Four columns abreast, a platoon of cadets marched between the buildings at West Point. A centipede of dour skinheads.
“Smirk off, new cadets!” snapped the older ones in charge of our training. Smiles denoted insubordination. There were none. The most fearsome cadets wielded their voices like a whip. When they singled you out, “got in on your ass,” it felt like an electric convulsion, or that squirmy feeling when the dentist drills a nerve.
It was a cheerless place.
The summer leading into the first cadet year at West Point is known as Beast Barracks—Beast for short. It marks the beginning of one’s military indoctrination. For me, Beast took place in the summer of 2003. I was seventeen years old. My first year at the academy, as for most of my classmates, was characterized by fear, intimidation, exhaustion, and infantilizing rituals.
Early on, we were sent to Robinson Auditorium—Rob Aud, in cadet vernacular—for a “motivational spirit briefing.” On the way, our cadet platoon sergeant—two years older than us—marched us to cadence:
Left right, left right, left right kill!
Left right, left right, you know I will.
I went to the mosque, where all the terrorists pray,
I set up my claymore, and blew ’em all away!
Left right, left right, left right kill!
Left right, left right, you know I will.
I went to the store where all the women shop,
Pulled out my machete, and I began to chop!
Left right, left right, left right kill!
Left right, left right, you know I will.
I went to the playground where all the kiddies play,
I pulled out my Uzi, and I began to spray!
I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it badass? Was I some kind of tough guy now? Across the path of stone pavers, we reached Thayer Hall, a peculiar, near-windowless building once used for equestrian practice, back when cavalry meant horses, not helicopters and armored vehicles. We were led inside and took seats in the auditorium.
Severe-looking officers took turns mounting the stage. We didn’t know who they were or what they did, but they radiated gravity. Authoritative presence. I wanted that.
“All of you who graduate from here will almost certainly be sent to war in Iraq or Afghanistan,” said a lieutenant colonel, doing what appeared to be a rendition of the famous opening scene in Patton—the one where General Patton galvanizes his troops with a speech about going through “the Hun” like “shit through a goose.” The lieutenant colonel continued, “I want you to look within and ask yourself if you are willing to lead men and women in combat. It’s not for everyone and if you want to quit, do everyone a favor—just stand up and walk out of this auditorium right now.”
No one budged.
“Your class, the West Point Class of 2007, has the auspicious honor of being the first class to apply to West Point after 9/11. That moment was a call to action. You, the men and women sitting in this auditorium, answered that call.”
Hoots and hooahs from the new cadets.
“That is true patriotism—the essence of what it is to be American. Now it’s time to share a motivational video so you can see what some of our forward-deployed troops are doing to win this war. Are you motivated?”
To this we responded with our well-rehearsed chant:
“M-ma-ma-ma-mo-motivated.”
“New cadets, are you dedicated?”
“D-de-de-de-de-dedicated.”
The lights dimmed. We heard the recognizable opening chords of “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, basically the theme song for the “War on Terror.”
Let the bodies hit the floor.
Let the bodies hit the floor.
The auditorium went wild. Ravenous screams. My skin turned to gooseflesh. The hairs on my arms stood erect. The anticipation and adrenaline were amplified: this was what we had come here for. The video began.
A highlight reel of death and destruction. Supernova nighttime explosions in an Iraqi city. M1 Abrams tanks rolling through Baghdad. Dismounted infantrymen patrolling dusty, rubble-strewn streets, communicating with hand and arm signals.
An AC-130 Spectre gunship is flying a large orbit around its objective: a couple of sedans and a beat-up pickup. A small assemblage of people stand jaw-jacking around them. So killable. Unbeknown to them, they are seconds from death. The crosshairs are on them, center mass. The Bofors 40 mm antiaircraft gun begins pounding them, literally to pieces. Through the thermal lens, a yard sale of body parts. The heat signature shows streaks of white—splashes of blood and chunks of still-warm flesh scattered around the engagement area.
We cheered, practically frothing at the mouth.
A man flees the scene—a “squirter.” He starts running. The gunner switches to the 25 mm Gatling gun and hoses him down. A snail trail of blood. A video game, but not. The camera pans out, revealing a Jackson Pollock painting made of gore.
Where was the popcorn? We were loving it. Finish him!
Different scene. First-person shooter. A .50-cal machine gunner cranks hot, saltshaker-sized shells at a building. Anti-tank missiles explode. Now the screen is pixelated and green. Night-vision goggles. Soldiers on a night raid. Stack formation beside a mud shanty. Flash-bang grenades are tossed inside. Bright lights and deafening sounds. The soldiers flow through the “fatal funnel” into a room, surprising what appears to be a family. Their faces reveal what can only be called a pants-shitting expression.
My classmates and I reached a fever pitch of feral screams. Hoots. Applause. Glee.
