Vic Sizemore thought he knew why he was going to war. Now, he’s not so sure.
This past Christmas my sister bought us all tickets to see a special Christmas concert. Well into the show, the singer called out for anyone who “has served, is serving now, or has a loved one serving,” in the United States military to stand. Almost half the crowd stood and he honored them with a reverent rendition of “America the Beautiful.”
As the singer crooned “and bless thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea,” I started thinking about those words. In what way is the song speaking of America being good? What is the brotherhood being called down from on high to crown that good? Of course there’s the Marine Corps promise to be semper fidelis.
In 1990, I was with my Marine Corps engineer platoon, participating in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm (an experience I fictionalize here). We did not have communication with the outside world for much of our time at sea and in country during the buildup and the war, but we did manage to hear that our war was not the only thing going on. The Berlin Wall had already crumbled, and while we were in the Middle East, the USSR crumbled as well. On March 6, 1991, George Bush declared the advent of a “new world order.”
In the same speech, Bush admonished that surely, “if we can selflessly confront evil for the sake of good in a land so far away,” we can take care of a few domestic problems. We sailed home, and I took my discharge and went back to school, feeling no better about the war than when we had started, but relieved that, though I had witnessed enemy death, I had at least not caused it with my own hands.
We were the forces of good confronting evil. People thanked us when we came home for protecting their freedom, for serving our country. Who were we there fighting for? What was the identity of our “country?” Throughout history, soldiers have been drummed into a battle frenzy with calls to kill the them in the name of the us. The historians relate tales of “combat between collective identities[.]” Who exactly is the us we were fighting for?
According to Lewis Lapham, the ideal of “What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past.” We are a nation with shared values of freedom, government in which everyone has a voice, equal access to opportunities for all. This is what unites us as a people, crowning our good—the good in whose name we confront evil abroad—with brotherhood.
Not so fast.
While my platoon was cruising toward San Diego on the USS Tarawa after the war, our politicians and defense contractors were coming to terms with the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. What Senator Sam Nunn described as a “threat blank” in the defense budget gaped open—it looked as if the United States was going to be cutting back drastically on military spending. Defense contractors panicked. “An enemy had to be found,” writes Andrew Cockburn for Harper’s Magazine. For the defense industry, it was a matter of urgency. They went on a “feeding frenzy of mergers and takeovers, lubricated by generous subsidies at taxpayer expense in the form of Pentagon reimbursements for ‘restructuring costs.’”
In warning that we are close to losing our democracy to the “mercenary class,” Bill Moyers quotes the historian Plutarch, who described what happened in Rome “The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on,” he writes, “this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”
We were warned by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961that, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” Of course, it’s too late to guard against that; it appears to be general knowledge that the United States’ sword is hopelessly enslaved by the power of gold. Charles Simic writes in “A Thieves’ Thanksgiving”:
Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering in the dust,” warned Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster,” declared Franklin Roosevelt as the United States entered World War II.
Yet today, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting, an independent, bipartisan legislative commission established to study wartime contracting, somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion of US government money has been lost through contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is now common knowledge that contractors were paid millions of dollars for projects that were never built, that the Defense Department gave more than $400 billion to companies that had previously been sanctioned in cases involving fraud, and that the beneficiaries of such past largesse have not only gotten fabulously wealthy, but continue to be invited to pursue lucrative business opportunities in the new homeland security–industrial complex.
When we go to war on behalf of the us, against the them, again I ask who is the us for which we fight: wealthy war profiteers and the politicians in their pockets; not anyone I know and love. In this new—or maybe not so new—world order, the wealthy, who “regard themselves as peers in the realm of a global plutocracy, having less in common with their once-upon-a-time fellow citizens of the United States than they do with their counterparties in Zurich, Bahrain, and Mumbai.” We service members are sent to sacrifice and die for an us to which we do not, and never will, belong.
After all these years since the collapse of the USSR, the old world order is reasserting itself. Andrew Cockburn tells us that Mike Rogers, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee hosted a fundraiser not long after Russia rolled into Crimea in 2014. He oversees a seventy-billion dollar intelligence budget, so a crowd came, “largely composed of” Cockburn writes, “lobbyists for defense contractors.” Mr. Cockburn asked an acquaintance who attended the fundraiser what the mood was like now that things appear to be heating up once again with Russia. His acquaintance told him that it was “borderline euphoric.”
More war, more money—what’s not to like.
More war, more troops sent into harm’s way. More physically and emotionally maimed veterans casting about to find a good reason for their sacrifice. At least the professional soldiers in Rome and Greece were given their fair cut of the war booty. We have been used as unknowing mercenaries, and are being told to stand up at concerts and parades to take our pay in fuzzy patriotism.
Fuck that.
Photo: Sharat Ganapati/Flickr
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As Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) pithily put it after the death of his son Jack in the Great War(WWI)-“if they ask why we died, tell them it was because our fathers’ lied!”
Terry
Thomas Jefferson warn us about banks being powerful and Abe Lincoln also talk about where he worried that corporations would acquire too much power in the USA.
Ronald Reagan promise that he would clean up the waste in the federal government; however, he and his Secretary “Cap the Knife” Weinberger did not cut out the waste in the US military and let the military contractors off the hook.