We Are Training Our Children For War
It's all fun and games until...
Note: You can watch a video version of this article here.
In the summer of 2016 I was working at an opera company in Utah as a carpenter. This company put up all of its out-of-town staff in apartments. One of my roommates was a guy named Zach. He was also a carpenter, though it’s usually considered a faux pas to house people of the same department together. One conversation that Zach and I had while sitting in our kitchen sticks with me to today. I can’t remember what led to the subject, but we were discussing military service. He shocked me when he said, “If there was another 9/11 I would join up immediately.” I thought about how two people of similar backgrounds, both of us being young white American boys working in the same profession, could have vastly different reactions to phenomena. I thought about how one person, such as myself, could watch a movie like Saving Private Ryan, certainly not an antiwar film, and be so disgusted by the brutality, senselessness, and randomness of the violence depicted that they would then disavow any and all wars. Whereas someone else could watch the same movie and feel that, sure, war is hell, but nevertheless feel proud to be an American and empowered to join in combat for a good cause.
In my response to Zach, I tried to explain that there is no good war. I said that America’s involvement in WWII is generally considered to be the “good war,” the one that was worth fighting, the one where we were unquestionably virtuous. None of those things are true of course, as any honest reckoning with the history would show. But that’s what the popular, enduring, stubborn, and dangerous conception of that war is. And yet, despite the propagandistic line of “making the world safe for democracy,” despite the supposed freedoms the Allies secured, WWII, like all wars, destroyed the individuals who fought it, not to mention the millions of noncombatants caught in the maelstrom, and by extension carried that destruction through whole generations. I told Zach that my grandfather fought in Europe during WWII, and that he in no way found his experience during the war to be ennobling. That in fact he considered it a horrific thing which took his identity away from him. “I didn’t know who I was,” my grandfather said about returning home from the war. Of course he certainly couldn’t relate to his family, to his wife and five children, people who did not suffer as he did and who ran away from him because they were afraid of him. This life of alienation was what millions of American men came home to. James Baldwin once described listening to the war experiences of a high school friend of his, a young Jew who had seen the German’s concentration camps. “I will never forget his face,” Baldwin writes, “I had once known it very well – shortly before, when we had been children. It was not a child’s face now. He had seen what people would do to him – because he was a Jew; he knew what he had done to Germans; and not only could nothing be undone, it might very well be that this was all that the world could do or be, over and over again, forever. All political hopes and systems, then, seemed morally bankrupt: for, if Buchenwald was wrong, what then, really made Hiroshima right? He shook his head, an old Jew already, an old man.”
The empire never takes care of those it throws into the maw of combat. “We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed,” wrote General Smedley D. Butler, “Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another ‘about face’! This time they had to do their own readjusting, sans mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice, sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any…speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final ‘about face’ alone.”
It doesn’t matter what any just-war theorist has to say. War destroys everything it touches. No high-sounding motivations for war can change this fact. I don’t think I really tarnished any of Zach’s nationalist patriotism during our conversation. But I wanted him to think about the reality of his own death. That reality is never taught to us by America’s relentless pro-military media. What is taught to us, however, from our earliest years, is the romanticization of combat, obsequiousness to authority, and a love for war.
In his shattering book, Un-American, Afghanistan War veteran Erik Edstrom describes this insidious glorification of militarism:
Once upon a time, I used to feel pride when I watched those empty-calorie patriotic action flicks. That has changed. Films like American Sniper and Lone Survivor that depict American soldiers as badasses and heroes make me feel sad, alienated, or revolted…Every time I hear Americans cheering at combat scenes in the movies, I can’t help but think they are cheering for ignorance. If Americans knew what I knew, they wouldn’t act the same way. It’s as if many ordinary Americans don’t notice, or don’t care to notice, that they are cheering for the invader. The man pumping bullets into people who are defending their country from him. We are the bully. The storm troopers. The leviathan that ignores international law.
Hollywood has a long and sordid history with the Pentagon. Any film production that wishes to have access to the U.S. military’s vast resources — armored vehicles as props, expert technical consultants, filming rights on military bases and other government lands — is required to submit their scripts to Pentagon censors so they make sure the military is painted in a positive light. Pentagon officials have literally made line edits and given extensive notes for adjustments to screenplays. If the filmmakers refuse the edits, their access and their funding are taken away. Likewise, videogame developers and publishers have worked hand in glove with the military to create glorified recruiting products to inculcate young boys (and some girls) with a braindead love for guns, military, and country. Edstrom writes, “the military-entertainment complex got me hooked on their recruitment propaganda, thinly disguised as a free, first-person shooter game called America’s Army. The tagline: ‘Empower yourself. Defend freedom.’”
