[Several new memoirs from disillusioned military veterans reflect
on the horrors of war. They’re essential tools for challenging US
empire.]
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THREE NEW BOOKS BY FORMER SOLDIERS THAT THE US MILITARY DOESN’T
WANT YOU TO READ  
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Steve Early, Suzanne Gordon
February 5, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Several new memoirs from disillusioned military veterans reflect on
the horrors of war. They’re essential tools for challenging US
empire. _

A US infantry soldier sweeps the mountains during a patrol in the
Paktika Province in eastern Afghanistan. September 23, 2009., PFC
Andrya Hill / United States Army via Wikimedia Commons

 

Review of _Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War_,
by Erik Edstrom (Bloomsbury, 2020); _Pain Is Weakness Leaving the
Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming_, by Lyle Jeremy Rubin (Bold Type Books,
2022); and _Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s
Misguided Wars_, edited by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen
(Metropolitan Books, 2023)

One frequent casualty of war is the confident belief shared by new
soldiers that their cause is just and worthy of great personal
sacrifice. After Al-Qaeda downed four civilian airliners and caused
nearly three thousand deaths on September 11, 2001, US military
recruiters were flooded with eager volunteers. Patriotic fervor,
coupled with an urge for revenge and a desire to make the world a
safer place, motivated many young men and women to enlist.

As the reality of simultaneous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan
began to sink in, many participants — like Vietnam veterans before
them — became angry, embittered, and disillusioned. Some of them
have turned to memoir-writing that debunks the whole costly and
disastrous $8 trillion project known as the “global war on
terror.” Three excellent new book-length reflections on military
training, socialization, and combat duty in the Middle East definitely
won’t end up on the reading lists of college-level or junior ROTC
programs
[[link removed]],
or even the US service academies.

But many civilian readers will benefit from the policy critiques and
personal insights found in Erik Edstrom’s _Un-American
[[link removed]]_; Lyle
Jeremy Rubin’s _Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body
[[link removed]]_;
and _Paths of Dissent
[[link removed]]_, an
edited collection compiled by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen,
both of whom became historians after serving as career Army officers.

Like Bacevich and Sjursen, Edstrom attended West Point. Afterward, he
served as an Army Ranger, an infantry platoon leader and Bronze Star
winner in Afghanistan, and a member of Barack Obama’s Presidential
Escort Platoon. The grandson of a World War II veteran and product of
a middle-class upbringing in a Boston suburb, he was part of the first
post-9/11 crop of applicants to the Point, a place where “you
couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of shooting, bombing,
and invading.” His second thoughts about soldiering started when his
first-year class was immediately “isolated, separated from families
and support networks” so that, during their “initial
indoctrination,” they would be “sheltered from anything that could
temper or make us question military dogma.”

Pray and Spray

As part of the process of getting “all-American swimmers, pious
altar boys, cauliflower-eared wrestlers, nerdy class treasurers, and
Eagle Scouts” ready for eventual deployments in Iraq and
Afghanistan, West Point cadets were marched in cadence to this
edifying chant:

Left, right, left, right, left right KILL! . . . I went to the mosque
where all the terrorists pray, I set up my claymore, AND BLEW’ EM
ALL AWAY . . . I went to the store where all the women shop, pulled
out my machete, AND BEGAN TO CHOP! I went to the playground where all
the kiddies play, I pulled out my Uzi AND BEGAN TO SPRAY!

At the academy, Edstrom reports, “I was taught to think about _how
to win my small part of the war, _not_ whether we should be at
war._” Sent to Afghanistan, he soon discovered that “fighting
terrorism” was a confounding task for soldiers up and down the
“chain of command.” Many of his local foes turned out to be
“teenagers or angry farmers with legitimate grievances . . . people
tired of our never-ending occupation of their land and contemptuous
devaluation of Afghan lives. When I searched my own soul, I couldn’t
blame them for fighting back. Had I been in their shoes, I would have
done the same.”

Rubin took a more unusual route to becoming a junior officer
disillusioned with his own “forever wars” involvement. As we learn
in _Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, _Rubin was a fervent Zionist
in high school and a “pro-war activist” while a Young Republican
in college. Skipping service academy training and ROTC at Emory
University in Atlanta, Rubin first experienced the Marine Corps as a
failed Officer Candidate School contender who became a boot camp
grunt. This gave him considerable insight into what he calls the
“lance corporal underground” and “camaraderie of the enlisted
ranks that adds up to a latent class solidarity”:

As enlisted Marines are fond of remarking, they represent the majority
of the military that “works for a living.” The Marine officer
corps, on the other hand, is made up of strivers, who’ve learned to
compete at an early age and [end up] pitted against other in a
cutthroat peer-review process and promotional system that follows. . .
. There was an earnestness to the enlisted existence, a conviction of
collective duty and sacrifice, however barbaric its realizations, that
was never allowed to congeal among the brass.

