Like most American boys who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, I was fully immersed in militarism. My older brother and I played with plastic toy guns. He was the cop. I was the robber. He was the cowboy. I was an Indian. He was the good guy. I was the bad guy. Or something like that. We dressed in camo, owned real guns by the time we were teenagers, and fantasized about parachuting into foreign lands and killing enemy combatants.
We watched and rewatched Rambo, Commando, Navy Seals, Missing in Action, and every other violent and patriotic movie featuring Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger. The post-Vietnam era showcased a hypermilitarized culture, and my brother and I loved every minute of it.
My father had served in the military during the Vietnam War, but he didn’t go to the war zone. While his friends died for a bullshit war in Southeast Asia, Pops was skiing in West Germany, keeping those Germans safe from their “commie” cousins on the other side of the Berlin Wall. He enjoyed his time in the Army but returned home to find his friends who’d served in combat dead, depressed, or addicted to drugs. He knew the US war in Vietnam was illegitimate but also appreciated his experiences in the military.
My grandfather had served as a basic infantryman during World War II. He’d fought Italian Fascists in the infamous Battle of Anzio, receiving two Purple Hearts for his troubles and a lifetime of nightmares and embedded shrapnel. He never encouraged my brother or me to join the military and never mentioned a word about his experiences fighting “the good war.” He spent his later years mainly sitting silently on his reclining chair, smoking pipes, watching golf, and reading the daily paper.
By the time I was thirteen years old, I knew that school wasn’t for me. I wasn’t meant to go to university, at least not yet. I loathed sitting in classrooms and couldn’t see the connection between whatever my teachers talked about and my life outside of school. The only classes I enjoyed were homeroom and physical education—bodybuilding and strength and conditioning. I was an active kid. I’m still active. I don’t like to sit still, never did. And I enjoy the pain and suffering of intense workouts. They push me to the brink of exhaustion, and that’s always made me feel more human, more alive.
Plus, I grew up in a dying Rust Belt region dotted with deindustrialized ghettos, suburban hellscapes, and rural poverty. Most teenagers in my neck of the woods leave at the first opportunity. Why wouldn’t they? There’s nothing for young people in Northwest Indiana. It’s a hellhole of alienation and social conservatism. I wanted out. And with a 1.9 GPA, my only options were the Marine Corps or the steel mills. Looking back, as contradictory as it may sound coming from someone who’s now a “war resister,” I’m glad I chose the former instead of the latter.
In short, I joined for excitement and a change of scenery. I also wanted to test myself and see if I could make it through Marine Corps boot camp. My classmates were going to college to guzzle booze and sleep with as many strangers as possible, but I’d experienced enough of that in middle and high school. More important, I didn’t want to end up doing what everyone else was doing. I hoped to chart my own path, and that’s precisely what I did.
The events of 9/11 played absolutely no role in my joining the Marine Corps. I saw the planes hit the Twin Towers while doing dumbbell bench presses in my senior year of high school. At first we thought it was a movie. Then everyone gathered around the television hanging in the corner of the gym, watching with some combination of horror and indifference. To be honest, my only concern on 9/11 was whether or not we were getting the day off school. After all, it was early September, and the beaches were still open—a perfect day to smoke some joints down by the lake.
The Marines didn’t have much trouble finding me. I walked straight into the local USMC recruiter office and told the two NCOs on duty that I wanted to be in the infantry. They were ecstatic. Later, when I got to boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, I was shocked by the number of doughy, scrawny, and exceptionally stubby people all around me. Weren’t marines supposed to be the ultimate badasses? Muscular, ripped, chiseled jaws, and all the rest? I guess the propaganda had colored my expectations. That’s why they call it propaganda.
For me, boot camp was a breeze. I quickly became a squad leader, then a platoon guide. The physical challenges were a piece of cake. Funny enough, I was in better shape when I entered boot camp than when I graduated! Lots of running in the Marine Corps and not much weight training. Guys who came in looking like marines from Hollywood movies left boot camp looking more like Lance Armstrong. I’d expected much more rigorous workouts. Psychologically, it was difficult being away from friends and family. There’s no doubt about that. But overall, boot camp wasn’t as hard as people make it out to be.
