(The following remarks were delivered at Mickey Mouse in Vietnam, a film-based anti-war observance of Veterans/Armistice Day, at the Buskirk Chumley Theater, Bloomington, Indiana, November 12, 2018.)
Thank you, Tim, for this vital event that you’ve organized. And thank you, dear audience, for being part of this critical conversation.
I first want to share a couple anecdotes from my ROTC training, at Notre Dame, about 15 years ago. These stories are quite ordinary. They are not glamorous. They take place in university classrooms--not in Iraq or Korea--but in public spaces that all of us are familiar with. But because of their ordinariness and their lack of glamor, I believe they are reflective of how most of the public--including most of the military--views war. I believe they are reflective of how insidious, of how normal, and of how banal, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, militarization is.
My freshmen year as a midshipman, I was introduced to the “controversy” surrounding the annual Pass in Review, a parade on campus conducted by the three ROTC units. “[It] is a long-standing military tradition where newly assigned commanders get to inspect their troops.” In the past, I learned, this ceremony had taken place outside in full view of the university, but now it was to be held inside. Officially, the university cited only unpredictable spring weather as the reason for the move. But the upperclassmen midshipmen told me that the students of Pax Christi (the Catholic peace movement) and left-leaning faculty were to blame. These faculty and students did not want the ceremony outside or want the ceremony at all, and so the university moved it indoors as a compromise. That was the scuttlebut, at least. The student newspaper covered the “controversy” every year and student op-eds would fire back and forth in the lead-up, and then it would blow over until the next seasonal campus controversy.
In addition to the unit commanders standing on the parade stage, Notre Dame’s version of the Pass in Review involved our civilian priest-president, also “reviewing” the troops and giving a speech.
Whether or not Pax Christi protest was behind the move, one of the group’s larger aims was to remove ROTC from Notre Dame’s campus and from other Catholic colleges and universities.
The standard ROTC wisdom retorting the Pax Christi protest was: yes, war is terrible, but sometimes necessary; if we are going to have a military, that military might as well be led by Notre Dame-educated officers; we would be both intelligent and moral, formed by the university’s academic rigor and Catholic intellectual tradition and community, an elite and prestigious community no less; our two required theology classes, two required philosophy classes, other liberal arts requirements, civilian dorm communities, each with its own chapel and liturgies, and high study-abroad participation, to name a couple attributes, would form well-rounded officers.
(But) Our captain my freshman year actually didn’t like this line of reasoning. Not a graduate of Notre Dame himself, he rejected it on its elitist grounds, taking issue with the implied claim that only the Notre Dames of the world could produce moral, discerning officers.
Nevertheless, I had accepted the standard wisdom, like most of my classmates did. We would be the philosopher-officers. I was the self-satisfied self-sacrificer.
(1/3 Metal Jacket)
Senior year’s “naval science” class was “Leadership and Management.” During one round of student presentations, a Marine-option classmate played the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, of Private Pyle fumbling his way through Marine Corps boot camp. We laughed at the raucous, not-politically-correct Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and the helpless Pyle. I think some leadership and management lessons hid somewhere in between the scenes. Regardless, my classmate probably received an A or a B+ on the presentation. It was hard not to get A’s and B’s in most naval science classes.
By the time senior year concluded, I had seen the first third of Full Metal Jacket numerous times. I recall a different student or maybe one of the other lieutenants showing parts of the film in another naval science class a previous year. Every so often, someone had it playing in the residence hall. I chalked it up as a guys’ dorm classic that I was supposed to like but hadn’t really seen, like Animal House or Scarface. However, from what I remember, it was only ever the first third of the film. I never hung around long enough to watch the rest. Did they or we watch the rest of the movie? I didn’t, not until two years ago in fact.
For those who haven’t seen the film or seen the last two-thirds of it, Full Metal Jacket is brutal to watch. It is a story of dehumanization on multiple levels. Private Pyle is dehumanized. Those were the scenes we laughed at in class. While we’re maybe supposed to laugh at Pyle getting yelled at by the drill sergeant every minute of boot camp, I imagine Kubrick also wanted us to feel sorry for him. If that’s not apparent enough in the first third of the film, it becomes starkly evident by the bathroom scene where (spoiler alert) Pyle shoots Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and then shoots himself. Private Joker is witness to the scene, and then the film shifts, months and miles away, to Joker as a Marine journalist for Stars and Stripes in Vietnam, near the city of Hue, around the time of the Tet Offensive.
