Dissent is a difficult topic for me to address. This is not because it brings up thoughts or emotions I find troubling or overwhelming. Nor is it because I don’t want to revisit my past experiences and what led to them. Rather, the problem is that my journey of breaking from the military, the wars, and the US empire was not a simple one. It is not anything like a straight line.
In high school, I applied to West Point (the US Military Academy), to Annapolis (the Naval Academy), and for a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship. The military academies require both a standard academic admissions process and also a nomination from one’s member of Congress. I was academically accepted at West Point but only received a congressional nomination to Annapolis. I could have delayed college for a year and asked my member of Congress to nominate me for West Point instead, but I chose not to. And while I was offered an Army ROTC scholarship for college, I declined that as well.
This change came about because of the Gulf War. In 1990, a few weeks before my senior year of high school began, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait. Initially, I supported US intervention in the region. I believed the situation with Saddam and Kuwait was analogous to the oft-cited example of Hitler annexing Czechoslovakia. Even as I was filling out my applications to West Point, Annapolis, and ROTC, though, I started to recognize that the rationale for the war—let alone any moral foundation for it—was fluid and inconsistent. I realized that my intellectual critiques and moral principles did not square with what I was seeing happen in the Persian Gulf.
When the US invasion began, I was aghast at the slaughter. On both an intellectual and moral level I was angered by US hypocrisy, by our government’s blatant manipulation and destruction of lives for purposes of US geopolitical and economic primacy. Even a high school senior could notice that the United States had only recently armed and supported Saddam Hussein, providing him with weaponry, equipment, money, and intelligence during the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s. When Saddam had used chemical weapons, not just on Iranians but also on his own people—weapons that had been directly and indirectly supplied and approved of by America—the United States provided him with political cover at the United Nations. But now, in 1991, the same officials who had supported Iraq in the 1980s as members of the Reagan administration (including President George H. W. Bush himself, Reagan’s vice president) were turning on Iraq and Saddam simply because it was politically convenient to do so.
The Gulf War was over before I graduated high school in the spring, and I went to college that fall. I had applied to college wanting to study international relations. When one application essay asked me to imagine my future self delivering a commencement address, I chose to write it as if I had become secretary of state. But as a result of the Gulf War, I turned inward. Rather than studying foreign affairs, economics, and political science, as I had imagined only a year earlier, I studied religion, philosophy, literature, and classical mythology. I went from being a high school kid with a subscription to the Economist to a college kid with a passion for the poetry of John Milton.
Throughout my time in college, I gave little thought to the military, politics, and foreign affairs. After graduating, I worked in finance and operations for publishing companies. I did that for about two years before my boredom and restlessness became too much. Above all else, I was afraid that I would pass my time as a young man without ever having done something. Those years of inward focus in college had been enough. Now I was haunted by the idea of waking up one day at forty years old and realizing that I had never challenged myself, never served others, never exposed myself to danger, never participated in the world or the making of history.
I looked into becoming a firefighter, but the fire department where I lived wasn’t hiring for another year or two, and I didn’t have the patience for the residency requirements of fire departments in other cities. One day, frustrated, I saw an advertisement in the New York Times for becoming an officer in the Marine Corps. I called the telephone number and began the process. Nine months later I arrived at Quantico, Virginia, for Marine Officer Candidates School (OCS). I needed to be of service, to be a hero and take part in something bigger than me. I thought I would find that in the Marine Corps.
At this point, my understanding of history, while pretty thorough for someone of my age, was disjointed. I recognized and understood the downfalls and the deceits of our society, but I didn’t tie them together. I did not see history as a continuous line that runs through events; instead, I perceived historical events as separate episodes, with only loose associations of cause and effect. I was familiar with the genocide of the Native Americans and the conquest of the continent, the invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, the war against Mexico, American interventions in Asia (including the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Perry), the coup in Hawaii, the Spanish–American War, the centuries of American involvement in Central and South America, and assorted post–World War II coups, interventions, occupations, and proxy wars, up through and including the Vietnam War. All those incidents and wars I recognized, disliked, and denounced. Still, I didn’t truly understand them as the coherent story of American empire that they were.
When I entered OCS, I could say that the Vietnam War was awful, what the United States had done in Central America in the 1980s was terrible, what we did to Iraq in 1991 was horrible. But I failed to see that the same forces, and often literally the same people in government, were driving events in the present.
