Brainwashed Or Just Ignored? Class Stereotypes and the GI Anti-War Movement - By Ryan Harvey

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There’s certainly a difference between a soldier stuck in a battle they don’t agree with, a soldier whose mind starts changing once they start shooting, and a soldier who wants to be there to voluntarily commit crimes against humanity. Every army and police force in the world has a combination of all these various characters.

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Part One:

There are over 25 million veterans in the United States, comprising about 12 percent of the adult population.

While that’s a pretty sizable chunk of the population, there’s a tendency among the radical left to write them off. While I think there are a lot of us who would want to get more involved with the Veteran/GI movement but are afraid - for multiple, mostly illegitimate reasons - there seems to be at least an equal number who say that U.S. soldiers are our enemy. They say that soldiers carry out the imperial and repressive plans of the government. They kill and torture. They steal from people. Thus, they cannot be allies.

This may all be true. They do carry out imperial plans, and many soldiers have testified in their own writings to torturing and killing civilians, or stealing from the homes of Iraqis during house raids. So there is a trace amount of truth in such a naive stance. But there are multiple layers involved in the story of a soldier: family histories, social and class conditions, and specific experiences that lead to military service are all factors. There are also psychological conditions involved in war that non-veterans cannot understand - conditions that lead to terrifying acts of cruelty.

When soldiers are sent into combat in hostile areas, especially with increasingly less combat training, they are put in a position that many people will never experience: kill or be killed. This is no small thing. It is a psychological space where morality is trumped by fear, and where thoughts and theories are worth nothing. Each action is part of a struggle to survive another day, to get home to the family, to wake up again. The training and conditioning of boot camps kicks in hard. The thinking is: "Politics and all that crap can wait, you gotta get out alive." This is the experience of the soldier at war.

This fear can lead to atrocities. The killing of civilians who “could have been” armed; the destruction of whole towns or villages that “could have housed the enemy”; revenge murders of civilians in retaliation for sniper fire, roadside bombs, or landmines; and the killing of people whose cars “could have been bombs”; etc. are all actions that become possible under these circumstances.

There is also the very intentional killings and abuse that derive from the dehumanization of the enemy, or of the entire population to which the enemy belongs, usually aided by a strong institutionalized racism. Greg Payton, a black GI during Vietnam, later stated in an interview: “I remember one day the first sergeant was talking about Gooks. To show you how naive I was, I didn’t know that Gook was a racial slur. I didn’t really understand that. And I remember one day he was talking about Gooks and a light went off in my head and I said Wow, a Gook is the same thing as a Nigger.” The sergeant responded, “You’re a smart nigger.”

Under these conditions, feelings of rage and fear can combine on the battlefield into fierce oppression. In his book Memphis-Nam-Sweden, Terry Witmore, a black GI who deserted after getting injured in Vietnam, explains that some of the worst behavior came from the soldiers who were most against the war. The explanation for such a suggestion is hard to understand unless you’ve been in a combat zone. Some see it this way: "I kill them, I get to go home." Simple. That can be all it takes to unleash aggression.

And there are always those soldiers who just get off on killing, who hold racist views deep inside and tow the old manifest-destiny line today. While this would all stem from its own places, linked to family, culture, and the media, there’s certainly a difference between a soldier stuck in a battle they don’t agree with, a soldier whose mind starts changing once they start shooting, and a soldier who wants to be there to voluntarily commit crimes against humanity. Every army and police force in the world has a combination of all these various characters.

But we must always remember that it is politicians and generals who send soldiers into these scenarios, who design wars, decide strategies (such as the "search and destroy" missions in Vietnam), and enforce the Uniform Code of Military Conduct to ensure that each soldier obeys each order to its fulfillment.

It is only through a GI movement that the political and social space opens for soldiers to refuse orders en masse. So without a movement focused on the military, wars can only continue at their current pace, and soldiers will generally, with few exceptions, follow orders.

SOLDIERS AND THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

Within the context of anti-war organizing, we all-too-often generalize the soldier into a basic apolitical or Right-Wing statistic, a faceless servant of the empire. This is, ironically, the same way the Pentagon views their inventory. So let's explore that generalization.

On a labor level, we don't write off the person who delivers the mail for the price of the stamps for the increasing fear of our mail being read by some Homeland Security goons. Nor do we blame the shelf-stocker at the grocery store for the price of milk. That just doesn’t make sense. So it doesn’t really make sense either to hold the soldier accountable for the decisions of the Commander in Chief or the big shots. In fact, they have far less say in such matters as the shelf-stocker and the mailman.

On a moral level, one might argue that soldiers who have committed crimes against humanity, like killing unarmed civilians or looting houses during raids, are guilty and need to be held accountable. This is often true, and many of these veterans will testify to it, and many will carry the strongest guilt on their shoulders for the rest of their lives. But thankfully, people can change.

Joshua Key, a soldier who served 6 ½ months in Iraq before deserting to Canada, explains his path to change, and the guilt and responsibility he holds, in The Deserter’s Tale:

There is no excuse for the things I did in Iraq… If you have beaten or killed an innocent person, and if there remains a shred of conscience in your heart, you will not likely avoid anguish by saying that you were just following orders… When we prosecute an unjust war, or commit immoral acts in any war at all, the first victims are the people who were unfortunate enough to fall into our hands. The second are ourselves….

To argue that these people constitute a group that is "unreachable" or even worse, unable to change, puts us at an organizational level similar to the prison system. When we look at a radical approach to "criminal justice," we emphasize the conditions of poverty that tend to breed "crime." In the case of a drug-related violent crime, we look at the person's history, what drug(s) they were involved with, what societal conditions led them to crime and drugs, where racism most likely played out in their young life, what the unemployment rate is, where their parents were, etc. The soldier's history, on the other hand - which contains the conditioning by his or her abusive father, their class disposition to military service, the number of predatory military recruiters prowling the halls of their high school, or the cultural surroundings that bred them to appreciate war - seems to be ignored when radicals generalize the soldier.

Joshua Key came from a very abusive and racist family. His escape from his abusive stepfather growing up was to learn how to shot guns. He grew up poor in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and was duped by a recruiter who convinced he could join the Army as an engineer and build bridges in the U.S., no combat. Upon entering he was immediately sent to Iraq.

Joshua also describes his recruitment:

As poor and desperate as my young family was when I drove to the Armed Forces recruiting center in Oklahoma in March 2002, I would never have signed up if I knew that I would be blasting into Iraqi’s houses, terrorizing women and children and detaining every man we could find – and all that, for $1,200 a month… I would never have gone to war for my country, if I had known what my country was doing at war in Iraq.

We need to take a serious look at this tendency among the young left to not examine the deeper context behind the soldier and identify where it comes from, why it exists, and how we can go about changing it.