[No, I Do Not] “Thank You For Your Service” [To Imperialism and War]
by Jim Craven/Omahkohkiaaiipooyii (U.S. Army 1963-66)
We have heard as long as I can remember, even from those bitterly opposed to a given war, “We may or can oppose a given war, but never oppose “our” warriors.” But that begs a most fundamental and elementary question: How could we have wars, illegal or otherwise, if the so-called “warriors” did not show up? Just who exactly is waging these wars if not the warriors who show up? This is especially the case when there is no draft (the career military brass and career politicians oppose the draft by the way–Why?) and when it is clear that those who start the wars and are the biggest promoters of wars, are mostly those who never “served” in the military and/or war nor did their children if they had any. Often the ones with the biggest mouths, so solicitous with their “Thank you for your service”, had every opportunity to “serve” as did/do their children, but like Dick Cheney, Obama, Romney and his boys, “had other priorities”. What they really mean and meant was: “Thanks chump for you and yours, the poor and of color, doing your bit so that me and mine, the rich, white and smugly entitled, don’t have to walk our talk and put our precious, predestined [to rule] asses on the line.
http://jimcraven10.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/republican-chickenhawk-hall-of-fame/
The military, and the government in general, loves acronyms. In fact they love them so much, and use them as branding (as if calling an operation say “Eduring Freedom” makes it so) that they contrive names for a law or military operation that when translated into acronyms, it does further duty as a brand and meme (thought virus). For example, how about this law from 2001: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. And if you oppose this law, if you have some kind of problem with shades of creeping fascism, well you are not only a target for the ACT itself, but you obviously ain’t no U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Here is another wonderful example where the taboo acronym created by unintended words and was revealing instead of the other form of chosing words to form a desired acronym: The original name of the Operation to invade Iraq in March 2003 was Operation Iraqi Liberation and they printed patches that read O.I.L. but that was immediately rescinded, with orders to return ALL patches and a courts martial for anyone who kept even one.
When I was in Beijing the first time, I tried to tip the taxi drivers as I am a former taxi driver and remember well times when a tip made the difference if I ate that day or not. The drivers would turn it down and show displeasure. Why? Not partly because I was a foreigner and this might have shades of the historical paternalism and patronization by foreigners that China suffered and still suffers even if unintended. But also because they felt that in their pay, and in their professional responsibilities, they did not and could/should not accept extra for what it was their duty, for which they were paid, to do. They thought that if they did not like the pay, it was their duty to fight for more or seek another job that paid more. Do we thank others with far more dangerous jobs for their service? Often what is really meant, especially by non-veterans (92% of the population) is in addition to “Thanks chump…” is “I have some cognitive dissonance issues (I support war and the military as long as me and my loved ones do not have to go but it is not that I and mine are cowards, it is just that we come from the important strata of society and we “serve” in other ways”).
But in the case of the military, those who sign up to become a willing tool in an illegal war, founded on lies and naked imperialism, their “career choice” means not only death and destruction for the targets and victims of “collateral damage” of war, but they become willing tools of compromise of U.S. national security as it is clear even to the war mongers, that unwinnable wars, wars founded on lies and violations of international law, wars that create ten new insurgents and terrorists for each one allegedly killed, can only compromise national security with blowback, however it is defined.
When I was in the military 1963-66, the recruiters used an acronym MATTRESS that stood for the real reasons why men and women enlist. It stood for Money, Adventure, Travel, Training, Recreation, Education, Security and Satisfaction. In addition to those motives, you could add the acronym used in the intelligence services for the motives that lead people to commit treason and get recruited by intelligence services or indeed become insurgents: MICE which stands for Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. And to that list, one could add: Revenge, Love and Lust, Family, and of course just plain false flag or deception as to for whom one is really working, getting maimed and dying. But in all of these motives for enlisting or spying, you may find ideology in some crude form, but in reality people become mercenaries, and do mercenary business for mercenary reasons.