Edstrom writes about the letters and cards he would receive in Afghanistan from American schoolchildren, cards which I myself was made to write by my fourth grade teacher in 2004. “The kids thanked me for ‘keeping them safe at home’ or ‘freeing Afghanistan.’ The cards had pictures of tanks and green Army men that were adorably ill-informed caricatures of reality in the same childish way as the letters themselves. I knew I wasn’t making them safer, but this was what they were being told. This sacred-cow belief is rooted in the national idea that by being part of the U.S. military, you are, ipso facto, making the world a better place. Nearly every American child is treated to these same fables.”
This constant mythmaking, from childhood to adulthood, greases the wheels of American militarism. We are a militaristic society. We are addicted to war. Our wars are virtuous, our armies exceptional. Only those who serve and see combat really grasp, all too tragically, why these are lies. “For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket,” Butler wrote, “not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.” Similarly, as historian Kenneth D. Rose notes regarding the accounts of American soldiers in WWII, “one is struck by the extent to which they viewed appeals to idealism and patriotism as a base alloy that deserved only their cynicism…A bellicose patriotism may have drawn young men into the military, but as veteran William Manchester observed, ‘Despite our enormous pride in being Marines, we saw through the scam that had lured so many of us to recruiting stations.’”
Edstrom went through a similar process of awakening. He writes, “My attitude toward the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ has shifted radically. It’s taken a long time to get to my present state of mind. In the beginning I did not think our wars were self-perpetuating, self-defeating, and immoral. Like most of the men and women I served with, I came of age in the wake of 9/11. I was swept up in the hysteria of the times. Everyone was.” He goes on: “Only after graduating from West Point did I begin to question things. I began to doubt the very underpinnings that originally attracted me to military service: the belief that what we did ‘over there’ somehow kept the world safer. It was a spurious claim, soberly advanced by serious men with seriously short haircuts.”
This Great American Lie really only becomes solidified for propagandized soldiers with the reality of combat, with the deaths of their friends and the deaths they cause. And a soldier’s reevaluation of their actions, by virtue of their being totally immersed in the military culture, is almost always made from a far remove once the events are over. “And this is how most of my memories are,” Edstrom writes, “– same memory, two very different reactions based on the level of information I had.”
But even with the hell of war made real, a full-throated repudiation of the state that sent them to die, or even of the war itself, is not guaranteed. The vitriol and animalistic rage that soldiers are trained to feel against their enemies, those Huns, those gooks, those towel-heads, can endure far beyond the end of combat.
And the hard lessons learned by those who fought are little passed on or remembered. The state and the society makes sure that dissident crybabies like Edstrom are shielded from public view. When the next war comes, the same lies are promulgated, and a fresh generation is ill-equipped to combat those lies. In the same way that America’s many coups it has orchestrated abroad are at first seen as a fight for liberation, democracy, and liberal values, while only decades later it is seen for what it really was: a violent snuffing out of the democratic ideals of other nations. Our never-ending military incursions rely on this same cycle of lies, tardy reckonings, and quick forgettings. Always the next war comes.
“I worry that the training the military has given to soldiers has, in a different way, been given to all of American society,” Edstrom writes. “To some extent, we are all recruits in the U.S. military, inculcated with the same taboos and mythologies in schools, in newspapers, and at the dinner table. We are pressured to fall into formation, because not to do so would be un-American. Ordinary citizens are pinned with various terms of abuse if they question the military…To posit that our endless wars are a form of state terrorism earns you many enemies. And so we continue indefinitely, urged forward by our self-perpetuating education in nationalism, militarism, and terrorphobia.”
This normalization of militarism in American society breeds uniquely American public pathologies. In the lead up to one Memorial Day, a coworker of mine, a female veteran of the Iraq War, readily posted to our online work chat a picture of herself in military fatigues sitting on a gold throne in Saddam Hussein’s palace. “Another life, another time,” she said. This woman was Native American, of the Cherokee nation I believe. And so it is that the Great American Empire can send a woman of indigenous heritage, those inconvenient savage brown people the empire once saw fit only for annihilation, to fly across an ocean and a continent in the early years of this brave new 21st century to rape and pillage exotic lands far away, all in the name of freedom and democracy, and causing an estimated death toll of one million Iraqis. This is what we call patriotic nationalism, and even the indigenous can get in line behind the conquering nation-state. Any notion of a cohesive “identity” or a sense of irony is thus dead. When the empire can enlist people from the ranks of those who survived genocide at the empire’s own hands, and even when the empire steals tribal names for its own flying death machines (Chinook, Kiowa, Apache, etc.) — that is true power. The power to brand any person, regardless of identity, with the forever mark of armed service. The empire has thus won the war of conquest completely.
