Today is Veterans Day, and is bound to be filled with endless glowing accolades to "our men and women in uniform" — the people supposedly responsible even for my ability to write these very words.
If the military-worshipers are correct, I'm lucky to have made it out of bed this morning without the assistance of some tax-funded, uniformed warrior armed to the teeth and ready to kill Muslims (or anyone else he's told to) in the name of freedom.
I disagree with the premise; I don't think the military protects our freedom. I think the military is the president's private army. I also think the military makes us less secure by creating ill-will all over the globe and bankrupting our country while enriching parasites who profit from war. I do believe I'm in pretty good company.
I say this as a veteran myself. I spent 4 1/2 years in the military: a year and a half as a combat engineer in the Army Reserve, followed by three years on active duty as a forward observer. (I had to spend a further 3 1/2 years as a member of the Inactive Ready Reserve, or IRR, so technically I spent 8 years in the Army.)
Don't get me wrong: both of these jobs were fun. Building bridges and setting off C4 and doing helicopter insertions — that's pretty heady stuff for a seventeen-year-old. When I switched job descriptions, I was calling in grid coordinates and watching massive artillery rounds explode on targets, and shooting machine guns and grenade launchers, and taking part in tank maneuvers and all-night tactical marches — it could be downright intoxicating.
All of this made perfect sense. My oldest brother had just spent a year on the DMZ in Korea as an infantryman. He would go on to make a career in the military; after a year in Afghanistan ("What we're doing there is f#(@ed up," he told me after his return) he became a counter intelligence agent. My father was in the National Guard for several years; two uncles went to Vietnam, one in the Air Force, the other as a Marine Corp grunt; another uncle was in the Navy; my maternal grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, and fought as an infantry machine-gunner in the Guadalcanal and North Solomon campaigns.
It made sense to join the military. I'd spent my entire childhood hearing about how the military "protects our freedom", and the honorable tradition I would be continuing. What bunk.
I traveled a lot while in Europe, and that sure was fun. I went all over Germany, where I was stationed, but I also traveled to Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and even Russia and Siberia.
I also met my wife in the Army, and I'm very grateful for that. She was teaching English to adult students (Germans, Yugoslavians, Turks, etc.) in a small city called Giessen, about 15 miles away.
I spent a lot of time in that city — it was one of my first loves — enjoying the sites (including nearby Wetzlar, where the brilliant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once lived and set his masterpiece, The Sorrows of Young Werther), the great nightclubs and fantastic restaurants, the Cologne Philharmonic at Greifenstein Castle, taking night classes at the Volkshochschule — I even attended a "Free Kurdistan" rally once.
My girlfriend (now wife) being from the UK, she didn't have the reverence for US military forces that we practically inject into kids here. Nor did her students, with whom we spent a great deal of time. Talking with them I got a far different perspective than the one I'd learned in school, at home, and from our culture at large.
Not everyone in the world thinks we're as awesome as we think we are. Not by a long shot.
Where many Americans see the US military as a benevolent servant of the oppressed worldwide, these young people saw something quite different: a sleepwalking giant blundering its way around the world wreaking havoc, while endlessly patting itself on the back.
After reading Harold S. Gray's book, Character "Bad", a collection of letters written while he was serving a life sentence for refusing to take part in the First World War, I began to question the "conventional wisdom" (conventional in the US, that is) about the morality of America's military might — a "morality" imposed at the barrel of a gun, and therefore no morality at all. The book had been given to me by a friend who spent eight years in the Army but then applied for, and received, conscientious objector status and was ejected from the military.
When I finished the book I sought advice from a couple of sergeants in my platoon, but that didn't go very well: one seemed more concerned that I was a Communist; the other encouraged me to immediately apply for status as a conscientious objector. I was tempted, but couldn't, mostly because I'd heard from my friend that it was a process not unlike Hell on Earth. But also because I wasn't a pacifist, or even religious.
While I understood Gray's position, my personal objection wasn't to violence itself, but to the US government's use of violence: if the military exists to protect Americans' freedom, I reasoned, then what on Earth was it doing interfering in situations that had nothing to do with protecting the freedom of Americans? Our military is currently "protecting our freedom" in three quarters of the world's countries.
At the time a civil war was raging in Yugoslavia, and I was reading about the many people from other countries who were voluntarily going there to fight for one side or another. That made more sense to me; put some skin in the game if you think something's worth fighting for, but don't use me or my country's military to do your dirty work for you.
In the end, I decided that since I had less than a year left on my contract I would finish my time and part company with the military as soon as reasonably possible. This I did, and I've never looked back.
However, I do reflect from time to time on some of the other experiences I had while in the military. Talking with a roommate who parachuted into Panama with the 82nd Airborne, for instance.
They called this "Operation Just Cause", but it was really just 'cause President George H. W. Bush wanted to effect the largest drug bust in history by invading a small, powerless neighboring country. (Nine months later, while I was sweating it out in basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, the US government would inject itself into a Middle East conflict to protect a small country from a powerful neighbor. Go figure.)
My roommate told me about the carnage wrought in Panama, and how he'd seen a small child, a little girl, running through the streets of Panama City crying and bloody, frantically searching for her parents amid the nightmare unfolding around her. "Stupid kid, she should have known better than to come outside," he said. Talk about blaming the victim!
Another soldier, my team sergeant for about a year, also went to Panama as part of the invasion, but with the 5th Infantry Division. "I remember seeing a sniper on a balcony," he told me. "I swung my .50 caliber around and blew him and the building he was in to bits. I never even gave it any thought that civilians might be in there." What's a few dead civilians in the grand scheme of things, especially if they're foreigners?
Other soldiers at least showed some sympathy for the victims of US hegemony: a Staff Sergeant told me about how he had held an Iraqi man back from viewing what was left of his son after the child had stepped on a piece of US ordnance. Though he couldn't look at me while he told the story, the look on his face showed that he would forever live with that experience.
Another solider, who served on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle during Operation Desert Storm, told me that he shot an Iraqi solder with the vehicle's 25mm cannon. "His body literally disappeared," he said. "The funny thing was, his feet kept running for a few steps afterward." From the look on his face, I could tell he didn't think it was funny.
Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people, including 19 children, when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995, also served on a Bradley during the First Gulf War. He is said to have returned to the US feeling "confused and betrayed by his own government."
"I went over there hyped up, just like everyone else," he said in a prison interview. "Not only is Saddam evil; all Iraqis are evil. What I experienced, though, is an entirely different ballgame, and being face-to-face close with these people, in personal contact, you realize they're just people like you."
The reckless disregard for human rights that he observed in Iraq must have contributed to his callous disregard for the rights of his American victims a few years later.
Actions have consequences. Veterans have to live with what they see, and what they do.
The cost of war must be counted in the civilian deaths and mutilations, the environmental disasters, the horrible atrocities, the devastation of ancient cities, and the upending of entire societies that takes place. Likewise, we must consider the soldiers killed in action.
But the horror of war also lives on among those who return. It can be counted in the alarming number of suicides among US soldiers today — at least 22 every day. Blustering, chest-thumping militarists talk about the glory of war, and Man's supposed "natural" desire to fight and kill — usually from the comfort of their own living rooms — but that number tells a radically different story. We can see that story unfolding right here.
This of course has to be considered alongside the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers wounded — many of them permanently.
Tacitus said of the Romans, "They create a desolation, and call it peace."
The best gift we could give veterans today is to demand genuine peace, and an end to sending young men and women off to kill, die, mutilate and destroy for causes that have nothing to do with protecting our freedom.
