Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,818
By This is the grave of Raymond Odierno.
Born in 1954 in Rockaway, New Jersey, Odierno grew up in an Italian American family in that very Italian American state. He stayed there through his childhood and then went to West Point. He graduated in 1976 and then did a master’s degree at North Carolina State in nuclear effects engineering. He was commissioned as an officer in 1976. He rose fairly fast, becoming first lieutenant in 1978, captain in 1980, major in 1986, lieutenant colonel in 1992, and all the way up to major general in 2002. Most of Odierno’s career during these years isn’t really that exciting. He moved up the ranks, was perfectly capable, kinda boring but boring is a feature for a guy like this. Of course he was in Desert Storm and did well enough, not that it was hard to do well in that war.
What we do remember Odierno for is the Iraq War. He was an active general, doing three terms of duty in Iraq between 2003 and 2010 and leading troops in the field himself. He commanded the Fourth Infantry Division, which was part of the group that captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003. Odierno was there when the soldiers pulled his ass out of the hole. Incidentally, Odierno was a huge man, 6’5″ and at least 250, so I imagine he must have towered over a captured Saddam.
By the time Odierno returned for his second tour in 2006, the war had changed a lot. He was deeply skeptical of the Bush administration’s strategy by this time and did not see any possibility of these idiots dealing effectively with the insurgency or managing relations between Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis. He had a different idea. This became known as the Surge. Flood the field with many thousands of additional troops and try to get ahold of the insurgency, stabilize it, and hope to move from there. Don Rumsfeld hated this. Rummy had wanted the war to go the way he wanted it too–justifying his belief in a smaller military. When it didn’t, it was the fall of the war, not his fault. Finally, George W. Bush had to fire him in late 2006.
Odierno then got his way. The Surge did not defeat the Iraqi insurgency, nor was it particularly intended to do so. It did give the Americans a chance to reset a bit though and eliminate some pretty serious problems in the short term. David Petraeus was of course commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq. But Odierno was commander of Multi-National Corps Iraq beginning in late 2006, effectively second in command there. The Surge sent 20,000 additional troops into Iraq, as well as extending the tours of a lot of soldiers already there (not making those soldiers happy at all). There was a lot of political opposition to it at the time. Remember that by this point, the war was a complete unmitigated disaster and it did not seem that throwing more troops at it was a good idea. Democrats were almost totally united against it. But it probably wasn’t a bad idea, at the very least. I will say this–if you are going to fight a war, fight a war and quit using it as an excuse to engage in your ideological preconceptions. At the very least, Odierno understood this point and Rumsfeld never did.
In 2008, when Petraeus stepped away, Odierno got promoted to command U.S. forces in Iraq. By this time, the Surge was over, it was clear Barack Obama was going to become president, and Iraq was somewhat more stabilized as a government. So Odierno announced that U.S. troops would engage in operations at the behest of the Iraqi government, which was observed more in theory than practice perhaps, but was an important rhetorical shift in the war. Odierno wasn’t some desk warrior either. His son, a captain, had his arm blown off in Iraq from a grenade. He knew what it was like to see the family torn apart from war, unlike George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld.
In 2011, Obama nominated Odierno to be Army Chief of Staff. He stayed in that position for the next four years. Mostly, he fought the internal wars for the military to have enough soldiers that he thought it could fight a war effectively, i.e., recovering from Rumsfeld’s idiocy. He was also involved in encouraging the British and other European allies to spend more on the military and fulfill their NATO obligations, which western Europe has really not wanted to do for a long time now. He was also moved forces into places such as Africa to engage in special operations, a lot of which had some sort of humanitarian mission.
Odierno retired from the Army in 2015. He spent his remaining years engaged in his beloved sports. He headed USA Football after this, promoting young people playing the glorious game. He was also chairman of the Florida Panthers in the NHL. In fact, he was a big enough sports figure that he was on the College Football Playoff Selection Committee for a few years. In 2021, he was named to the board of trustees back at North Carolina State University.
But by that time, he was diagnosed with cancer. He died later in 2021, at the age of 67.
Raymond Odierno is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
If you would like this series to visit other people involved in the Iraq War, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. A lot of these people are still alive, though pretty old. Colin Powell, who lied to the United Nations to justify this war, is also in Arlington. Paul O’Neill, Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, who did nothing at the time to stop the war but later admitted publicly that Bush and his team had planned to take out Saddam since early in his presidency, is in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.