Service versus Sacrifice & Remembering someone I never met, FSO Anne Smedinghoff

This post, my first in some time, is going to ramble a bit, without much in the way of internal structure or logic.  Deal with it.  Or not.

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We lost another colleague the other day.

And we lost three comrades-in-arms at the same time.

They did not sacrifice their lives.

And if any of us sacrificed their lives, well, then we're doing it wrong.

Because that's not what it's about.

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Service members in (and out of) uniform do make sacrifices, let there be no misunderstanding.

They undergo stressful and difficult selection and training processes, go to uncomfortable places, deal with often hostile natives, get fed crappy food, miss children's/spouses'/parents' birthdays (and anniversaries, first-words/steps, &tc.), are under-compensated (no matter how you measure it), endure sub-standard housing and living conditions in unhealthy climates.... you get the idea.

(And that's not even mentioning all the shots and immunizations just to get out of the country in the first place.)

Sure, not all the time and certainly not in every assignment, on either the military or the FS sides of the ledger.  Still, those are the sacrifices you knowingly and willingly make for your country, for your comrades and colleagues, for the missions and causes America has committed itself towards.

But you do have a big bullseye painted on your back; you're representing, for good or ill, the United States of America.  So to America's enemies, you will always represent, at the very least, a target-of-opportunity.

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Uniformed service members know the risks.  So do diplomats.  But we take them because we believe in what we're doing.  We believe that, to our country, the missions on which we are sent are sufficiently important that taking those risks is justified.

The Foreign Service, FSOs and specialists combined, is only about the size of an Army (or Marine Corps) division, if that.  So when one of us gets killed, there's generally only one-or-two degrees of separation between us.  A second-tour entry-level officer like Anne Smedinghoff would have only been in the Foreign Service for three years or so; some initial training at the Foreign Service Institute, language training perhaps, two years at her first post (Caracas, Venezuela), perhaps some (more?) language training before going to Kabul, and most of a year there, so far.

And in that time she had A-100 classmates and FSI instructors, colleagues in two countries; it quickly adds up to hundreds of people within the State Department.  And there aren't that many more than 13,000 Foreign Service Officers (i.e., "generalists") and Foreign Service Specialists altogether.  So if you're currently in the Foreign Service, you either knew Anne (I didn't), know people who knew her (several), or know people who know people who knew Anne (dozens and scores, at least).

Going back to the parallel I made above, about the entire Foreign Service being only about the size of a division, when a fellow soldier in your division dies you know about it.

Maybe you didn't know him or her but you know you trod a lot of the same ground.  Your families shopped in the same stores.  You probably ate in the same fast food joints, cafeterias, or restaurants.  To say nothing of frequenting the same bars.  A death at that level of contrasting proximity and distance gives you pause, gives your spouse some added stress and tears, and makes you hug your kids a little tighter.

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Of Madam-at-Arms' words on the subject, the less said the better.  For all my perverse pride in in being a plain-talking, straight-shooting consular officer, she's much more of a plain-speaker than I am.

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Since I didn't know Anne Smedinghoff personally (it's possible we passed in the hallways at FSI or elsewhere, or sat at the same cafeteria table in either of those places), I'm not going to spend a lot of time extolling her dedication, fine qualities, and such.  By all reports (and you should read them), she had all of that in full measure and I'm proud to have been her (distant) colleague.  My sympathies go out to her family, not least because when I think of them I think of my own family back home, and what they would go through in similar circumstances.

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One FSO out of a Foreign Service of only 13,400 (more-or-less) put into the context of a military comprising roughly 1.4 million uniformed personnel means 100 deaths being an equivalent loss.

One hundred dead.  I don't think we've had that many losses on a single day of warfare since 9/11.  (Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.)

For those unhappy with the amount of press this one death has gotten by comparison to most individual military deaths, well, I get it.  I truly do.  It made me a little angry, as a veteran (and I'm an FSO as well).  But for the press it is a novelty, it's someone who the media's Kabul contingent will likely have known personally.

Add to that the kind of elite education Anne Smedinghoff had (which I'm not criticizing, it's a good thing that we have well-educated diplomats and I think rather well of Johns Hopkins' international relations programs) makes her someone whom our media elites feel just a little more kinship to compared to most of our uniformed folks, for good or ill.

In case I was being opaque, this is much more a criticism of our national press and editorial corps than of any of our country's services, military or un-military.

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Unlike Benghazi (four dead), there's a lot more clarity about how these four deaths happened, at least from the macro level.  Bad guys (most likely Taliban, even though they're taking credit for it and trusting their press releases is a sucker's game) hit a convoy (or two convoys converging or passing one another) that was taking books to donate them to a school.  FSO Smedinghoff was the assistant public affairs officer going along to deliver the books and probably make sure some good photography or video of the handover got in the can.

Because while the fact of the books themselves is important, it's just as important to let people know that books are getting to schools, and that it's the United States (and allies) that is making this happen.

No, I'm not kidding.  Good media coverage of accomplishments multiplies the good you accomplish; it's as simple as that.  If we're going to do this sort of thing in a place like Afghanistan, we have to make every success count, in as many ways as we can.

I don't have a problem with the United States providing books to an Afghan school, far from it, granting for the sake of argument that the books themselves are useful ones.  And you shouldn't have a problem with that either.  (If there's a country out there that could use more help educating its next generation than Afghanistan, I'd like to hear about it.)

I'm generally quite open (being a fairly skeptical sort of contrarian) to discussions about whether the U.S. ought to be in the business of nation-building in general, or whether (and how) that ought to be done (by us) in Afghanistan, but not today or even for the rest of the week.

This week, more than usual, it's just a little too personal a question.  Just as it is the other 51 weeks of the year when people talk about supporting the troops but not believing in the mission (whether that's Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or Franistan).

Military members (and their families) have, as the saying goes, "skin in the game."  U.S. diplomats (and their loved ones) do too.