At a place like West Point, you couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of shooting, bombing, and invading. It was presented as a borderline pornographic affair. Maybe we cheered because everyone was doing it. Maybe because we didn’t want to be seen as “unmotivated”—a term slung around with the intensity of a slur. Or maybe we had already developed a taste for bloodshed.
Whatever sorcery drove us to mania, we accepted it. We embraced it. After all, this was West Point, the world’s most celebrated military academy. It’s hard to find an institution more iconically American than West Point, and it’s hard to find Americans “more American” than West Point cadets. A book by journalist David Lipsky about West Point cadets is titled Absolutely American. We certainly didn’t want to be anything less than absolute in our ideological devotion to the cause.
Whatever was happening in this auditorium was as “American” as it gets. And I wanted to belong. I wanted to make friends. I wanted my future soldiers to respect me. I wanted to be a winner. I would never quit.
I screamed until it hurt.
You’re welcome, Middle East. Tell us, how would you like your freedom: large, extra-large, or supersize?
THERE ARE A handful of moments in life—inflection points, inciting incidents, liminal thresholds, event horizons, whatever you want to call them—that are so powerful they shift our entire frame of reference, forcing us to see the world, and perhaps ourselves, differently. They shatter the old truths, revealing that the compass we had trusted to direct us was broken all along.
There, in that West Point auditorium, I experienced one of those moments. The profession of political violence—my chosen career path—was no longer a romantic abstraction held at arm’s length. It was messy, violent, and required near-absolute devotion to a pair of beliefs: that the people our country was killing deserved it; and that the costs—the attendant horrors of military occupation—were, somehow, worth it. The moment I cheered for contextless Kill TV was the moment I became capable of celebrating ignorance and glorifying barbarity.
I had a motivational quote sticky-tacked to the faux-wood bookshelf in my room:
Somewhere a true believer is training to kill you. He is training with minimum food and water, in austere conditions, day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon. He doesn’t worry about what workout to do—his rucksack weighs what it weighs, and he runs until the enemy stops chasing him. The true believer doesn’t care how hard it is; he knows that he either wins or dies. He doesn’t go home at 1700; he is home. He only knows the cause. Now. Who wants to quit?
Now I, too, was becoming a true believer. A fanatic. An American supremacist.
My classmates and I arrived young, most of us still teenagers. Like blank paper, we were ready to receive whatever the military wanted to imprint upon us. And even though I was, in a legal sense, a minor, the topics we dealt with were major—and complex. Devilishly more complex than the boilerplate we are good, they are bad absolutist messages used by the military to recruit clueless, trusting children. At my core, I trusted the institution. I trusted that my classmates and I would be used as a force for good, even if that didn’t fully square with killing people who had nothing to do with 9/11, living in countries our government had not formally declared war against, for reasons that even the academy had trouble explaining.
As was true for many of my classmates, my reasons for joining the military were a conflated mix of economic necessity and idealistic do-goodery. It wasn’t necessary to pore over Census Bureau data or read books about income inequality written by Nobel Prize–winning economists to see that the socioeconomic cracks in American society were plentiful and widening. In a world where college is a form of mandatory certification for many desirable vocations, I wanted a degree and the social mobility that it enabled. But no matter how invested my parents were in my future, the family college fund was empty. Not a single dollar. Meanwhile, two years of stocking shelves on the weekend at the local grocery store for $7.40 an hour wouldn’t cover even two months of tuition.
The fear of joining America’s ever-growing precariat has been motivation enough for two-thirds of college students to leverage themselves in debt, sometimes for decades. But there are other ways to pay for college. One such option is the military. Only later would I realize that this is a perverse carrot to dangle before you: trade college funding for the formative years of your life. In the richest country on earth, you may literally have to kill, or die, for a decent education.
And yet, a stint in the military also felt like a good idea on its own merits. Serving in the American military provides a new identity and, with it, a special higher class of citizenship. I took the cue from Pa, my step-grandfather, a World War II veteran who was sometimes treated like Audie Murphy by appreciative churchgoers after Sunday service.
Pa wasn’t some decorated war hero or eminent general. He had no war wounds. He’d spent the war as an administrator at a station hospital in the United Kingdom. But that was enough. Enough to be respected—maybe even revered—for the rest of his life. All this just for doing his job half a century earlier. I liked the idea of being on the receiving end of such veteran worship. A recipient of the hefty social subsidies heaped upon America’s military service members.
