Army four-star general: talking about racial injustice was like learning 'a new language' for the...

MSgt Steve Sweeney - Again-fair point... my response to SFC Foreman above seems appropriate to yours as well.

LCDR Joshua Gillespie sir, I’m not being insulting or condescending when I ask this but did you spend any time as an enlisted man? It’s...different. Soldiers vent to peers. And if you foster a climate of trust, they eventually vent to their first line leaders. I’ve been enlisted my whole career. I’ve heard everything you could imagine, and have seen much as well.

Part of the concept of systemic or institutional racism that seems hard to grasp for a lot of people is that it is quite often subtle, and not even conscious. It’s the unconscious thoughts you (in the general sense not you specifically) in assigning crap details or recommendations for awards or even something as simple as assigning billets. And the really difficult thing is it’s so easy to build a self defense against in your own mind. Well I did X for a minority so I must not be racist. You can be. You yourself just don’t even realize it.

I’ve dug into this a lot in the past few years and had to identify some behaviors in myself to correct this. It’s hard for anyone but especially military leaders to take a long look in the mirror and admit to something being wrong. Unconscious bias doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person, but identifying and trying to fix it can make you a much better person.

SFC Thomas Foreman - No; that's an honor I cannot claim-and no, I take no insult from your comments. However, I'd like to believe that due to the nature of my limited role as a junior officer, my background as the son of an enlisted man, and my extemporaneous experiences as a lower-wage earning construction worker... I had some limited understanding of what their lives were like; at least I made it a personal point to try. In the Navy (and I presume the Army as well) there are many "crap details" that are never the less, essential. As a young officer candidate (treated pretty much like pond scum) aboard a ship... an E-5 once assigned me to clean an entire engine room. As an O-3 working with a team in Afghanistan, we simply didn't have any junior enlisted personnel...so often, these tasks fell to me, as one of the younger members-even though we had E-6 and E-7 level personnel in our team. It simply didn't make sense for senior enlisted professionals busy with other duties to do things a Reserve officer whose role was primarily confined to operations could do. Similarly, in my division years prior, we often assigned our most junior enlisted sailors to such mundane tasks as cleaning manifolds and "needle-gunning" deck plates. I usually joined in on the latter whenever possible because frankly... there's few jobs as menial or soul crushing as stripping ten years of paint off steel in the middle of the ocean in 100 degree heat. The vast majority of these junior enlisted people were in fact minorities... probably due to the fact that for many inner-city kids, or recent immigrants, few jobs offer the sorts of benefits and potential opportunities... or simply because many suburban white kids are shuffled off to college without any clear reason why, just because that's what people from the suburbs do I guess. Since many of senior enlisted persons doling out these tasks were also minorities... it doesn't make sense to me that any of that was motivated by "race". I could be wrong, and I'll admit as much.

MSgt Steve Sweeney - Great comment; extremely well stated and full of critical thinking points to consider. So-full disclosure: before I "grew up" a little, and put three plus decades of life experience under my belt... I was infamous for being able to speak entire paragraphs in profanity. Like the "clip" suggests-you find ways of inserting yourself into the "pecking order"; rank really means nothing... and even less out in the middle of some wadi as the only "squid" (and officer to boot) among infantrymen. In that sense (and that sense alone-not reaching for any false equivalency here), I understand where "Generation Kill" is coming from in a very personal sense. However, within that understanding is a very sincere belief that most everyone involved (either giving or receiving) sees it for what it is... necessary roughness. My first "culture clash" happened not 48 hours after raising my right hand... when several Hispanics suggested I and my "Tennessee" (you know what) didn't belong. My response was to remind those fine folks that the last time "we" fought, it took about 5,000 of them thirteen days to bowl over less than a couple hundred of we "hicks", and suggested maybe they didn't want a rematch. Fortunately, they didn't call my bluff... and ultimately, ended up being some of my closest friends. The way I saw it then... and the way I see it now, is that tough people respect toughness. Had I said something like, "Oh, I'm sorry if my White Privilege threatened you; how can I apologize?" I imagine I'd have been viewed by each of those people as less than a man-certainly less a man than any of them. It's not that I held Hispanics in low regard, or felt that their defeat of the Alamo was some sort of "racial scar"-Some Texians launched a rebellion and Santa Anna tired to crush it; all's fair in love and war. I didn't honestly feel any of them hated me for being a cornbread white boy either... it was just the obvious "weakness" to exploit. I will say this-because you're right; just because I didn't see something doesn't mean it didn't happen... but neither does that mean what has happened is experienced universally. Maybe some people don't understand that you don't just "join" certain fraternities... or that part of what binds certain people together is how well they take what they dish out.