Was he pushed or did he jump?
He was a deeply faithful Christian
"War is the hardest place to make moral judgments."
-- Col. Ted Westhusing, Journal of Military Ethics
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=9312
WASHINGTON --
One hot, dusty day in June,
Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead
in a trailer at a military base near
the Baghdad airport,
a single gunshot wound to the head.
The Army would conclude that he
committed suicide with his service
pistol.
At the time, he was the
highest-ranking officer
to die in Iraq.
The Army closed its case.
But the questions surrounding
Westhusing's death continue.
Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer.
He was one of the Army's
leading scholars of military ethics,
a full professor at West Point who
volunteered to serve in Iraq to be
able to better teach his students.
He had a doctorate in philosophy;
his dissertation was an extended
meditation on the meaning of honor.
So it was only natural that Westhusing
acted when he learned of possible
corruption by U.S. contractors in
Iraq.
A few weeks before he died,
Westhusing received an anonymous
complaint that a private security
company he oversaw had cheated the
U.S. government and committed human
rights violations.
Westhusing confronted the contractor
and reported the concerns to superiors,
who launched an investigation.
In e-mails to his family,
Westhusing seemed especially upset
by one conclusion he had reached:
that traditional military
values such as duty, honor
and country had been replaced
by profit motives in Iraq,
where the U.S. had come to rely
heavily on contractors for jobs
once done by the military.
His death stunned all who knew him.
Colleagues and commanders wondered
whether they had missed signs of
depression.
He had been losing weight
and not sleeping well.
But only a day before his death,
Westhusing won praise from a senior
officer for his progress in training
Iraqi police.
His friends and family struggle with the
idea that Westhusing could have killed
himself.
He was a loving father and
husband and a devout Catholic.
He was an extraordinary intellect
and had mastered ancient Greek and
Italian.
He had less than a month
before his return home.
It seemed impossible that anything
could crush the spirit of a man with
such a powerful sense of right and wrong.
On the Internet and in
conversations with one another,
Westhusing's family and friends
have questioned the military
investigation.
A note found in his trailer
seemed to offer clues.
Written in what the Army
determined was his handwriting,
the colonel appeared to be
struggling with a final question.
How is honor possible in a
war like the one in Iraq?
Even at Jenks High School in suburban Tulsa,
one of the biggest in Oklahoma, Westhusing stood out.
He was starting point guard for the Trojans,
a team that made a strong run for the state
basketball championship his senior year.
He was a National Merit Scholarship finalist.
He was an officer in a
fellowship of Christian
athletes.
Joe Holladay, who coached Westhusing
before going on to become assistant
coach of the University of North
Carolina Tarheels,
recalled Westhusing showing up at
the gym at 7 a.m. to get in 100
extra practice shots.
"There was never a question of how
hard he played or how much effort he
put into something," Holladay said.
"Whatever he did, he did well.
He was the cream of the crop."
When Westhusing entered West Point in 1979, the tradition-bound institution
was just emerging from a cheating scandal that had shamed the Army.
Restoring honor to the nation's preeminent incubator for Army leadership was
the focus of the day.
Cadets are taught to value duty, honor and country, and are drilled in West
Point's strict moral code: A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal -- or
tolerate those who do.
Westhusing embraced it. He was selected as honor captain for the entire
academy his senior year. Col. Tim Trainor, a classmate and currently a West
Point professor, said Westhusing was strict but sympathetic to cadets'
problems. He remembered him as "introspective."
Westhusing graduated third in his class in 1983 and became an infantry
platoon leader. He received special forces training, served in Italy, South
Korea and Honduras, and eventually became division operations officer for
the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C.
He loved commanding soldiers.
But he remained drawn
to intellectual pursuits.
In 2000, Westhusing enrolled
in Emory University's doctoral
philosophy program.
The idea was to return to West
Point to teach future leaders.
He immediately stood out
on the leafy Atlanta campus.
Married with children,
he was surrounded by young,
single students.
He was a deeply faithful Christian
in a graduate program of professional
skeptics.
Plunged into academia,
Westhusing held fast to his military ties.
Students and professors recalled him
jogging up steep hills in combat boots
and camouflage, his rucksack full,
to stay in shape.