The extreme psychosocial dynamics of America’s military fetish do not translate to other public service professions. Imagine an alternate universe where the stories we tell one another are different and it’s the IRS agents who get to board the plane first. Maybe it’s they who get to ask, as if entitled, for “IRS discounts” at chain restaurants and theme parks. People stop tax collectors in the street to thank them for their service. “Just part of the job, ma’am,” says one taxman, smug as hell. There are IRS Appreciation Day truck sales. SUPPORT THE IRS bumper stickers. TAXES: THE PRICE WE PAY FOR CIVILIZATION, proclaims a T-shirt sporting an American flag with one money-green horizontal stripe, a version of the Blue Lives Matter iconography. Just before kickoff at the IRS Bowl, tax collectors step up to the fifty-yard line, pyrotechnics exploding in the background, as sixty thousand proud Americans rise to their feet and sing the national anthem. And when honest, salt-of-the-earth tax collectors pass away after a lifetime of faithful service to our country, they receive a twenty-one-gun salute and are buried with a copy of this year’s federal budget, perfectly balanced.
If serving as an IRS agent were the status job—if it received the same social perks as being in the US military—maybe America would be better at collecting taxes. Maybe we would have more funds for development, infrastructure, education, health care, climate change mitigation. But we don’t. Instead, the military is prioritized, and as a result, we have more shiny military toys and more unnecessary, counterproductive wars.
THE 9/11 ATTACKS, too, were a compelling factor in my decision. Like nearly everyone, I was swept up in the hysteria of the times. Seeing the towers collapse on TV during my high school chemistry class forced me to ask myself a hard question: Would I do anything about it? Who would I be if, at this moment of national need, I refused to answer the call?
Of course, the same line of questioning could be applied toward any complex and urgent problem. There are countless causes worthy of people’s time and devotion. It is a uniquely American answer to look at the problems that face our country—the climate crisis, systemic racism, a broken health-care system, extreme income and wealth inequality, a public education system befitting a developing country, cringeworthy public services and infrastructure—and conclude that what really requires our time, attention, and trillions of taxpayer dollars is a series of wars unbound by time or geography.
Despite having never visited West Point, I applied nowhere else. And when I arrived, my indoctrination began.
Military indoctrination is the voluntary surrender of one’s own identity to join a profession that often takes away the human dignity of others by force. Through repetition, service members have their values, behaviors, and identity recalibrated with the ultimate aim of making them willing to kill or be killed in political violence without thinking about it too much. It is the construction of blind faith in the state and the deconstruction of any critical thinking that could stand in opposition to the state’s aims.
The academy gave careful treatment to facts that were likely to make cadets feel embarrassed by or skeptical about the state, especially the military adventurism that we were about to partake in. Instead, we were trained to believe that we should be concerned only with things we could immediately influence—our conduct, and the conduct of those around us. The message was: keep your head down and focus on your warrior tasks and drills. Also: soldiers are made to win wars, not think about them.
A famous 1962 address from General Douglas MacArthur illustrates this point well. “Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men’s minds,” he told cadets at West Point. “These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.”
There it is. Our job was to focus on proximate outputs—a uniform prepared for inspection, a faster two-mile run—rather than judging what really mattered, the ultimate outcomes, like whether our collective actions were statistically “moving the needle” on safety for Americans at home, and whether, if deployed, the military could do it in an ethical, legal, and cost-effective way. Burdened by seventeen-hour days of exercise, classwork, military rituals, and study, we scarcely had time for reflection. We did not take our responsibilities lightly, and we trained with vigilance. Without any understanding of the world outside West Point or what I’d ultimately be serving after graduation, I redoubled my efforts, devoting myself to the task at hand.
I derived a good amount of satisfaction from the process. Hiking the ski slope in winter with ninety pounds on my back to prepare for summer military training was a good way to make great friends. These shared burdens brought people together. I felt deeply loyal to my classmates—to the corps of cadets. I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself.
Even now, I still think fondly of rowing on the Hudson River in the predawn darkness with the self-proclaimed “fastest eight in Army crew history.” Golden light would stream across the hilltops and saddles of the Hudson River valley, dispelling stubborn pockets of shade as our team shouldered the boat at the end of a hard morning practice, panting, exhausted. It felt as though we were beating the day before it even had the chance to start.
I received coaching from older cadets, like Sam. A year ahead of me, Sam wasn’t the strongest on the team, but he was determined and consistent, eventually ending up as the stroke of the heavyweight varsity eight. He taught me to honor the work, always strive to beat my average, and prioritize technique over dumb, brute force. These were good lessons to learn.
Our team spent racing season in threadbare Econovans, driving up and down the Eastern Seaboard along I-95: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, Delaware, with spring training often in Florida. Our hands were bloodied and bandaged. We lived on Nutella-and-banana sandwiches, and were bound together by the common pursuit of “better.” A remarkable sense of brotherhood was built in unremarkable places.
