A Veteran's Suffering Does Not Justify Their Violence
Many in the US military sacrificed much for the cause of imperialism and some continue to be mistreated by the government despite their service, but this does not excuse their atrocities.
A gauche example (and possible lie), but a statement representative of many “wounded warriors” and their enablers
In this previous entry, I outlined and debunked the commonly used moral defenses of US soldiers and their private-sector logistical supporters. One statement in particular bears further examination, though, a counter to the sympathy-garnering plea that a warfighter’s actions should be excused because they were injured physically or psychologically in the war or suffered some other major loss as a result of their service. My response: “True, soldiers sacrifice time, energy, and sometimes their lives for a cause. But so do mafia soldiers, extreme sports athletes, and Russian soldiers in 2022. Mere sacrifice is not sufficient to justify the cause for which sacrifice is being made.”
It is true that a massive propaganda effort exists in the US to glorify military service and recruiters to lie to potential enlistees. This is precisely the reason it is crucial to hold veterans accountable for their actions: this is a key part of combating that propaganda. The worship of warfighters in the US media and the immediate forgiveness they enjoy for any crimes they commit (even in the rare instance they openly admit to having committed them) is inseparable from a support for the particular war they waged. The actions are inseparable, because the enlistee serves willingly. If criticism of the military industrial complex falls just short of indicting the very fighters of its war, the criticism is toothless and vain, an echo of the standard institutional defense of American police—the police themselves are fundamentally either good or neutral, only the system they labor under is objectionable. This is simply not true, and many examples can be found here:
Any injured warfighters who are now regretful of their service fall into one of two categories: they are entirely self-interested and their regret is solely the result of their injury or other mistreatment by the military (meaning they are amoral and entirely self-interested, no better than any other criminal whose schemes backfired), or they are also now aware of the deadly folly of their service and duly regretful to the damage they have caused to others’ lives. In neither of these cases does the veteran’s dogged defense of the military, the wars, or even soldiering in general serve to warn others away from undergoing similar imperilment at the hands of our bloodthirsty, imperialist leaders.
If sacrifice does lead to sanctity and justification of the mission, would this article be a more compelling read if I cut off a finger as I was researching it? What if I lost a hand? What if reading about the unending atrocities of the US military gave me PTSD? If a reader decided to offer a rebuttal, would they be required to cut off two fingers to give their response the adequate gravitas? There is a very deadly sunk cost fallacy which is just as potent an argument to remain in war as mounting casualties are for the abandonment of it, which is witnessed with the end of any conflict (most recently the withdrawal from Afghanistan): “these lives should not have been lost in vain.” They will always have been lost in vain, no matter how long the unwinnable war drags on, and the sentiment only applies to wars of conquest at any rate. A truly justified defensive war from a sinister invader would require no such justification, and simply be fought as a matter of fact. To remain in a quagmire simply because so many have already died in it is to glorify and amplify the act of dying in a quagmire, a far more offensive sentiment to the injured survivors and the families of the dead.
Should we have sympathy for a wounded veteran? As they are still human beings (despite their occasional claims otherwise), yes. But they should be treated with no more deference or respect than that which would be afforded a daredevil who lost a limb in an ATV crash. Or, for a more apt analogy, a survivor of a vicious and pointless gangland turf war who, for instance, got an eye shot out in a drive-by. The salient difference: the veteran has access to a premier healthcare package for rehabilitation, prosthetics, physical therapy, and counseling. Others, especially those without insurance, are not so lucky. In either case, the manner of injury is important, both in assessing treatment and the likelihood that it will recur at some point in the future.
These questions must be asked of every “wounded warrior”: what were you doing when you were wounded, and was it the result of justified self-defense on the part of a population you were in the process of brutalizing during the waging of a legally and morally bankrupt war which was nothing more than a boondoggle for politicians and their private sector allies (and which was known to you at the time)? If a suspected mafia enforcer was injured, we would be right to wonder where those injuries came from, especially if they were of a defensive nature; why do we not also wonder why it was that a wounded veteran lost his or her legs to a roadside bomb? What were they on the way to do? None of them are innocent, whether they were on a routine patrol or on the way to kill an Iraqi family. As some would have it, a wounded veteran is just as much a victim of government policy as the country they invaded—this is preposterous, even restricting analysis to sheer numbers (looking at Iraq alone, at least a million Iraqis were killed, millions more injured, displaced, and impoverished; importantly, the US stopped even attempting to keep an accurate count), but to compare the invader to the invaded is to equate the rapist with their victim, especially given the character of the average enlistee:
In this entry, I directly quoted primary sources and veterans who chose to be open and honest about the atrocities they witnessed and committed abroad. Many of these quotes come from veterans who admit to war crimes with a freewheeling attitude which could only come from a criminal who knows they will never be prosecuted for their crimes. One particularly harrowing example comes from this Nation article:
While on tank patrol through the narrow streets of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, Pfc. Clifton Hicks was given an order. Abu Ghraib had become a “free-fire zone,” Hicks was told, and no “friendlies” or civilians remained in the area. “Game on. All weapons free,” his captain said. Upon that command, Hicks’s unit opened a furious fusillade, firing wildly into cars, at people scurrying for cover, at anything that moved. Sent in to survey the damage, Hicks found the area littered with human and animal corpses, including women and children, but he saw no military gear or weapons of any kind near the bodies. In the aftermath of the massacre, Hicks was told that his unit had killed 700-800 “enemy combatants.” But he knew the dead were not terrorists or insurgents; they were innocent Iraqis. “I will agree to swear to that till the day I die,” he said. “I didn’t see one enemy on that operation.”…
Several veterans said it was common to carry a stash of extra automatic weapons and shovels to plant near the bodies of unarmed civilians they had killed to make it look as if they were combatants. Others described the surreal sensation of committing cold-blooded murder without facing any consequences. Jon Michael Turner, who served as a machine gunner with Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Eighth Marines, said he shot an unarmed Iraqi in front of the man’s father and friend. “The first round didn’t kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterwards he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend…and I said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen.’ So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family.” Later, Turner pointed to a tattoo on his right wrist of the Arabic words for “fuck you.” “That was my choking hand,” he explained. “And any time I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead and use it.”…
“This is not an isolated incident,” the testifiers uttered over and over, to the point of liturgy, insisting that the atrocities they committed or witnessed were common. The hearings were not organized to point fingers at “bad apples” or even particular squads, several testifiers said.
