Over here, “safe” training saves lives. Over there, it ends them.

The closest I came to death from my time in the military (that I know of, at least) happened in early 2008 in Iraq. My platoon rolled into the middle of a firefight involving insurgents, the Iraqi army, and the armed neighborhood watch known as the Sons of Iraq. (Remember those jackalopes?) The rounds fired our way pinged around heads, bouncing off the Strykers and through the buildings behind us — close enough for that oh-so-distinctive whistle-whistle-crack effect. Ah, memories.

We had a few other hairy situations with IEDs and IED emplacers, but nothing too wild. We were lucky. In fact, my second closest brush with the Reaper in the military didn’t happen in combat, or in Iraq at all. It happened in Hawaii, during a training mission.

We were off the coast, flying to Wheeler Army Airfield in helicopters, with endless Pacific blue under us. We were cav scouts — the ground-pounding kind — in the back and headed home, already planning out our weekends. Then the Chinook dropped and kept dropping, and in those mad, dizzying seconds, I felt certain we were all going to die then and there.

We didn’t, obviously. Praise all three parts of the Holy Trinity for those pilots and their cool-as-the-other-side-of-the-pillow life approach. They righted that bird and got us all home safe. It was close, though, or at least close-ish. Too close-ish for this scribe remembering it a decade later. My stomach still clenches up when I think about it.

Just like in Iraq, we got lucky. That’s war’s (and training’s) dirty little not-so-secret: the power, and importance, of good chance. I thought of that good chance (and many, too many, of my friends’ bad chance) during the various military training accidents across the globe in late summer and fall. The Navy warship collision east of Singapore. The USS Fitzgerald’s collision with a container ship near Japan. The Special Forces “Q Course” soldier killed on the firing range in September. The downed Black Hawk off Kaena Point in Hawaii — the very same area where our Chinook fought for flight ten years ago.

And those are just four recent examples. According to the Department of Defense, over 50 servicemembers were killed or wounded in training incidents this summer alone. Senator John McCain, ever a guiding light on issues of defense and the application of military manpower, wrote in a statement: “Four times as many servicemembers died during routine training in the last three years than in combat.”

“These incidents,” McCain continued, “demonstrate the current over-taxed state of our military both at home and overseas, and the failure of Congress and the president to give our troops the training, resources, and equipment they need.”

Whoa. Say what you will about the ol’ Arizona battle-ax (and plenty’s been said recently, from the far left and far right), but he’s not one to shy away from bluntness. The Straight Talk Express, baby!

But about that “over-taxed state” — what’s to be done, really? The war in Afghanistan isn’t going anywhere. In fact, President Trump recently committed to a sort of “mini-surge” there. The campaigns in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere will continue to ebb and flow — all part of the Global War on Terror that has now achieved un-ironic Forever War status. If my infant son ends up joining the military, will he fight terrorism, too? Yeah, probably. The truth is, the military has been over-taxed for years. Another dark truth: It will remain over-taxed for years to come. 

But these training deaths can’t continue. Not like this. There’s some acceptance of risk here, of course — the chance of becoming an unfortunate statistic is “part of the job description,” as any good NCO will tell you — but when a young soldier or Marine or sailor has a better chance of getting killed training for war than actually, you know, in war itself, we have a systemic problem on our hands.

We had a term in the Army for the reactionary, hyper-cautious mentality that arose from leadership after training went awry: “zero defect.” In our era (God, that makes me sound old — when the fuck did that happen?), we tied the zero-defect mentality to the lessons learned from Desert Storm, where more soldiers were killed and injured by fratricide than by enemy combatants. (This also led to a lot of grisly jokes about the competence/shooting prowess of Saddam’s military, but I digress.)

So what happens now? I hope I’m wrong, but history’s as good a guidepost as any — in this case, the trajectory post-Vietnam, post-Desert Storm, and post-Kosovo. Media attention and Congressional inquiries lead to more scrutiny on small-unit training operations and missions. More scrutiny means “safer” training, and if nothing else, “safer” means fewer real-life scenarios (say, shoot-house training with live rounds) and more scripted training.

More scripted training translates to less prepared young servicemembers. There’s no replication for direct experience, of course, but good training — as opposed to training for the sake of training — aspires to come close. But as explored already, good training is risky. Safe training will save lives over here. But over there? Over there, safe training ends lives, because the real-life scenarios are being experienced for the first time. 

The irony of it all is that dead soldiers at war is the expected headline. It takes them dying stateside to get attention and concern now. So goes the loop of perpetual war in twenty-first-century America. Embrace the Suck, indeed.