Look at the recruiting posters and see what they give as reasons to enlist. Do they say “Join the Army and Kill ‘Commies’, ‘Hajis’ and ‘Terrorists’ for Jesus”? Do they say come to “West Point, or Annapolis or the Air Force Academy, institutes of ideological cloning (disguised as institutions of higher education) for a career as an expendable tool of U.S. Imperial Power projections”? No the posters talk about MATTRESS stuff. The patriotism and ideology, due to cognitive dissonance come later. During my time in the U.S. Army, and it remains the same today (I still have many students who are Iraq and Afghanistan War returnees who are open about their own motives for enlistment) the motives of MATRESS and some of MICE are still the motives that recruiters quickly spot and play upon. In the TV series “The Unit”, advised and written for by fomer Sgt. Major Eric Haney one of the founding members of Delta force, through the character Col Tom Ryan (commander of The Unit) visibly beaten up, flashing back to his own recruitment at 17 as he ran away from an abusive stepfather who beat him all the time:
Recruiter: “I’m assuming the reason you came is you want to join the Army. Well here’s the good news. You’ve got your own birth certificate on you. When you leave this room, you will never have to go home again. Did I guess right? Here’s what’s going to happen to ya. You get to be a man which means your gonna get to use a weapon. In your travels, you will have more women than you know what to do with. And whatever son of a bitch you’ve been dealing with, should you see him again, I guaran-freaking-tee you [that] you will look upon him with pity and he will look upon you with fear.And you get to serve your country, so what the hell are you waiting for? [Colonel Tom Ryan hands him his birth certificate]. One day if the enemy don’t kill ya, or if your not blown to bits by your own forces, or knifed by a whore, or something, you may live to be a general.”
Maybe you are shall we say “vertically challenged” [short] in terms of height and stature, like Audie Murphy was seen to be; perhaps you were bullied most of your life. Well a uniform, some training, ribbons and decorations, training in the combat arms, and before you know it, those who used to laugh and mock you now run in fear when they see you; and there is nothing like a war to turn a nobody into a somebody. Perhaps you were dumped by your girlfriend Muffy for Biff the quarterback and BMOC in high school; well when you come home from a war with chest full of medals, that “bitch” Muffy will see now she dumped the wrong guy cuz now you are a somebody. Perhaps you are from some podunk small town and do not want to work for 30 years in the same factory as your daddy, the factory that gave/gives him bloody lungs and a cheap watch after thirty years. Perhaps you come from a family of “warriors” and they expect you to do your bit as did Dad, Uncle Frank even Aunt Milly. Perhaps you are afraid of the outside world, job searches and rejections, and the choices and uncertainties that that outside world has–no guaranteed “three hots and a cot”. Maybe it was a case of getting some woman pregnant and getting out of town before her brothers intent on homicide showed up; or maybe an offer from a Judge of either enlisting or winding up in the joint married to a 300-lb tatooed biker named Spike. Maybe you decided no student loans or working my way through school; I am going to finance my education, plus the travel, adventure, need for a job and job security, getting an ego boost from a uniform, etc. by becoming a paid thug and killer for U.S. Imperialism.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when there is a contradiction between fact vs emotion, or emotion vs belief, or fact vs belief. So I am not going to say that “I went into the military for thrills; ego; a job; rather than the joint or prison; travel; adventure; psychopathic or sociopathic desire to kill (“Damn, when I was a kid I used to torture small animals and always wanted to kill and torture people, but it is against the law and I might get caught; but now, in the military, they give me medals, pay, promotions, travel, status, a job and job security, all for doing what I always wanted to do”); boredom; cheap dope and hookers; family pressure; skills; education; or whatever–particularly if one has been in war and wounded. That is when the “patriotism” comes out” [“I was fighting for freedom in a place I cannot spell or find on a map”; or “I was fighting them over there so we would not have to fight them here…”] This is when they provide all the comforting rationales for enlistment that make one appear not as just some “mercenary merc” but as a patriot and hero driven only by desire to serve the nation. This is especially the case for the wounded and families of the dead who must come to terms that they lost the use of limbs for the rest of their lives, or lost their son or daughter, in wars founded on lies, and who were sent to war by those who never served nor would their children; this is a bitter pill to swallow so in many cases they will contrive reasons for enlistment that has nothing to do with their original reasons and justify in their own minds that their “sacrifice” for “The Cause” was worth it.
But what about patriotism? What about ideology?
Here is the real truth from a real warrior and hero Maj Gen Smedley Darlington Butler, three times nominated and one of 19 who were awarded twice, the Medal of Honor:
Speech by Maj. General Smedley D. Butler, USMC (Three times nominated for Medal of Honor, twice awarded it)
Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933 by General Smedley Butler, USMC
“War is just a racket. I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to.
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Note:
In 1934 there was an Attempted Overthrow of FDR Government and Replacement with a Fascist Dictatorship (Foiled By Maj. General Smedley Butler). Note, in addition to the Duponts and various other industrialists in the American Liberty League, George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush and other Skull and Bones members were intimately involved in the plot.
