As impressed as I was with the quiet, uninhabited enormity and grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, coming down from as high as over 12,000 feet in elevation into the wide open spaces of Montana and into eastern Wyoming into South Dakota, the territory once known as the Great Desert – the Great Plains – was no less awe-inspiring, not really because of its immensity as much as its surprising richness. It is anything but plain.
After California, the South, and the Southwest, the Great Plains appears to be the next region in America to take its turn at economic and social transformation. From Sioux Falls down to Kansas City, tracing much of the early Lewis and & Clark expedition route, for the last 10 or so years, these former frontier towns have seen strong job growth in high-paying jobs in energy, professional and business services, science and engineering, and agricultural products such as soybeans and specialty grains, prompting an influx of population from the rest of the country. Still, these states are not exactly the diverse metropolises of the coastal areas. Pending the new census results, South Dakota’s population is barely 600,000. And although the region maintains the among the highest percentage of college graduates, at around one-third, and the lowest unemployment rates in the country, at less than 4%, it is also about 90% white.
After limping into Billings from the torrential rain and wind encountered at Yellowstone and slipping between low-pressure systems sailing across the Montana sky the next morning, I aimed for Deadwood, South Dakota that day, after seeing Devil’s Tower and at least making an appearance in Sturgis, where every August thousands of bikers from around the world overwhelm the area for the largest bike fest in the world. (Other than that, Sturgis has no claim to fame.) I was looking forward to a couple of days rest in Deadwood. On the way, I thought, I would stop off at Little Bighorn National Park to punch the history ticket and move on. What I learned in southeastern Montana was far from perfunctory. (John Lennon and John Steinbeck strike again!)
Most of us know the story: On the 25th of June, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and five companies of his 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment were defeated at the hands of the Plains Indians – a combination of warriors from the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. The battle on the bluffs, ridges, and fields overlooking the Lakota encampments on the Little Bighorn River became the iconic event of the long struggle between European and Native Americans, entering into American and global folklore as a sort of Armageddon of the Wild West.
Often thought on a deadly scale of thousands, the battle actually claimed the lives of about 260 U.S. cavalrymen and an estimated 60 Indian warriors. As the group I joined peered out into the expansive fields where the battle unfolded, we received an illuminating presentation from a well-read and enthusiastic park ranger (originally from Texas). He was able to bring the battle to life with his blow-by-blow description and a colorful discussion of the personalities involved. More captivating, however, was his insightful description of the overarching circumstances that led to an encounter of inevitable happenstance more than a premeditated conflict by either side. Many wars, by the way, are as accidental as they are intentional.
Understanding this link in a chain of events helps to understand the complex history of a centuries-long clash of cultures that peaked in the decade following the Civil War, when settlers resumed their vigorous westward movement. The U.S. government, recognizing the increasing hostilities being brought on by growing connectivity with the Indians (and, unfortunately more importantly, their lands) and the expense of having to fight them off as the Union Pacific laid track in the direction of the Rockies, signed a treaty at Fort Laramie, Wyoming with the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other tribes of the Great Plains in 1868. A large area in eastern Wyoming was designated a permanent Indian reservation, thought “bad lands” because they had no apparent value to the government at the time.
Entrance to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Called "bad lands" by white men because there was no gold, nor could be farmed or used for grazing cattle.
As long as the Indians stayed on the reservation, the government would protect them “against the commission of all depredations by the people of the United States”, as well as provide food – the motto being it was “cheaper to feed than to fight the Indians” (as well as make them dependent on the government for their existence and thus prone to comply with its terms – a typical insurgency and counterinsurgency tactic, by the way – if you control the food supply, you control the population).
When I saw this at the Wounded Knee Museum, I recalled where I had seen "food as a weapon" to control, manipulate, or subjugate populations among insurgents and counter-insurgents, in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Africa.
The arrangement, unfortunately, did not last long. In 1874, as the U.S. descended into the Long Depression after the collapse of an overheated economy, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the heart of the reservation, bringing in thousand of eager miners. Undermanned in the wake of a massive post-war demobilization to return it to its traditionally negligible strength, and with no police forces to speak of on the frontier, the U.S. Army was unable to prevent their encroachment. Efforts to purchase the Black Hills from the Indians (who had no concept of land ownership) met failure. In growing defiance, the Lakota and Cheyenne left the reservation and resumed raids on white settlers. In December 1875, the commissioner of Indian Affairs ordered the tribes to return before the end of January or be treated as hostile forces. Following their non-compliance, President Grant (who of course knew much more about war than diplomacy) ordered an expeditionary force (the 7th Cavalry) to enforce the order. The rest, as they say, is history.
