Guys Like Me

Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace

Michael A. Messner

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781978802834
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

Over the last few decades, as the United States has become embroiled in foreign war after foreign war, some of the most vocal activists for peace have been veterans. These veterans for peace come from all different races, classes, regions, and generations. What common motivations unite them and fuel their activism? Guys Like Me introduces us to five ordinary men who have done extraordinary work as peace activists: World War II veteran Ernie Sanchez, Korean War veteran Woody Powell, Vietnam veteran Gregory Ross, Gulf War veteran Daniel Craig, and Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran Jonathan Hutto. Acclaimed sociologist Michael Messner offers rich profiles of each man, recounting what led him to join the armed forces, what he experienced when fighting overseas, and the guilt and trauma he experienced upon returning home. He reveals how the pain and horror of the battlefront motivated these onetime warriors to reconcile with former enemies, get involved as political activists, and help younger generations of soldiers. Guys Like Me is an inspiring multigenerational saga of men who were physically or psychically wounded by war, but are committed to healing themselves and others, forging a path to justice, and replacing endless war with lasting peace

CHAPTER 1

Projects of Peace

If I step outside the door of my home in South Pasadena at just the right time on New Year’s Day, I stand a chance of witnessing the tail end of a B-2 stealth bomber’s flyover of the nearby Rose Bowl. A neighbor who viewed this spectacle gushed to me that the low-flying bomber was “just the coolest thing ever.” I agreed that seeing the bat-like stealth bomber so close up was awe-inspiring, but wondered aloud why we need to start a football game by celebrating a $2 billion machine that has dropped bombs on Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. When I suggested that the flyover, to me, was yet another troubling instance of the militarization of everyday life, my neighbor replied that, well, perhaps it was thanks to such sophisticated war machines that we are now enjoying a long period of peace. I reminded him that we are still fighting a war in Afghanistan, that we have troops still in Iraq, and that even this past fall, four U.S. Special Forces soldiers died in battle in Niger. It may feel like peace to many of us at home, but for U.S. troops, and for people on the receiving end of U.S. bombs, drone missile strikes, and extended ground occupations, it must feel like permanent war.

WAR IS BOTH EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

The fact that my neighbor and I talked past one another should come as no surprise. For most Americans today, war is both everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, it seems omnipresent. Politicians continually raise fears among the citizenry, insisting that we pony up huge proportions of our nation’s financial and human capital to fight a borderless and apparently endless “Global War on Terror.” We’re inundated with war imagery—an unending stream of films and TV shows depicting past and current wars,¹ pageantry like the Rose Bowl flyover, and celebrations of the military in sports programming exploit sports to recruit the next generation of soldiers.² The result, according to social scientist Adam Rugg, is “a diffused military presence” in everyday life.³

Following the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, U.S. wars in the Middle East have continued to rage, spilling over national borders and introducing new and troubling questions about modern warfare. Though scaled back since the initial invasions, these wars continue. Through fiscal year 2018, the financial cost of our “Post-9/11 Wars” has surpassed $1.8 trillion, and Brown University’s Costs of War Project puts that number at $5.6 trillion, taking into account interest on borrowed money to pay for these wars and estimates of “future obligations” in caring for medical needs of veterans.⁴ The human toll has been even costlier. By mid-2016, 6,860 U.S. military personnel had been killed in the Global War on Terror, and more than 52,000 had been wounded.⁵ Most of these have been young men. Through the end of 2014, 391,759 military veterans had been treated in Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities for “potential or provisional Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” following their return from Afghanistan or Iraq.⁶ It’s difficult to accurately measure the carnage inflicted on the populations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but the Costs of War Project estimates that between 2001 and 2016 more than 109,000 “opposition fighters” and over 200,000 civilians have been directly killed, and 800,000 more “have died as an indirect result of the wars.”⁷

