Miles Lagoze
Former Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller was the kind of infantry officer I probably would have loved as an enlisted Marine back in 2008. The officer who shuns bureaucracy and looks out for his Marines at all costs, even if it costs him his command and career. The officer who focuses on fighting wars instead of enforcing asinine rules and regulations. The kind of officer who embodies the mentality that a leader isn’t a leader until he earns that status from his men, that his identity isn’t real until it’s solidified in the hearts and minds of his Marines. It’s a powerful sentiment. And, based on his new memoir, “Crisis of Command” (Knox Press, 2022), it seems that Scheller succeeded in embodying this sentiment over the course of his 17 years in uniform.
Having been an enlisted Marine, I suspect Scheller is the kind of officer who wishes he had enlisted instead of being commissioned. It’s not uncommon. With those corporate, cushy desk jobs and promotion selection boards, officers place heavy emphasis on “professionalism” and the political skills required to maneuver a career through the appropriate checkpoints. These things never seemed to interest Scheller. After all, he abandoned his first career as a corporate accountant to join the Marine Corps in late 2004, shortly after the start of the Iraq War.
In this sense, Scheller was a perfect fit for the Scarlet and Gold. He had a yen for the tough life, and the culture of the Marine Corps glorifies its “saltiest” guys. Marines with the most combat experience typically get pushed out because they’re unable to overlook or accept the hypocrisies of the system, but they get the most respect from grunts and junior Marines. Meanwhile, those who play it safe and follow the rules make it to retirement with full pension. It’s the old trope from movies like “Heartbreak Ridge,” where Clint Eastwood’s renegade Gunnery Sergeant Highway clashes with a young officer who hadn’t seen the kind of shit Highway had, but acts like he knows how to command a unit in battle.
“With all due respect, Sir, you’re beginning to bore the hell out of me,” Highway growls to the officer after defying orders and seizing a hill during a combat operation. Highway’s a hard-drinking rogue, a throwback to World War II and Korea with a penchant for taking authority figures down a notch or two. He’s also authentic, the real deal – and the audience loves him for it.
This mentality – keep your head down, say the right things, put aside your values, do anything to get ahead – has seeped into many aspects of American culture, not just the military. Nothing makes it through the legislative process without the kinds of compromises and giveaways that leave both sides feeling like losers. COVID upended the world and changed the way we live. Social media continues to distance us from our sense of self. And, to top it off, we disgracefully lost a 20-year war, retreating like a dog with its tail between its legs. In a country where people fear its place in the world fading, its identity in flux, we seek our heroes from military people because they’ve confronted and survived life-or-death situations and seem more tested, more trustworthy, and more real.
In late August 2021, Scheller posted a video on Facebook in which he railed against the failures of the generals and politicians in pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. “I have been fighting for 17 years,” Scheller said, looking into the camera. “I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, ‘I demand accountability.’” The video went viral, and within about a month, Scheller was charged with several violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military adjudicators threw him in the brig because he refused to stop posting videos, including one in which he called for a revolution and told followers to “tear the system down.” Scheller’s actions became the center of a right-wing media storm, with Fox News expressing outrage that a Marine with the moral courage to stand up and speak out about the military’s failures (but mostly President Biden’s failures) was silenced. By the end of 2021, Scheller was relieved of his command and released from the military with a “general discharge under honorable conditions” – something beneath an honorable discharge.
Now he’s out to set the record straight.
Scheller’s central thesis in “Crisis” is that the Marine Corps (or, the military writ large) is more focused on providing career paths for lifers than winning wars. The “system,” as he calls it, is too preoccupied with its own public image to focus on the real mission of killing bad guys and keeping America safe. We’ve been failing at war since Korea, he says. Scheller trains his fire on the generals and politicians responsible for what he sees as the rot in our military and the failure of our foreign policy.
Scheller’s argument that “the generals should be held accountable” for the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan certainly found footing on social media, where he became an overnight celebrity. But questions remain. Should General McKenzie – the officer in charge of the withdrawal from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and the focus of Scheller’s ire – really be the one held accountable for our failure in Afghanistan? Or, should it be the generals who started the Global War on Terror in the first place? Why not hold accountable the American people for turning a blind eye to the problem for two decades? How can we place all the blame on the one person tasked with cleaning up a mess that started two decades before and was perpetuated by countless other generals who insisted on more troop surges, more time, and more money? It’s easy to demand accountability; it’s hard to identify all those responsible through the years, and harder still to exact a punishment.