I was initially stationed with the Marine Corps in Okinawa, Japan, then assigned as a staff officer to the Pentagon, working for the Office of the Secretary of the Navy. That’s where I was when we invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003. As the realities of the Iraq War assaulted my moral and intellectual foundation, the initial excuses I’d made for being part of this enterprise fell away, but new ones arose. My disagreements with the American wars, and my internal justifications for continuing to be involved with them, were never static: they competed against each other, mutated and evolved, each rebutting the other in turn. That’s why I left active duty in the spring of 2004 and went to Iraq as a government official on a State Department reconstruction and governance team. Even though I was convinced of the illegality of America’s war there, its mendacity, and its counterproductive nature, I thought that as an individual, I could make a difference. If I went to Iraq, I told myself, I could do good there. Where others harmed, I would help. I believed I could be a moral actor in an immoral environment.
I spent a year in Iraq, handing out millions to local political leaders for reconstruction efforts. Two safes in my bedroom held as much as $24 million in cash at a time. I worked closely with Iraqis of all backgrounds, saw many of them suffer and die, and all of them, along with their families and neighbors, endure lives of hellish fear. I left Iraq with a clear sense of the folly of the war, the cruel damage being done to the people there, and the potent mixture of US ignorance and arrogance.
After coming back to the United States, I went to work as a consultant on the State Department’s Iraq desk. Now my thinking wasn’t so much that I could do good right away, but that if I stayed involved, I might be able do so in the future. I knew that as a junior or mid-level person in government, I couldn’t change things. However, I thought, if I stuck around, maybe I could make a difference as a senior official in the years and decades to come. The work I did at the State Department belied this optimism, though. I had seen senior people at the Pentagon allow themselves to be misled, and now I saw the same at the State Department. Whether they embraced the war openly and eagerly, or were passive in their ignorance, the lies of the war were circulated and celebrated throughout Washington.
For a while at the State Department, I was responsible for writing the Iraq Weekly Status Report. This report, in classified and unclassified versions, went to many people in Washington: government officials, the media, members of Congress, admirals and generals. It was placed on the desks of the secretary of the state, the vice president, and even the president. So, among other tasks, I would spend my time each week trying to assemble “good news” about the Iraq War. Of course, there was none. The weekly status report was a complete work of fiction, as anyone with any degree of intellectual or moral honesty would recognize. However, it was promoted, disseminated, and cited, and I did my part.
How could a system that was so rotten and corrupt—and so incentivized for that rot and corruption to succeed—ever be changed? What could someone within it possibly do? Once again, my justifications for my involvement in the war began to change. While working at the State Department, I was also a reserve officer in the Marine Corps, and one day I received an email from the Marines looking for volunteers for Iraq. The first position in that email immediately appealed to me: they needed a captain to command a combat engineer company being deployed to Anbar Province in Iraq.
My argument for staying in the war now became that I was a good officer, better than most. This was a combat unit I would be taking over, with some 150 sailors and marines, and I knew I could bring those young men home to their families. I would be protecting and taking care of others.
This is a common excuse seen throughout the military, held by many officers and senior enlisted personnel throughout their careers. But it involves shrugging off any responsibility for what you are taking part in, denying your duty to understand whether the orders you are following are legal or illegal. There may be some truth to your commitment to take care of others, but it means dismissing the overall reality of the war. And this excuse is used to such an extent by people in leadership positions in the military that it has become a washing of the hands, a self-absolution that ignores one’s complicity.
It was a difficult and violent deployment. From late summer of 2006 through the early winter of 2007, in many parts of our area of operations attacks and combat happened almost daily. Our armored vehicles and body armor saved many lives and limbs; some of my marines had their vehicles hit by ten or more IEDs during our time there. (Whether they truly escaped unharmed is another question. These days the Department of Defense requires anyone within fifty yards of an explosive blast to be evaluated for traumatic brain injury, but that standard did not exist during our deployment.) Most of us had stories of roadside bombs, rocket and mortar attacks, rifle fire, grenades, and so forth that in previous wars—or even in the first year of the Iraq war—would have killed or maimed us. Now, thanks to our equipment, we just brushed ourselves off and continued with our patrols and operations. The Iraqis, of course, had no such protection.
Things started to change around the end of 2006, when American officers began speaking directly with Sunni insurgents and trying to address their grievances. Those grievances amounted to no more than the well-understood consequences of having a people occupied and abused, by both foreigners and a sectarian conflict driven by America’s divide-and-conquer strategy. Answering these grievances meant turning control of Sunni areas over to Sunni leaders. In return, those leaders abandoned al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, and violence began to drop quickly. Such reactionary religious groups had never amounted to more than a few percent of the insurgency, which raises the question of what would have happened if we’d spoken to the Sunnis right from the beginning. Of course, never invading Iraq in the first place was always the correct answer, but just how wrongheaded and counterproductive a strategy the United States pursued afterward—never mind how massively immoral—was clear to anyone with the courage to see it.
