Bob McCarty Writes

Jake Johnson is a man with more than a decade of Special Operations experience who left the service in 2006 for a sales career in Arizona.  During a recent interview, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask him about a NATO proposal to award what some are calling the “Courageous Restraint Medal” to soldiers in combat.

Asked if he thought soldiers should be awarded medals for not firing their weapons, the 39 year old used a single word to answer:  “No.”  Immediately thereafter, however, he shared something from his experience as a Special Forces combat medic, something about which he thinks the typical American is not aware.

“While I was there (in Iraq), I didn’t just respond to American casualties,” he explained.  “It’s not like in the movies where the bad guy gets shot and he dies.

“A lot of times, the bad guy gets shot for good reason and he doesn’t die.  Well, guess what?  That guy just bought himself an air evacuation within an hour to some of the best trauma surgeons in the world.

“A lot of Americans that I’ve told that to, one, can’t believe it, (and) two, when they hear that, they say, ‘Wait a minute!’

“They start thinking through it, and they think, well, “Did these trauma surgeons use their blood?” — if they know anything about a trauma unit — “Did they use their blood that’s on reserve?”

His answer:  “Yeah, they absolutely did.”

When those same people ask whether the enemy fighters were place in beds reserved for American casualties, he replied, “Oh yeah.  They did that, too!

“(Physicians) don’t question who the patient is,” he said.  “When they get a patient, they save that life to the best of their ability and they use all of the resources they have at their disposal to do that.

“Not only do we do that, we’re committed to doing that kind of thing.

What kind of reaction did that get from the Iraqis with whom he fought?

“When they saw that, the Iraqi soldiers that we were working with couldn’t believe it,” he said.

He recalled them asking the incredulous question, “These are your enemies and this is how you treat your enemies?”

“I felt that was the right thing to do, and we did it whenever that opportunity presented itself,” Johnson said.

“Has the media ever really portrayed that?  No, I don’t think so — and (they) probably never will,” he continued.  “But I think that’s a testament to who we are as a people, and I think there’s some value in that, too.”

Rules of engagement in warfare have attracted attention recently as a result of the “Courageous Restraint Medal” proposal, but date back to the 1990s.

“I first noticed when I went to Kosovo that there was a general culture that, if you were to fire a round, that you were going to be, it was going to be heavily reviewed,” Johnson explained.  “To the credit of our commanders, (they) basically told us, ‘Here’s the rules of engagement, but if you feel that you need to….”

In other words, he said, commanders basically recognized that Special Forces soldiers are multi-million-dollar soldiers when it comes to the training that’s put into them and they have the ability to decide when to fire and when not to fire.

“That, by its nature, is what separates a Special Operations soldier from a typical infantryman,” Johnson said.  “Because they train in shoot and no-shoot scenarios, they understand what type of scenario requires the use of deadly force.

“But I do know that my experience is that these kinds of situations create a culture of questioning whether or not you need to fire. And, if you do, you might end up in some sort of review process where you really have to prove that the situation warranted that type of action.”

When asked if the fear of review might cause paralysis on the battlefield, Johnson wasn’t willing to go that far.  He compromised by saying the fear certainly causes hesitation which, in itself, is not good.

“You and I both know you don’t want to allow the enemy any kind of advantage,” he said.  “It’s hard enough as it is, and you don’t need to give them any kind of advantage by putting hesitation in the minds of your soldiers who have to make that split-second decision.”

To that statement, however, he added a caveat:  “Special Operations soldiers train constantly on shoot and no-shoot scenarios.  If you were to watch them in their training, going through their typical high-level urban combat type training, (in) almost every scenario, there’s a no-shoot scenario put in there.

“And, if you’re in that training environment and you have a soldier who’s not properly taking that into account — in other words, he’s engaging a no-shoot target — that’s just the same as not being able to operate your weapon properly,” he explained.

“That no-shoot scenario is really a core principle of Special Operations.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The name and location of the Special Forces veteran featured in the story above have been changed in order to protect him from individuals who might want to do him harm.

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