your boss for things 3 or 4 levels below him that he can't possibly be controlling and quote accusations from present and former flag officers who he has never eyeballed personally. well the above items are things that he directly controls, or should; things he came into office vowing he was going to fix or change drastically. and in the latest QDR, his last, he made none of the hard choices about wasted money on high dollar weapons systems that make no sense in the real world today….this is what has my attention; this is what has me in a mood to question over and over and over, waiting for answers that never come, change that never comes, course corrections that never come. you wanted some specifics. there are some specifics…. “your boss is fond of saying that this or that thing is ‘unknowable.’ the most unknowable thing of all is who your enemy is going to be next time and where you are going to need allies and bases from which to attack or defend. “all i can say is what the hell are you doing questioning my columns when you ought to be in there at the elbow of your boss reading those columns aloud to him every wednesday afternoon and urging him to pay attention to them. best wishes, Joe.” -- DiRita replied: “Thanks for these insights, joe. none of this is easy. Your perspective seems pretty fixed but I do appreciate the experience you bring to it. “Again, what bothers me most about your coverage is your implication that the people involved in all of this are dumb or have ill-intent or are so sure of what they know that they don't brook discussion. That's the part you're just way off on, friend. This is tough stuff, and we're all hard at it, trying to do what's best for the country.” -- Galloway concluded: “i like to think that is what i am doing also, and it is a struggle that grows out of my obligation to and love for america's warriors going back 41 years as of last month. "there are many things we all could wish had happened. i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, ‘You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don't quit now...’ Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty. “i could wish for so much. i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time. i could wish that Jackson's widow Betsy had not found, among the possessions of her late husband, a copy of my book, carefully earmarked at a chapter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was reading at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her husband, herself and a 3 year old baby girl. “those things i received in the mail yesterday and they brought back the tears that i wept standing there in that pit, feeling the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen american soldier 41 years ago on a barren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war. someone once asked me if i had learned anything from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry.”