He wrote a paper challenging an
essay that questioned the morality
of patriotism.
"He was as straight an arrow
as you would possibly find,"
said Aaron Fichtelberg,
a fellow student and now a professor
at the University of Delaware.
"He seemed unshakable."
In his 352-page dissertation,
Westhusing discussed the ethics of war,
focusing on examples of military honor
from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee
to the Israeli army.
It is a dense, searching and sometimes
personal effort to define what, exactly,
constitutes virtuous conduct in the context
of the modern U.S. military.
"Born to be a warrior,
I desire these answers not
just for philosophical reasons,
but for self-knowledge,"
he wrote in the opening pages.
As planned,
Westhusing returned to teach
philosophy and English at West
Point as a full professor with
a guaranteed lifetime assignment.
He settled into life on campus
with his wife, Michelle, and
their three young children.
But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
he told friends that he felt experience in
Iraq would help him in teaching cadets.
In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty.
"He wanted to serve,
he wanted to use his skills,
maybe he wanted some glory,"
recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory.
"He wanted to go."
In January,
Westhusing began work on what
the Pentagon considered the most
important mission in Iraq:
training Iraqi forces to take
over security duties from U.S. troops.
Westhusing's task was to oversee
a private security company,
Virginia-based USIS, which had
contracts worth $79 million to
train a corps of Iraqi police
to conduct special operations.
In March, Gen. David Petraeus,
commanding officer of the Iraqi
training mission,
praised Westhusing's performance,
saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations."
"Thanks much, sir,
but we can do much better and will,"
Westhusing wrote back,
according to a copy of the
Army investigation of his
death that was obtained by
The Times.
In April, his mood seemed to have darkened.
He worried over delays in training
one of the police battalions.
Then, in May, Westhusing received
an anonymous four-page letter that
contained detailed allegations of
wrongdoing by USIS.
The writer accused USIS of deliberately
shorting the government on the number of
trainers to increase its profit margin.
More seriously,
the writer detailed two incidents in
which USIS contractors allegedly had
witnessed or participated in the killing
of Iraqis.
A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi
police trainees during the assault
on Fallouja last November and later
boasted about the number of insurgents
he had killed, the letter says.
Private security contractors are
not allowed to conduct offensive
operations.
In a second incident, the letter says,
a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees
kill two innocent Iraqi civilians,
then covered it up.
A USIS manager
"did not want it reported because
he thought it would put his contract
at risk."
Westhusing reported the allegations to
his superiors but told one of them,
Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS
was complying with the terms of its contract.
U.S. officials investigated and found
"no contractual violations,"
an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter,
a USIS spokesman, said the investigation
"found these allegations to be unfounded."
However, several U.S. officials
said inquiries on USIS were ongoing.
One U.S. military official, who, like others,
requested anonymity because of the sensitivity
of the case,
said the inquiries had turned up problems,
but nothing to support the more serious
charges of human rights violations.
"As is typical,
there may be a wisp of truth
in each of the allegations,"
the official said.
The letter shook Westhusing,
who felt personally implicated by
accusations that he was too friendly
with USIS management,
according to an e-mail in the report.
"This is a mess ...
dunno what I will do with this,"
he wrote home to his family May 18.
The colonel began to complain to colleagues
about "his dislike of the contractors," who,
he said,
"were paid too much
money by the government,"
according to one captain.
"The meetings [with contractors]
were never easy and always contentious.
The contracts were in dispute
and always under discussion,"
an Army Corps of Engineers
official told investigators.
By June,
some of Westhusing's colleagues
had begun to worry about his health.
They later told investigators that
he had lost weight and begun fidgeting,
sometimes staring off into space.
He seemed withdrawn, they said.
His family was also becoming worried.
He described feeling alone and abandoned.
He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails,
including one that said,
"[I] didn't think I'd make it last night."
He talked of resigning his command.
Westhusing brushed aside
entreaties for details,
writing that he would say
more when he returned home.
The family responded with an outpouring
of e-mails expressing love and support.
His wife recalled a phone conversation
that chilled her two weeks before his
death.
"I heard something in his voice,"
she told investigators,
according to a transcript of the interview.
"In Ted's voice, there was fear.