After boot camp, I entered School of Infantry (SOI) training at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Much like basic training, SOI consisted of a lot of running, hazing, and hiking. We learned the basics of various weapons systems but mastered none. The NCOs in charge of our platoon were drunks. Their lives were in shambles: divorce after divorce, DUI after DUI, drunken brawl after drunken brawl. Once again I left training disappointed, and increasingly skeptical that I had made the right choice in joining the USMC.
By March 2003, I had graduated SOI and was sent off to Kuwait to prepare for the initial invasion of Iraq. It’s hard to overstate just how little any of us understood about the war we found ourselves fighting, thousands of miles from the small towns most of us came from. Some of the guys I was serving with were looking to kill “sand niggers” and “towelheads”; others had joined to “defend the Constitution.” Others had enlisted for college money and health care.
According to President George W. Bush and company, Saddam Hussein was buddies with Osama bin Laden, Iraq had supported 9/11, and it possessed chemical weapons or worse. We followed orders, as good soldiers and marines do. Information was scarce, especially for privates and lance corporals. All ties to the outside world were cut. We spent our time in fighting holes and barracks huts. We waited for the chemical attacks and rigorously tested our outdated gas masks and deteriorating protective gear. I went on a few patrols, some in brand-new Toyota SUVs. Thinking back, there was so much weird shit going on. Just the amount of money and equipment sloshing around was enough to blow your mind.
A few months into the deployment, one of our staff sergeants came into the hut with a piece of paper in his hand and said, “Emanuele, why don’t you grab your smokes and come outside.” As a young PFC, I was scared shitless. Any good grunt knows that it’s best to stay off everyone’s radar. “What did I do?” I sat down, lit my cigarette, and the sergeant told me, “Your mother has had a brain aneurysm. She’s not dead, but she could go at any moment. She’s undergoing emergency surgery as we speak. So your deployment is over, marine. Get your shit together because you’re flying out of Kuwait City first thing tomorrow afternoon. You’ll land in Ireland, then to Chicago. I’m sorry this happened. Take care of yourself. Semper Fi!”
The next thing you know, I’m sitting in the waiting room at Northwestern University, awaiting news from the surgeons and doctors. Fortunately, my mother made it out of that episode alive and, for the most part, well. But that summer taught me a lot. While I had been learning about discipline, life, death, and violence, my friends in college were learning about politics, culture, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and so much more.
I started reading up about the countercultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s. It turned me on to all sorts of writers and thinkers—people like Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and so many more. I liked the idea of sexual freedom. (I grew up Catholic, but that didn’t stop me from experimenting at a very young age—in fact, it probably encouraged it.) I appreciated the absurdist and creative Merry Pranksters, the stories about protests and fighting the man. All of that sounded interesting to me.
Then I started to experiment with mind-altering substances, mostly psychedelics but also copious amounts of marijuana. Psychedelics opened up entirely new worlds of thought and consciousness. As a result, I started to ask more profound questions. What’s life all about? Why are we here? Am I ready to die? Am I a good son, brother, partner, friend? Do I love myself? What is love? What is reality? Who am I? What’s my purpose in this life? Why is it so hard to be vulnerable? What am I hiding?
All those experiences, reading, conversing, and experimenting, forced me to question why I was in the Marine Corps and whether I genuinely wanted to die for the cause. Turns out, I didn’t. I had no idea why we were fighting a war in Iraq. And I couldn’t understand my place within this entire mess. None of it made sense, but I knew I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.
Nevertheless, I went back to Twentynine Palms, California, where my unit was stationed. They were happy to be back from the deployment. Enlisted personnel and officers celebrated our victory over the Iraqi Army and the taking of Baghdad, and Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech on the aircraft carrier. The boys were ready to hit the Pacific for the regularly scheduled tour of various Asian countries and Australia. Older marines who had yearned for an opportunity to showcase their fighting skills were happy to come home with war stories. After all, that’s what it’s all about, right? The stories we tell, most notably the ones we tell ourselves.
By the end of 2003, though, it became clear that the war wasn’t going to be quick and easy like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush, and others had predicted. In early 2004, we got word from command that our unit would instead redeploy to Iraq in August. That gave us eight months to get ready. Morale dropped. Marines started drinking heavily. Pills hit the scene, mainly acquired from the medics. Some guys, including myself, were smoking pot in the barracks daily. Others smoked meth, blew coke, and freebased crack in decrepit military base housing or in hotel rooms and back alleys of Tijuana, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
This was by far the darkest period of my time in the Marine Corps. All around me, drinking, DUIs, assaults, overdoses, and suicides increased. The self-loathing, confusion, and anger were too much to bear. Alcohol eased the pain, and stress evaporated in bottles of Jack Daniel’s or Joshua Tree whiskey—what we bought when we didn’t have enough dough to get the good shit.