The timing of the battle was also critical. The defeat at Little Big Horn as the U.S. was celebrating its centennial in the midst of economic calamity, called a “massacre” in the press, sent shock waves throughout the United States and prompted a strong military response that eventually led to Wounded Knee. Custer, a flamboyant and popular war hero, was brevetted (i.e., promoted three grades) posthumously to major general and martyred along with his men. As the docent explained, it was “kind of a 9/11”, conjuring a similar kind of response on a continental scale as was done on a global scale 125 years later.
Stones marking where members of the 7th Cavalry fell at "Custer's Last Stand" (Custer's body was found at the spot marked by the black-plated stone).
There are certainly many other parallels – the shock/anger/send-in-the-cavalry sequence seen before and after in American history, the media hyperbole and “how-could-this-have happened?” mass introspection, and the reflexive choice of overwhelming hard power made trademark by the recent victory of the industrial North over the agrarian South.
There are, of course, exceptions. Among the most important was that the armies involved were rather different. Interestingly, as at the Alamo – another complete defeat provoking a war rally response, a large ratio (44% in this case) of the nearly 900 poorly fed, poorly equipped, largely illiterate, and poorly motivated troopers at Little Bighorn were foreign-born, the largest group from Germany. Of the American-born, the largest contingent came from New York, the country’s most populous state. Since 1972, the U.S. military has been all-volunteer, increasingly professionalized and resembling more of the best of what America has to offer – a remarkable and perhaps irreversible transformation that occurred during the 30 years of the span of my own career.
Another is that the U.S. military has become what John Nagl’s counterinsurgency treatise, Learning to Eat Soup with an Knife, calls a “learning organization” – with the ability to learn lessons from operations faster than the opponent and thus stay ahead. While the Indian wars could certainly be described as “asymmetric” counterinsurgency operations, the U.S. Army at the time was little concerned about learning – especially after the Civil War, it clearly possessed superiority to the enemy (who could less run and hide on the plains then as Al Qaeda can now in Central Asia’s mountains). It was simply a matter of time when the U.S. government would get around to subduing them. Hence, the approach to the Indians was conveniently an extension of Russell Weigley’s description of The American Way of War as the execution of a “strategy of annihilation” – brute firepower and death and destruction to include to the civilian base. No “hearts and minds” campaigns nor need for precision-guided munitions when it came to the Indians.
Admittedly, the approach also owes to bigotry. Most European Americans, to include the president at the time, felt the Indians were primitive savages who needed to be civilized and Christianized, although a few more enlightened Americans (among them, George Washington) thought these nature-loving peoples had a culture from which European-Americans could learn a few things (especially today, considering the importance of environmental power). Joseph Campbell observed that the Europeans who came to dominate the North American continent, as Judeo-Christians, were essentially an anti-nature culture who took the Cartesian adaptation of science to control nature to the extreme of a Faustian bargain with technology, giving us for example nuclear weapons. Recalling Steinbeck’s observation of the “savage” and “thoughtless” approach to the land noted in my earlier discussion of the National Parks, it is no wonder European-Americans, by and large, looked upon the Indians, who saw themselves as part of rather than outside of the ecosystem, with disdain.
Signs persist of that lingering prejudice and our failure to reconcile ourselves fully with the some of our treatment of the most original of the continent’s tenants – as a whole nation of Americans. The Indian warrior memorial at Little Big Horn, for example, came just a few years ago - more than 90 years later than the monument to the U.S. 7th Cavalry dedicated at the start of the 20th century.
After two days of recovery in Deadwood, which in 1876 was a thriving frontier town of about 2,000 offering many conveniences then known to much larger towns, I began to make my way for what I anticipated would be a long and boring ride across the prairie. Wrong again. South Dakota’s topography unfolded surprisingly, starting in the foothills of the Rockies in the Mountain time zone, then across the more predictably nearly endless plains, then to lush, hilly areas in the Central time zone that suggest you have, in just one day, gone from West to East. It wasn’t all the setting for “Dances with Wolves”.
The Indians largely object to the widespread use of references to their culture among American sports teams, first because they were never really asked and second because it has nothing to do with their culture. In addition to their lands, their identity is one more thing they feel the white man has stolen from them.