I don’t think you could, or should, reduce the film and simply call it an “anti-war movie.” Rather, it seems to follow the rules that author and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien wrote about war stories:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.... As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
Full Metal Jacket is indeed obscene, both at Parris Island and in Vietnam. Both are versions of hell, at least for some of the characters. In order to make war, to make hell, you have to dehumanize: from boot camp at Parris Island to the fighting “in theater.” From Hartman to Pyle and ultimately back to Hartman in the bathroom, from “Yankee imperialists” to “gooks” and in return, from oversexed men (on all sides) to the vulnerable women caught in between. From the movie to the real thing, dehumanization makes the whole war spin. When you watch the entirety of Full Metal Jacket, that seems to me to be the only lesson.
(Rules of Engagement)
On a different day in class, we looked at a fictional scenario in the movie Rules of Engagement. Perhaps some of you know this movie. In the particular scene, Tommy Lee Jones’ men are being attacked. They do not have the upper hand. Meanwhile, a little ways away in the jungle, Samuel L. Jackson’s men do have the upper hand. He has several recently unarmed North Vietnamese soldiers at his disposal. He orders them to call off the attack on Jones’ men across the jungle. When they refuse, Jackson kills one of the prisoners. Finally, the North Vietnamese commander, threatened himself, calls off the ambush on Tommy Lee Jones’ platoon.
Was Jackson right to kill the unarmed man in order to save his men?
It was and is a worthy question, and my ROTC classmates landed on different sides of the debate. There was much discussion of that morality of the moment, but not much discussion of the morality of the historical context leading up to it. If we zoomed out and asked the morality questions of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the first place, would that not then necessarily color our response to the Samuel L. Jackson moment? I had that question and other analogous questions in the back of my mind, in that class, as our country was in year one of the Iraq war. But, I don’t recall raising my hand.
(Just War Forum)
Every fall, our ROTC unit would put on a forum about just war theory. This was how we were different from other ROTC units across the country, we told ourselves. Who else was having these intellectual and moral discussions?
The speaker every year was Professor Charles Rice, of the Notre Dame Law School. I actually relished these types of forums and lectures, which would shape me into that philosopher-officer. Professor Rice would go over the definitions involved in the theory: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, etc. He would broach particular scenarios in the more distant past. We would weigh in, and then there was some healthy debate. While he was mostly very forgiving of U.S. history and policy, I do remember he always held up the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II as an unjust act.
In the fall of 2002, our unit held another--my third--just war forum. Also, in the fall of 2002, the Bush administration was making the case for preemptive war against Iraq. In the forum, we tackled the annual, requisite jus ad bellum, jus in bello, Dresden, and other historical scenarios. Then, one of the senior midshipmen asked, “What about this impending war in Iraq?”
“That’s a good question,” Professor Rice answered. “And a tough one. Well, there’s just so much we don’t know, and I think we just have to trust our leaders on this one.”
The senior seemed less than satisfied with the answer. “But, would a preemptive war be a just war?”
“Yes, very good question, but as I said, I think we just have to trust our leaders on this one.”
And, that was all we said about that. Five months later, our leaders, whom we trusted, ordered the invasion of Iraq.
**
Despite its depiction of war as hell, you might still arrive at the end of the Full Metal Jacket and believe that war is morally right in some cases. That is fair. Or, after you’ve done the calculus, you might even say that it was morally right in Vietnam, or more specifically in those scenes in Hue. I would disagree, but fair enough.
You might then add in the historical context, also Vietnam, leading up to the Samuel L. Jackson moment in Rules of Engagement and still not develop the same uneasiness I did. Also fair.
Your just war forum might actually touch on the war at hand--be it Iraq, be it the next place, Iran?--and you could, conceivably, argue that Iraq or the next war is just. And although I would strongly disagree, I grant that that would be somewhat fair, too.
However, if we cut the movie short, we have only the guise of introspection, which gives lie to the moral formation we so proudly claim is happening. If we do not look at the larger context in which Rules of Engagement takes place, it does the case study injustice. (The popular movie didn’t ask those larger questions of the public, either). In class, we look at the case study of the USS Stark, which was allegedly accidentally fired upon by our then-ally Iraq in the 1980s as they fought Iran. We examine the Stark commander’s decisions, but we don’t talk about the money and weapons (including chemical) we pumped into the Iran-Iraq war. Those questions aren’t up for debate, apparently. We look at the case study of the USS Vincennes, in which we shot down an Iranian civilian jet, killing the 290 passengers onboard. We study the miscommunication and missteps--and I believe shooting down that plane was an honest tactical mistake--but we don’t discuss the larger, strategic question of why our ships are in the Gulf in the first place. At the risk of sounding glib, you’re bound to shoot down a civilian plane sooner or later with all that military hardware over there.