[At about the same time the Du Ponts were serving the Nazi cause in Germany, they were involved in a Fascist plot to overthrow the United States government. ]
“Along with friends of the Morgan Bank and General Motors,” in early 1934, writes Higham, “certain Du Pont backers financed a coup d’etat that would overthrow the President with the aid of a $3 million-funded army of terrorists . . .” The object was to force Roosevelt “to take orders from businessmen as part of a fascist government or face the alternative of imprisonment and execution . . .”
Higham reports that “Du Pont men allegedly held an urgent series of meetings with the Morgans,” to choose who would lead this “bizarre conspiracy.” “They finally settled on one of the most popular soldiers in America, General Smedly Butler of Pennsylvania.” Butler was approached by “fascist attorney” Gerald MacGuire (an official of the American Legion), who attempted to recruit Butler into the role of an American Hitler.–R. William Davis, “The Elkhorn Manifesto,” July 4, 1996] [Butler exposed the plot in a famous press conference to the public.]
[If one were to look closely at the past 58 years, one would be hard pressed to find a single U.S. military or C.I.A. intervention that has brought us one iota of safety, or, for that matter, that has actually been done for national defense purposes.] As Butler illustrated in 1933, and it is even truer now than then, the U.S. engages in interventions meant to protect the interests of the powerful and wealthy of our nation and our allies, and rarely, if ever, in order to actually protect its citizens.–Chris White, “Is War Still a Racket?” CounterPunch, January 9, 2003]
Charlie Liteky, “An Open Letter to the U.S. Military: Congressional Medal of Honor recipient addresses U.S. forces in Iraq,” Veterans Against the Iraq War, May 7, 2003
John S.D. Eisenhower, “War Turned Eisenhower Into a Pacifist,” International Herald Tribune, June 6, 2004
Stan Goff: ‘Hold On To Your Humanity: An Open Letter To GIs In Iraq’ By Stan Goff (US Army Retired 11/15/13: (CounterPunch) Dear American serviceperson in Iraq, Please see also: http://jimcraven10.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/stan-goff-a-christian-soldier-at-60-on-veterans-day/ I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you–some more extreme than others–are changes I know very well. So I’m going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed. In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they’d never been there, or to war at all. The essence of all this shit was that we had to “stay the course in Vietnam,” and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt. When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me. When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote. What they didn’t tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and commiting rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren’t in a position to figure out the difference between me–just in country–and the people who had done those things to them. What they didn’t tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children. My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids. So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight. And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn’t be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of the Vietcong. But there we were, ordered into someone else’s country, playing the role of occupier when we didn’t know the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full of bullshit our so-called leaders had told us during training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, but any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we stated to ask is who put us in this position? In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back in Washington DC with their fat fucking asses stuffed full of cordon blue and caviar. They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped. That’s you now. Just fewer trees and less water. We haven’t figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story. I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something–something that craved other peole’s pain. Just to make sure I wasn’t regarded as a “fucking missionary” or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people too crazy to fuck with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone’s house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly a second thought. People who had the power of life and death–because they could. The anger helps. It’s easy to hate everyone you can’t trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you’ve seen, what has happened to you, and what you have done and can’t take back. It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn’t name, and the reason I know that is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to “niggers” here before they could be lynched. No difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive, even when that wasn’t true, but something inside us told us that so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill them. So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby. Until that baby was silenced, though, and here’s the important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That’s the thing you might not get until it’s too late. When you take away the humantiy of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul because it is standing in the way. So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics–drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, esepcially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient. You can ever escape that you became a racist because you made the excuse that you needed that to survive, that you took things away from people that you can never give back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never get back. Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life. Many do not. I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one else sees it. You might hear it in my words. I hate being chumped. So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don’t surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching fucking military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium. The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world’s energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic competitors. That’s what’s going on, and you need to understand it, then do what you need to do to hold on to your humanity. The system does that; tells you you are some kind of hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you. Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable commodity. They don’t care about your nightmares, about the DU that you are breathing, about the lonliness, the doubts, the pain, or about how you humanity is stripped away a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already are. They don’t care. So you have to. And to preserve your own humanity, you must recognize the humanity of the people whose nation you now occupy and know that both you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the shots. They are your enemies–The Suits–and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will “never run” in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they fucking aren’t there. You are They’ll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses. So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible for your being there, and responsible for keeping you there. I can’t tell you to disobey. That would probably run me afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have to take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience dictate. But it is perfectly legal for you to refuse illegal orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering you to keep silent about these crimes is also illegal. I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you are never under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls. Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face. Don’t leave your souls in the dust there like another corpse. Hold on to your humanity. Stan Goff US Army (Ret.) Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org. |