July 17 marked the 11th year anniversary of the end of my active military service. Every time I think of the bullshit, the condescension and the incompetence that I had to deal with while a member of the US army it makes me glad that I left that mess behind. Every time I read and see the news and learn of another roadside bomb killing more soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan and see more and more of then being deployed, I feel a tremendous sense of relief and happiness that I am not one of them and never again will be.
But still, I was lucky. I got to serve in the US army during the last few peaceful and quiet years and got out more than a year before the shit hit the fan on 9/11. I knew from that day on that those whom I knew while in the army who decided to ‘reenlist’ for 2-3 or more years were in deep crap. But I remember warning them about this and they agreed with me, albeit reluctantly, that they can no longer complain when something bad happens since they reenlisted. I told them I saw it as this: The first time you sign up for the military you most likely don’t know any better. But after being in for a while and seeing how shitty it is, and STILL deciding to reenlist, you have no one else to blame than yourself for any and all future consequences from the moment your signature is on that reenlistment contract. I did not choose to make that same mistake because while they were out ‘clubbin’ on weekends my ass was in my room, reading books on history, politics and current events, and after I put it all together it did not take a political science major to realize that the foreign policy of this country is rotten and that sooner or later something really bad was going to happen, and I wanted to be as far away from the military as possible when it did.
So during my ‘reenlistment interviews,’ while sitting there listening to some crazy sergeant feed me the Same old Shit I’ve heard years ago that hasn’t come true, I coincidentally thought of a big skyscraper coming down—I am not bullshitting you, I really did! So my answer to their offer was always ‘no.’ After 4 years of picking grass from between cracks in the sidewalk, soaking up motor oil with dry sweep at the damn motor pool, of pointless and redundant vehicle inspections, of fixing broken showerheads, of going to banal and uninteresting field exercises, of putting up with butt hole squad leaders who barely got their GED, of cheap propaganda, forced esprit-de-corps, and most important, missing out on the economic boom times of the late 1990s because I was stuck in the army doing friggin’ KP, I’ve had enough!
Whatever I managed to accomplish while in the military was due to my own self-discipline and willpower, characteristics which I had before I joined the military and which the army certainly did not instill in me. I basically made the same mistake which pretty much everyone who joins the military makes: they assume that ‘nothing’s going happen’ and think that they can just go to college without hindrance. Wrong! This is the false assumption that people make when they join the military and this assumption is exploited by the recruiting lowlifes to snare as many naïve unfortunates as they possibly can.
Listen. The military is not the boy scouts, not prep school, not college, not a summer camp or a social club! It’s the military. The main purpose of the military is to fight and die in wars. Don’t believe the sugar-coated version of army life the recruiter gives you. After all, when I got to basic training one of the first and oft repeated phrases I heard from the Drill Sergeants themselves was ‘Your recruiter lied to you.’ Military duty takes precedence over EVERYTHING else, including your family life. I’ve seen people frustrated and brought to the edge of divorce (and further, including suicide) because they made the army their number 1 priority. This is not a healthy lifestyle by any means. When you go to school while in the army, and miss a week of classes because you are in the field, tough. The military is under no obligation to let you go because ultimately military duty takes priority over everything else. I learned this lesson myself the hard way.
Another very good point that someone recently brought up to me is that being a member of the military you are at the forefront of national defense of any kind and does not only obligate you to fight wars. It also obligates you to be a guinea pig for testing of various vaccines and concoctions so that in case of mass infection all citizens can be immunized and saved. After all, the way the US government sees it, it’s better that a couple of hundred soldiers suffer so that tens of millions can be saved. If you get sick and suffer bad side effects from the crap they inject you with you’re on your own. The army is not liable for your condition because somewhere in that mess of paperwork they threw in front of you when you enlisted they made you sign a statement where you volunteered to be used as a guinea pig, whether you knew it or not. Don’t think so? Look at the Gulf War I vets. More than 200,000 of them are now dead and thousands more are suffering weird maladies which the US government refuses to acknowledge and treat.