If we invite only a speaker whose inconclusive conclusions about Iraq we know are safe for our ROTC/military audience, we are not actually holding a forum. By the way, Professor Rice, what historical examples would give us reason to trust our leaders? The land-grab Mexican-American war? “Remember the Maine”? The Gulf of Tonkin resolution? Iran-Contra? The made-for-TV-so-we-can-get-over-Vietnam-syndrome wars in Granada, Panama, or Iraq I?
You might nevertheless want the university to hold the Pass in Review front and center and therefore show proudly that it “supports the troops.” In making your case, you might highlight that there are strong historical connections between Notre Dame and the military, most notably when the navy established a training program on campus during World War II that boosted enrollment and provided an economic surge for the university. Fair. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should have military parades on civilian campuses, or Catholic priests blessing the soon-to-be troops.
It seems to me that, in a thinking, democratic society, we should be uncomfortable with parades and priests’ blessings of troops, or even football game fighter jet flyovers, for that matter. That is, we should be wary of any military thing that obscures what the military and war is actually about.
Furthermore, to not want such military parades or priestly blessings, be it on the quad or indoors, is not necessarily to be anti-military. For some, maybe. But, it is to be anti-militarization, which we all should be.
We all have “dirty hands” (Reinhold Niebuhr) in this “filthy rotten system” (Dorothy Day). We, as individuals and as collectives, are a multitude of contradictions. After all, Private Joker’s helmet in Full Metal Jacket reads “Born to Kill” at the same time that he wears a peace button.
We have these contradictions, but we do our best to resolve them. In military training, or in ROTC training, and in actual-war making, in policy-making, we should try to hold the tension of these contradictions--of competing impulses --and at the very least, make it to the end of the movie. We should dare to ask the bigger questions. And ask not just the Dresden 1945 question but also the Baghdad 2003 question. Intellectual honesty seems to demand that.
(Part 2: Critical Yeast)
In my second year out in the actual navy, I nearly completed and submitted a conscientious objector application. I was on a broken minesweeper tied to the pier in Ingleside, Texas. In the end, I did not submit it. I wasn’t sure I was truly a CO. And, even though the navy was hard, I was safe and unlikely to ever be in combat. But, I think I didn’t submit it because I wasn’t ready to upend my entire life. I think I lacked the courage.
Toward the end of my short naval career and immediately thereafter, I embraced pacifism. I needed a totality, a worldview that would buttress my wandering mid-20s identity. With that embrace of pacifism, I mistakenly thought I had to make the case against every war in the past and every war in the future. Thus, I read and devoured history with an agenda. It was a heavy burden to prove, and I exhausted myself. Simultaneously, I was also afraid to engage with people who viewed the world differently than I did--including and maybe especially those still in the military. Now, while I still admire the saints, teachers, and friends who are pacifist and read their books, my anti-war sentiments are a little more nuanced,... or I should say, honestly, more muddied and confused. I am probably a de facto pacifist, when you consider most current political contexts and the destruction of modern weaponry. Because, with such weapons now, can there actually be a just war?
I share this philosophical evolution of mine because, in my conclusion, I want to argue that we need to make common cause with all types of war resisters.
Now, seventeen years after my first Pass in Review, when I didn’t give eye contact to the Pax Christi protesters on the sidewalk, I still actually find some truth in the aforementioned Notre Dame ROTC retort: that is, the military, the police, and any people entrusted with power and guns ought to have some larger, liberal arts, ethical training.
But, that training is not a foregone conclusion. ROTC at Notre Dame, or insert any school, does not, by definition, make a moral philosopher-officer.
Catholic ethics gives primacy to an individual’s conscience. (I briefly share the Catholic framework here, but analogies of this ethical framework exist in other faith traditions and secular philosophies.) We have the duty to follow our conscience, but we first have the duty to form it. In short, Catholic ethics recognizes both just war theory and pacifism. That is, it allows for people to choose to fight in just wars and for people to choose not to fight in any war. Somewhere in between those two, it also allows for selective conscientious objection, that is, opposition to not all war but to specific wars or war acts.
