When some friends of mine invited me to collaborate on writing a science fiction space opera, they warned me that the character whose perspective I would be writing was a soldier in the military. They worried that might be hard for me, the raging antiwar activist, to sympathize with.
I was surprised. Just because I’m writing a character who’s in the military doesn’t mean I can’t sympathize with or like them, I said. They don’t have to be pro-war. Maybe they were drafted unwillingly. Maybe they were intending to tear down the system from within. Maybe they hoped they could make the world better from a position of power. Maybe they believed in a cause that turned out not to be what the war was really about. Maybe they were desperate and out of prospects.
Antiwar rhetoric can walk a dangerous line between decrying war itself--the lies, the death tolls, the profiteering, the Pentagon, the geopolitical and/or imperial motives--and assigning that blame as well to the people who served in those wars, as pawns if not agents in the games of war. If we cannot separate the people from the institutions, we risk erasing their stories while superimposing others. This can be done both by antiwar activists, as well as by those pro-war or simply patriotic people who seize Veterans’ Day to advance US imperial and national security rhetoric.
I think when I was younger, I did resent the soldiers. I saw people in uniform and scowled. I thought Veterans’ Day was just a diluted version of the Fourth of July, full of unearned, unthinking patriotism and militarism. I listened to my parents rail against Bush and the (second) Iraq war, and learned to associate everything camouflage-and-armed with atrocity and criminality.
I eventually unlearned this, as I came to hear and read the stories of veterans in the peace movement. In eighth grade, I was writing a story about a futuristic version of the United States in which my character was drafted unwillingly into a special ops arm of the military, where she then tried to foment a rebellion. I can’t say the story was all that good, but I remember a conversation with a friend of mine who claimed to want to join the Marines and was quite interested in the fact that my story was about the military. We were discussing how the rebellion would progress, and I said that I figured there would be protest within the military as well as the civilian world. Maybe some soldiers would desert and join the rebellion. My friend looked at me, seemed gratified, and said that it was good I wasn’t going to make all the soldiers just blindly go along with the government, that I wasn’t just going to portray them as part of the problem.
Believing that the common soldier is “part of the problem,” that they are worthy of scorn, obligated to shoulder the blame for the consequences of decisions or protocols their superiors make, is a damaging attitude (as is the attitude that members of the military should be held above reproach). Peace and justice movements are incomplete whenever they fail to recognize the experiences, the stories, the truths of the people who fought our wars. Theirs is a critical perspective. The soldiers are not the problem--oh, certainly, some of them are or become so, like those responsible the torture and other events at Abu Ghraib prison--but they are perhaps a victim, or a symptom, of it. And we must remember also that when soldiers were prosecuted for atrocities--from Vietnam to Iraq--it is the lower-ranking soldiers who take the fall, though their actions were not the result of their own mentality and policies, but ones handed down from on high.
Journalist Dahr Jamail has done, I think, an admirable job in representing and weaving together the narratives of “both sides,” as one might say, of wars (specifically the 2003-onward Iraq war). The first of his books that I read told the not-via-embedded-journalists story of the experiences of Iraqis during the US invasion and occupation, and it read with a simple, brutal clarity. Little sympathy for US soldiers was aroused through those stories, but Jamail’s next book focused singularly on the tradition of resistance to war within the US military, emphasizing the role of groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace, as well as individual soldiers who left the military and spoke out against it.
Other books, like Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers, helped me realize that soldiers experience several strange kinds of invisibility: they are praised and glorified as we are urged to do our patriotic duty and support them, whether or not we the civilians or the troops themselves even believe in the “cause” they are fighting for. When it’s convenient, we invoke our soldiers as emblems of US bravery and strength and integrity. We have created a narrative that has little to do with the facets of war that Dahr Jamail, and others, reveal. And then, when those soldiers whom we faithfully “supported” come home, our alleged support falls away. Let’s think about that. Think about stories of the VA’s dysfunction, think about how “the troops” exist in our cultural mindscape only when out of sight and mind, presumably overseas serving some greater good. When that service brings them home wounded or dead, they cease to exist in our cultural consciousness.
On Veterans’ Day we are impelled to “thank a veteran,” as a few teachers urged my classmates and me as we left school on Tuesday. But what are we thanking them for? This is a third kind of invisibility: not the invisibility of faraway deployments or postwar injury, but the erasure that comes of obsequiously “remembering” people who have sacrificed, and imposing our thanks without, perhaps, considering what we think we are grateful for or what experience that veteran really had with war. When we wave our flags, or just enjoy the day off if we have it, what story are we helping to tell? What does Veterans’ Day really have to do with the people who make up our military, as opposed to the triumphant story we are told about our finest fighting forces in the world?
Before we called November 11th Veterans’ Day, it was Armistice Day, and before its rechristening, it was supposed to be more of a time to reflect on peace, on attitudes much better displayed by soldiers like Aidan Delgado (author of The Sutras of Abu Ghraib) than American Sniper Chris Kyle. But there isn’t much room for reflections on peace in this time of endless war, and not much space in our militaristic national story to remember that what has become a day for refreshing our patriotism, paying lip service to the idea that we support our troops, was once a day for imagining a better, more peaceful world--a world that the Pentagon (not to be conflated with the everyday people in the military) has no ability nor intention to build.
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