In this essay for The New Yorker, Elliot Ackerman responds to Donald Trump's suggestion, made at a 2016 campaign rally, that U.S. soldiers who distributed Iraq reconstruction money were "living very well right now," drawing on his own experience managing those funds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Handing Out the "Baskets of Money"

Ackerman describes his own role distributing money under the Commander's Emergency Response Program, or CERP, which funded schools, roads, and clinics, and notes that the marines who secured those projects, most of them lance corporals earning under seventeen thousand dollars a year, did so at real risk to their lives.

Two Swimming Pools in Afghanistan

Ackerman recounts leading a team on a remote Afghan firebase that used operational funds to convert a Soviet-era pool into an irrigation reservoir, and to maintain a second, improvised "pool" that turned out to be a septic flushing system built by the special-forces team before them.

Skills That Don't Translate to a Résumé

Ackerman argues that programs like CERP gave young service members real experience managing large, complex budgets, experience that too often goes unrecognized by civilian employers, as when a former Navy SEAL he knew was turned down for a managerial job at Home Depot.

Read the Original Article

This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Read “A Former Soldier Explains Why Trump Was Wrong About the Troops” at The New Yorker →