The military allows for conscientious objection, for dissenters who are “approved” after a lengthy process. But, the military does not allow for selective conscientious objection. There is no protected legal status for such. You might argue, that institutionally, the military couldn’t allow for such a status--that its discipline in ranks would fall apart. But, that is the crux. Until it does allow for selective CO, I have to agree with the underlying logic of Pax Christi and others who want ROTC removed from Catholic colleges and universities and by extension perhaps all colleges and universities.
Could ROTC allow some students to take the just war forums and case studies to their potentially logical conclusions and decide they cannot participate and then bow out of the program? Among other considerations, there is the financial price tag. Would a student have to pay back the tuition that the ROTC scholarship covers, tuition that at private universities is now astronomical? I don’t have good answers.
Is an ROTC education by definition thin? I guess it doesn’t have to be, but, in my experience, it was. And I admit, aside from dining hall quips here and dormitory snark there, I didn’t do too much to courageously deepen my ROTC education while I was in the thick (or thin) of it.
On its face, this all seems like quite the niche, narrow topic: ROTC, Notre Dame, Catholic theology, the military, broken navy ships in Texas, ...that is, my little world between ten and seventeen years ago. What does it have to do with the rest of us, now?
In short, I believe that the same assumptions, presumptions, and foregone conclusions that made up my mostly thin ROTC education govern popular debate today. There is a kinship of ignorance between the civilian armchair warriors at home and the military armchair warriors in the blue-light, ship combat control rooms, or in drone control rooms, or the generals and Pentagon civilians in war rooms. That is, men (usually men) who have not, typically, seen the other end of their missiles. I see a gravely shallow understanding in the greater public when it comes to war, peace, and patriotism. For instance, I see this in the vitriol spilled over Colin Kaepernick and the lapse of logic that argues he ipso facto doesn’t support the troops. I see a shallow understanding of what “support the troops” even means. I see this in the now whitewashed war legacies of “statesmen,” from John McCain to John Brennan. I see this in the bipartisan and nonpartisan, never-ending hero worship. And, all of this maybe we could let go as cultural frustrations, like teenagers’ love of smartphones and Americans’ love of royal weddings. But, this is not something we can let go. With such shallow and broken understanding of what war is really about, militarization has moved into all of the cracks and crevices and filled the easy voids. With that, we are all too primed--the skids are greased--to believe the case for the next war, most likely Iran. And as distasteful as the regime in Iran can be, especially to its own people, a war there would be catastrophic for them and us.
What then is one to do?
There are huge cultural currents and policy choices that need reversing, not only, but especially, in our country. We need to stop the wars in Afghanistan, in Yemen, and in Syria. Wars where we are directly involved and wars where our weapons are at play. We need to stop the war with Iran before it begins. Not only must we stop the wars, we must stop the machine that funds and profits from war. These are tall tasks.
Arundhati Roy writes, “Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ”
Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, called for “a mighty league of conscientious objectors.”
To achieve Roy’s dream, Day’s dream, our dream, we need critical mass. In physics, it’s not the quantity. It’s the quality of a particular interaction that creates the replication of energy. Social change theorists have borrowed from physics to describe the critical amount of people needed to make social change. Say, 30% percent of a population, for instance.
Critical mass seems daunting. It is especially daunting with the current president and his reality-show militarism and his flirtations with fascism. It is daunting even without Trump in the picture because, we know, war is the thing both parties have been able to come together on. War, sadly, is the elixir that brings the nation together.
What we must strive for in the meantime then is what professional peacemaker John Paul Lederach calls “critical yeast.” Lederach challenges us to ask who, which people, in a situation, “would have a capacity, if they were mixed and held together, to make things grow, exponentially, beyond their numbers?”
We need resistance on the outside, but strange as it might sound, as cold and non-life giving as the military can be, we need resistance on the inside. That’s where I want to focus my conclusion.
When I went back to work at Notre Dame, in the residence halls, students in ROTC or considering ROTC asked me for advice. I tried to share my opinion without being heavy-handed: I would say, paraphrased, “even though I was safe and not in combat, the navy was very hard and I was part of an organization that kills, rightly or wrongly, you may decide, but it kills. Are you ok with that?” Maybe I should have been more or less heavy-handed, I don’t know.
Now, teaching high school, several Junior ROTC students ask me about joining the military. (I should add that I teach in a lower-income, primarily Latino, small New Jersey city. JROTC units are less likely to be find in whiter, wealthier suburbs).
ROTC and JROTC students or any young person discerning the military: I want to respect their individual consciences--and not be heavy-handed--but I don’t think much conscience formation is happening in the first place. It’s not necessarily the students’ fault. It’s the militarized culture that has not left any space for conscience formation.
