Troops & tobacco: A hard habit for America's soldiers to break

Time was that a soldier with a cigarette was an icon of glamor. And a victory cigar an innocent indulgence. But rates of tobacco use are higher in the military than the general public despite decades of efforts to curb it.

[Photo: AP]

During landing operations on the Pacific island of Peleliu, Pfc. Douglas Lightheart, right, and Pfc. Gerald Churchby of the U.S. Marines take time out for a cigarette.

Todd Simmons gathered with fellow soldiers around a 19-inch television in a former Iraqi Republican Guard officers club to hear the news: U.S. troops had captured Saddam Hussein.

As his friends cheered, Simmons broke the seal on a pack of Partagas cigars.

"I passed them around like someone in a delivery room," recalled Simmons, 37, a 1st sergeant with the Florida National Guard who returned home to Tarpon Springs from Baghdad this month. Look at photographs and television images of key moments from the conflict, and you're likely to spot plenty of victory cigars. Soldiers stood alongside military Humvees clutching stogies after Hussein's capture. Earlier, after U.S. forces ousted Hussein, Gen. Tommy R. Franks celebrated with his top officers and a Marine sat with swagger in Hussein's chair - all of them with cigars.

Despite pushes for nearly three decades by the military's top brass to weaken the historic link between troops and tobacco, it remains a persistent part of armed forces culture. Cigar and pipe smoking, in particular, have increased dramatically.

Military officials have tried to strike a balance between 1.4-million service members' right to buy legal products and keeping them in the best possible physical shape.

While military smoking rates generally mirror the decline among civilian adults, they remain higher. Some lawmakers and military officials are alarmed and aim, at least on paper, to prevent a repeat of what happened during World War II, when "an entire generation" became "hooked . . . into nicotine addiction," according to an online history of tobacco use and the military published by the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

Consider:

Cigarette smoking in the military dropped from 51 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 1998, according to a Department of Defense health survey that year, the most recent available. The rate remained "well above" the government's 20 percent goal for the military by 2000. (A new health survey is due out in early March.)

By comparison, 24.1 percent of the U.S. adult population smoked in 1998, according to the American Lung Association.

The Defense Department survey noted a "sharp increase" or "strong resurgence" in cigar and pipe smoking, rising from 18.7 percent in 1995 to 32.6 percent in 1998. "This trend should be addressed and monitored. . . ," the survey said.

Nineteen percent of military men 24 years old and younger used smokeless products such as chewing tobacco and snuff in the month before being surveyed - far higher than the government's goal of 4 percent.

In the 1980s, the military began offering smoking-prevention and quitting programs, and banned lighting up in dining areas, health facilities, classrooms, elevators, vehicles and aircraft.

But the government hasn't extinguished the relationship between troops and tobacco products. Shortly after the Iraq invasion in 2003, a U.S. manufacturer of smokeless tobacco sent samples to deployed Marines. Two members of Congress harshly criticized the company, pointing out it had violated Marine policy against such tobacco giveaways.

And just this month, officials at U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa contacted reporters to express gratitude about a large donation of cigars to service members. Although several military branches ban free tobacco products, the command accepted some 800,000 cigars and helped ship them to service members overseas.

"No one did anything intentionally illegal," said Lt. Col. John Robinson. "What we did was pass on a positive gesture to our troops and improve morale. Cigar smoking is not illegal. Ultimately it is the choice of each of the service members."

Others don't see such donations as benign.

"It's not appropriate for the government to facilitate delivering these products to our soldiers, products that will kill you when used as intended," said Cassandra Welch, director of national advocacy for the American Lung Association, which has worked with the military on developing quitting programs and smoke-free workplaces.

"Their primary concern should be the health of soldiers and not sending them products well-known to be dangerous to their health."

Stan Anderberg teaches a seven-week quitting class for smokers at the Bay Pines VA Medical Center in St. Petersburg. Some tell him they smoked before joining the military. But many began afterward, prompted by a practice surrounding the smoke break, Anderberg said. You either smoke or you don't get a break, veterans regularly tell him.

"They talk about how they got smoke breaks, and if they weren't smokers they didn't get a break," Anderberg said. "It comes up with the younger guys, too.

"Older vets talk about getting cigarettes in their rations," the instructor said.

During World War I, the government began including cigarettes in soldiers' rations. It was a time before medical evidence linked illness with cigarettes, historians said. In fact, many at the time viewed smoking as glamorous.

Gen. John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force during World War I said: "You ask me what we need to win the war? I answer tobacco as much as bullets."