Military conscription was halted in the United States in 1973, a direct legacy of the mass movement that helped to end the war in Vietnam. With no draft in place, the military shifted to an all-volunteer force that required intensifying recruitment strategies, especially in times of escalating wars. During the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the volunteer military faced dire personnel shortages that led to multiple redeployments, placing huge burdens on military personnel and their families.⁸ Two years into the Iraq War, U.S. military desertions were on the rise, and “recruiters were consistently failing to meet monthly enlistment quotas, despite deep penetration into high schools, sponsorship of NASCAR and other sporting events, and a $3-billion Pentagon recruitment budget.”⁹ In response, the military stepped up recruitment ads on TV and in movie theatres, and launched direct recruitment efforts in American high schools and community colleges.¹⁰ The American high school, faced with increased recruiting efforts and opposition from parents and others, became, in education scholar William Ayers’s words, “a battlefield for hearts and minds.”¹¹

Since 9/11 the military seems omnipresent and a state of war permanent, while paradoxically, the vast majority of Americans feel untouched by it all. Disconnected from the wars, we go about our daily lives as though we’re living in a period of extended peace. For most of us, war is nowhere. How is this Orwellian situation tolerable, or even possible? Following America’s defeat in Vietnam, the government has engaged in a carefully controlled, public-relations framing of news of all wars and invasions, containing contrary views that could emerge from critical investigative reporting.¹² Examples include “embedding” reporters with U.S. troops during the invasion of Iraq and prohibiting the news media from filming or photographing flag-draped coffins being unloaded from military transport planes.

Another reason most people experience these omnipresent wars as “nowhere” lies in the shifting nature of warfare. Today, the military can deploy new technologies to minimize the number of U.S. casualties while maximizing the carnage of those designated as terrorists, enemies, or targets. The normalization of drone strikes—escalated by President Barack Obama and expanded by President Donald Trump—is the epitome of this “out of sight, out of mind” warfare. As the United States deploys drone strikes, war becomes “unilateral … a kind of permanent, low-level military action that threatens to erase the boundary between war and peace and … makes it easier for the United States to engage in casualty-free, and therefore debate-free, intervention while further militarizing the relationship between the US and the Muslim world,” according to anthropologist Hugh Gusterson.¹³

Another reason for the electorate’s distance from current wars is the vast divide between civilians and the military. Only half of 1 percent of the population is in the military, the lowest rate since between the world wars. Los Angeles Times reporters David Zucchino and David Cloud also note that Congress today has the lowest rate of military service in history, and four successive presidents have never served on active duty.¹⁴ As many as 80 percent of those in the military come from families in which a parent or a sibling is also in the military. Military personnel often live behind the gates of installations or in surrounding communities. This segregation is so pronounced that nearly half of the 1.3 million active-duty service members in the United States are concentrated in five states: California, Virginia, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. In short, Zucchino and Cloud conclude, the U.S. military is becoming a separate and isolated warrior class. With no draft in place, large proportions of the population, especially those from the privileged classes, are increasingly insulated from the experience and realities of military service and war.

Veterans are symbolically made visible through “Support the Troops” celebrations and political oratory, but the voices of actual veterans who have fought our wars are mostly under the radar. And even less audible are the voices of vets who advocate for peace. I wrote this book because I believe it’s more important than ever for us to listen to the voices of veterans for peace, those who have been there and recovered sufficiently (no easy task) to inform us how traumatically devastating and morally compromising it is to be an instrument of America’s military-industrial geopolitics. This book highlights the life stories of five veterans whose experiences spanned five wars: World War II, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the recent and continuing wars in the Middle East. Why is this legacy of peace advocacy by military veterans so little known?

MANLY SILENCE

Part of the reason many Americans do not know the true costs of war, I believe, is due to a phenomenon I’ve come to call “manly silence,” like my grandfather’s reluctance to talk about his World War I experiences or about his opposition to future wars. Every war births a new generation of veterans who live out their lives with the trauma of combat embedded their bodies and minds, but many remain silent about their experiences. That was certainly my father’s modus operandi after World War II, and even my grandfather’s predominant way of dealing with his experiences in World War I.

