The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Non-Citizen Soldiers

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

I can’t say that I devoted much time to the question of  citizenship and military service until I wrote a book about immigrants in the army.  My working assumption, to the extent I had one, was that only citizens could be soldiers and that soldiers had to be citizens.  It turns out that things were – and are – a little more complicated.

In the years immediately preceding World War I, when the wave of European immigration crested, becoming a citizen entailed a lengthy two-step process.  First you had to take out your “first papers,” renouncing the government of your country of origin and declaring your intention to transfer your allegiance to the government of the United States; then you had to reside in the U.S. for five years (and be able to prove it).  Only then did you qualify for citizenship.  That naturalization process was still in effect when the United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917.  The reinstitution of a draft (for the first time since the Civil War) a few weeks later raised the immediate question of whether immigrants were subject to conscription.  The answer was yes: if they had taken out their first papers, they got drafted along with everyone else.  Eventually the War Department raised an army of some 4.7 million men, nearly 20% of whom had been born overseas.

Immigrant families, many of whom had come to America to spare their sons mandatory service in imperial armies, were stunned that a draft had followed them across the Atlantic.  Rumors began to circulate that foreign-born boys who enlisted would be granted citizenship at once.  Joe Chmielewski, a 20-year-old Polish-born coal miner in the hills of western Pennsylvania, believed the rumors and signed up at Columbus Barracks in Ohio on June 17, 1917.  Lots of other guys did the same, though they soon found out that all they had secured was a fast-track to the trenches.

That changed on May 9, 1918, when Congress enacted an amendment to the naturalization law that essentially allowed foreign-born soldiers on active duty to become citizens at once.  No more first papers; no more residency requirement.  If you were fighting for Uncle Sam, you were in.  It was a fitting and timely response to the demographic and political realities of the day.  Tens of thousands of foreign-born soldiers were shipping out to France that spring; bloody battles loomed – Catigny, the first major American engagement of the war, started on May 28; the costly push to take Belleau Wood would drag on for most of June.  From then until the Armistice was declared, American forces were involved in one high-casualty push after another – the Aisne-Marne offensive in July; St. Mihiel in the middle of September; the Meuse-Argonne from September 26 until the war ended on November 11, 1918.  Immigrant soldiers fought and died in these battles alongside their U.S.-born comrades.  Those who survived took advantage in substantial numbers of the streamlined naturalization process.  According to some sources, over 280,000 immigrant soldiers became citizens by virtue of their service in the war (others put the figure at 123,000).

There has been an interesting new twist on this naturalization process in the post September 11 era.  On July 3, 2002, President Bush granted the right of immediate naturalization to all foreign-born soldiers serving honorably at any time on or after September 11, 2001.  (The five-year residency requirement for civilians remained in effect.) Bush’s clear intent was to underscore the fact that from September 11 forward, the nation was in a permanent state of war.  Any military service is now deemed active duty during a period of hostilities – with no end in sight to the war.  The right of immediate citizenship also extends to those serving in the Selected Reserve of the Ready Reserve.

So, as things stand now, if you were born overseas and are currently fighting or have fought honorably in a war for the U.S. even for a single day, you’re in if you want to be.  Just two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security further streamlined this process by eliminating the requirement for foreign-born soldiers to file biographic information that had previously slowed down the naturalization process.   As the Immigration Prof Blog points out, this new DHS rule has the effect of “removing administrative redundancy and increasing efficiency for those who risk their lives for the nation’s security.”  DHS secretary Janet Napolitano notes that the newly streamlined process, which takes effect on February 18, “reflects our commitment to honoring those who come from all over the world to serve our country and become its newest citizens.”

If you are an alien in the military and want help with the naturalization process, go to the military section of the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.  To have naturalization forms mailed to you, call toll-free800-870-3676 and ask for the military packet.

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In Memory of Colonel Armstrong

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

“Reading your blog is a strange endeavor,” my old friend Joyce wrote me recently, “because I just don’t think about you writing of war.”  Joyce has a point.  I’m a guy who likes to hike, ski, garden, read poetry beside the ocean, coddle my sleepy old dogs.  War and the rough camaraderie of soldiers are about as far outside my ken as investment banking or particle physics.  I’ll confess that when I started work on The Long Way Home I didn’t know a battalion from a brigade.  But I was lucky because I had a friend on the inside – Bob Armstrong, Colonel Robert Armstrong, United States Army Reserve – who was happy to serve as my guide and guru to all things military.  I won’t say Bob was a typical soldier – those who knew him can attest that there was nothing typical about Bob.  But he was a soldier, first and foremost, and he spent a hell of lot of his too short life attending to the soldier’s business of war and peace.   To the extent that I ever felt comfortable writing about what it was like for guys to fight in the Great War, I have Bob to thank for it.