In July 2004, less than a month before we deployed a second time, a friend took me to a movie theater in San Diego to watch Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. I laughed and cried during the screening. Moore nailed the absurdity, brutality, and banality of the war, and blew apart Bush and company’s justifications for the US-led occupation. He also made soldiers and marines look like a bunch of uneducated dummies, which jibed with my personal experiences.
After leaving the theater, I called my father and told him that I didn’t want to go to Iraq for a second deployment. He understood my reservations and protests but didn’t have any suggestions. I could have deserted, I guess, but we were told that doing so would ruin your life. If a potential employer saw that you were dishonorably discharged, they’d never hire you—that’s what we had heard. Of course, all of that is bullshit, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was afraid, far from home, and unsure how I would explain to my fellow marines that I was running away while they were reluctantly sprinting into the fire.
Soon enough, we were back on the birds and on our way to Kuwait. Our destination: Al-Qa’im, a small town in Anbar Province. Located on the border with Syria, hugging the Euphrates about 250 miles northwest of Baghdad, Al-Qa’im had been the central location of Iraq’s refined uranium ore production from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. Most of the town, including the production facilities, was bombed out and destroyed during the Gulf War in 1991.
By late summer 2004, Al-Qa’im was at the center of the Iraqi resistance. Local Sunnis battled with US forces, as did foreign fighters streaming across the Syrian border. One officer told us that we were simply bullet sponges for the boys downstream in Ramadi and Fallujah. Our job was to intercept as many fighters and weapons as possible before they made their way to the country’s interior.
In reality, no one knew what the hell was going on. Many officers went on patrol when the missions were safe and stayed back at the huts when things got bad. Those who did patrol with us ended up getting people killed because of their ignorance or bravado. Some of these guys were fresh out of college—baby-faced wannabe warriors, most of them.
Morale continued to drop during that second deployment in western Iraq. We started smoking weed on patrol and doing coke while setting up observation posts. We’d brought most of the drugs with us when coming over. I remember emptying the first aid kit latched to my flak jacket and filling up the pouch with as much weed as I could. Most of those drugs lasted only the first few months of the deployment, though. We’d planned to stretch our supply to the end, but it didn’t stay secret for very long that we had good shit with us. And how could we deny anyone the pleasure of getting stoned under the brilliant, unprecedented Mesopotamian sky?
The deployment turned sour quickly, with several marines, including some of our commanding officers, killed in the first seventy-two hours. After that, things went from bad to worse. We shot at noncombatants. We tortured prisoners. We blew up civilian structures. We ran over, mutilated, and took pictures of dead Iraqis. As one headline in Maxim magazine put it, Al-Qa’im was the “Wild West of Iraq.” Frankly, we did whatever the fuck we wanted. Eighteen-year-olds with machine guns, rocket launchers, and a license to kill, or so we thought.
I’m happy to say that I didn’t participate in many of those “extracurricular” activities. I raised my voice about them on several occasions but was basically told to shut up unless I wanted to meet the same fate as Pat Tillman—the NFL star who enlisted in the Army Rangers and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004. I didn’t shut up, though. I kept talking, and reading, and writing letters to my friends and family back home. At that point, I was regularly reading the New York Times, Newsweek, Mother Jones, and the Nation. I was a good liberal. I voted for John Kerry via absentee ballot and hung up antiwar stickers and postcards on the wall next to my bunk.
But I didn’t know the first thing about resistance. I was reading about the countercultural and antiwar movements of the 1960s, but I didn’t know anything about the modern antiwar movement. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have known what to do as a marine deployed in the combat zone. Thank God for my friend and bunkmate Nick Epstein. He was one of the only marines in our platoon besides myself who was willing to speak up about the unjust and insane nature of the war. We both paid a heavy social price for our outspokenness. We were put on shit missions, in shit positions, usually the most dangerous or tedious ones. They did their best to break our rebellious spirits, but they lost. We were some hardheaded bastards. Still are.