My first recommendation to a young person considering joining the military is, not to join. I don’t think one junior officer or junior enlisted can really effect institutional change. But, to those who nevertheless want to join and attempt to be courageous, moral, philosopher-soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, or officers...to those who are in and can’t get out...to those are now financially or contractually entangled...even to those who are in and want to stay in: may you be the resistance. In this audience or perhaps reading these words later: May you continue to form your conscience. May you follow your conscience. May you be resistance,.
Who am I to give this lofty advice? I didn’t submit my CO application. I participated in more juvenile rather than courageous acts of defiance. But, I think resistance inside the military is our only chance of survival.
We have many examples of critical resistance within the military.
(1) Several years ago, Captain Nathan Smith, US Army, made national headlines when, as active duty stationed in Kuwait, he sued President Obama to force the President to get proper authority from Congress, under the War Powers Resolution, to wage the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
I know Nathan. He is the brother of my close friend from the navy. From this friend, I knew Nathan and I didn’t share the same politics, at the time (at least on the surface level, I knew we didn’t). So when I read about his case, my knee jerk reaction was, “I wonder if he would have sued Bush.” Nathan wasn’t as anti-war as me or maybe not even anti-war at all. He was approaching it from a more constitutional-libertarian angle. And so because Nathan was coming at this from a different perspective, I dismissed it. I went into liberal defense mode of Obama. And, I went into defense mode of my forms of resistance, my ideology, my way of being right.
I think this little encounter is illustrative, though. I went back to Nathan’s case and realized my mistake, a mistake that perhaps many of us commit: that is, my ideology had gotten the best of me and I initially missed an opportunity for coalition building. To achieve less war, we may need to put our ideology or our geopolitical worldview aside, important as they are, if just for a moment, in order to make common, just cause.
With Trump’s inauguration, Nathan’s lawsuit automatically shifted against the new president. The DC Circuit Court did rule this past summer that Nathan no longer had standing and threw out the case. They waited until he was no longer in the reserves to make this ruling. However, Nathan was following his conscience. People inside and outside of the military read about his case and were inspired by his courage. Maybe more active duty service members will now sue. Will the court rule that they have no standing? This is a type of resistance, and it can grow, if we feed it.
(2) Oscar Romero, Bishop of San Salvador and now officially a saint, on the day before he died, begged the army to put down their arms, to not follow immoral orders, to “stop the repression.” It’s unclear how many listened to him, but Romero had no choice but to preach those words.
(3) The Catholic Peace Fellowship and other religious and secular groups help staff the GI Rights Hotline, which advises military members on CO applications and their rights. This is a type of resistance.
(4) Israeli soldiers are refusing to serve in the occupied territories. Not enough of them yet, but these refusals matter.
(5) Tim Bagwell, the organizer of this event, participated in Operation Dewey Canyon during the Vietnam War, where he returned his medals as an active duty member. Then, he became a conscientious objector. (6) You will hear from veteran Gary May later on and his mode of resisting. (7) Andy Stapp formed the American Servicemen’s Union, during the Vietnam war, as way of building power against unjust orders.
(8) Susan Schnall, a navy nurse lieutenant during Vietnam pulled off a very creative act of protest. She saw the US dropping flyers over villages in Vietnam, warning civilians of imminent bombing. So, back in the Bay Area, she hired a plane and dropped flyers that announced an anti-war demonstration. She dropped them over Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, where she worked; on the Presidio, the Army base. Over Alameda Naval Air Station, onto the decks of the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. She conducted her protest and press conference in uniform.
(9) And Hugh Thompson. He was the helicopter pilot who saw the My Lai massacre happening from the air. He landed his helo. There were Vietnamese civilians cowering in a bunker from the American troops. Thompson threatened to open fire on his compatriots if they shot at the Vietnamese in the bunker. The killing stopped, but 504 Vietnamese civilians had already been killed. Thompson, an actual hero, who was not worshipped, was shunned for many years and not officially honored until 1998.
(10) Spenser Rapone and Mike Prysner, veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, have started an anti-war podcast, called Eyes Left, which I highly recommend. Their message is to active duty members. They’re calling on soldiers to resist. They’re lifting up these stories of GI resistance and conducting outreach to active duty members who either have decided to resist or who are struggling with the moral questions of war.
(11) Women service members, survivors of sexual assault, have spoken up in the #metoo movement to fight the culture of impunity and toxic masculinity in military commands.