We met in the autumn of 1975 as grad students at Oxford.  Bob had a few years on me because he had taken a detour after high school: instead of going on to college, he had enlisted in the army and served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and 5th Special Forces Group.  Our first encounter took place in a grotty student pub near our college and I remember thinking, How the hell did this guy get into Oxford? Bob was on the short side, maybe five foot seven, wiry, intense, tightly wound, as blunt in his delivery as a sawed-off shotgun and incredibly foul-mouthed.  Whatever or whoever offended Bob – pretentious fellow students, idiotic college rules, English food or weather or manners – he would curse out foully and unhesitatingly, preferably right in the offender’s face.  When I learned that Bob had been in the military, I thought typical and gave him a wide berth.

But somehow we fell in together and gradually, as I got to know Bob, I came to realize that under that profane exterior there lurked not exactly a heart of gold – but a sharp, curious mind; a highly developed sense of morality and responsibility; a fierce, fearless loyalty to people and ideas he believed in.  For reasons I’ll never fathom, that loyalty got fastened on me.  God knows my opinions and actions elicited plenty of eye-rolling and the occasional mutter of “You asshole.”  But our time in the trenches as Yanks at Oxford made us comrades and for Bob that was a permanent condition.

Bob got his degree a year before me and for a while I kept up with him mostly through our mutual friend Jim Moran.  Bob went on to get a Ph.D. in agronomy and genetics from Purdue University, but his path was far from conventional.  In a couple of decades he burned through two wives, before finding a soul mate in Leslie in middle age; he fathered two children and adopted two more; he tried his hand at half a dozen careers including teaching at a New England private school, working for the CIA, and heading up a mysterious government-owned corporation dedicated, in Bob’s words, to shifting America’s energy source “from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates.”

The one constant in Bob’s life was the military.  Vietnam wasn’t enough for him, so he signed on with the United States Army Reserve and put in regular stints training young soldiers.  This work took on considerably more urgency when these young people began fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Bob eventually was promoted to the rank of colonel but he fervently wanted to be a general; a fellow officer told me that the only reason Bob didn’t make it was that he was too outspoken around superiors.  Bob never could resist calling an asshole an asshole.

Though I didn’t often agree with Bob’s political views, I still took delight in how he expressed them.  He once boasted to me that he belonged to the very small cohort of people who had voted for both Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader; he hated George Bush (“born with a silver spoon up his ass” as Bob put it) and assured me that he and his military pals loathed Cheney and Rummy and their war of choice on the cheap in Iraq.   Bob had a special string of curses reserved for people who abused power and threw their weight around; a born iconoclast and bitter cynic, he quailed under authority; yet strangely, he thrived in the rigid hierarchical structure of the army.  A complicated guy.

Bob and I got a lot closer in middle age when I started traveling frequently to D.C. on research trips.  It was in the cafeteria of the National Defense University, where he worked in the final years of his life, that Bob helped me clarify the idea for The Long Way Home.  It pleased him no end that our interests had converged after all these years and he was tireless in answering my questions and putting me in touch with colleagues and contacts inside the vast military bureaucracy.  With a little arm-twisting, Bob secured me an interview with Brigadier-General John Nicholson, then head of the American Battle Monuments Commission (the organization in charge of the nation’s overseas  military cemeteries and monuments).  “The General was a little suspicious,” Bob told me before the interview, “and he kept asking, ‘Is this guy a liberal? You’re not sending me a liberal, are you, Bob?’ So don’t blow my cover.”

Bob was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2000 and he fought the cancer bravely and stoically for as long as he could.  I last saw him at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was being treated, on a bitter cold day in the later winter of 2008.  We talked about the 1918 influenza epidemic which he had studied in depth (Bob’s work at NDU focused on ways to combat the spread of infectious agents) and the disastrous aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles.  It worried me that Bob didn’t swear once or call anyone an asshole.

More than anything Bob wanted to live to see his youngest daughter Katie established at a good college.  Devout rationalist though he was, he never stopped hoping for a miracle cure.  Our friend Jim told me that on the last day, the doctor told Bob that it was okay to stop fighting.  Only then did this soldier-scientist surrender.  Bob died on April 3, 2008, eight months shy of his sixtieth birthday.

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