Letter to a Young Army Ranger (From an Old One)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/no_author/letter-to-a-young-army-ranger-from-an-old-one/
Why the War on Terror Shouldn’t Be Your Battle
By Rory Fanning
TomDispatch.com
January 17, 2015
You’ve probably just graduated from high school
and you’ve undoubtedly already signed an Option 40 contract guaranteeing
you a shot at the Ranger indoctrination program (R.I.P.). If you make
it through R.I.P. you’ll surely be sent off to fight in the Global War
on Terror. You’ll be part of what I often heard called “the tip of the
spear.”
The war you’re heading into has been going on
for a remarkably long time. Imagine this: you were five years old when I
was first deployed to Afghanistan in 2002. Now I’m graying a bit,
losing a little up top, and I have a family. Believe me, it goes faster
than you expect.
Once you get to a certain age, you can’t help
thinking about the decisions you made (or that, in a sense, were made
for you) when you were younger. I do that and someday you will, too.
Reflecting on my own years in the 75th Ranger regiment, at a moment when
the war you’ll find yourself immersed in was just beginning, I’ve tried
to jot down a few of the things they don’t tell you at the recruiting
office or in the pro-military Hollywood movies that may have influenced
your decision to join. Maybe my experience will give you a perspective
you haven’t considered.
I imagine you’re entering the military for the
same reason just about everyone volunteers: it felt like your only
option. Maybe it was money, or a judge, or a need for a rite of passage,
or the end of athletic stardom. Maybe you still believe that the U.S.
is fighting for freedom and democracy around the world and in
existential danger from “the terrorists.” Maybe it seems like the only
reasonable thing to do: defend our country against terrorism.
The media has been a powerful propaganda tool
when it comes to promoting that image, despite the fact that, as a
civilian, you were more likely to be killed by a toddler than a
terrorist. I trust you don’t want regrets when you’re older and that you
commendably want to do something meaningful with your life. I’m sure
you hope to be the best at something. That’s why you signed up to be a
Ranger.
Make no mistake: whatever the news may say about
the changing cast of characters the U.S. is fighting and the changing
motivations behind the changing names of our military “operations”
around the world, you and I will have fought in the same war. It’s hard
to believe that you will be taking us into the 14th year of the Global
War on Terror (whatever they may be calling it now). I wonder which one
of the 668 U.S. military bases worldwide you’ll be sent to.
In its basics, our global war is less
complicated to understand than you might think, despite the
difficult-to-keep-track-of enemies you will be sent after — whether
al-Qaeda (“central,” al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Magreb,
etc.), or the Taliban, or al-Shabab in Somalia, or ISIS (aka ISIL, or
the Islamic State), or Iran, or the al-Nusra Front, or Bashar al-Assad’s
regime in Syria. Admittedly, it’s a little hard to keep a reasonable scorecard. Are the Shia or the Sunnis our allies? Is it Islam we’re at war with? Are we against ISIS or the Assad regime or both of them?
Just who these groups are matters, but there’s
an underlying point that it’s been too easy to overlook in recent years:
ever since this country’s first Afghan War in the 1980s (that spurred
the formation of the original al-Qaeda), our foreign and military
policies have played a crucial role in creating those you will be sent
to fight. Once you are in one of the three battalions of the 75th Ranger
Regiment, the chain-of-command will do its best to reduce global
politics and the long-term good of the planet to the smallest of matters
and replace them with the largest of tasks: boot polishing, perfectly
made beds, tight shot groupings at the firing range, and your bonds with
the Rangers to your right and left.
In such circumstances, it’s difficult — I know
that well — but not impossible to keep in mind that your actions in the
military involve far more than whatever’s in front of you or in your gun
sights at any given moment. Our military operations around the world —
and soon that will mean you — have produced all kinds of blowback.
Thought about a certain way, I was being sent out in 2002 to respond to
the blowback created by the first Afghan War and you’re about to be sent
out to deal with the blowback created by my version of the second one.
I’m writing this letter in the hope that offering you a little of my own story might help frame the bigger picture for you.
Let me start with my first day “on the job.” I
remember dropping my canvas duffle bag at the foot of my bunk in Charlie
Company, and almost immediately being called into my platoon sergeant’s
office. I sprinted down a well-buffed hallway, shadowed by the
platoon’s “mascot”: a Grim-Reaper-style figure with the battalion’s red
and black scroll beneath it. It hovered like something you’d see in a
haunted house on the cinder block wall adjoining the sergeant’s office.
It seemed to be watching me as I snapped to attention in his doorway,
beads of sweat on my forehead. “At ease… Why are you here, Fanning? Why
do you think you should be a Ranger?” All this he said with an air of
suspicion.
Shaken, after being screamed out of a bus with
all my gear, across an expansive lawn in front of the company’s
barracks, and up three flights of stairs to my new home, I responded hesitantly, “Umm, I want to help prevent another 9/11, First Sergeant.” It must have sounded almost like a question.