(12) Pat Tillman, the former football player turned army ranger, was killed in Afghanistan in 2004. It turns out he was killed by friendly fire, but the military covered up the circumstances of his death, in order to hold him up for hero-worship, nationalism, and recruiting reasons. Last year, as a counterweight to Kapernick and the NFL national anthem protests, Trump held up Tillman for the same jingoism, as a real American or non-”son-of-a-bitch” football player. Predictably, Trump didn’t know Tillman’s real story. Tillman joined the army after 9/11, true. But, he was against the Iraq war. His fellow ranger, Rory Fanning, tells the story of how Tillman supported him when Fanning applied for conscientious objection. He talked with and listened to Fanning, while everyone else in the unit had turned against Fanning. Tillman may not have been a pacifist, but he was resistance (as was Fanning), in the belly of the beast that eventually killed him.
(13) In the NATO war game, Able Archer 83, the US and the Soviet Union nearly escalated to nuclear war. Soviet fighters had been on alert at Polish air bases. Soviet helicopters were moving nuclear weapons from storage sites to launching pads. NATO planes visibly armed with what turned out to be dummy nuclear warheads were seen leaving their hangars, (according to recent declassified documents via the New York Times). Therefore, the Soviets heightened their alarms. And, according to our pre-planned military doctrine, we were supposed to do the same, in return. But General Leonard Perroots made his own judgment call and did not raise our status. He followed his instinct to defuse the situation, even though that meant deliberately not following military doctrine. General Perroots, having attained the rank of 3-star, was no pacifist. We don’t know about his other moments, his orders received and his orders given, in that long military career, but in that particular moment, on the brink of nuclear escalation, he followed his conscience.
(Full disclosure, General Perroots, now deceased, was my wife’s grandfather.)
Sure, we need to dismantle the nuclear weapons, and these war games shouldn’t happen in the first place. Absolutely. The larger historical and political contexts matter. That work must continue.
But as we work towards a world without war, in the meantime, we must incrementally work for a world with less war. As we try to convince our countrymen that peace is ultimately the only way, we must build coalitions and make common cause, sometimes narrower, with people who might feel differently. As we try to convince people not to join the military in the first place we must support critical thought, wherever we can find it, within the military. That is probably the most meaningful “support the troops” we can give.
And finally that brings us to “Operation Faithful Patriot.” Military operations usually take loaded, euphemistic, Orwellian terms. This one is loaded, to say the least. We are talking about the Trump Administration’s deployment of up to 8,000 troops to our southern border as “support” against the “invading” caravan. While it is no longer called Faithful Patriot apparently, that phrase hangs in the air and begs the question, begs for reflection. Faithful patriots?: That is what I ended up naming this talk. Patriot: How does one show love of country? Does love of country matter compared to other loves? Faithful: To whom? To what?
This deployment is wrong on many levels. 1. The migrant caravan is not an invasion force. They are individuals fleeing dangerous situations in their home countries with the intention of legally seeking asylum. 2. Many of the dangerous conditions they are fleeing, namely in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, result directly from US policies in those countries in the past forty years. 3. The Trump administration has been using these migrants to stoke the flames of white nativism, to his party’s electoral advantage. 4. Deploying troops to the border, on US soil, is forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. We have, hitherto, mostly, agreed not to use the military as a domestic policing agency, for good reason. We are not Argentina in the 1970s. We are not Egypt. And, 5. Trump has said that if the migrants were to throw rocks at the troops, the troops should consider them as if they’re holding rifles. That is, the President is insinuating that our soldiers should fire on rock-throwers. This would be a war crime.
Spenser Rapone and Rory Fanning (mentioned earlier) are calling for soldiers to resist. So is Veterans for Peace. Organizations such as GI Rights Hotline and Courage to Resist are standing by to support war resisters. While we are hearing less about this invading force, now after the midterm elections, we still call for resistance. Resistance not only in that direct chain of command, heading south, but also... imagine resistance at other commands, across the branches, as a response. Rightly or wrongly, the great majority of Americans do support the military. Resistance within the ranks will send a message that will be supported and amplified from the outside.
As we attempt to build critical mass, to stop the wars, we must find and cultivate these pockets of resistance, of Lederach’s critical yeast, inside and outside of the military. Pacifists and non-pacifists. Active-duty members and veterans. Enlisted and officers. Combat and support. ROTC students and JROTC students. And young people, perhaps in this audience, who despite these warnings, maybe still want to try to serve with integrity.
Can that all add up to stop the current wars, or the potential war crimes on the border, or the next war? I hope.
But, I can think of no other way. Thank you.