Most alumni speak positively of growth during their four years at West Point. So it was for me: In this span of time, I transitioned from self-doubt to self-confidence, from insecurity and mediocrity to grit and conviction. I had grown as a leader and was now capable of issuing clear instructions to a company of 120 new cadets. I was proving myself physically strong, capable, and resilient. I had passed some of the most demanding Army courses, including Special Forces Assessment and Selection at the age of nineteen. The more success I had, the more devoted I became.
One decision led to the next, often more extreme one almost effortlessly. Why go to West Point unless you want to lead troops in combat? If you wanted to push papers, you could have done so for more pay, with a better lifestyle, elsewhere. The logic extended in the same direction. If you’re going to go infantry, why not join the Rangers or Special Forces, and work with better-trained troops? Knowing there was something more to strive for was seduction enough to pursue it. In those moments, everything made sense.
Aim high. Train. Achieve. Repeat.
With the greatest conviction, I channeled all my energy onto a course toward direct combat.
ON GRADUATION DAY, I received my diploma from Dick Cheney, the soft-handed architect of the War on Terror. It was clear that those flabby hands would never carry out the rough deeds ordered by his administration. He was leaving that dirty work for us. I pinned on my infantry branch insignia, swore my oath, and drove away, putting West Point in the rearview mirror with a sense of both excitement and sadness. Castle Grayskull wasn’t all bad, and I had made some incredible friends. But it was not long before the illusion fell apart. Bearing witness to the human costs of America’s War on Terror started almost immediately, and it hasn’t stopped in the fourteen years since.
At my first duty station in Fort Carson, Colorado, while serving as the staff duty officer, I got a call in the middle of the night. A soldier had slit his wrists with a razor blade.
His mutilated arms looked like a grid of bloody squares. Lines going both vertically and horizontally, six inches up his wrist. He had not cut himself deep enough to end his life. When the military medics arrived, they expressed what I can only describe as mild irritation for getting the call. “Come on, why would you play tic-tac-toe on your wrists with a razor?” They acted as if they had dealt with this before.
After the wrist-slitting event, the Army briefly put the troubled soldier in an inpatient mental health ward and gave him medications that, his father said, made him seem “dangerously stoned.” Eventually he was sent back to the unit. Missing from formation one morning, he was found dead in his barracks room. He had overdosed on the prescription drugs the Army gave him, plus a couple of his own.
Not long thereafter, I received a call informing me that Sam, my close friend from the crew team, had been seriously injured by an IED in Afghanistan. Arriving at the intensive care burn unit in San Antonio, I saw him lying in bed. His lithe six-foot-four-inch frame was mummified in gauze; only the portions of his body needed for intravenous tubes were exposed. He was nearly unrecognizable. Parts of his face were raw and marbled, as if a psychopath had flayed him with a cheese slicer and then worked him over with a blowtorch. His ears and nose were charred black; a stiff breeze would’ve made them crumble to dust. His lips were split, oozing a putrid brownish wax. He was covered in greasy ointment. Although his hands were bandaged like oven mitts, I noticed a missing finger. His resting heart rate was in the 130s—a constant jog just to survive. Sam was a living revenant.
Foolishly, I had packed up my Xbox 360 and Call of Duty, hoping it would provide Sam with some entertainment and distraction during what I’d assumed would be a dull recovery process. In my mind he’d be on a sofa somewhere, sipping milkshakes and being chastised for pushing the limits of his rehab, complaining that his run times were slipping. I felt like an idiot when it dawned on me that I had brought a video game console for a man whose fingers had been literally burned off and who lacked the strength to speak.
As cadets, we were never exposed to wounded veterans, never encouraged to consider whether their suffering was at all connected to the security of America, thousands of miles away. Seeing Sam in that bed, I felt as though I had been asleep all my life. There was no greater cause—just tens of thousands of American troops fumbling around in countries we should never have been in.
From that point, I witnessed a veritable funeral procession. In the decade following graduation, the number of my friends injured or killed crossed into the double digits and kept going. Some were shot to death. Others were blown up. One died in a helicopter crash. A couple committed suicide. Many more were maimed and horrifically disfigured. Nearly all of us harbored internal demons.
I started to see how the War on Terror was breaking the people I cared about. Adam Snyder, a senior at West Point when I was a freshman there, was killed in Iraq. The New York Times mentioned Snyder’s death in an article dishearteningly titled “Veterans Watch as Gains Their Friends Died for Are Erased by Insurgents.” Snyder “idealized the Middle East,” according to a fellow platoon leader. “In Hawija, though, the idealism ‘fell apart for him, the reality of trying to effect change through force.’ By the time they had deployed to Baiji, ‘he had become disillusioned over the whole thing.’” To hear that he was disillusioned with the war at the hour of his death only exacerbated my own disillusionment.
