“
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.
Tomgram: William Astore, Six Vows to Support Our Troops
Last year, in a joint investigation Propublica and National Public Radio reported
that “[t]he military medical system is failing to diagnose brain
injuries in troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom
receive little or no treatment for lingering health problems.”
This year, the city of Clarksville, Tennessee, decided to relax
restrictions on outdoor signage for those wishing to post banners in
support of troops returning to nearby Fort Campbell from deployments
overseas. Mayor Kim McMillan told
a local television station, “We had a number of individuals that wanted
to display banners that really honor our soldiers, those that are out
protecting our freedoms every day. We really wanted to make sure they
could do that without having to deal with those [restrictions].” It
will cost $25 for a banner permit.
Last week, the Washington Post reported:
“Nine months after President Obama authorized a broad expansion of
benefits for those caring for service members severely wounded in the
nation's two current wars, none of the assistance has materialized and
it is caught up in a bureaucratic tangle that could shrink the number of
families eligible for the help.”
Only days before, a local New Hampshire newspaper carried a story
about municipal workers in the town of Somersworth who were planning to
take part in a national "Red Shirt Fridays" campaign to show support
for U.S. troops. "It's fun," Development Services Director Craig
Wheeler told a reporter from the Foster’s Daily Democrat.
"I think it's the right thing to do... It shows unity on behalf of the
city and the staff and it's pretty clear why we're wearing them."
Somersworth’s T-shirts and Clarksville’s banners join a host of similar efforts, ranging from “Support Our Veterans” license plates to the National Football League’s dispatch of cheerleaders
to military bases to boost morale. Such initiatives typify an American
response to its distant wars -- acts of superficial support
proliferate while Army suicides climb skyward, veterans have their sexual abuse complaints ignored, large numbers of troops with battlefield concussions
continue to suffer, and military doctors fraudulently use diagnoses
like “personality disorder” to discharge wounded soldiers and deny them disability benefits.
Late last year, at his Foreign Policy blog, former Washington Post correspondent and bestselling author Tom Ricks published an essay by a Marine who had served four tours in Iraq. It concluded:
“As a young person who served in a war you made, I don't want your
handshake, your pity, your daughter's phone number, or your faded bumper
sticker. I did my frigging job so now do yours. Baby Boomers and
Generation X: I want your leadership. Rather than cower behind a set of
fragmented ideals you don't even live up to, I am asking you to
exercise your adulthood and feel some pain.”
He also called for an “open and vigorous discussion of compulsory
national service” to diversify the ranks and create the conditions
necessary for serious debate about America’s wars, present and future.
He sounded a lot like the men and women who write to TomDispatch regular
and retired Lieutenant Colonel William Astore, men and women driven to
serve by love of country, who now disagree with the status quo and
whose critical voices Astore offers up in his latest article. (To
catch 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 iPod here.) Nick Turse
The Cost of Our Wars:
On Listening to Our Troops
by William J. Astore
How do I know? I’ve had the privilege of reading hundreds of emails
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 guards-men 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 U.S. can withdraw from this senseless war… This war has
bankrupted the U.S. and caused untold suffering among U.S. 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 email 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 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.
