War is a Racket

                                                                                        

Story of a highly paid military hitman

"The First World War, boys, it came and it went/ the reason for fightin' I never did get/ but I learned to accept it, accept it with pride/ for you don't count the dead when God's on your side."

                                                                Bob Dylan, "With God on Our Side" 

 “We submit to pragmatists, profiteers, and the paranoiacs who insist that war is part of our humanity, our identity.” 

                                                               Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer 

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service…most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big business, for Wall Street and for Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, and gangster for capitalism.” 

                                                               Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, War is a Racket 

 “Theirs is not to reason why/theirs is but to do and die.” 

                                                              Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charge of the Light Brigade 

I’ve spent a good deal of my academic career studying war, and the literature of war, its contradictions and paradoxes, and the idea of fighting wars, young men and women dying, society suffering and never knowing why. Maybe that’s why armies encourage teenagers to enlist. They’re easier to manipulate and control, to convince dying in combat is honorable. They rarely ask intelligent questions about politics or about the reasons societies go to war, which adults usually wrap up in a soundbite, “For Liberty.” “For God and Country.” “So, we don’t have to fight on our soil.” “They’re communists.” “They’re fascists.” “They’re evil. “They’re crazy.” “Those people don’t value life like we do.” 

After the attack on the World Trade Center, Bush and Cheney blamed Saddam Hussein and tasked their administration to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. When neither international nor administration experts could find WMD’s, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell created a story. They showed the American public, and the world, grainy black and white photos of trucks carrying huge tubes and claiming those were the so-called “smoking guns,” obviously to be used for, none other, than WMD’s to destroy their enemies. Hussein is an evil madman. “Shock and Awe” followed. It mesmerized Americans and proved that nobody should mess with us. 

I was teaching at Santa Monic College, at the time, a placid campus just blocks from the Pacific Coast. The war machine was gearing up. Funny, we thought Vietnam would be our final war, having caused so much havoc in American life, tearing apart families and friends. If politicians even thought about going to war, say like in Central America, the public would say, “Oh, no, not another Vietnam.” 

I’d walk across the quad and see Army and Marine recruiters set up shop right next to university representatives who were there to provide transfer information to students. As a Vietnam veteran, I knew the game, so I saw it as my duty to convince students to stay in school, transfer, and earn their degrees before making life-changing decisions, like joining the military. So many of our students travelled to the coast from the inner city, to experience a different environment, start fresh, and strive for entrance to a campus from the University of California.

I noticed the military recruiters, mainly African American and Latinos, in sharp, crisp uniforms, aggressively going after Latino and Black students, in a couple of cases actually chasing down anyone who gave them a second glance. University recruiters normally sit passively at tables, under banners emblazoned with their campus name, colorful brochures in neat piles, waiting for students to ask questions. 

I’d listen to military recruiters promising students world, travel, job training, Officer Candidate School, free education on the G.I. Bill, and adventure, but not a word about the “conflicts” brewing in the Middle East. I approached the military recruiters, telling them I was a Vietnam veteran, so I knew things about the military and war. I’d say, “You know, we're trying to get these students into universities. Most of what you’re promising them is false. You aren't telling them about Afghanistan and Iraq or about having to meet your recruitment quota each year or you’ll lose your recruiting job and get sent back to some crap job.” 

I tried to sound respectful but honest. They’d say something like, “Look, Professor, we’re just doing our job,” which I understood, but how many students would buy their sales’ pitch. quit school, and find out the truth, too late that it was all a lie? 

Many of my students knew I was a veteran. Some had read the stories I’d published about my time in Vietnam. One, in particular, told me he was considering joining the Marines and what did I think. “Don’t do it,” I leveled with him, saying most of their promises wouldn’t come true. He’d more than likely find himself in a Humvee patrolling the streets of Fallujah, and, possibly, die for nothing. 

He was a good student, high grades, and a bright future. He said he was ready to sign the enlistment papers. I begged him to think carefully about it, to talk to his parents, first. There was no glory in death. I'd learned the hard way.  He said if he died in combat that was just a part of being in the military. That’s when I knew I’d lost him. I found out later he hadn't passed the physical to be a navy seal.

I joined a group of faculty members who lobbied to keep military recruiters off campus. I spoke to student clubs to start protesting and get the military recruiters off campus. I attended administration meetings asking the campus administrators to support the ban. On Fox News, before he got canned, Bill O’ Reilly called teachers like me traitors for discouraging college student from joining the military. To ban military recruiters from campus was un-American. Yet, O’ Reilly, born in 1949, draft age during Vietnam, didn’t serve. He stayed in college, even travelled to London to study and avoid the draft, like other political war mongers and masters of war who dodged the military when they had the chance to prove themselves. the height of hipocrisy. 

The Bush administration threatened to withhold government subsidies from any institution of higher education who did not admit recruiters on to their campuses. Then, little by little, the media began publishing stories coming out of the Middle East. Nobody knew what to believe, whether Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9-11 or a Saudi businessman, Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist organization Al Qaeda, killing 3,000 people. 

Most Americans had no idea about Sunnis, Shiites, Wahabi, or a myriad of other Muslim factions in the Middle East, which were allies and which were enemies. Like Vietnam, wars in the Middle East had been fought by war lords, business interests, religions, and puppet governments going back generations. England, France, Germany, and European Zionists had planted their footprints in the old Ottoman Empire going back to the 1800s, and because of it, Americans, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghanis and Iraqis were dying, and for what? 

It took another twenty years to finally get out, leaving the Middle East in chaos, worse than Vietnam, and still, nobody could answer that question, why? except the a new crop of mercenary armies, weapons manufacturers, and military equipment contractors, who walked away making billions of dollars in profits, giving rise to war profiteers, like Haliburton and Blackwater, whose employees earned hundreds to thousands of more dollars than the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines doing the fighting and dying. 

Eventually, the military recruiters disappeared from campus, but now, as a new war ramps up, by a president who promised “No more forever wars.” He criticized Bush and Cheney, called them war criminals. Yet, how soon he changed. The bombs are falling again. The names change, from Hanoi, Gulf of Tonkin, Bagdad, Islamabad to Tehran, Strait of Hormuz, Gaza, Israel's Existence, and Two State Solution. Yet, the ones who start it, the brains at the top, the masters of war, sit behind their desks, their own children protected by their parents’ positions, and the rest believe the fear tactics: Communism, Domino Theory, WMD’s, and Nuclear Bomb, excuses or more reasons to kill and profit, big-time. 

All this got me to thinking about friends who never made it home from Vietnam, Wayne Podlesnik, a handsome, lady’s man, a real charmer from a steel town in Pennsylvania, Nathaniel Dabon, a buck sergeant, a husband and a new father, from Chicago, and a guy we knew only as Mac, something of a hustler, but a joker with a great laugh, all gone on the same day when NVA and VC forces overran our fire base. All of them there, not for anything patriotic or altruistic, just pawns, doing their duty, and fulfilling Tennyson’s line, “Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do and die.”