“There is only one answer to what I just asked
you, son. That is: you want to feel the warm red blood of your enemy run
down your knife blade.”
Taking in his military awards, the multiple tall
stacks of manila folders on his desk, and the photos of what turned out
to be his platoon in Afghanistan, I said in a loud voice that rang
remarkably hollowly, at least to me, “Roger, First Sergeant!”
He dropped his head and started filling out a form. “We’re done here,” he said without even bothering to look up again.
The platoon sergeant’s answer had a distinct
hint of lust in it but, surrounded by all those folders, he also looked
to me like a bureaucrat. Surely such a question deserved something more
than the few impersonal and sociopathic seconds I spent in that doorway.
Nonetheless, I spun around and ran back to my
bunk to unpack, not just my gear but also his disturbing answer to his
own question and my sheepish, “Roger, First Sergeant!” reply. Until that
moment, I hadn’t thought of killing in such an intimate way. I had
indeed signed on with the idea of preventing another 9/11. Killing was
still an abstract idea to me, something I didn’t look forward to. He
undoubtedly knew this. So what was he doing?
As you head into your new life, let me try to unpack his answer and my experience as a Ranger for you.
Let’s start that unpacking process with
racism:That was the first and one of the last times I heard the word
“enemy” in battalion. The usual word in my unit was “Hajji.” Now, Hajji
is a word of honor among Muslims, referring to someone who has
successfully completed a pilgrimage to the Holy Site of Mecca in Saudi
Arabia. In the U.S. military, however, it was a slur that implied
something so much bigger.
The soldiers in my unit just assumed that the
mission of the small band of people who took down the Twin Towers and
put a hole in the Pentagon could be applied to any religious person
among the more than 1.6 billion Muslims on this planet. The platoon
sergeant would soon help usher me into group-blame mode with that
“enemy.” I was to be taught instrumental aggression. The pain caused by
9/11 was to be tied to the everyday group dynamics of our unit. This is
how they would get me to fight effectively. I was about to be cut off
from my previous life and psychological manipulation of a radical sort
would be involved. This is something you should prepare yourself for.
When you start hearing the same type of language
from your chain-of-command in its attempt to dehumanize the people you
are off to fight, remember that 93% of all Muslims condemned the attacks
on 9/11. And those who sympathized claimed they feared a U.S.
occupation and cited political not religious reasons for their support.
But, to be blunt, as George W. Bush said early
on (and then never repeated), the war on terror was indeed imagined in
the highest of places as a “crusade.” When I was in the Rangers, that
was a given. The formula was simple enough: al-Qaeda and the Taliban
represented all of Islam, which was our enemy. Now, in that group-blame
game, ISIS, with its mini-terror state in Iraq and Syria, has taken over
the role. Be clear again that nearly all Muslims reject its tactics.
Even Sunnis in the region where ISIS is operating are increasingly
rejecting the group. And it is those Sunnis who may indeed take down
ISIS when the time is right.
If you want to be true to yourself, don’t be
swept up in the racism of the moment. Your job should be to end war, not
perpetuate it. Never forget that.
The second stop in that unpacking process should
be poverty: After a few months, I was finally shipped off to
Afghanistan. We landed in the middle of the night. As the doors on our
C-5 opened, the smell of dust, clay, and old fruit rolled into the belly
of that transport plane. I was expecting the bullets to start whizzing
by me as I left it, but we were at Bagram Air Base, a largely secure
place in 2002.
Jump ahead two weeks and a three-hour helicopter
ride and we were at our forward operating base. The morning after we
arrived I noticed an Afghan woman pounding at the hard yellow dirt with a
shovel, trying to dig up a gaunt little shrub just outside the stone
walls of the base. Through the eye-slit of her burqa I could just catch a
hint of her aged face. My unit took off from that base, marching along a
road, hoping (I suspect) to stir up a little trouble. We were
presenting ourselves as bait, but there were no bites.
When we returned a few hours later, that woman
was still digging and gathering firewood, undoubtedly to cook her
family’s dinner that night. We had our grenade launchers, our M242
machine guns that fired 200 rounds a minute, our night-vision goggles,
and plenty of food — all vacuum-sealed and all of it tasting the same.
We were so much better equipped to deal with the mountains of
Afghanistan than that woman — or so it seemed to us then. But it was, of
course, her country, not ours, and its poverty, like that of so many
places you may find yourself in, will, I assure you, be unlike anything
you have ever seen. You will be part of the most technologically
advanced military on Earth and you will be greeted by the poorest of the
poor. Your weaponry in such an impoverished society will feel obscene
on many levels. Personally, I felt like a bully much of my time in
Afghanistan.
Now, it’s the moment to unpack “the enemy”:
Most of my time in Afghanistan was quiet and calm. Yes, rockets
occasionally landed in our bases, but most of the Taliban had
surrendered by the time I entered the country. I didn’t know it then,
but as Anand Gopal has reported in his groundbreaking book, No Good Men
Among the Living, our war on terror warriors weren’t satisfied with
reports of the unconditional surrender of the Taliban. So units like
mine were sent out looking for “the enemy.” Our job was to draw the
Taliban — or anyone really — back into the fight.