Dan Hyde, a classmate of mine, was one of the four regimental commanders at West Point. He possessed exceptional talent and at the age of twenty-one was responsible for one thousand cadets. After the two of us graduated from Ranger School, he was deployed to Iraq. Soon he went back home to California—in a government-issue coffin. A grenade had penetrated the roof of his vehicle.
Whenever good people are killed, the natural reaction is to retrofit their death with some higher meaning or purpose. It is easier to invent a noble military fable than it is to confront the reality that a loved one’s death may have served no one. Not the American people. Not the Afghan people. Not an abstract moral arc toward justice. But soldiers dying in inglorious ways for no coherent reason wouldn’t provide much solace to grieving families and friends. For the sake of our sanity, we had to push these thoughts out of our mind and remain resolute.
ABOUT A MONTH after I heard about Hyde’s death, I was deployed to Kandahar as a platoon leader. By the time I stood on the tarmac in southern Afghanistan, it was very clear that this was not going to be some Lawrence of Arabia–type epic filled with horses and camels and curved pulwar swords. Yet I tried to cling to the fantasy that we’d drink black tea with too much sugar and sit cross-legged on hand-tufted carpets. Afghan elders would praise us for offering our help. In a great climax, we would outwit the black-clad Taliban in a skirmish. The schools would be reopened, and the villages would rejoice in celebration. We would return home dusty, tan, and more interesting—our war experience a rough-and-tumble ornament that we could place upon the mantel of a well-rounded, adventure-filled life.
It took less than a week before my platoon started getting ripped apart. There was no romantic daybreak assault on our position. No action-packed shoot-out. Instead, as we drove down a dusty road in Maywand District, my squad leader’s vehicle hit an antipersonnel mine linked to 250 pounds of homemade explosives.
Maybe it was the ketamine talking. Or maybe A. J. Nelson, an eighteen-year-old private, possessed a type of bravery that I did not. Whatever it was, lying on his back, bones broken, blood pouring from his lacerated lips, he said something that I can’t forget.
“I want to come back.” Flecks of blood sprayed in the air with each word, speckling his uniform. “I want to come back to the platoon, sir.”
Nelson was one of four soldiers injured in the blast. The desert around us was a jumble of twisted metal and vehicle parts. The wreck of their vehicle—its engine block completely sheared off—looked as if it had been stripped at a junkyard. As the Black Hawk helicopter hovered to land, we attempted to shield the wounded men from the sandblasting rotor wash. At that moment, I knelt, looked at A.J., and proceeded to lie directly to his face.
“You’re going to be okay.”
I had no idea what okay might even mean in that situation. Did okay mean quadruple amputee with a pulse? Did it mean years of horrific facial reconstruction surgeries? Or the loss of only one eye? Paralyzed just from the waist down? Or maybe okay meant being really lucky—merely a single-leg amputation below the knee, what my wounded friends from Walter Reed Hospital would later call a “paper cut.” I would have a lot of time to figure this out. Before our tour was over, eleven months later, 25 percent of my men would become casualties.
One soldier had his face and torso torn up by shrapnel after a pressure cooker filled with homemade explosives, bicycle chains, and nails blew up nearby. Another was shot from six feet away by a member of the Afghan National Police who was high on drugs, a negligent discharge. A squad leader, transferred to a different platoon because of the number of casualties in our unit, received a traumatic brain injury after getting blown up in his vehicle. One of my best friends, serving in our sister battalion, was shot to death; later, as part of the honor guard, I buried him in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, handing the folded American flag to his crying mother. Trauma was everywhere.
My former team leader stepped on an antipersonnel mine, losing both legs above the knee. He was evacuated to Walter Reed, where he died about ten days later. What made matters worse was that battalion headquarters had known where the mine was. On a video feed, they had observed the insurgents emplace the IED on our patrol route the previous night. They just didn’t bother to tell us. I learned that this sort of stuff happens in combat all the time.
One of my soldiers, who was eighteen years old when he deployed to Afghanistan, killed himself not long after returning home, a reminder that suicide has been deadlier than combat for the military. There have been over thirty thousand suicides among US service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars, significantly more than the roughly seven thousand service members killed in post-9/11 war operations.
Another soldier from my platoon has been in and out of rehab for years. Hard drugs. Alcohol. Depression. The works. Whenever we speak on the phone, it seems like he is nursing a buzz. At his best, he’s getting by; at his worst—we don’t need to talk about his worst.
As for A. J. Nelson, the soldier injured by a roadside bomb during our first week of deployment—the one who had wanted so badly to return to the platoon—he got his wish: the military patched him up and sent him back to us seven months later. He may have recovered from his physical wounds, but still, I was wrong. He was not “going to be okay.” In 2012, he and an accomplice kidnapped a stranger and rammed a crossbow bolt through his ear; when this failed to kill him, they choked him to death with a chain. After they chopped up his body in a bathtub, they used his car to rob a bank. Nelson is now serving life in prison without parole.
