TDI: For a military officer, is it an advantage or a disadvantage to come from a liberal-arts college rather than one of the military academies?

Fick: You could tell who had come from where. The academy guys were much better off than we were. They knew the rules of the game. They’d had four years in uniform so they were better. We were the ten-week wonders - seventy days and voila. But the playing field levels out pretty quickly. A year or two in uniform and they’re pretty much indistinguishable. The old stereotype that the academies are grooming the admirals and the generals and that they [the academy graduates] get all the cherry assignments and choice promotions is just not true anymore. The one advantage the academies have is that the graduates know a lot of people. Imagine if everybody at Dartmouth went into the same profession - there would be that network advantage. But generally, the playing field is pretty level after the first couple years.

TDI: You’ve mentioned that several professors tried to dissuade you from enrolling in the military. Is anti-military liberalism here to stay or is it the product coming of age during the 1960s?

Fick: I don’t think it’s here to stay and I think the pendulum has already swung back. My impression when I was here was that the student body was more middle-of-the-road than the faculty. I thought that the faculty was fairly definitively liberal and that the students were across the spectrum. I don’t think that the entrenched anti-military attitude is here to stay. Entrenched liberalism, maybe, but I don’t equate the two. I think that liberalism goes hand-in-hand with academia to some extent, but the anti-militarism is more a product of people who came of political consciousness in the 60s. I think that’s already ebbing.

TDI: How do you think the dispute between colleges and ROTC can be solved? How do the armed forces suffer from the lack of recruits from elite schools?

Fick: It takes a little bit of effort on the part of both the military and the schools. I was surprised to learn yesterday from [Dartmouth] President Wright that the reason that the ROTC program here isn’t fully funded is not because Dartmouth isn’t putting up the cash but because the army isn’t putting up the cash. I think my knee-jerk position is to blame the schools but it’s not the situation in Dartmouth’s case. The military has to hold up its end of the bargain and respect some of the wishes of the school. They have to recognize that they can’t treat Dartmouth students like they treat high school kids. There has to be a defter touch. Some of that might come from putting recruiters from this background back in places like this so they know how to navigate the culture.

On the flipside, for the schools, don’t accept the military so grudgingly. Accept that we all have a shared interest in having people from this background in the military. The military benefits from it because people from these backgrounds tend to go on to do other things and the military needs advocates in the private sector. The CEO of Fed-Ex, a guy named Fred Smith, was a marine in Vietnam. He’s a strong advocate working with a group called Business Executives for National Security that’s really influential in national defense. If you’re running a company the size of Fed-Ex you’ve got some sway in Congress. Guys like McCain and Duncan Hunter are influential and they generally come from backgrounds similar to Dartmouth.

TDI: You talk about the need to make small, tangible improvements in the lives of ordinary Iraqis in order to accomplish the military mission. How can this be accomplished when you must protect your own troops and those you need to help look exactly like the insurgent enemy?

Fick: The marines tried something in Vietnam called the CAP – the Combined Action Program. There’s this great book about it called The Village by this guy named Bing West. What the CAP did was took the marine squad and made it live in a village for a year – learn the language, learn the culture, not go back behind the wall at night. It made the squad have a vested interest in building relationships and not doing anything stupid to tick people off. They were able to convince the average person on the ground that the U.S. backed government had something to offer. But living there was dangerous. We pull people back behind the walls because it is safer. Instead of going on foot patrol in dangerous cities, the U.S. goes inside a Bradley armored vehicle and drives through the streets at 60 mph and calls that a patrol. That’s not a patrol. Forced protection – the act of keeping yourself from getting hurt – is not a strategy. We have to get beyond the forced protection and recognize that there might be a spike in the casualties that we take but in the long run it’s the only chance we have.

TDI: Will the public accept these casualties?

Fick: I think if you have the military at every level accepting that this is the right tactic, the public really has no choice. The public will listen to that.

TDI: How big of a role is Syria playing in the insurgency?

Fick: Huge. Just huge. More than is being attributed to it. Insurgency has three enablers: men, money, and weapons. All three are absolutely, definitively, and provably crossing the Syrian border into Iraq. The last estimate I heard from a buddy of mine in western Ambar is eight to ten jihadists a day crossing the border. That doesn’t seem like many, but if you figure in the course of a week that’s fifty to seventy people with that degree of fanaticism. That’s fifty suicide bombers or fifty trained fighters that can train other insurgents. That’s a lot of people.

