CHAPTER 1
Projects of Peace
If I step outside the door of my home in South Pasadena at just the right time on New Yearâs Day, I stand a chance of witnessing the tail end of a B-2 stealth bomberâs flyover of the nearby Rose Bowl. A neighbor who viewed this spectacle gushed to me that the low-flying bomber was âjust the coolest thing ever.â 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 nationâs financial and human capital to fight a borderless and apparently endless âGlobal War on Terror.â Weâre inundated with war imageryâan 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 âa diffused military presenceâ 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 âPost-9/11 Warsâ has surpassed $1.8 trillion, and Brown Universityâs 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 âfuture obligationsâ 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 âpotential or provisional Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)â following their return from Afghanistan or Iraq.6 Itâs 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 âopposition fightersâ and over 200,000 civilians have been directly killed, and 800,000 more âhave died as an indirect result of the wars.â7
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 ârecruiters 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.â9 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 Ayersâs words, âa battlefield for hearts and minds.â11
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 weâre living in a period of extended peace. For most of us, war is nowhere. How is this Orwellian situation tolerable, or even possible? Following Americaâs 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 âembeddingâ 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 ânowhereâ 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 strikesâescalated by President Barack Obama and expanded by President Donald Trumpâis the epitome of this âout of sight, out of mindâ warfare. As the United States deploys drone strikes, war becomes âunilateral ⊠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,â according to anthropologist Hugh Gusterson.13
Another reason for the electorateâs 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 âSupport the Troopsâ 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 itâs 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 Americaâs 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 Iâve come to call âmanly silence,â like my grandfatherâs 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 fatherâs modus operandi after World War II, and even my grandfatherâs predominant way of dealing with his experiences in World War I.
How do we understand so many menâs 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; itâs 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 menâs 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 menâs 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 impedesâoften severely, and sometimes for the rest of oneâs lifeâveteransâ 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, âPTSD? It donât ever go away.â For the men I interviewed, PTSD was a lifelong challenge thatâafter in some cases years of denial, struggle, alcoholism, and medical careâeventually 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 âshell shockâ among troops subjected to the horrors of trench warfare. Little understood at the time was the emotional impact of modern warfareâs growing efficiencyâwith machine guns, volleys of artillery fire, or strafing from low-flying planesâin maiming and massacring hundreds, even thousands in a very short time. Leo Braudy argues that by World War I, technological war had âobliteratedâ 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 âwar ⊠would affirm national vitality and individual honor ⊠and rescue the nation from moral decay.â22
The belief that fighting a war would build manly citizens plagued menâs 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 âenfeebled manhoodâ: âShattered 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.â23
During World War II, attitudes began to shift. General Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed dismay with General George Pattonâs denigration and abuse of soldiers suffering from âbattle neurosisâ as malingering cowards. Mosse explains that in 1943, General Omar Bradley issued an order that âbreakdown in combat be regarded as exhaustion, which helped to put to rest the idea that only th...