Rubin was eventually tapped to be a first lieutenant doing signals
intelligence work in Afghanistan. This followed a two-month stint at
the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade,
Maryland, where he was briefed on a surveillance system “designed to
make kill-or-capture missions as user friendly as possible.” As part
of his training, Rubin learned about the NSA’s “pattern-of-life
analysis of random Afghans at a Top Secret watch floor,” where it
was hard not to feel suffused with a “god-like omniscience.”

Real-Time Targeting

As Rubin discovered later in the field, the US military’s ability to
“eradicate anyone holding an earmarked SIM card” did not prevent
tech-savvy Taliban commanders from “switching out their cards as a
regular security precaution.” The same “real time” targeting
capability was used thousands of times during his deployment “to
finish off alleged enemy combatants, many of whom investigative
reports have now concluded were civilians.” At the time, however,
“battle damage assessments listed virtually all military-aged males
as the enemy.”

The disconnect between war on terror propaganda and the reality of
meddling in the affairs of a country long resistant to foreign
occupation took a painful toll on Edstrom and Rubin. Upon his return
to the United States as an Army captain, Edstrom received “thudding
back slaps and free beers from well-meaning civilians” for whom the
war had become “elevator music.” Meanwhile, he had to live with
the memory of soldiers killed and maimed under his command, and the
knowledge that terrorism — in the form of “targeted
assassinations, bombings, drone strikes, secret ‘black site’
prisons, torture, and wanton civilian murder” — was central to the
“counterterrorism” mission. All Rubin wanted to do, after coming
home, “was stop the war. And short of that, commiserate with those
who, at the very least, could see it.”

The fifteen contributors to _Paths of Dissent _shared that desire as
well and often helped create organizational platforms for educating
and agitating against US foreign and military policy. In his essay for
the book, Jonathan Hutto describes his path from Howard University to
the Navy, where he became a key organizer of the “Appeal for
Redress.” This 2006 statement, backed by several thousand
active-duty, reserve, and National Guard troops serving in ten
countries around the world, called on Congress to end the occupations
of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Following their military service abroad, both Joy Damiani and Vincent
Emanuele found their way to Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans
for Peace. With their guidance and encouragement, Damiani “learned
more and more of the truth whose surface I’d barely scratched as a
miserable, demoralized soldier” assigned, as an Army public affairs
specialist, to “making PR look like news and an unwinnable war look
like a victory.” A Marine who refused a third combat deployment to
Iraq, Emanuele took his criticism of the war to Capitol Hill, where he
testified in 2008 about mistreatment of prisoners and “rules of
engagement” that endangered noncombatants.

Pathways to Dissent

Among the other notable voices in this outstanding collection
are Matthew Hoh [[link removed]], a
dissenter within the Pentagon and the State Department who resigned in
protest in 2009, continued his antiwar activism, and ran for US
Senate
[[link removed]] as
a Green Party candidate from North Carolina in the most recent midterm
election. In another chapter, entitled “Truth, Lies, and
Propaganda,” former minor league baseball player Kevin Tillman
recalls how he and his brother Pat, a National Football League star,
became Army Rangers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat Tillman’s
death during a 2004 firefight in Afghanistan was infamously covered up
by the Pentagon. As his brother recalls, “the Bush Administration
didn’t like the optics of a high-profile soldier like Pat being
killed by friendly fire . . . So the government lied to us — his
family — and to the American people with a manufactured story about
dying by enemy fire and then used him to promote more war.”

In addition to coediting _Paths of Dissent_, retired Army colonel and
former Boston University history professor Bacevich and retired Army
major Sjursen both helped launch new vehicles for influencing public
opinion about military intervention abroad.  Bacevich cofounded
the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
[[link removed]], a Washington, DC–based think tank that is
promoting “ideas that move US foreign policy away from endless war
and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international
peace.” As Bacevich told us when the Quincy Institute was launched
in 2019, “I’m optimistic that we’re going to make a dent at
least in the foreign policy consensus. That won’t necessarily send
the military-industrial complex fleeing or surrendering, but it will
have some impact.”

Like Quincy, the nonprofit Eisenhower Media Network
[[link removed]], started by Sjursen, is
dedicated “to educating Americans about the social, political, and
financial destructiveness of the military industrial complex.” Now
directed by retired Air Force master sergeant Dennis Fritz, the Media
Network has assembled a distinguished roster of former service members
who can offer media outlets an alternative perspective often missing
from mainstream reporting and commentary on “defense issues.”
(Eisenhower experts include Edstrom and his fellow _Paths of
Dissent _contributors Hoh and Dan Berschinksi.)

