Gen. Vincent Brooks is ‘Drafted’ into another Top Job

By. George E. CurryNNPA Editor-in-Chief WASHINGTON (NNPA) -When he was interviewed almost two years ago in Doha, Qatar, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks was particularly pleased that a reporter had noticed that he was deputy director of operations at the United States Central Command, not just the highly-visible person that conducted the daily media briefings on the war in Iraq. The 1980 West Point graduate, volunteered for the Army but drafted to become the official face and voice of the war. Once that assignment ended shortly after the fall of Baghdad and he had served a brief stint at the Pentagon, Brooks was just weeks away from rejoining his old unit at Fort Stewart, Ga., where he had commanded the 1st Brigade in the 3rd Infantry Division. Had he returned to Georgia, he would have been assigned to lead his brigade into Iraq, probably for a 2-year tour of duty. But Brooks was drafted again last summer to serve as deputy chief of the Army’s Office of Public Affairs and, as of December 6, its chief. He would have preferred returning to the battlefield but his 24 years in the military has taught him to expect the unexpected. “As I’ve told you before (in Doha), I am convinced that God puts me in my assignments,” he said in an interview at a hotel near the Pentagon. “I’ve never gotten my first choice on an assignment and it’s always worked out better than I had expected.” In his current assignment, Brooks is responsible for effectively communicating the Army’s messages within the service and to the public, both at home and abroad. Having never been a public affairs or public relations officer, Brooks still has to learn the technical aspects of his new job. But because he is a former field commander, he believes he can bring a certain sensitivity, perspective and depth of experience that many career public affairs officers might not possess. “I have some thoughts on how I, as an operator, can help to shape the way public affairs officers think and act and how they are received by their commanders,” Brooks says. “We have to create a culture of engagement. We seek to tell the story that’s out there.” Though he has been in the public affairs department only briefly, Brooks is familiar with the natural tension between journalists who complain that the military is more interested in dispensing propaganda than news and Army public relations officers who feel reporters are more interested in sensationalizing an issue than fully explaining it to the public. He said the Army has alternated between being open with the media and feeling it was better to, in his words: “Be silent, do the mission and the rest will take care of itself.” Brooks continues, “There have been other windows of time where our approach to communications undermined the trust. The period of the 70s was probably the best example. There was a lack of trust on the part of the journalists of the military and a lack of trust on the part of the military toward journalists.” Brooks says the Army can never afford to return to an earlier period when it was reluctant to deal with the news media. “We have a need as well as a responsibility to be active in that information stream that communicates to the public,” he says. Brooks has already demonstrated the agility of veteran publicists when questioned about an unpopular topic. When asked about the Army’s ability to recruit in the middle of a war, Brooks notes that the Army has reached its recent recruitment goals but acknowledges that there might be “challenges” if the war in Iraq continues to require the call-up of so many National Guardsmen and reserves. On the day Brooks was giving the interview last week to the NNPA News Service, the National Guard was announcing that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goal and is now paying enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000, triple the normal recruitment bonus, to increase their numbers. National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers make up nearly 40 percent of the troops in Iraq. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, the head of the National Guard, told reporters that recruitment is off because the military is seeing too many veterans declining to join the Reserves or National Guard after active duty for fear of being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for a year or more. A few days earlier, Army Reserve Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly told the Dallas Morning News that recruiting was in a “precipitous decline” and that if the trend is not reversed, there may be renewed talk about reviving the military draft. Brooks argues that members of National Guard shouldn’t balk at being called to active duty.”The National Guard is the nation’s militia,” he explains. “When it’s time for the nation to be at war, we call up the militia into federal service. That’s exactly what it exists for.” While that’s true, it’s not helping the National Guard’s recruitment efforts. And there are signs that although the Army has met its recruitment targets, trouble could be on the horizon. “We’re recruiting enough, we’re paying enough and it defies what some would expect to be the projected trend in a time of war,” he says. “But there are some challenges, especially in minority recruitment. In the Hispanic community, it has actually gone up slightly. In the African-American community, it has gone down.” Some observers see that as a rejection of the war in Iraq. But Brooks attributes the decline in the Army not effectively reaching Black recruits, something he intends to change. Whatever the reason, no one had to recruit Brooks or his older brother, Leo, also a graduate of West Point and a Brigadier General. Their father, Leo A. Brooks Sr., was also an Army general. When Vince was in Doha, Leo Jr. was commandant of the U.S. Corps of Cadets at West Point. Now, they both work at the Pentagon. The older brother is vice director of Army staff. “Our family style is not to engage in competition with one another,” says Vince, whose sister, Marquita, is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. There have plenty of opportunities for the Brooks brothers to compete. Leo was a year ahead of Vince at West Point. They were at the Army War College and the Army Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas at the same time. They served at the Pentagon together for a month in the mid-1990s, when they were assigned to work as aides to the Army chief of staff and vice chief of staff. This is the longest they’ve ever worked together. “Now that we’ve returned to the Pentagon, we find ourselves in Army Headquarters, often sitting side-by-side in meetings of the Secretary of Army, Chief of Staff or Vice Chief of Staff,” Brooks says. The brothers do become competitive when asked, “Which one are you?” Both give the same reply, “I’m the good-looking one.”