As at Little Bighorn, I was moved by an unexpected stop at a the small, privately-run Wounded Knee Memorial Museum in Wall, South Dakota – brought to my attention by one among the incessant commercial billboards that litter the landscape along American highways. Wall is about 90 miles to the north of the site of the final destruction of the Indian tribes as an independent civilization on 29 December 1890 and among the greatest of atrocities committed by the U.S. military against civilians. I found it disappointing that the U.S. government can have National Historical Sites and National Parks on everything to include a Minuteman missile headquarters not far away from Wall, but not something like this. I recalled explaining to a number of Germans when stationed in their country in the 1980’s – as they sought some moral relief in their process of coming to terms with their darker past by pointing out the U.S treatment of the Indians – that genocide was never the expressed policy of the government of the United States. There was no comparison and thus no moral equivocation. Still, if the Germans could face up to the commitment of some of the worst affronts to human dignity in their name by directly confronting their past, then this should be no issue for Americans, either. If there can be a Holocaust Museum in Washington, then there ought to be a national site of some kind to Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, and other less proud moments in American political and military history. Even the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall provides little balance as such.
This is not only a matter of doing what is right. It is a matter of continuing to restore our moral credibility and thus much of the soft power the United States very much needs as part of a more comprehensive approach to national security advocated by the Project on National Security Reform and others. We must do what I suggested to John Nagl after presenting on his book while I was at the Army War College in 2006: As the U.S. military has been doing since 9/11 at the tactical and operational level, the United States must do as a whole-of-government, whole-of-nation – become a learning organization. Keeping in mind Napoleon’s observation of the moral component in war (“…the moral is to the physical as three is to one”): If we believe in the words of the ideals of America so succinctly stated in the Declaration of Independence – if we are sincere in communicating to the globalized world to which we also belong that we are about connectivity, not conquest, then we must demonstrate our commitment to our values in our actions and set the example, thus making ourselves truly exceptional. Walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Real patriotism, after all, is not what you feel; it is what you do.
What I saw on the Great Plains also helped me think about what being an American means and what America is really about. While in Liberia, my accumulated experiences in helping to stabilize broken countries culminated in the realization that the most successful, powerful, and enduring societies have an inclusive sense of collective identity; those who make exceptions risk de-stabilization and disintegration – the loss of peace, prosperity, and freedom. United we stand; divided we fall.
In my early years in Europe, whenever receiving a lecture from stodgier German neighbors on the importance of community values and need to respect, for example, the collective right to peace and quiet or on crossing the street illegally as setting a bad example to children, I would answer back by pointing out tolerance as the primary value in “real democracies” or that “where I come from, children learn to think for themselves”. I must admit, I was hard on the Germans at times, much as I like them. But I was also hard on others, like Liberians, pointing out that they should change their racist constitution that forbids anyone but “Negroes” to be citizens, vote, or own property (especially since the election of President Obama). But I’m also as hard on Americans, if not more (because we should know better). That kind of honesty is appropriate first at home and then abroad.
One of the historical ironies the docent at Little Bighorn pointed out in his lecture was that, to the Indians, who were the original inhabitants of the North American continent, the white European settlers were “illegal immigrants”, made even more poignant by a quote from Chief Crazy Horse posted at the Indian memorial: “We did not ask you white men to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home. You had yours… We did not interfere with you… We do not want your civilization.” In my comment to a speech this summer by the Mayor of New York on the swirl of controversy on the building of an Islamic community center near “Ground Zero”: “If we have no confidence that our culture of inclusiveness can withstand its inherent risks, then we might as well hang it up and join the rest of the world. And much of that, my friends, is not a very pretty place.”
And one of the greatest comparative strategic advantages that is unique in spirit and scale to the third most populous country in the world is in its cultural power, encapsulated in three short words: e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”). The immigration and assimilation culture that is at the core of the American way of life should be cultivated and strengthened, subject more to reason than passion.
As an American soldier deployed in the face of far more morally complex situations than those of past generations (and less than those who will follow mine), I often contemplated the small patch on my right shoulder (with the blue field on the right, facing forward into battle), and the special privileges and burdens placed on those who wear it. Indeed, we are not on a level playing field – held to a higher moral and ethical standard for the encouragement of friends, the mitigation of foes, and the deliberation of the nonaligned. It is unfair – we are no better, no more or less human than any of the others; and yet, we are called to higher comportment. After all, we Americans set the bar.
As public servants, we either accept that task or move on to another profession. As the citizenry that a soldier represents, we also either accept this or admit a lesser moral standard for ourselves, leaving our fate for others to decide, and not having the right to send these young men and women into harm’s way on our behalf, wearing that flag, to represent values that we believe should be spread abroad but cannot live up to at home. We are either all real Americans, or none of us at all.