By the end of my deployment, local Iraqis and foreign insurgents controlled the town of Al-Qa’im. Much as during the Vietnam War, local towns were destroyed, then captured by US forces, only to be retaken by the other side. With some of them it happened over and over again. Marines reportedly regained control of Al-Qa’im in May 2005, a few weeks after my unit left the country. In 2006 the insurgents took back the city and surrounding areas, and would maintain their dominance for years to come. In August 2014, even more extreme Islamic State forces took over the train station where our base had been located. Low-level fighting, drone strikes, and bombings have occurred in the area ever since.
I remember sitting in front of my computer screen back in 2014, watching as ISIS took over Mosul and Al-Qa’im. I couldn’t help but laugh. The Iraqi resistance fighters were always going to control their country—no matter how long US forces stayed, no matter how brutal our attacks became. The Iraqis were fighting for their families, their land, their pride, their dignity. American troops were only in it for health care, college money, steady housing, or ideological nonsense. Almost none of us actually believed the people we encountered posed a threat to our homeland. And those who did believe that were absolutely out of their minds, as history has shown.
When I finally returned from that second deployment, I was shattered. I was drinking heavily and smoking so much weed that my eyes looked permanently glazed over. Eventually, I went home on leave. After long talks with friends and family, after many nights of solemn reflection, I decided that I could no longer kill people for the US military. I checked myself into a Veterans Affairs (VA) facility and entered a two-month inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. The doctors tried their best to convince the command that I should stay home, but my commanding officers disagreed and forced me to return to Twentynine Palms.
When I got to base, my fellow marines were excited to see me. Everyone else had returned from leave two months earlier and already received word about a third deployment. Back home, my father and uncle started writing letters to every Senate and House Armed Services Committee member. Soon after, letters, phone calls, and inquiries poured into our unit’s command offices. I was called in to speak with high-ranking officers and enlisted personnel—marines way above my pay grade. They talked to me about “the mission” and “American freedom” and all the rest. At that point, I not only knew they were full of shit but could also outtalk and outthink most of them. Nevertheless, I kept my mouth shut and kept repeating, “I will not go to the armory, and I will not board an airplane.” They were gonna have to drag my unconscious body to Iraq if they wanted me to deploy a third time.
Eventually, the command acquiesced and offered me a “general discharge under honorable conditions.” The bureaucratic pretext was my failure to complete the drug and alcohol rehabilitation process. Once a marine finishes the two-month inpatient program, they must also complete two months of outpatient treatment. Since my command never offered me that treatment, and since I never sought it out, they figured this was the easiest excuse to get rid of a troublesome and vocal antiwar resister. They would rather lose a seasoned gunner than allow me the opportunity to bring down unit morale.
They made the right choice. I’d promised myself that if I were forced to deploy for the third time, I would kill as many of my commanding officers as humanly possible. Anger and resentment flowed through my body, pumping faster than my blood after a long run. I was ready to kill, only this time for the right reasons. In hindsight, the Marine Corps avoided a disaster, and I avoided the death penalty or a lifetime behind bars. I was lucky, and so was Uncle Sam.
The day I left Twentynine Palms remains the happiest day of my life—even better than returning from the war. I was finally free. I remember lighting up a cigarette on California State Route 62 and sticking my head out the window like a dog. Smiling from ear to ear, I didn’t have a care in the world.
Once I got back to Northwest Indiana, I ended up living with my parents for several months. I got a job as a rodbuster with Ironworkers Local #1 in Chicago. It was a good gig: I made great money even as a first-year apprentice, twenty-five dollars an hour in 2006. But I knew I didn’t want to be an ironworker for the rest of my life. My father had been one for years until he fell off a scaffolding that collapsed, breaking his neck, back, shoulder, hip, and arm and blowing out both eardrums from his head smacking against steel beams before hitting the deck. That wasn’t for me. The money wasn’t worth it.
One day, my dad told me about an event at a local university that featured a debate about the war in Iraq, for and against. After the discussion, they asked for comments from the audience. I raised my hand and said that I was a former marine and combat veteran with two tours of duty and fully supported the antiwar position. Stunned, the audience whipped their heads around to see who the hell I was. After the event, a Vietnam-era veteran ran up to me and asked if I had ever heard of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). I had not, but took his advice and attended an IVAW event in Chicago the following week.