During his stint in the Navy in World War II, Joshua Rioux's grandfather took for granted that he could smoke nearly anywhere aboard the USS Bunker Hill, including the racks, said Rioux, 26, of Palm Harbor.

As a Marine in Vietnam, Rioux's father cherished the daily ration packs. Among the canned meals, toilet tissue and chewing gum, he found cigarettes.

"In my father's era and especially in my grandfather's, smoking was accepted," said Rioux, who smoked before joining the Marines in 1999. He was discharged in November after serving in Iraq. "It wasn't bad for you. It was something everyone did."

By the 1950s, some medical evidence linked smoking to bad health, but the government continued including cigarettes in rations, historian Richard Kluger said.

"As a marketing device by the tobacco companies, cigarettes were portrayed as a companion, something you could find solace in during prebattle tension, anxiety and loneliness," said Kluger, author of Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris.

"For the tobacco industry, it was a form of smart marketing while appearing to be patriotic and building a future customer base."

In a scathing four-page letter in June to U.S. Smokeless Tobacco - the Connecticut company that sent Marines products after the invasion of Iraq - two congressmen compared the company's donation to the U.S. tobacco industry's "long and disgraceful history" of giving away products to troops.

"Your actions recall tobacco companies' distribution of free cigarettes to soldiers during World War II, which caused hundreds of thousands of servicemen to become addicted and die of tobacco-related illnesses," wrote Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., and Bill Janklow, the former South Dakota representative recently jailed for a traffic-related manslaughter conviction.

U.S. Smokeless Tobacco officials defended the gift, saying the intent was to "provide product to current adult consumers who were unable to purchase the product."

Other tobacco manufacturers such as R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. say they have abandoned efforts to give away cigarettes to soldiers. "We are not sending cigarettes to troops in Iraq or elsewhere nor are we currently investigating that option," said Carole S. Crosslin, an R.J. Reynolds spokeswoman.

In 1975, the government stopped including cigarettes in rations. By the 1980s, medical evidence became "overwhelming" and the antismoking crusade gained steam, Kluger said.

Also during the '80s, the defense secretary ordered a major antismoking campaign in the armed forces. The order foreshadowed smoking bans inside military properties, cessation programs and policies by the Navy, Marines and Air Force banning tobacco giveaways.

In the 1990s, the Pentagon raised prices of cigarettes sold in commissaries - the military equivalent of a discount grocery store.

At Bay Pines VA Medical Center, it wasn't until about five years ago that officials pulled cigarettes from the canteen, said Deborah Grassman, a hospice nurse at the center.

"Here we are supposed to be promoting health, and (we) were selling cigarettes in the canteen," Grassman said.

Rioux tried his first cigarette as a middle school student. By 16, he was a regular smoker.

"It was one of those things everybody was doing," Rioux recalled. "My dad smoked. I was around it a lot."

He smokes about a pack a day. He's tried quitting at least five times over the years. The longest he has abstained was three months.

"Part of it is stress, but it is an addiction," Rioux said of why he continues to smoke.

After Rioux returned from overseas in November, he was about to light up a cigarette at Hooters when a waitress stopped him. Word of the state's workplace smoking ban that went into effect in July hadn't reached Rioux overseas.

"I said, "You got to be kidding me,' " Rioux said. "I was shocked. Being overseas and being in the desert a lot, I'm used to being able to smoke anywhere. Here, you can't smoke here, you can't smoke there."

Smoking is "very much a big part of the atmosphere" in the military, Rioux said. It's not the government's responsibility to get service members to quit, he said.

"I want to quit, but you should have the right to smoke if you want to," he said.

Todd Simmons, the Tarpon Springs soldier who opened the pack of cigars while in Baghdad after Hussein's capture, began smoking cigars after he joined the Army Reserves. He smoked cigarettes before joining the active Army in 1987 but quit a year later.

"Cigarettes were part of peer pressure in high school," said the married father of two. "At some point I came to the realization that smoking cigarettes was not a healthy thing to be doing."

After moving to Tampa around 1992, he took up cigar smoking. "I don't remember what prompted me to smoke cigars, but I continue to do it because I enjoy it."

Although military policy counsels against using tobacco, friends and relatives shipped Simmons cigars when he was in Iraq, he said. Sometimes he bought them over the Internet, he said. Other soldiers deployed overseas buy cigarettes from military exchanges or local merchants.

"Tobacco use - cigar smoking, cigarettes and chewing tobacco and dipping snuff - is definitely a fairly significant part of everyday life in the military," Simmons said.

"There's not a lot of antismoking counseling going on in a combat zone. It's not the place to try to encourage people to change those habits."

- Marcus Franklin can be reached at mfranklin@sptimes.com or 727 893-8488.

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