{"id":228984,"date":"2023-02-13T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2023-02-13T12:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=228984"},"modified":"2023-02-10T04:59:48","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T04:59:48","slug":"three-new-books-by-former-soldiers-that-the-us-military-doesnt-want-you-to-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/02\/three-new-books-by-former-soldiers-that-the-us-military-doesnt-want-you-to-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Three New Books by Former Soldiers That the US Military Doesn\u2019t Want You to Read"},"content":{"rendered":"
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5 Feb 2023 – Several new memoirs from disillusioned military veterans reflect on the horrors of war. They\u2019re essential tools for challenging US empire.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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A US infantry soldier sweeps the mountains during a patrol in the Paktika Province in eastern Afghanistan. 23 Sep 2009.
(PFC Andrya Hill \/ United States Army via Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

Review of Un-American: A Soldier\u2019s Reckoning of Our Longest War<\/em>, by Erik Edstrom (Bloomsbury, 2020); Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine\u2019s Unbecoming<\/em>, by Lyle Jeremy Rubin (Bold Type Books, 2022); and Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America\u2019s Misguided Wars<\/em>, edited by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen (Metropolitan Books, 2023)<\/p>\n

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One frequent casualty of war is the confident belief shared by new soldiers that their cause is just and worthy of great personal sacrifice. After Al-Qaeda downed four civilian airliners and caused nearly three thousand deaths on September 11, 2001, US military recruiters were flooded with eager volunteers. Patriotic fervor, coupled with an urge for revenge and a desire to make the world a safer place, motivated many young men and women to enlist.As the reality of simultaneous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began to sink in, many participants \u2014 like Vietnam veterans before them \u2014 became angry, embittered, and disillusioned. Some of them have turned to memoir-writing that debunks the whole costly and disastrous $8 trillion project known as the \u201cglobal war on terror.\u201d Three excellent new book-length reflections on military training, socialization, and combat duty in the Middle East definitely won\u2019t end up on the reading lists of college-level or junior ROTC programs<\/a>, or even the US service academies.But many civilian readers will benefit from the policy critiques and personal insights found in Erik Edstrom\u2019s Un-American<\/a><\/em>; Lyle Jeremy Rubin\u2019s Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body<\/a><\/em>; and Paths of Dissent<\/a><\/em>, an edited collection compiled by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen, both of whom became historians after serving as career Army officers.Like Bacevich and Sjursen, Edstrom attended West Point. Afterward, he served as an Army Ranger, an infantry platoon leader and Bronze Star winner in Afghanistan, and a member of Barack Obama\u2019s Presidential Escort Platoon. The grandson of a World War II veteran and product of a middle-class upbringing in a Boston suburb, he was part of the first post-9\/11 crop of applicants to the Point, a place where \u201cyou couldn\u2019t help but get excited at the prospect of shooting, bombing, and invading.\u201d His second thoughts about soldiering started when his first-year class was immediately \u201cisolated, separated from families and support networks\u201d so that, during their \u201cinitial indoctrination,\u201d they would be \u201csheltered from anything that could temper or make us question military dogma.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
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Pray and Spray<\/h1>\n

As part of the process of getting \u201call-American swimmers, pious altar boys, cauliflower-eared wrestlers, nerdy class treasurers, and Eagle Scouts\u201d ready for eventual deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, West Point cadets were marched in cadence to this edifying chant:<\/p>\n

Left, right, left, right, left right KILL! . . . I went to the mosque where all the terrorists pray, I set up my claymore, AND BLEW\u2019 EM ALL AWAY . . . I went to the store where all the women shop, pulled out my machete, AND BEGAN TO CHOP! I went to the playground where all the kiddies play, I pulled out my Uzi AND BEGAN TO SPRAY!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the academy, Edstrom reports, \u201cI was taught to think about how to win my small part of the war, <\/em>not whether we should be at war.<\/em>\u201d Sent to Afghanistan, he soon discovered that \u201cfighting terrorism\u201d was a confounding task for soldiers up and down the \u201cchain of command.\u201d Many of his local foes turned out to be \u201cteenagers or angry farmers with legitimate grievances . . . people tired of our never-ending occupation of their land and contemptuous devaluation of Afghan lives. When I searched my own soul, I couldn\u2019t blame them for fighting back. Had I been in their shoes, I would have done the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rubin took a more unusual route to becoming a junior officer disillusioned with his own \u201cforever wars\u201d involvement. As we learn in Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, <\/em>Rubin was a fervent Zionist in high school and a \u201cpro-war activist\u201d while a Young Republican in college. Skipping service academy training and ROTC at Emory University in Atlanta, Rubin first experienced the Marine Corps as a failed Officer Candidate School contender who became a boot camp grunt. This gave him considerable insight into what he calls the \u201clance corporal underground\u201d and \u201ccamaraderie of the enlisted ranks that adds up to a latent class solidarity\u201d:<\/p>\n

As enlisted Marines are fond of remarking, they represent the majority of the military that \u201cworks for a living.\u201d The Marine officer corps, on the other hand, is made up of strivers, who\u2019ve learned to compete at an early age and [end up] pitted against other in a cutthroat peer-review process and promotional system that follows. . . . There was an earnestness to the enlisted existence, a conviction of collective duty and sacrifice, however barbaric its realizations, that was never allowed to congeal among the brass.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rubin was eventually tapped to be a first lieutenant doing signals intelligence work in Afghanistan. This followed a two-month stint at the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, where he was briefed on a surveillance system \u201cdesigned to make kill-or-capture missions as user friendly as possible.\u201d As part of his training, Rubin learned about the NSA\u2019s \u201cpattern-of-life analysis of random Afghans at a Top Secret watch floor,\u201d where it was hard not to feel suffused with a \u201cgod-like omniscience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Real-Time Targeting<\/h1>\n

As Rubin discovered later in the field, the US military\u2019s ability to \u201ceradicate anyone holding an earmarked SIM card\u201d did not prevent tech-savvy Taliban commanders from \u201cswitching out their cards as a regular security precaution.\u201d The same \u201creal time\u201d targeting capability was used thousands of times during his deployment \u201cto finish off alleged enemy combatants, many of whom investigative reports have now concluded were civilians.\u201d At the time, however, \u201cbattle damage assessments listed virtually all military-aged males as the enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The disconnect between war on terror propaganda and the reality of meddling in the affairs of a country long resistant to foreign occupation took a painful toll on Edstrom and Rubin. Upon his return to the United States as an Army captain, Edstrom received \u201cthudding back slaps and free beers from well-meaning civilians\u201d for whom the war had become \u201celevator music.\u201d Meanwhile, he had to live with the memory of soldiers killed and maimed under his command, and the knowledge that terrorism \u2014 in the form of \u201ctargeted assassinations, bombings, drone strikes, secret \u2018black site\u2019 prisons, torture, and wanton civilian murder\u201d \u2014 was central to the \u201ccounterterrorism\u201d mission. All Rubin wanted to do, after coming home, \u201cwas stop the war. And short of that, commiserate with those who, at the very least, could see it.\u201d<\/p>\n