So when I came back from that second Iraq deployment, I demobilized from active duty as soon as I could and resigned my Marine Corps commission. I wanted to step away from the war entirely. There was an enormous dissonance between what I had taken part in during my time in Iraq and who I thought I was as a person. The dissonance was causing chaos, dismay, and desolation within my mind and spirit. This was moral injury: the harrowing feeling of having transgressed—whether through thought or deed, action or inaction—against your moral code. It is a betrayal of who you thought you were.
Moral injury also occurs when a person is betrayed by organizations or other people whom that person had believed in, respected, and cherished. And in the case of the military, it’s not only a matter of what groups and people one identifies with or wishes to emulate: these are institutions and leaders for whom a person is willing to make the most extreme physical sacrifices, to die and to commit violence against others. I had betrayed who I thought I was by being morally and intellectually dishonest, and I was betrayed by others who were conducting a war based on lies.
I was in a bad way. I cannot emphasize enough the destructive effects—mental, emotional, and spiritual—of moral injury. It is believed by many to be the primary driver of combat veteran suicides. It is much more than mere guilt, shame, and regret, which it incorporates but supersedes in its manifestation and symptoms. The deaths of both Iraqis and Americans, the ongoing suffering of the Iraqi people, the anguish of American families bereft of their hoped-for futures were a burden on my soul. And I had not only witnessed the slaughter but taken part in it too. My hands had been covered in blood and brains, fragments of ligament and bone. I was a perpetrator.
To deal with the moral injury and perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS), I self-medicated with alcohol. Daily I would numb myself to accept who I was. By keeping closed the doors of intellectual and moral honesty in my mind, by not allowing myself to recognize what the war truly was, and by consuming alcohol in massive quantities, I neutered myself into a piece of meat that was happy to have been a servant of the US empire.
AFTER DEMOBILIZING IN 2007, I expected to find my employment in the private sector. But just as I was about to accept a job offer with an HVAC and plumbing subcontractor in Baltimore, I was invited to work with a Pentagon unit that was building and acquiring technology to protect US troops from IEDs, suicide bombs, and the like. The recruiter told me: “Hey, I saw your résumé, and based on your skills and experience I think you can help save a lot of lives.” The argument caught me just when I was most susceptible to it, and I went back into the wars once again. I thought I could help save others. I felt I owed it to them.
Not very long after I started working at the Pentagon, I had a chance to receive a direct appointment into the Foreign Service—something relatively rare—and go to Afghanistan. I was excited about the opportunity. I believed President Barack Obama’s administration would be different from the Bush administration. I concurred with what General Petraeus said about needing to pursue a political solution to Afghanistan rather than a military one. I had been in the Sunni parts of Iraq during the Sunni Awakening that began in late 2006, and had seen how dialogue with the Sunnis brought about a temporary cease-fire and the near destruction of al-Qaeda in Iraq. (Optimistically, I thought the cease-fire would hold, once again ignoring the continuity of American history and warfare.) If the United States similarly met the grievances of the Afghan insurgency, I thought, the war there could be brought to an end.
I thought I could be of use in Afghanistan. I also felt that Afghanistan could be of service to me. My relentless consumption of alcohol was a slow and steady form of suicide. The idea of dying in Afghanistan was more attractive to me than dying in the United States: I could kill myself in America by drinking or with a gun, or die seemingly more honorably in service abroad. Being back in the war was what I needed and where I belonged. As soon as I landed in Afghanistan, in April 2009, my issues with PITS and PTSD quite nearly vanished. All felt right.
It didn’t take long, though, for those feelings to dissipate. Perhaps it was the absence of drink: I could no longer water my brain with alcohol every day, as if it were a pesticide to keep back the weeds of intellectual and moral honesty. Perhaps those weeds were beginning to bloom again. Whatever the reason, I was confronted in Afghanistan with the same realities I’d experienced in Iraq.
It soon became apparent the only difference between the Iraq War and the Afghan War was that one had been run by a Republican and the other by a Democrat. As weeks and months went by, I was again sickened by what I was taking part in. As the late veteran-turned-antiwar-activist Jacob George put it, the United States was sending poor farmers overseas to fight poor farmers. Just as in Iraq, I saw local villagers get ripped apart, bodily and mentally, with no promise that their suffering would ever mean anything. I saw American men and women go home in coffins to families to whom I could not justify their sacrifice.
Event after event confirmed the agreement of the Afghan War with the Iraq War, as well as with the multitude of previous wars fought to establish and ensure American primacy, devastating all but the few who profited from them. Naturally, there were some things unique to Afghanistan, such as the drug trafficking (largely dominated by our allies in the Afghan government). But by and large, the Afghan War was the identical twin sibling to the Iraq War. Arguments I was making to myself foundered, and my reasons for being there quickly began to feel silly or selfish. The thought of a government career as a neocolonial officer of the American empire was nauseating.