How do we understand so many men’s silence about what they endured, not only that of the millions of combatants of the two world wars, but also that of combat veterans today? Although women fight shoulder to shoulder with men today, and perhaps this phenomenon of manly silence will slowly change, the military is still a place governed by rigid and narrow conceptions of masculinity, a key aspect of which is keeping a stiff upper lip. One common refrain among war veterans is that it makes no sense to talk of such things because only someone who was there can truly understand their experience. Only veterans who endured the same traumas, witnessed similar horrors, or committed comparable acts of brutality are worth opening to. Otherwise silence, often accompanied by self-medication and other efforts at dissociating oneself from these traumas, prevails.

The foundation for this kind of emotional fortification rests on narrow definitions of masculinity, often internalized at an early age and then enforced and celebrated in masculinist institutions like the military. But rigid masculinity is not confined to the military; it’s more general. Research by psychologist Joseph Schwab and his colleagues showed that men routinely respond to stressful life experiences by avoiding emotional disclosure that they fear might make them appear vulnerable.¹⁵ Silence, the researchers concluded, is the logical outcome of internalized rules of masculinity: a real man is admired and rewarded for staying strong and stoic during times of adversity.

Who benefits from this manly silence? Certainly institutions like the military that instill and then rely on men’s private endurance of pain, fear, and trauma. But individual men (and women) rarely benefit from such taciturnity. Trying to live up to this narrow ideal of masculinity comes with severe costs for men’s physical health, emotional well-being, and relationships.¹⁶ Researchers and medical practitioners have compiled long lists of the costs men pay for adhering to narrow definitions of masculinity: undiagnosed depression;¹⁷ alcoholism, heart disease, and risk-taking that translate into shorter lifespans;¹⁸ fear of emotional self-disclosure and suppressed access to empathy, resulting in barriers to intimacy.¹⁹

A 2015 study of 1.3 million veterans who served during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars showed suicide rates twice that of nonveterans.²⁰ The New York Times reported in 2009 escalating rates of rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, and homicide committed by men who had returned from multiple deployments to the war in Iraq.²¹ PTSD impedes—often severely, and sometimes for the rest of one’s life—veterans’ reentry into civilian life, and thus their development of healthy, productive, and happy postwar and postmilitary lives. A combat veteran of the Vietnam War told me, “PTSD? It don’t ever go away.” For the men I interviewed, PTSD was a lifelong challenge that—after in some cases years of denial, struggle, alcoholism, and medical care—eventually served as an impetus to do something healthy, positive, and peaceful with their lives.

During World War I, military leaders and medical experts were concerned with the growing problem of “shell shock” among troops subjected to the horrors of trench warfare. Little understood at the time was the emotional impact of modern warfare’s growing efficiency—with machine guns, volleys of artillery fire, or strafing from low-flying planes—in maiming and massacring hundreds, even thousands in a very short time. Leo Braudy argues that by World War I, technological war had “obliterated” the ways wars traditionally elevated and celebrated a chivalrous ideal of heroic warrior masculinity. Eclipsed by the realities of modern warfare in the first decades of the twentieth century, these outmoded ideals were still widely held, including the belief that “war … would affirm national vitality and individual honor … and rescue the nation from moral decay.”²²

The belief that fighting a war would build manly citizens plagued men’s already terrible experiences on the battlefield. Grunts like my grandfather experienced no glorious affirmation of their manhood; they were exposed instead to terror, vulnerability, and disillusion. For many, this experience of modern warfare manifested as a suite of crippling somatic symptoms that came to be called shell shock, viewed at the time, as described by George L. Mosse, as a kind of “enfeebled manhood”: “Shattered nerves and lack of will-power were the enemies of settled society and because men so afflicted were thought to be effeminate, they endangered the clear distinction between genders which was generally regarded as an essential cement of society.… The shock of war could only cripple those who were of a weak disposition, fearful and, above all, weak of will.… War was the supreme test of manliness, and those who were the victims of shell-shock had failed this test.”²³

During World War II, attitudes began to shift. General Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed dismay with General George Patton’s denigration and abuse of soldiers suffering from “battle neurosis” as malingering cowards. Mosse explains that in 1943, General Omar Bradley issued an order that “breakdown in combat be regarded as exhaustion, which helped to put to rest the idea that only th...