Panetta Institute lecture: Army officer responds to question on US military checkpoints

Every spring, the Panetta Institute in Monterey hosts an evening lecture series consisting of four events. At each event, Leon Panetta moderates, and the guests engage in back-and-forth discussion.

In 2006, one of the events was titled "How to Balance National Security and Freedom in Our Democracy." The guests were former Missouri Senator Jack Danforth, a Republican, and former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle, a Democrat.

That year, Panetta held an afternoon event with the same two guests at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), where I taught, and invited Army enlistees and officers to attend. The enlistees were mostly from the Defense Language Institute, and the officers, I believe, were students at NPS. NPS faculty were also invited. I missed the first part because I didn’t want to cut my class short.

When I arrived, the only seats left were in the back. I prefer sitting in the front because it makes it harder for the moderator to ignore me when I raise my hand.

An opportunity came up fairly quickly. Daschle matter-of-factly referred to the "social contract" we were all part of. I raised my hand, intending to tell him that I had signed no such contract. But Leon didn’t call on me.

(I call him Leon because that’s what everyone called him when he was our Congressman. He’s very sharp and probably figured out early that encouraging people to call him Leon made him seem more approachable.)

The discussion continued.

Later, Leon said he would like to hear from people in the audience who had been to Iraq. I realized this wasn’t the right time for me to raise my hand. But no one else did.

So I raised my hand, and Leon said, "Yeah." His tone suggested he didn’t particularly want to hear from me. There’s a chance he recognized me from an interaction we had on a flight from Dulles to San Francisco 20 years earlier. You might think that’s unlikely, but one thing I’ve noticed about successful politicians is that many seem to have an amazing mental Rolodex. But his tone doesn’t really matter. At least he called on me.

Here’s what I said:

I haven’t been to Iraq, and I haven’t even served in the military. But I want to ask a question of everyone here. Imagine that tomorrow morning you get in your car and go to work. On the way, you are stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers with guns, and the soldiers are wearing the uniform of a foreign military. On the way home from work, you’re stopped again. This goes on day after day for months. Here’s my question: how do you feel about that? How do you regard those people who carry guns and stop you?

No one on the panel said anything. There was a long pause. Then a person who appeared to be a 30-something Army officer raised his hand. Leon called on him. He was about 20 feet in front of me and to my right. He stood, turning his head slightly in my direction, and said, "I wouldn’t necessarily put it the way the previous questioner did, but I do think we should seriously think about how we are regarded when we have our military in other countries."

No one on the panel said anything, and no one else in the audience raised their hand.

Leon didn’t ask if there were any more questions. Instead, he ended the session abruptly.