By making well-credentialed Pentagon critics available to podcasts, TV
and radio shows, national magazines, and newspapers, the media network
is trying to reach “broad cross-partisan audiences,” rather than
just activists already opposed to war and militarism. The authors
of _Un-American_, _Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body_, and _Paths
of Dissent_ have the same vital educational mission, which their
readers can assist by sharing (and even having their local libraries
order) these important books.

_STEVE EARLY AND SUZANNE GORDON are coauthors of the new book Our
Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of
Veterans Affairs, from Duke University Press._

_STEVE EARLY has been active as a labor journalist, lawyer, organizer,
or union representative since 1972. For 27 years, Early was a
Boston-based staff member of the Communications Workers of America. He
finished his CWA career in 2007, after serving as administrative
assistant to the vice-president of CWA District 1, which represents
more than 160,000 workers in New York, New England, and New Jersey,_

_Early aided CWA organizing, bargaining, and/or major strikes
involving NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, AT&T, Verizon, Southern New England
Tel, SBC, Cingular, and Verizon Wireless. He also assisted CWA public
sector organizing, plus mergers with other AFL-CIO affiliates and
independent unions._

_Early’s freelance journalism has appeared in The Nation, The Boston
Globe, Boston Herald, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles
Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor,
Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, Toronto Globe & Mail, The Berkshire
Eagle, The Progressive, CounterPunch, Beyond Chron, The Guardian, In
These Times, Our Times, American Prospect, Mother Jones, Labor
History, New Politics, New Labor Forum, Social Policy, Labor Notes,
Labor Studies Journal, WorkingUSA, Labor Research Review, Monthly
Review, Technology Review, Boston Review, Dollars and Sense, Socialism
and Democracy, Democratic Left, The Guild Reporter, Jacobin, Tikkun,
and Labor: Studies in Working Class History in The Americas._

_He is the author of EMBEDDED WITH ORGANIZED LABOR: JOURNALISTIC
REFLECTIONS ON THE CLASS WAR AT HOME (Monthly Review Press, 2009)
and THE CIVIL WARS IN U.S. LABOR: BIRTH OF A NEW WORKERS’ MOVEMENT
OR DEATH THROES OF THE OLD? (Haymarket Books, 2011). His book, SAVE
OUR UNIONS: DISPATCHES FROM A MOVEMENT IN DISTRESS, was published by
MRP in early 2014._

_SUZANNE GORDON is an American journalist and author who writes about
healthcare delivery and health care systems
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[[link removed]]. Gordon coined the term "Team
Intelligence," to describe the constellation of skills and knowledge
needed to build the kind of teams upon which patient safety
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includes, First Do Less Harm: Confronting the Inconvenient Problems
of Patient Safety (Cornell University Press, 2012), a collection of
essays edited with Ross Koppel
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Checklist: What Else Health Care Can Learn from Aviation Safety and
Teamwork (Cornell University Press
[[link removed]], 2012),
written with commercial pilot Patrick Mendenhall and medical educator
Bonnie Blair O’Connor, with a foreword by Captain Chesley "Sully"
Sullenberger [[link removed]]._

_It also includes books about nursing's contribution to health care
including Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines, and Nursing
Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and
Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care. With Bernice
Buresh, she is author of From Silence to Voice: What Nurses Know and
Must Communicate to the Public, which is in its third edition. Along
with Sioban Nelson, she co-edits The Culture and Politics of Health
Care Work Series at Cornell University Press
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_She is author, co-author or editor of 18 books. She is currently
working on a book about the innovations and clinical care at
the Veterans Health Administration
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is co-author of the play about team relationships in healthcare
entitled Bedside Manners. This play has been performed at numerous
venues including the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,
The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
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Medical Center
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The National Patient Safety Foundation
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and is being used in Interprofessional Education programs in the US
and Canada, including the University of Toronto
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The University of California at San Francisco
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University [[link removed]], and many
others._

_Gordon has been a radio commentator for US CBS Radio
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TeamSTEPPS Master Trainer. Gordon has lectured all over the world
on healthcare [[link removed]] issues.
She is assistant adjunct professor at the University of California at
San Francisco
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of Nursing. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Wilson Centre at
the University of Toronto
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Medicine and an editorial board member of the Journal of
Interprofessional Care
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* Veterans
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* US military
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* military industrial complex
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* war
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* foreign intervention
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* anti-war
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* Pentagon
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