TDI: Is there a way to solve this problem or has the moment of opportunity passed?

Fick: We’re starting to see it but it’s too little and it’s too late. There are three things we can do. We can seal the border- which is slow, we can conduct offensive operations across the border which I wouldn’t advocate, or we can lean diplomatically on [Syrian leader] Assad hard, really hard. I’m talking UN Security Council hard. But that means building a case. Tom Ricks at the Washington Postwrote a series of articles on Syrian involvement. They are the most definitive investigation yet.

TDI: Your book mentions that Recon trained you to scuba dive and parachute, but all in preparation for war in landlocked Afghanistan and Iraq. Does this contribute to the ongoing military problems?

Fick: I’m really of two minds on that. Like I’ve said before, many of my friends are now instructors. I’ve asked them if they are changing the curriculum and I expected them to say ‘yes’, but they say ‘no’ and they’re not even upset about it. Their attitude is that the schools exist to train recon marines to accomplish a wide variety of missions. Marines have to be as prepared to go to North Korea as they have to be set to go to Iraq or Colombia. Trainers take a much broader approach and say that it’s the unit’s responsibility to tailor that training to whatever the mission is. When I take a step back, it makes sense to me. Believe it or not, in Vietnam we did a really good job of it. When people went over as advisors to Vietnam, they went through a multi-month course before deploying. That’s not happening as well as it should anymore.

TDI: Nonetheless, the Department of Defense seems to be making adjustments and shifting course on some levels. What catalyzed this?

Fick: A few things: some of it is good analysis and the recognition that things have to change. Some of it was congressional pressure and the DOD did it kicking and screaming. They’ve cancelled some big weapons programs and said that we’re not going to put our money into R&D on the Seawolf submarine which has absolutely no role in a fight like this. Instead, we’re going to take those funds and dedicate them to more armored humvees. And there is a descent feedback loop going from the people on the ground to the people that are making a policy. Websites like platoonleader.com and companycommander.com were started by junior officers in Iraq as discussion boards. They would post really tactical minutia like “I’m responsible for this stretch of highway. Who has been there and what did you see?”. Within an hour, there were lots of responses. In the past, lessons learned would have to go all the way up the chain of command and get institutionalized somehow. It was a cumbersome process. But the problem is that these were private websites. Inevitably a lot of classified material was creeping onto the sites so DOD hardened the sites by changing these sites to dot mil addresses. It’s just as efficient, but now it’s harder to hack into. This is a good example of smart innovation.

TDI: The media also has a duty to provide information. Was the embedded reporter’s program an aid or a hindrance to your mission?

Fick: I think it really helped, actually. Yeah, there were times when it was a hindrance, but it was a hindrance in the service of a greater good. Generally, I have a high opinion of the program. I think it was good for three reasons: One, it removed the greatest number of obstacles and filters between what was happening and the people watching. Two, in a way, it kept our military honest. Everybody knew that there’s transparency so be careful. Three, it kept the Iraqis honest. When Comical Ali would say that Americans were dying at the gates of Baghdad and that the Americans were butchering Iraqis with machine guns, people would see American tanks driving behind him and realize it was clearly untrue. The propaganda couldn’t work since the American unites had reporters in them.

TDI: What is the influence of Pressfield’s Gates of Fire and your classics background on your book?

Fick: Thucydides, the man Thucydides, was a participant in the Peloponnesian War. He was a naval commander until he got relieved because he screwed up. He didn’t get to a certain battle in time and the battle was lost so he was exiled from Athens. It’s like if Scooter Libby gets sent to jail and uses the time to write his book, that’s what Thucydides did. I find it interesting that a participant’s account was able to endure. The reason it could endure is because it’s not primarily about Thucydides. When I wrote my book I had to make it about a lot more than just the person. It’s really hard to write a memoir that’s not about you. Even though the word ‘I’ was in there a lot I worked really hard to tell a whole story.

Pressfield really drives home the human element, the idea that it’s not about weapons and it’s not about tactics and that it’s really about the spirit and the morale – not military rah-rah morale – but the human constitution. I tried to focus on that and command relationships, some of the intangibles that are hopefully still of interest once this war is behind us and no longer part of the daily public consciousness.