DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Six vows to support our
troops By William J Astore
"Support our troops" is an unconditional
American mantra. We're told to celebrate them as
warrior-liberators, as heroes, as the finest
fighters the world has ever known. They're to be
put on a pedestal or plinth, holding a rifle and a
flag, icons to American toughness and goodness.
What we're not told to do is listen to
them.
Today, I'd like to suggest six vows
we should make when it comes to those troops:
Vow #1: Let's start
listening to them. And when we do - when we begin
to recognize them in all their frailty and
complexity, their
vulnerabilities and
imperfections - we'll realize that they're as
restless and conflicted about our wars as many of
us are.
How do I know? I've had the
privilege of reading hundreds of e-mails from
today's (and yesterday's) troops sent to me in
response to articles I've written for
TomDispatch.com. From these I've selected a
handful of passages to share with you: voices that
resonated with me, words that often got me right
in the gut.
Consider this passage from an
army national guardsman, a non-commissioned
officer who answered his country's call and
deployed to Iraq:
I am ... on my second tour of Iraq.
My unit ... has been plagued by suicides and
psychiatric problems. Our guardsmen even prior
to deployment come from compromised social and
economic environments, leaving them very
susceptible [to military recruiters]. Many of
our soldiers are almost forced into volunteering
for multiple tours due to the lack of economic
opportunity and the cold fact that there is no
other way to support their families ...
I have seen blatant corruption among the
[private] contractors [in Iraq] and even cases
of outright human trafficking and forced
prostitution among female third country
nationals ... My hope is that the US can
withdraw from this senseless war ... This war
has bankrupted the US and caused untold
suffering among US forces and
women.
When we praise our troops as
volunteers in our "All-Volunteer Military", how
many of us consider that significant numbers of
them are not truly volunteers? Rarely do we face
the fact that our country has been running a
poverty draft, sweeping up the disenfranchised and
disadvantaged, with an emphasis on the rural
working class, and sending them halfway across the
world into harm's way.
Which leads to my
second vow:
Vow #2: Let's
stop consoling ourselves with the myth that all
our troops are volunteers - a myth which leads
most Americans to pay remarkably little attention
to and take no responsibility for the wars our
"volunteers" are fighting.
The second part
of this sergeant's letter calls for yet another
vow. It reminds us that war, by its nature, breeds
corruption and gives free rein to abuses of all
sorts. Indeed, as a historian of past wars, the
harsh realities of psychological casualties, of
forced prostitution, of rampant corruption should
hardly surprise me - but I confess that they still
do. As one officer who specializes in contracting
wrote me from Baghdad, he found the amount of war
profiteering by private contractors in Iraq
"mind-blowing, but nonetheless eye-opening".
Despite evidence of endemic corruption and
rampant war profiteering, why do our eyes remain
glazed over, if not stubbornly shut? Is it because
our government-military-media complex is always
seeking to put the best spin on our wars?
Vow #3: Let's stop putting a
happy face on our wars. Americans should start
taking them in for what they truly are in all
their waste and inhumanity. Only then might we be
moved to put an end to them.
As we
glamorize war, or, if not war itself, the
"voluntary" decision of young soldiers to fight
and possibly to die in them for us, we continue to
play down the hardships involved, while refusing
to consider the hopelessness of the tasks we've
assigned them.
A helicopter pilot wrote me
recently as he was preparing for deployment to
Afghanistan. The odds of successful
"nation-building" in that country were not good,
he assured me, when you consider past "abject
failures" in Haiti and elsewhere. How in the world
did such nation-building efforts, denounced as
worse than useless by Rush Limbaugh and
presidential candidate George W Bush in 2000, come
to be considered right, just, and true - or even
practical?
As this pilot summed up the
Sisyphean situation in which he and other American
military personnel have been placed: "Somehow this
heretofore impossible task [of nation-building in
Afghanistan] will now be accomplished by complete
novices while people are trying to kill them."
Just ponder that sentence: All by itself
it could serve as an antidote to the Afghan
Kool-Aid being drunk in the halls of the Pentagon.
Which leads to my next vow:
Vow
#4: Don't send novices on nation-building
exercises in places where the natives are hostile
and the rebels are trying to kill them. Again,
if you listen closely to our troops, you might be
surprised at their views on how and why we fight.
Consider the following confession from an Army
lieutenant colonel:
I have been in uniform for almost 30
years - obviously I love my country. But it is
astonishing to see a nation that once was so
committed to liberty and truly assisting the
world, turn into a narcissistic empire fighting
out of insecurity, as opposed to increasing
security. (Whatever happened to walk softly and
carry a big stick?)
Here's a simple
truth Americans seem to have lost touch with:
greater security doesn't come from fighting more
wars; it comes from fighting fewer of them or none
at all.
Vow #5: Some things
are worth fighting and dying for, others aren't.
It's time for us to do a far better job of
figuring out the difference.
With respect
to how we fight, the e-mail message that hit me
the hardest lately came from a recently retired
general and former infantry division commander. In
his considered words:
As an old warrior, I keep wondering
how it is our leaders keep praising our
supposedly superior arms while licking wounds
inflicted by [Afghan] village warriors armed
with little more than IEDs [improvised explosive
devices] and small arms. As for the drones, if I
were a jihadi/Taliban, I would think them a
coward's way of doing business - an obvious sign
of cultural weakness. [Because of the end of the
draft,] our leaders breathe war and our people
care not. We reap what we sow.
Are we
as a nation breathing war more and yet caring less
precisely because the killing in our name is now
being done by "volunteers" and ever more of it by
remote control? And here's a question: As we
praise ourselves for our innovative, comparatively
low cost (to us) high-tech weapons like our
"Predator" and "Reaper" drones, is our reliance on
massive firepower only serving to strengthen the
resolve of the enemies we're fighting? Which leads
to my next vow:
Vow #6:
Don't get involved in land wars in the Middle East
and Central Asia - unless you're willing to reap
what you sow.
Whether we realize it or
not, the truth is that we're already reaping what
we've sown. Leaving aside the "collateral damage"
we've inflicted on others, our own harvest is
measured in the wounded bodies and minds of our
troops who still aren't getting the medical and
psychological care that they've earned and
deserve. And in these budget-cutting times, is it
not likely that we'll soon hear about cuts in
benefits even possibly for wounded veterans?
Which leads me to a final vow:
Bonus vow: Recalling Abraham
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, let's vow to
care for those who have borne the battle, and for
their families, and strive to achieve a just and
lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations.
Finally, a special "thank you" to
all the troops and veterans who have written me
from the boonies, whether deserts or mountains -
or even the green and peaceful hills of
retirement. I hope my vows do you some justice.
William J Astore, a retired
lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of
history, is a TomDispatch regular. He welcomes
reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com. To listen
to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio
interview in which Astore discusses the difficulty
of speaking one's mind in the military, click
here,
or download it to your iPodhere.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