My coworker was later sure to brandish her activist bona fides by telling me that she was present at the Standing Rock protests. “Water is life.” People are happily never only one thing. Veterans can become some of the most powerful and well-grounded voices against war and imperialism. Time can change the worst in us. This is the only hope of redemption. But our actions remain. Howard Zinn, famous for giving America a new way to look at its history, participated in the bombing of European civilians as a veteran of WWII. After the war, Zinn was invited to speak in Japan to a group of survivors from America’s atomic bombings, those acts of “unforgivable enormity,” Baldwin wrote. Faced with these poor victims, Zinn could not come to grips with what he had done. He writes:
When my turn came, I stood up and felt I must get something off my conscience. I wanted to say that I had been an air force bombardier in Europe, that I had dropped bombs that killed and maimed people, and that until this moment I had not seen the human results of such bombs, and that I was ashamed of what I had done and wanted to help make sure things like that never happened again. I never got the words out, because as I started to speak I looked out at the Japanese men and women sitting on the floor in front of me, people with horribly burned faces, people with no eyes in their sockets, without arms, or without legs, but all quietly waiting for me to speak. I choked on my words, could not say anything for a moment, fighting for control, finally managed to thank them for inviting me and sat down.
People of good-conscience like Zinn are grinded up by the war-mongers. The U.S. propaganda machine, to say nothing of its many-tendrilled law enforcement regime, has never failed to manufacture or force sufficient compliance of the underlings to carry out whatever military adventure the empire managers have dreamed up. Even at the height of American anarchist, socialist, and communist antiwar organizing efforts in the lead up to U.S. involvement in WWI, the war to end all wars, the one-two punch of the passage of the Espionage Act and Sedition Act, which imprisoned thousands of antiwar activists for nothing more than exercising their free speech, among whom was Eugene V. Debs, the most popular socialist politician of the day, as well as the later Palmer Raids against labor organizers, effectively quashed any militant antiwar efforts that posed a serious threat. During this time, Kate Richards O’Hare, a stalwart rhetorician who ran multiple times for the U.S. Senate under the Socialist Party, said that America’s mothers were being used as nothing more than “brood sows to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer.” For this, she was sentenced to prison.
I don’t blame an American who, in the midst of the heady swirl of fear, jingoism, and the visceral desire for revenge after the 9/11 attacks, joined the armed forces and followed the orders of their commander in chief. But, these more than twenty years later, knowing all that we know now of the mendacity that hurled us into Iraq, where the neocons promised we would be hailed as liberators; learning of the subterfuge and wanton corruption which kept us in Afghanistan for twenty years, doing nothing but fueling the Taliban insurgency by our mere presence and empowering local child rapist warlords; hearing of the litany of brutal crimes committed against the peoples of the Middle-East — not forgetting the brutalization of U.S. troops in return; and suffering the complete gutting of our civil liberties at home with mass surveillance, criminalization of whistleblowers, the suspension of habeus corpus, militarization of police, and widespread entrapment schemes targeted against “future terrorists,” some humility and nuance from those who dutifully participated in these criminal wars is quite due, to say nothing of contrition – let alone an international war crimes tribunal such as one we used against the Nazis and Imperial Japan.
Veterans who are critics of empire and the cynical wars the nation sent them to fight are relegated to writing for obscure pamphlets and zines and to speaking at poorly attended antiwar lectures and rallies. I recently attended such a rally in Minneapolis, put on by Veterans For Peace. The action was organized against the war in Ukraine and America’s belligerent stance against Russia, acts that are bringing the world closer to nuclear armageddon. People carrying signs stood on the corners of a busy intersection, perhaps 50 or so of us in all. A woman with a bullhorn led some poorly practiced chants. Another woman passed out little antiwar messages that you could sign and mail to your representative. I can tell you, the warmongers aren’t listening.
In contrast, veterans who propound the myths of empire and who talk of their wartime experience as, perhaps brutal, but ultimately righteous and ennobling, are used as props to sell our wars to the public, to the future soldiers. American Sniper, the account of Chris Kyle, “the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history,” sold over a million copies and the film adaption directed by Clint Eastwood made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. Myth peddlers such as Tom Brokaw and Stephen E. Ambrose get rich selling hagiographies like The Greatest Generation and Band of Brothers. Compare these glowing receptions to little-known books such as Edstrom’s Un-American, or Shade it Black, or Paths of Dissent, all scathing critiques by veterans against self-perpetuating American wars, and you will understand how deep the American idolatry of violence runs. Nuance is not popular or profitable.
