Professional victims

During the last baseball game we attended in Arizona, at Chase Field, the stadium announcer asked all people who had served in the military to stand so that we could applaud and honor them. Though I sympathize with their plight I don’t “honor” these people. But there is no way of expressing sympathy without joining the general applause for nonexistent accomplishments fighting manufactured enemies as unwitting agents of Wall Street (or the military-industrial complex, if that makes more sense.)

All of these people had to go through basic training. It’s a terrible experience that none should endure. My brother, a gentle man who had no business carrying a gun, was force-marched, made to stand guard in the rain until exhausted, sleep deprived and hypothermic. He was drilled to exhaustion, kicked in the stomach by a drill instructor, called every imaginable demeaning name. This, we are told, made him a man. But he was already well on his way to manhood before this interruption. The experience merely separated him from humanity, which is necessary to create killing machines.

I have often run across men on the blogs who were in the military, and they often assume that the experience makes them experts on the various wars. But that cannot be, as by definition they are 1) indoctrinated, and 2) compartmentalized. Their information might be useful if assembled with thousands of others, as it has been with Vietnam veterans, to ascertain the extent of the carnage they perpetuated. Beyond that, is useless. Chris Hedges did an interesting piece in the Nation, although using too small a sample to be statistically significant, on returning Iraq veterans. (The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness behind a subscription wall, unfortunately). But if we were to extrapolate that onto Iraq as a whole, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that we are savages, and brutalized the place.

Killing other humans is not normal behavior for most of us. It is so unnatural that we don’t do it except in extreme states or accidentally. When that happens, we are overwhelmed by revulsion and remorse (PTSD). This is a problem for the military, as they must make killers of ordinary people. So most killing is done from a distance by advanced weaponry. But we still need soldiers and guns for house-to-house raids and to guard the oil and poppy fields. The people that do this have to somehow believe in the cause.

So the boot camp experience by necessity has to deconstruct and reassemble them. They are, as my brother was, psychologically debased, transformed into automatons. They also have to depersonalize the newest enemy on the block, so that we never hear of “Iraqis,” “Germans,”, or “Vietnamese,” but rather of ragheads, sand bunnies, krauts, gooks, and Cong. Women and children cannot be spared in colonial wars, as counterinsurgency makes the whole of the population the enemy. The great open secret we never talk about: My Lai was not even unusual.

I could go on, but my point is that military service is not honorable unless one is called upon to defend his home and loved ones. Americans have not been attacked, except by ourselves, on our homeland since 1812, and we sort of invited that one on ourselves too by first attacking Canada. Going to a foreign land, killing its inhabitants, stealing its resources and destroying its infrastructure is not something I am going to honor anyone about at a ball game.

Military personnel might be a nice people, might think they have behaved honorably or that we have real enemies and that their behavior is praiseworthy and even courageous. But as far as I am concerned, they are just home-grown victims of the American military machine.