“We’ve won every fight at the tactical level, but we continue to lose wars politically,” Scheller says throughout the book. It’s a favorite theme, and consistent with his belief that the junior warfighters are not the ones to blame. Blame lies with the people pulling strings at the top of the system, Scheller tells us.
But did we really win every fight in Afghanistan at the tactical level? When I was in Helmand Province in 2011, there didn’t seem to be any strategy other than, “Let’s walk around aimlessly and wait to get shot at.” We bombed the wrong houses. We killed civilians. We blundered continuously. The Taliban were so clearly playing rope-a-dope with us – shooting from hundreds of meters away, then egressing once our air support came thundering in – that if you sought the opinions of most infantry guys with combat experience, they’d tell you the same thing: “The Taliban’s just going to come back after we leave.”
I don’t remember much “winning.” I doubt many soldiers and Marines do.
But like so many people today – angry, fed up, unable to express themselves to a wide enough audience – Scheller went to social media for validation. This is a forum that’s good for gaining attention but bad for achieving depth of thought, not to mention basic coherence. Scheller contradicts himself and unconsciously points out the flaws in his own logic. After championing a more aggressive approach in Afghanistan, and seeming to advocate for more or smarter military spending, he harkens back to President Eisenhower’s warning about the unstoppable gears of the “military industrial complex.”
So, which one is it? Do we need to spend more and strengthen our military; or should we be more skeptical of the military and its staggeringly large budget? Scheller argues for the latter in a recent op-ed, but his message in the book is less clear.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Scheller’s self-righteousness and misplaced anger fit perfectly into the current culture, where what you’re fighting for matters less than the fact that you’re angry and willing to “fight like hell.” Though Scheller claims to be apolitical, he does parrot several right-wing talking points throughout the book: He’s fed up about Benghazi; he thinks it’s unlawful to hold people in custody who were not charged for their participation in the Jan. 6 riot; he bemoans PC culture in today’s military; and he champions retired Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of war crimes but later acquitted. Gallagher provided Scheller with legal assistance and more than $2 million in fundraising.
Since his exile from the Marine Corps, Scheller has made an appearance at a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference and on the campaign trail in New Hampshire alongside retired Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who is running as a Republican for U.S. Senate. Scheller’s politics, like his arguments, are mixed up and often hard to decipher. Personally, I don’t think he got himself into this mess with politics in mind, but that seems to be the way the current is taking him.
Veterans are frequently used as pawns in today’s political chess match. We bring a presumption of patriotism to a country that isn’t sure what it should be patriotic about anymore. But here’s to hoping Scheller retrieves some agency and introspection after spending time away from the military bureaucracy he so vehemently opposes. He’s not a bad guy. What he did undoubtedly took balls, conviction, and more than a touch of madness. In one of the more difficult parts of the book, he goes into detail about the deterioration of his marriage following his decision to post videos on social media. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. Scheller was three years away from retirement and full pension before he spoke out, causing considerable hardship for his wife and three sons.
Since his discharge, it’s been interesting to watch his transition to civilian life. There’s a naivete to him that I recognize in a lot of the people I served with, and he reflects the feeling of hopelessness and anger that many Operation Enduring Freedom veterans experienced watching the Taliban return to Kabul. What was it all for?
Ultimately, “Crisis” does little to clarify the Afghanistan war or add closure, and Scheller’s attempt to correct the military and hold people accountable is for the most part lost in the hollowness of the book’s arguments. Mostly he comes across as “God’s lonely man,” a self-perceived martyr who, instead of successfully holding the military to task, appears to be searching for answers to questions that can’t even be properly articulated. I’ll accept that emotional arguments are important for making change, and political change doesn’t come without people being fed up. But in “Crisis of Command,” Scheller appears to be shouting into the void more than championing actual solutions to the fundamental problems inherent in our military and foreign policy.
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