It makes you wonder: Were these accumulated traumas of the War in Afghanistan necessary to protect the national territory of the United States?
No. No, they were not.
BUT IT WAS not the harm inflicted on US soldiers alone that fed my disillusion. That came with the moral injury of realizing that the War on Terror—the thing I had spent years of my life preparing for—was illegal, immoral, self-perpetuating, and counterproductive.
I remember the moment of this realization: it was Halloween 2009.
We were supporting a mission that the soldiers had nicknamed Operation Highway Babysitter. It worked like this: the infantry secured the road, allowing logistics convoys to resupply the infantry—all so that the infantry could secure the road, so that the logistics convoys could resupply the infantry. For several months, we did this with no greater follow-on objective. A complete waste.
Worse, whenever a stretch of road was blown up—since protecting all the roads, all the time, was impossible—American forces would grant exorbitant cost-plus contracts to Afghan construction companies to rebuild it. It was common knowledge that many of these companies were owned by Afghan warlords guilty of human rights abuses. The construction companies, in turn, would pay a protection tribute to the Taliban. Then the Taliban would buy more bomb-making materials to destroy more roads—and US vehicles. We were, indirectly but also quite literally, paying the Taliban to kill us.
Nicholas Kristof described this dynamic in the New York Times: “Afghan contractors in Kabul who supplied U.S. forces told me that for every $1,000 America paid them, they gave $600 to the Taliban in bribes to pass through checkpoints.” That’s 60 percent. Sixty percent of US taxpayer dollars were estimated to be going to the Taliban!
Meanwhile, our patrols were not only mind-numbing but dangerous. On Halloween 2009, our stakeout was interrupted by the sound of gunfire a couple of kilometers down the road. We buttoned up our trucks and set course toward the commotion. By the time we arrived at the reported location—a large grape field—the shooting had stopped. Just a little skirmish. No biggie. Probably just a few insurgents taking potshots at a convoy before bugging out.
To investigate, about ten of us dismounted and started off toward the field in a V-shaped wedge formation. Fifteen seconds later, our world erupted in gunfire. We had walked into an ambush.
Thankfully, my soldiers performed a spectacular “react to ambush,” field-manual perfect. We returned fire, found cover, called out suspected enemy locations, maneuvered ourselves into more defensible positions, radioed our trucks to provide support by fire, and, lastly, called in a pair of Kiowa helicopters for close air support.
The insurgents had fled and we could not tell where they had gone, as we explicitly told the Kiowa pilots when they arrived. But they must have positively identified the armed fighters because they released a salvo of rockets on the nearby village. The gun runs were punishing. The Kiowas took turns flying nose up until they were right over the target, at which point, almost birdlike, they swooped downward, launching 2.75-inch rockets one after another into the fields and buildings.
The whooosh and impact of each incoming rocket could be felt by every soldier in the grape field. Then the Kiowas strafed the entire area with their .50-caliber machine guns. They continued their attacks on the buildings until they expended all their ammunition.
My soldiers erupted in cheers. We had survived. Eventually, the sweat on our faces began to dry. The adrenaline wore off. I had just experienced my first real firefight. My NCOs seemed to have more respect for me. For a moment it felt as if it might become one of the proudest moments of my life: our small group of dismounts had performed admirably. We finished the mission, our heads held high.
It was only later in the evening, after we had returned to FOB Wilson—after our fifteen-hour patrol—that I learned the truth.
The helicopters hadn’t had positive identification on any insurgents. They’d fired their rockets at the village blindly, leaving it in fiery shambles. The US military had the entire thing on film. Above the helicopters was an unarmed drone, which provided a direct-to-battalion live video feed. By the end, it showed three dead civilians, including a woman in a blue burka lying in a pool of blood.
I dropped my equipment in a heap inside my tent and walked to the company headquarters to fill out the debrief paperwork. I looked at the SIGACT (significant activity) whiteboard to see how the Army had described the engagement. The report was vague: small arms fire, grid location, call for helicopter air support. The final column—the punch line—was BDA, battle damage assessment. Here, in bold capital letters, was written UNKNOWN.
There was no mention of the civilian casualties in the reporting. I felt urgently sick. Was this a war crime being covered up and intentionally misreported? Where were the “Army values” that I had been taught at West Point?
OVER TIME, I realized that the people who were trying to kill me weren’t international terrorists. They weren’t attacking me because “they hate our freedoms” or some other bullshit Bush-era line. They were mostly angry farmers and teenagers with legitimate grievances. Their loved ones, breathing and laughing minutes before, had been transformed before their eyes into little more than stringy sinew and bloody flesh. Like someone hit a piñata full of raw hamburger meat. That’s what rockets fired from helicopters do to human beings. It’s always a mistake, always the result of extenuating circumstances, and always excused. The paperwork is easier if the corpses rest as “enemy” or “unknown.”