The lack of alcohol was not the only reason why my intellectual and moral strength returned. There was a searing column written by Bob Herbert of the New York Times on the passing of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “Lyndon Johnson’s icy-veined … intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people to their utterly pointless deaths.” And there was a letter I received from my father, which made me realize that I alone could decide what I did next. Only I could determine my morality and ascertain whether my life was an honest one. By my fifth month in Afghanistan, sleepless, sickened mentally and emotionally, I submitted my resignation from my post with the State Department.
My resignation occurred as Obama was preparing to send an additional thirty thousand soldiers into Afghanistan, to go along with forty thousand US troops he’d added to the war almost immediately upon entering office, plus tens of thousands more security contractors (that is, mercenaries) and NATO soldiers. The war was distinctly immoral, a pursuit of military victory solely for the sake of glory for the White House and the Pentagon—quite akin in that respect to George W. Bush’s crusade in Iraq. It was also strategically unsound, counterproductive, and futile. The Taliban were fighting an extension of a civil war that went back to the 1970s, a war largely caused by American interference and manipulation meant to stymie the Soviet Union. The bulk of the Taliban’s soldiers were in it not for some religious ideology but because they wanted to end foreign occupation. This was not my lone opinion, but the assessment of nearly all my diplomatic, military, and intelligence colleagues.
After I returned home, a chain of Forrest Gump–like events led to the Washington Post interviewing me about my resignation. They ran the piece as a front-page, above-the-fold three-thousand-word profile. The morning it was published, I woke up to three TV trucks outside my apartment; by the end of the day, I had received more than seventy-five interview requests. Within a few days, I had six book offers and was heading to New York City to be on the Today show. I asked the Washington Post reporter, Karen DeYoung, why she had given me such extensive coverage. Karen replied that it was because she had asked everyone she knew at the White House, the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon about what I had written in my resignation letter, and no one had disagreed with me. Not one person, though, went on the record to support me.
There was never any single moment when I decided I could not lie to myself any longer and keep participating in the wars. The sense of what is fair and honest just overtook me by degrees. Perhaps it’s as simple as being an alcoholic without alcohol on hand to subdue his feelings. The entire US government, including our military, intelligence, and diplomatic corps, was—and is—full of people who don’t believe in America’s endless wars, don’t believe in our supposed reasons for fighting them, and don’t believe that the sacrifices and costs are worthwhile. The extent of their lying, to themselves and to the public, has been well documented, not only for Iraq and Afghanistan but for all American wars of this century, and most wars of previous centuries as well.
In 2019, the Washington Post reported on the Afghanistan Papers, a confidential trove of interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with more than six hundred US officials, both military and civilian. The report laid bare the systemic lying of the entire US government regarding the Afghan War, just as the New York Times unveiling the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed the systemic lying of the US government regarding the war in Vietnam. Yet our elected officials have made no attempts to address the unmitigated mendacity. Britain’s Parliament, to its credit, has held formal inquires regarding the wars in Iraq and Libya, confirming that those wars were started and sustained upon lies. In the United States, we have not had justice or truth-telling from our leaders.
Chelsea Manning showed the world video of US helicopters massacring journalists and an ambulance crew; she was imprisoned, while lies disavowing such attacks (to say nothing of the attacks themselves) remain unpunished. CIA officer John Kiriakou spoke out about the agency’s torture of prisoners; he, too, went to prison, while the torturers were untouched. Actual US assistance to al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other jihadist groups in Syria and Libya has now been so thoroughly documented—by journalists and whistleblowers, leaked documents and recovered weapons—as to be undeniable, yet there has been no investigation, no accountability, no justice. Instead, there has been a subordination of mind, soul, and spirit at all levels of the US government. I’m speaking of not simply generals and top political leaders but the men and women who fill out the ranks of the military, the intelligence community, and the diplomatic corps. And the same goes for Congress and the mainstream American media as well.
Since coming home in 2009, I have spoken out against the wars and worked with peace movements. I have tried to live a life that aligns with my principles and values. But I am still dealing with the effects of moral injury, still reckoning with what I did in the wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Washington, DC. My suicidal tendencies grew even worse after I resigned my position, peaking years after I had done “the right thing.” They are still something I grapple with daily.
The great cowardice that kept me participating in the wars, the willful ignorance of how history runs unbroken through the events of our lives, and the ravenous desire to be a part of something bigger than me even if it meant destroying myself and others—all these may be behind me now, but they are still things for which I must atone. I do not know when or how I will meet the dictates and requirements of atonement. When will my guilt, regret, and shame be satiated? Perhaps never, and that is fair, for I helped wreck lives not solely in the current generation but for generations to come. But I do not believe the answer is to punish myself, although I sometimes struggle with that instinct. Instead, I’ve come to believe that it is to live a life according to how my mind, soul, and spirit dictate—to be intellectually and morally honest for the remainder of my days.