Believe me, it was ugly. We were often enough
targeting innocent people based on bad intelligence and in some cases
even seizing Afghans who had actually pledged allegiance to the U.S.
mission. For many former Taliban members, it became an obvious choice:
fight or starve, take up arms again or be randomly seized and possibly
killed anyway. Eventually the Taliban did regroup and today they are
resurgent. I know now that if our country’s leadership had truly had
peace on its mind, it could have all been over in Afghanistan in early
2002.
If you are shipped off to Iraq for our latest
war there, remember that the Sunni population you will be targeting is
reacting to a U.S.-backed Shia regime in Baghdad that’s done them dirty
for years. ISIS exists to a significant degree because the largely
secular members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party were labeled the enemy
as they tried to surrender after the U.S. invasion of 2003. Many of them
had the urge to be reincorporated into a functioning society, but no
such luck; and then, of course, the key official the Bush administration
sent to Baghdad simply disbanded Saddam Hussein’s army and tossed its
400,000 troops out onto the streets at a time of mass unemployment.
It was a remarkable formula for creating
resistance in another country where surrender wasn’t good enough. The
Americans of that moment wanted to control Iraq (and its oil reserves).
To this end, in 2006, they backed the Shia autocrat Nouri al-Maliki for
prime minister in a situation where Shia militias were increasingly
intent on ethnically cleansing the Sunni population of the Iraqi
capital.
Given the reign of terror that followed, it’s
hardly surprising to find former Baathist army officers in key positions
in ISIS and the Sunnis choosing that grim outfit as the lesser of the
two evils in its world. Again, the enemy you are being shipped off to
fight is, at least in part, a product of your chain-of-command’s
meddling in a sovereign country. And remember that, whatever its grim
acts, this enemy presents no existential threat to American security, at
least so says Vice President Joe Biden. Let that sink in for a while
and then ask yourself whether you really can take your marching orders
seriously.
Next, in that unpacking process, consider
noncombatants: When unidentified Afghans would shoot at our tents with
old Russian rocket launchers, we would guesstimate where the rockets had
come from and then call in air strikes. You’re talking 500-pound bombs.
And so civilians would die. Believe me, that’s really what’s at the
heart of our ongoing war. Any American like you heading into a war zone
in any of these years was likely to witness what we call “collateral
damage.” That’s dead civilians.
The number of non-combatants killed since 9/11
across the Greater Middle East in our ongoing war has been breathtaking
and horrifying. Be prepared, when you fight, to take out more civilians
than actual gun-toting or bomb-wielding “militants.” At the least, an
estimated 174,000 civilians died violent deaths as a result of U.S. wars
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan between 2001 and April 2014. In
Iraq, over 70% of those who died are estimated to have been civilians.
So get ready to contend with needless deaths and think about all those
who have lost friends and family members in these wars, and themselves
are now scarred for life. A lot of people who once would never have
thought about fighting any type of war or attacking Americans now
entertain the idea. In other words, you will be perpetuating war,
handing it off to the future.
Finally, there’s freedom and democracy to
unpack, if we’re really going to empty that duffel bag: Here’s an
interesting fact that you might consider, if spreading freedom and
democracy around the world was on your mind. Though records are
incomplete on the subject, the police have killed something like
5,000people in this country since 9/11 — more, in other words, than the
number of American soldiers killed by “insurgents” in the same period.
In those same years, outfits like the Rangers and the rest of the U.S.
military have killed countless numbers of people worldwide, targeting
the poorest people on the planet. And are there fewer terrorists around?
Does all this really make a lot of sense to you?
When I signed up for the military, I was hoping
to make a better world. Instead I helped make it more dangerous. I had
recently graduated from college. I was also hoping that, in
volunteering, I would get some of my student loans paid for. Like you, I
was looking for practical help, but also for meaning. I wanted to do
right by my family and my country. Looking back, it’s clear enough to me
that my lack of knowledge about the actual mission we were undertaking
betrayed me — and you and us.
I’m writing to you especially because I just
want you to know that it’s not too late to change your mind. I did. I
became a war resister after my second deployment in Afghanistan for all
the reasons I mention above. I finally unpacked, so to speak. Leaving
the military was one of the most difficult but rewarding experiences of
my life. My own goal is to take what I learned in the military and bring
it to high school and college students as a kind of counter-recruiter.
There’s so much work to be done, given the 10,000 military recruiters in
the U.S. working with an almost $700 million advertising budget. After
all, kids do need to hear both sides.
I hope this letter is a jumping off point for
you. And if, by any chance, you haven’t signed that Option 40 contract
yet, you don’t have to. You can be an effective counter-recruiter
without being an ex-military guy. Young people across this country
desperately need your energy, your desire to be the best, your pursuit
of meaning. Don’t waste it in Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen or Somalia or
anywhere else the Global War on Terror is likely to send you.
As we used to say in the Rangers…
Lead the Way.