I started to realize that if the birth lottery had allocated me to Afghanistan, I probably would have joined the insurgency too.
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said General Stanley McChrystal, the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan at the time. A couple of weeks later, as if to prove his point, just a few hundred meters from our platoon outpost, the Arkansas National Guard hosed down a passenger bus with an M240B machine gun, killing five and injuring eighteen innocent Afghans. It had all the trappings of yet another unforced error, reported as justifiable. Another “whoopsies” mass shooting of innocents—gunned down by US soldiers and excused by the US military propaganda ministry.
I saw the systematic dehumanization and devaluation of Afghan lives on a regular basis. We searched homes, people, and cars unilaterally and without warning. By and large, we never sought the consent of the Afghan people for anything. We regularly violated Karzai’s Twelve, a series of rules intended to protect civilian lives and safeguard Afghan citizens against the deep indignities of a foreign military occupation. What the Afghan people wanted was completely immaterial to our own on-the-ground military operations.
Not once during deployment did our military leadership say any of the following phrases in relation to the people of Afghanistan:
“What do they want?”
“Are we putting their interests above our own?”
“Are we respecting their habits and culture?”
“If we were in their shoes, how would we see America’s occupation?”
The truth is, the US military would never treat Americans the way it treated Afghans. I saw the hypocrisy of US military actions abroad as cutting to the bone of America’s own identity.
If America is truly a country based on justice and racial equity, it should not be willing to tolerate innocent civilians being killed in foreign countries by the US military any more than it should tolerate innocent civilians being killed in America by the police. It’s not just citizens of this country who have a right not to be killed by uniform-wearing, gun-wielding Americans who habitually use excessive force.
And if Afghans and Iraqis know they’ll never be treated with equal dignity, doesn’t it seem ridiculous to be expecting their cooperation with our vision for their country during our war?
I couldn’t justify the way we were treating our Afghan and Iraqi brothers and sisters. So when I received an email from the Army stating that I had been chosen for the Special Forces Qualification Course, to begin after deployment, I knew what I had to do.
Had I received this offer one year earlier, I would have accepted without hesitation. Now, war-rattled and disillusioned, in five minutes I respectfully wiped away five years of work and ambition. It was the first time I said no to what others in the military kept telling me was “a great opportunity.”
The War on Terror strip-mined my soul. My time in Afghanistan, from May 2009 to June 2010, was defined by the horror of watching good people getting mutilated and dying terrible deaths. It was filled with intense moral anguish, gnawing fear, butt-puckering anxiety, boredom, aggression, envy, and hatred. It strained my relationships, destroyed my notion of patriotism, eroded my support for American foreign policy, dissolved whatever faith I may once have had in religion, and made me deeply sad.
The decision to leave the military, on the other hand, filled me with joy, hope, and anticipation. I would have the agency to pick a career that wasn’t actively making the world worse off. A “good day” would no longer be measured by the absence of tragedy.
IT’S ONE OF America’s darkest ironies: in efforts to “prevent terrorism” in our country, we commit far larger acts of terrorism elsewhere. Terrorism—and the images that come with it: targeted assassinations, bombings, drone strikes, secret black site prisons, torture, and wanton civilian murder—is precisely what we inflict on others. Particularly galling is America’s arrogance in expecting that this won’t come back to haunt us, even when we’ve historically proved that we ourselves will destroy far more for far less.
We Americans are truly raised to believe that terrorism isn’t a crime—when America does it.
Fed up with the war and the lobotomized patriotism that perpetuated it, I left the country as soon as my contractual obligation was over. I went on to earn a dual degree from the University of Oxford, then moved to Australia for five years, working primarily in management consulting. But all along I found my mind wandering, always returning to the place I tried to forget.
I kept tabs on my friends still in uniform and on the war itself. I was disappointed, and sometimes aghast, at what I found.
In 2016, four years after I had left the military, I learned that one of my friends, Andy—Captain Andrew Byers—had been killed in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The place where he died was not far from where the United States had bombed a Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital roughly a year earlier, killing at least forty-two people, including numerous patients and staff.
Andy was an exceptional and talented guy, a Green Beret detachment commander in the Special Forces. Reading about his death, I found two very different accounts of the facts.
An article from the US Central Command titled “Until Dawn: Surviving the Battle of Boz Qandahari”—a dramatic and romantic-sounding name—provided a rah-rah account of the mission and contained many interviews with soldiers from Andy’s team. Andy and a fellow Green Beret were said to have been killed in a mission to “target known enemy safe havens and disrupt the refit operations of several high-level Taliban leaders.” The article said that the US Special Forces had inflicted “catastrophic damage on multiple enemies.”
