A bracing op-ed from a recent vet: highly recommended
NOTE: It has taken awhile to cut this down to the required length (I hope I cut it sufficiently) and to add the link to the Los Angeles Times. But it hasn't been easy to get this far, and I've already lost it once. It's a good piece of writing, and maybe we'll see Danny Sjurson entering politics one of these days.
~~Hekate
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e
I was an obsequious Army grunt. But no longer
I’m one of the lucky ones. Leaving the madness of U.S. Army life with a modest pension and all of my limbs intact feels like a genuine escape. Both the Army and I knew it was time for me to go. I’d tired of carrying water for empire and they’d grown weary of dealing with my dissent and with footing the bill for my PTSD treatment. I entered West Point in July 2001, a bygone era of relative peace, the moment, you might say, before the 9/11 storm broke. I leave an Army that remains, remarkably, engaged in global war, patrolling an increasingly militarized world.
>snip<
I recognize that there’s a paradox at work here: The Army and the global war on terror made me who I am. Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in particular turned a budding neocon into an unabashed progressive, an insecure aspiring dealer in violence into a pacifist, or as near to that as a former military man can get. What the Army helped me become is someone whom, in the end, I don’t mind gazing at in the mirror each morning.
>snip<
I am not sorry to leave behind the absurdity I witnessed. .... Farewell to the generals who knew tactics but couldn’t for the life of them think strategically ....Who shamelessly traded in their multi-starred uniforms for six- and seven-figure gigs on the boards of corporations that feed the unquenchable appetite of the military-industrial beast. ...... So long, too, to the chauvinism in the senior ranks that asserts a messianic American right to police the globe. Farewell to the faux intellectualism of men like former Gen. David Petraeus who have never seen a problem for which improved counterinsurgency tactics wasn't the answer and are incapable of questioning the efficacy of force....
Goodbye to the devotees of American exceptionalism who filled the Army’s ranks, and to the hypercapitalism and Ayn Randian conservatism among officers in what is the nation’s most socialist institution. Godspeed to the often-hypocritical evangelical Christianity and the rampant Islamophobia infusing the ranks. Ciao to the still-prevalent patriarchy and homophobia that affects everyone in uniform.
>snip<
Sayonara to the adrenaline junkies and power-obsessed freaks atop so many combat units, folks who lived for the violence, the rush of nighttime raids without a thought for their often counterproductive and bloody consequences. It’s a relief to leave them behind as they continue to feed the insurgencies the U.S. battles far faster than they kill “terrorists.”
Toodle-oo to the vacuous “thanks-for-your-service” compliments from civilians who otherwise ignore soldiers’ issues, foreign policy and our forever wars.
Maybe it’s hopeless for a former Army major to fight American militarism. .....And here’s the truth of it: I’m not alone in my views; as supportive texts and emails to me have made clear, there are more silent dissenters in the ranks than you might imagine. I hope more serving officers and troops gather the courage to speak their minds and tell Americans the score about our brutal, hopeless adventurism. ..... Goodbye to all that, and hello to what’s next.
Danny Sjursen retired from the Army in February, after tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, and teaching history at West Point. He is the author of “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” Twitter: @SkepticalVet. Podcast: “Fortress on a Hill.” A longer version of this essay appears at TomDispatch.
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