From 2006 to 2008, I traveled most of the country with IVAW. I gave antiwar speeches at union halls, religious services, universities, community centers, town halls, libraries, street corners, parks, and protests. I was interviewed by every media outlet under the sun—cable news shows, radio programs, magazines, newspapers, and all the rest. It was a whirlwind experience, culminating in the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings, when hundreds of veterans converged on Silver Springs, Maryland, for several days of testimony about US war crimes, sexual assaults in the military, drug abuse, and much more. Later that year, about a dozen of us officially testified before the United States Congress.
At the time, no one could tell us whether or not we would face legal repercussions from doing so. And even though IVAW had thousands of members, only a dozen or so were willing to testify, which really bothered me at the time. I should’ve paid attention to my instincts, because such cowardice was par for the course within the modern antiwar movement and broader left-wing political movements in general. People were afraid of the consequences of speaking on the record. I understand their position better today, but I still don’t respect it. If you want to remain silent, that’s fine. Go about your civilian life in peace. But if you’re supposedly trying to stop a war, then you should be willing to sacrifice as much as those who are fighting it. If not, why bother?
Since then, I’ve gotten involved with every political movement under the sun: environmental efforts, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, labor protests, union efforts, Fight for $15 campaigns, community organizing, and cultural projects. Each step of the way, I’ve learned a lot about myself and society, and I’ve grown because of it.
In the end, I can’t say whether my particular form of dissent meant anything in the grand scheme of things. The antiwar movement never had the infrastructure, vision, discipline, or capacity to sustain resistance to the US war machine. Symbolic protests and street theater won’t stop the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon or mammoth defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. And pink-haired college kids and old Quaker grannies aren’t the sorts of people I would choose to lead any serious political movement. In many ways, the antiwar movement was a joke. There were good people involved in the movement, but they were few and far between. Too much over-moralizing and not enough strategy.
Am I glad I resisted? Absolutely. Would I recommend others do it? Perhaps. I was fortunate in my circumstances: I’m close with my immediate family, who supported my decision to refuse orders for a third deployment. I had childhood friends in my corner. I had, and maintain, an excellent social network. And because of those connections, I never had a problem getting a job. Many veterans cannot say the same, and they shouldn’t be shamed for not speaking out. That’s an individual choice, not a collective choice, unless the collective is willing to take care of the individual dissenter and their family if and when they face repercussions.
These days, I’ve taken a step back from political organizing. In 2017, my best friend, Sergio Kochergin—a former scout sniper and briefly a platoon mate—and I cofounded a community cultural center called PARC (Politics Art Roots Culture) in Michigan City, Indiana. For several years, we offered a space for local progressive organizations and hosted open mic poetry slams, live music events, hip-hop shows, comedy showcases, art installations, documentary film screenings, soup kitchens, and an endless array of casual social events. It was fun, but then the pandemic hit. We were able to hang on for fifteen months, only to have our landlord turn around and sell the building. Ain’t capitalism grand?
Yet no bitterness on my part. My time in the Rust Belt has come to an end. As I write this, I’m actively making plans to live in New York City, close to my brother and fully immersed in the most diverse and culturally vibrant city in North America. I will carry forth the idea of PARC and hopefully reopen the space someday in an environment more conducive to cultural and political experimentation. In our “age of isolation,” community and social bonds are that much more critical. They are the source of our collective strength. And I believe the more time we spend together, in person rather than mediated by screens, discussing and debating the major issues of our time—climate change, war, capitalism, race—the more likely we are to successfully address them.
If Americans were collectively organized, if working-class people had a voice, if unions were strong, if democracy truly flourished, perhaps we wouldn’t ever have gone to Iraq in the first place. Maybe the US empire would be a thing of the past. Who knows. It may sound simplistic, but all we can do is try. In the meantime, I’m going to have as much fun and create as much as I can. Life is too short, and there’s no time to waste. The war taught me that much. If you’re not busy living, you’re busy dying. I’m interested in living and embracing the infinite contradictions that color and shape our lives.
If you’re reading this and you’re a veteran, welcome home. Join a mixed martial arts gym. Stay active. Lift weights. Run. Get involved in sports and community efforts. Have lots of sex. Learn to play an instrument. Paint, draw, and sculpt. Stay away from booze, TV, and social media. Listen to your family and friends. They’ve noticed changes you’ll never recognize. And while you may not be the man or woman you once were, that, too, is okay. You’re here now, and your mission is to stay alive, contribute what you can, and live the rest of your life with as much happiness, purpose, and dignity as humanly possible.