Why does America afford premier medical care to these admitted butchers and abusers while everyone else scrapes by hoping they never get sick or injured, putting off essential medical care due to cost often with their sadly preventable deaths as a result? If anything, the opposite should be true: if we are comfortable rationing medical care based on the whims of the free market, should not the shop accident casualty who needs rehabilitation move to the front of the line, while the veteran, who suffered reprisal at the hands of the population he willingly destroyed, be asked to wait?
There are of course exceptions to the rule and many veterans do fight a difficult, sometimes years-long battle to secure needed medical care, especially for psychiatric issues, but this should be a sobering peek for these veterans into the lives of millions of civilians in the US, as outlined in the above “Miniscule Value of Human Life Under Capitalism” essay. The obvious answer: everyone should have access to free medical care regardless of how their injuries came about. But this is not the reality of the late-stage, collapsing economic arrangement in the United States. These veterans were promised some manner of care in return for their service; civilians were never given such a right. The difference is purely legalistic.
Veterans: repudiate your service! Your injuries are defensive wounds given to you by a population you were sent to brutalize in the manner of a mafia thug sent to terrorize a rival organization. You should be so lucky that those defensive wounds are being adequately treated.
Current active duty warfighters: desert your posts immediately. Few of you will even suffer consequences, aside perhaps from the loss of your VA benefits (which would put you roughly on par with the rest of us in terms of healthcare access):
At the height of the Iraq War, fewer than 5 percent of deserters received a court-martial, and fewer than one percent served prison time.
The Pentagon, in fact, makes little effort even to count missing troops. There is no comprehensive list of AWOL and desertion cases for the military, nor any unit responsible for keeping one. When I called the Office of Personnel and Readiness at the Pentagon to ask why this was so, a lieutenant commander named Nathan Christensen said that, by chance, his office had just recently compiled such a list, which was so complete that it counted even those who were missing for a few hours. But as soon as Christensen sent me the list, it was clear that his figures were drastically low. For example, Christensen listed the total number of missing troops in the American military in 2007 at 1,571. The Marines alone list twice as many missing in 2007, and the Army lists three times as many. Christensen’s total number of missing personnel between 2001 and 2012 was 14,650. The real figure, based on internal numbers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, appears to be north of 50,000.
Hylton goes on to say that “the only deserters who have consistently been punished by the American military are those who went to Canada … it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the military is making a special example of those who fled north and spoke out.” In other words, the only people punished for desertion are those who speak out publicly about it. Bergdahl may have not spoken out publicly about his reasons for walking off his base in Afghanistan, but he has become the most well-known soldier to go AWOL — and never had the choice to go quietly. Most AWOL soldiers also don’t have much of the legislative branch, and many members of the military, questioning their motives.
Only 40 percent of Marines would report a fellow unit member for committing a war crime (55% for the Army); the military has a rampant sexual assault problem it still refuses to address as well as pronounced white nationalism issues. These injured veterans are by and large not ignorant sacrificial lambs at the altar capitalism or brave defenders of liberty who gave significantly to protect us, they are the equivalent of unlucky gangbangers looking for a free meal ticket whose ill-conceived plan backfired.
To be sure, the economic pressure to enlist was always to some degree real (though not as compelling or common a motivator to enlist as many believe), as was the effective propaganda campaign which permeates American media, which is why debt relief is now being criticized as potentially harmful to already-falling recruitment numbers:
In the wake of President Joe Biden unveiling his new policy on student loan debt relief, there’s been plenty of policy responses, ranging from glowing praise to condemnations. While the White House’s policy will benefit millions, not all of the criticisms should be dismissed out of hand, and not all of the disapproval is coming from the Democrat’s opponents on the right.
That said, some critics really haven’t thought through their talking points. Take Republican Rep. Jim Banks, for example, who published this message yesterday:
“Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.”
Once in a while, I’m surprised by what prominent Republicans are willing to put in writing. This is one of those times.
To be sure, concerns about military enlistments are legitimate. Politico recently published a report on the issue, noting that there’s bipartisan pressure on the Pentagon to address “what is widely considered the worst recruiting environment since the end of the Vietnam War.”
To anyone thinking of enlisting due to dire economic conditions: rob a bank instead. You are less likely to ruin your life, and your actions will have been more justifiable than serving in any potential current or future US military. And any potential injuries to your body and mind are no more worthy of care than those suffered by a heavy equipment operator or extreme athlete—in fact, they are less so, because they were received in the commission of a demonstrable war crime.