One Air Force combat controller attached to the unit was “recommended for the Air Force Cross Medal for his actions, [having] spent the night calling in precision air strikes on enemy positions.” The mission that killed my friend was described as “a bittersweet victory,” and one Green Beret from Andy’s team “felt content with the effects that we had on the enemy that night.” For their actions that night, members of the team were awarded “three Silver Star Medals, three Bronze Star Medals (two with Valor), four Army Commendation Medals with Valor, and six Purple Heart Medals.”
Articles in the New York Times and Al Jazeera told a very different story. The Al Jazeera article was titled “US Forces Admit Killing 33 Civilians in Taliban Clash.” One Afghan resident whose family was killed by the air strikes said the attack “only killed innocent people,” whose houses were targeted based on “speculation.” Afterward, “residents carried more than a dozen bodies, including children, towards a local governor’s office in a show of anger.”
As deeply tragic as the death of American soldiers is, it’s remarkable how the official Army account completely omits any mention of the thirty-three civilians killed by US air strikes during the battle—more than fifteen times the number of Americans killed. To avoid moral dissonance, the military does not like to publish accounts that mix “medals with valor” and dead children. But the collateral damage made the circumstances of Andy’s death all the more tragic.
The methods America uses to achieve “peace,” presumably the ultimate goal of warfare, assure that it will never happen. If General McChrystal’s “insurgent math”—for every innocent person you kill, you create ten new enemies—is correct, the raid that killed Andy created another 330 insurgents. This 10:1 ratio means that just to keep an insurgency from growing, the American military needs to kill more than ten insurgents without a single civilian death, a seemingly impossible task in modern warfare. Grégoire Chamayou’s book Drone Theory puts it well: “Caught up in an endless spiral, the eradication strategy is, paradoxically, destined never to eradicate.”
As a kid, I’d wanted the kind of adoration my step-grandfather got for his military service. But now I was tired of the brainless veteran worship and shallow praise. I was tired of never-ending, counterproductive war. I was tired of witnessing the hypocrisy of America, its failure to adhere to its stated values. Andy’s death inspired me to take a stand and speak my mind. This, for me, was the inciting incident that shifted me from disillusion to dissent.
I took a break from the private sector and devoted myself to writing. About two years later, I had completed Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War. I hope I was successful in getting my point across. From the letters I’ve received, I knew that the book had a deep impact on some people’s lives—even if that number was smaller than the number of Americans who need to hear this message.
But the military-industrial complex is a force of nature. Neither my efforts nor the efforts of all the other contributors to this book have been successful in getting our country to confront its permanent war posture and profligate military spending. (The price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion.) Like the climate crisis, America’s military fetish needs a million voices—voices like yours, reader—to demand change. Without more pressure, our country and our troops will be condemned to more of the same.
Individuals—young men and women looking to prove their worth to society—must not be misled by the Disneyfication of military service. At the first sniff of adulthood, the military bamboozles children into one of the largest commitments ever conceived: to leave your life, be issued a new identity, and be sent across the world to inflict violence on people you don’t know, for political reasons you’re not meant to understand. I believe in informed consent, and I’m no longer sure that’s what happens when a military commitment is pitched to teenagers too young even to be allowed to drink alcohol or buy a ticket for an R-rated movie depicting gory military combat.
Society, for its part, must not overlook the incalculable costs of acquiescing to these aimless wars—to civilians overseas, to American soldiers who are wounded or killed, and also to the ones who finish their service intact in body but not in spirit. I have seen how those long-term effects—divorce, alcohol and drug abuse, depression, violence, suicide—have seeped into every corner of our country.
The American public has been complicit in allowing our troops to be sent into a series of wars that everyone knew to be costly and self-defeating, while simultaneously maintaining the audacious idea that, in doing so, we “support the troops.” That is not patriotism; that is betrayal.
WHEN I WAS sixteen years old, reflecting on the War on Terror and how I could be a good American, I asked myself a question: What will I do about it?
My answer then was to join the military. My answer now is different: dissent.
Given that the military is uniquely unlike everything else government runs—because of its expense, because of its ability to destroy the fabric of society—the costs are too high not to question the military. Rather, it is your civic duty to always question the military.
Without a legitimate and worthy purpose, death in war is merely a tragic and absurd loss. It is our duty as patriots to ensure that our country maintains nobility of purpose. And therefore, it is our civic duty to dissent—and loudly—whenever our country loses its way.
Military service is not an absolute good, but only as good as the purpose for which it is being used. Likewise, dissent is patriotic only insofar as it aims to redress society’s entrenched wrongs. For at least the past twenty years, the US government has misused the military in a way that runs counter to American ideals and undermines our country’s security.
In times like these, dissent is nothing short of a moral obligation.