And veterans who do not blindly accept the label of hero bestowed upon them by the maniac culture of nationalism and patriotism are stripped of their shallow honorifics and told to be quiet, get some therapy, and go away. The resulting alienation, coupled with the lingering trauma stemming from what the soldiers saw and did in combat, has led to an average of 20 veteran suicides per day in the U.S. You can take your “Support our Troops” sticker and shove it.
The cycle of military propaganda, starting in the crib, through to recruitment officers, enlistment centers, and basic training; the eventual encounters with combat and the ignoble boredom of military service; and a later, belated reckoning with the senselessness of it all, only able to be arrived at once one can stand apart and get some breathing room, to focus on things other than survival of yourself and your squad — these things ensure that those who know better are always too late and too little to make a difference for America’s next explosion of military violence.
This post started with a personal story. Here I’ll end it with another.
In the 1924 book War Against War by German anarchist Ernst Friedrich, a polemic which Susan Sontag described as “designed to horrify and demoralize,” Friedrich paints the insidious nature of our militarized culture starting at an early age:
Bring up your children so that they may later refuse to render military and war service! How very many lightly overlook the fact that in one’s own home, in the family, war is being spontaneously prepared! And here lies the beginning of all evils, here lies the beginning also of war! The mother that sings soldiers’-songs to the baby on her lap, prepares for war, yes, she prepares for war! The father that makes gifts of toy soldiers to his child mobilises the child for the war idea! The toy soldier is the Judas that you yourself bring into the home, is the betrayal of human life! Remember always this one thing: The little helmet made of paper will one day be a steel helmet on the head of a murderer! And if the child has once practised with his air-gun, how natural it is that he should in later years shoot with a rifle! The little sabre carved of wood will some day become the battle-sword that pierces the body of a human being! Ye parents that do not wish that your sons should murder the dear sons of other parents, you should remember that the child whom you present with a helmet and sabre and gun, plays his tender soul to death out of his young body.
This is good old fashioned anarchistic rhetoric, no doubt. But rhetoric, good rhetoric, is not itself divorced of truth, without which it has no hope of resonance. It was Friedrich’s words that were ringing in my head when my girlfriend’s father took her and I out to a shooting range near Cincinnati, Ohio. After we donned the proper eye and ear protection, he had to show his daughter how to properly load bullets into the Glock pistol’s magazine, insert the magazine into the gun, pull back the slide to move the first round into the chamber, and keep the pistol pointed down range at all times. It struck me that none of this had to be explained to me. My hands already knew what to do, not because I had used a real pistol before, I never had, but because my hands had already completed those tasks innumerable times with plastic airsoft guns when I was in middle school. And I had performed these same actions perhaps tens of thousands of times, virtually, by playing video games. The only thing alien to me about the real pistol was its unwieldy recoil and its concussive bang. It seemed impossible to me that anyone could maintain both a quick pull of the trigger and a steady aim with how much the weapon kicked back after each shot. But I knew that with enough practice I could get used to it. I was also aware that my childish familiarity with toy weapons was highly gendered. Boys play army. Girls don’t. Edstrom describes a similar upbringing:
My curiosity about the military was given to me, standard issue, at a young age. It first came in the form of toys. Not more than five years of age, I had buckets of plastic, forest green (American), gray (“Nazi”), and mustard (“Jap”) figurines bedecked in World War II-era kit. Machine gunners, radio operators, leaders doing the heroic follow-me pose. All dutifully aligned along the soapy perimeter of the bathtub. Then there were G.I. Joes: toy figurines, puzzles, board games, the TV show – whatever I could get my hands on. I watched Top Gun probably twenty times. I even had a few packs of Desert Storm collectible trading cards. I loved our ass-kicking political avatar: Captain America. At age twelve, I dressed in Realtree camo and played paintball.
In this way, we are brutalized and we are trained to brutalize others through nothing more and nothing less than muscle memory, all presented as fun and games. And it really was fun! I won’t deny that. As someone who is unapologetically and endlessly entertained by the Jackass film series and television show, as well as its spinoff Wildboyz, I definitely considered shooting my friends with fast-moving plastic airsoft bb’s to be my idea of fun.
I just wish this fun didn’t translate so easily, so troublingly, to the only language our state knows how to speak: violence.