How a Democrat can get my vote: advice from seven recent war veterans.

• Position: Cover story

One Soldier's Story: An Introduction

By Phillip Carter

I have a confession: I used to be a Republican. And not just a registered Republican, but a fairly active one. I volunteered for the Bush-Quayle advance team in Los Angeles in 1992; I attended the Republican National Convention in Houston as a youth delegate in 1992; and I canvassed neighborhoods for Richard Riordan, the centrist Republican mega-millionaire who ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1993 and led the city from 1993 to 2001.

Things began to change for me in 1995 when I joined the Army ROTC program at UCLA. I entered the Army just as the deployment to Bosnia was taking shape. That mission held a great deal of appeal for me, both as someone committed to idealism in American foreign policy and as the grandson of Holocaust survivors who felt that stopping genocide was a noble raison d'etre for this country. I adopted a worldview that hewed closely to the internationalism espoused by then President Clinton and the first President Bush. When the time came to pick a military branch, I chose to be a military police lieutenant, so that I could be on the front lines of America's future peacekeeping and nation-building endeavors.

After graduating from UCLA, I went to Korea, where I led a military police platoon of twenty-one American and eight Korean soldiers near the heavily militarized border with North Korea. My next assignment was to Fort Hood, Texas, where I led another platoon and trained for war in the California desert. Somewhere along the way, I became a liberal, at least by Army standards.

On foreign policy issues, I was already on board with the Clinton administration. When the war in Kosovo broke out, I felt we were on the side of right, and I supported the subsequent deployment of troops to keep the peace there. Although I recognized that there were limits to what military units could accomplish in the Balkans, I had a deeper faith that we could still make a difference there, and I remained committed to that ideal. Democratic foreign policy, with its fusion of realism and liberalism, appealed to this idealism of mine, especially the idea that we could intervene to stop wars instead of fighting them.

Rather, it was on the domestic policy side where I experienced my greatest transformation. I grew up in the upper-middle-class suburbs of west Los Angeles, and my conservatism was borne of privilege and distance from America's working class. I cared little for issues like health care and welfare because I had never personally experienced financial hardship, nor known many friends who had.

The Army changed that. Suddenly, I joined a world more diverse than anything I had known. My platoons comprised a mix of racial, religious, and socioeconomic groups unlike any cohort I had worked with before. I'd like to think that I did a decent job as their lieutenant, but the truth is that I probably learned more from my soldiers (especially my sergeants) than they ever learned from me. In addition to getting many practical lessons about soldiering, I got lessons about life in America. My men and women taught me about growing up in rural American towns, where advanced high school classes were taught three towns away. I learned that health care benefits often shaped military families' decisions to reenlist, because no private-sector employer was half as generous as Uncle Sam when it came to caring for spouses and children. My African American and Latino soldiers taught me to look at the military as an opportunity and a path to advancement and to forever see affirmative action and diversity initiatives through the lens of our military experience.

My second tour on active duty was in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, and it confirmed my conversion. There I worked with the Iraqi police in the Diyala Province, living on a small compound in downtown Baqubah with my adviser team, our interpreters, and our Iraqi counterparts. We faced some difficulty, however, because of the dissonance between our mission to promote the rule of law and U.S. policies elsewhere which undermined that principle. This made it harder for us to earn the respect and support of the Iraqi people. I saw firsthand the importance of being the good guys--and being seen as such--and came to believe more deeply in a foreign policy grounded in both our interests and our ideals, as well as a deep pragmatism about the limits of military force.

I still care deeply about the social issues that I learned to care about during my first tour on active duty. In 2008, I will pay close attention to health care, immigration, and taxation, because I think they have a profound effect on my life and our country. What concerns me most, however, is that for the past seven years our nation has drifted rudderless through the war on terrorism. The "preventive war" doctrine proved such a bust in Iraq that today we have no strategy. In the absence of guidance from the White House, decisions about military strategy and resources are being made in a vacuum. In 2008, then, I will be looking for the candidate who articulates a viable national security strategy, and shows me the ability to implement it in a responsive and flexible way that restores America's place in the world and keeps us safe. I think, given what I've seen of the presidential field so far, that candidate will be a Democrat.

That's my story, but I speak as only one military veteran. Each of the 1.4 million veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq has taken his or her own political path. Some, for example, have moved from left to right rather than right to left. Others have stayed in place. What nearly all have in common, though, is a conviction that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most important issues facing the nation.

We're entering a time of significant political shifts. That's reflected in the military, too. Three years ago, 60 percent of military voters polled by the Military Times identified themselves as Republican. Today, that number is down to 46 percent, or less than half. While Democrats, once at 13 percent, have inched up to 16 percent, most Republican defectors appear to have become independents of some sort. Even the officer corps, which in 2003 favored Republicans over Democrats by a ratio of more than seven to one (the Military Times has not gathered more recent statistics), is reported to be weakening in its support for the Republican Party. After all, what they most feared would happen under a Democratic administration--that the military was being overstretched and weakened--has instead happened under a Republican one. Although many military personnel still poll conservatively on issues, they now show a deep disenchantment with the Republican Party, and this administration in particular.

The sentiments of the military are viewed by the public as an important barometer of a president's fitness to lead. Under Clinton, hostile relations with the military limited the White House's policy options on issues ranging from gays in the military to intervention in the Balkans. Under Bush, support from the military has led to the opposite extreme, enabling the president to use force recklessly with the imprimatur of military approval. Neither model of civil-military relations is good for the country.

The question, now, is to what extent disenchantment with the White House will affect the military vote. It's possible that the GOP, for all its shortcomings, is still seen as the lesser of two evils. Then again, maybe not. So, what could get a veteran to vote for a Democrat in 2008?

This is the question the Washington Monthly posed to a group of military veterans of various ranks and political persuasions. Some of the essays that follow come to conclusions that conflict with the conclusions of other essays. That's the nature, of course, of a forum. The point was to shed some light on something that's a mystery to many readers: how members of the military think about politics. Complementing this collection is a reported piece by Spencer Ackerman, who argues that Democrats are right on the merits of withdrawal from Iraq but misguided on what message that will send to our troops there. While many troops want to see the war ended, Ackerman writes, many soldiers will see reason for hope in Iraq and still want to persevere. Any withdrawal proposal must account for both parts of this war-weary perspective. With any luck this issue of the Washington Monthly should help make that point of view clearer.

Phillip Carter, an attorney with McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP in Los Angeles, is an Iraq veteran who contributes on national security to the Washington Monthly.

Withdraw Decisively

By Ross Cohen

In 2003, I spent the summer engaged in a three-month training deployment to Fort Knox, Kentucky. Knox is best known as the repository of America's gold reserves, but it also houses a state-of-the-art complex for training the Army in urban warfare. Replete with an artificial sewer system, a piped-in muezzin calling the imaginary faithful to prayer, and paint-ballers firing live rounds (of paint), the Knox site seeks to replicate the intensity and claustrophobia of a nasty urban skirmish.

As my unit advanced upon our objective...