He did not like the
nighttime and being alone."
Westhusing's father, Keith,
said the family did not want
to comment for this article.
On June 4, Westhusing left his
office in the U.S.-controlled
Green Zone of Baghdad to view a
demonstration of Iraqi police
preparedness at Camp Dublin,
the USIS headquarters at the airport.
He gave a briefing that impressed
Petraeus and a visiting scholar.
He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.
That night in his office,
a USIS secretary would later
tell investigators,
she watched Westhusing take out his
9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it,
repeatedly unholstering the weapon.
At a meeting the next morning to
discuss construction delays,
he seemed agitated.
He stewed over demands for
tighter vetting of police candidates,
worried that it would slow the mission.
He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.
Uncharacteristically,
he lashed out at the contractors in attendance,
according to the Army Corps official.
In three months,
the official had never seen Westhusing upset.
"He was sick of money-grubbing contractors,"
the official recounted. Westhusing said that
"he had not come over to Iraq for this."
The meeting broke up shortly before lunch.
About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went
looking for Westhusing because he
was scheduled for a ride back to
the Green Zone.
After getting no answer,
the manager returned about 15 minutes later.
Another USIS employee
peeked through a window.
He saw Westhusing lying on
the floor in a pool of blood.
The manager rushed into the trailer
and tried to revive Westhusing.
The manager told investigators that
he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's
feet and tossed it onto the bed.
"I knew people would show up,"
that manager said later in attempting
to explain why he had handled the weapon.
"With 30 years from military
and law enforcement training,
I did not want the weapon
to get bumped and go off."
After a three-month inquiry,
investigators declared Westhusing's
death a suicide.
A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands.
A shell casing in the room bore markings
indicating it had been fired from his
service revolver.
Then there was the note.
Investigators found it
lying on Westhusing's bed.
The handwriting matched his.
The first part of the four-page
letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil.
Both men later told investigators that
they had not criticized Westhusing or
heard negative comments from him.
An Army review undertaken after
Westhusing's death was complimentary
of the command climate under the two men,
a U.S. military official said.
Most of the letter is a wrenching
account of a struggle for honor in
a strange land.
"I cannot support a msn
[mission] that leads to corruption,
human rights abuse and liars.
I am sullied," it says.
"I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
"Death before being dishonored any more."
A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's
e-mails and interviewed colleagues.
She concluded that the anonymous letter
had been the "most difficult and probably
most painful stressor."
She said that Westhusing had placed
too much pressure on himself to succeed
and that he was unusually rigid in his
thinking.
Westhusing struggled with the idea
that monetary values could outweigh
moral ones in war.
This, she said, was a flaw.
"Despite his intelligence,
his ability to grasp the
idea that profit is an
important goal for people
working in the private sector
was surprisingly limited,"
wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach.
"He could not shift his mind-set
from the military notion of completing
a mission irrespective of cost,
nor could he change his belief
that doing the right thing because
it was the right thing to do should
be the sole motivator for businesses."
One military officer said he
felt Westhusing had trouble
reconciling his ideals with
Iraq's reality.
Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place,"
the officer said.
"There's a lot of gray."
Fil and Petraeus,
Westhusing's commanding officers,
declined to comment on the investigation,
but they praised him.
He was "an extremely bright,
highly competent,
completely professional
and exceedingly hard-working officer.
His death was truly tragic
and was a tremendous blow,"
Petraeus said.
Westhusing's family and friends
are troubled that he died at Camp
Dublin,
where he was without a bodyguard,
surrounded by the same contractors
he suspected of wrongdoing.
They wonder why the manager who
discovered Westhusing's body and
picked up his weapon was not
tested for gunpowder residue.
Mostly,
they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing --
father, husband, son and expert on doing right --
could have found himself in a place so dark
that he saw no light.
"He's the last person who would commit suicide,"
said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague.
"He couldn't have done it.
He's just too damn stubborn."
Westhusing's body was flown back
to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Waiting to receive it were his family
and a close friend from West Point,
a lieutenant colonel.
In the military report,
the unidentified colonel told
investigators that he had
turned to Michelle,
Westhusing's wife,
and asked what happened.
She answered:
"Iraq."
.
|