Much has been made of the atrocious conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital and the substandard treatment that soldiers got. Guess what? This is ancient news to me! Do you think that this started with George W. Bush and the Iraq debacle? Hell no! It has gotten much, much worse on Bush’s watch because of the Iraq war. Back in 1996 when I joined, I’ve seen how injured soldiers are treated. Basically they are fucked with and are forced to break their medical profiles and told to do such enlightening activities as sweeping the motor pool and other nonsense that they have a hard time during because of their injuries. My roommate who was with me in AIT injured his knee and had to use crutches the whole time except when he was sitting or sleeping. When he got to permanent party the squad leaders started getting pissed off and ordered him to go do PT and walk around without his crutches. They pounded on the door of our room one day and told him to get his ass downstairs and he was constantly seeing the 1st SGT about the mistreatment. He got out on a medical that following summer since they couldn’t find anymore ways to mess with him.
Another example of shoddy care is when I got sick on a number of occasions. With a temperature of over a 100 I was given some damn ibuprofen (the military’s cure-all wonder drug!) and just told to report for normal duty. I felt like crap but there was nothing I could do. I always had a suspicion that these army doctors deliberately misdiagnosed me so that I would be available for duty instead of giving me a few days bed rest so I could get well. This is something that happened at Walter Reed, where soldiers with injuries and disabilities were re screened and their injuries were watered down so that they could be deployed back to the Iraqi hellhole. If you wake up one morning and feel sick then you can’t just take a sick day because there is no such thing in the military. They quickly tell you that if you are not dead, dying or bleeding to death your ass better show up for formation. If you do not make formation because of illness you get written up. Even if you call ahead they still don’t like it. That whole place is like a friggin’ kindergarten-prison. You have to ask permission for everything. You have your hand held the whole time. Grown men and women get treated like 5-year olds. That’s one of the main reasons why I got out. Civilian life is pretty much the same but at least you can cuss out someone for being an idiotic asshole and not have to worry about getting messed with for the rest of your days. For those who don’t know this, you actually lose some constitutional rights when you join the military, the most important one being the right to privacy. They can wake you up at 5am for a drug test. They can go into your room and ransack it looking for drugs, just like in prison. They treat you like shit. You become ‘government property,’ that’s what the dog tags are for. Tattoos are not allowed after you go into the military because if you get one you will be charged with ‘destruction of government property.’ How about that? You still want to join? Well, then let me discourage you further.
A lovely little standard operating procedure that the army has in regard to chemical weapon detection was all I could stand. After I learned about it I was even more determined to get the hell out. It goes like this: IF you are in a war zone and in an environment where chemical weapons might have been used and the standard chemical detection devices cannot determine if there indeed is a presence of chemicals in the air, they pick the lowest-ranking private and order them to take their pro-mask off. If the individual doesn’t get a reaction, or die, all is safe. What camaraderie!
Another lovely chunk of pure US government reasoning concerns the ever-famous gays in the military policy. A few months before I got out, we had a meeting with our PLT SGT about the army’s new policy towards homosexuals. It was explained to us as so: If you have gay magazines, march in gay parades or talk about homosexual acts the military does NOT consider you gay. To be considered gay and court-martialed you must either get caught in a homosexual act, get married to another person of the same sex or openly admit to your chain of command that you are gay. These are the three exceptions. But if you get caught with so much as a racist magazine or book then you are considered a racist, no excuses.
Speaking of racism, there is plenty of it in the army, although a lot of it is covered up by rank. There is certainly black on white racism as I have personally experienced. The military is a place of contradictions and hypocrisy. They like initiative but only in the context of military duty. When you take initiative by educating yourself on your off time they consider it a nuisance. Then there are the never ending changes to rules and regulations to keep up with and the mass disorganization all over. It takes hours to get one small thing done and ‘politics’ always gets in the way. It’s like this in the civilian world too but you’d think that the military would be better, not so though.
And don’t believe the hype of government officials and the pro-war PR spin that deployment extensions are ‘no big deal’ and that the troops don’t mind. BULLSHIT! They do fucking mind! I know so because I was a soldier once. The truth is that having your deployment extended sucks. It’s a big morale buster and soldiers, at least the sane ones, hate it. It is one of the worst things that can happen to you. When I hear of these deployment extensions in Iraq, I know how these soldiers feel. They are pissed off as hell. I question the sanity of the ones who don’t mind or are glad to do it. Maybe they are just too brainwashed or too scared to go against the grain. Better to just turn the Iraqis lives upside down instead of yours by refusing to fight an idiotic, illegal and failed war, I guess.
The truth is that the military has become a tool of domination and exploitation. The stuff about fighting for freedom and democracy is bull crap. The military is being exploited for strategic and economic domination of other countries in order to expand the American empire and make a small elite group of rich old farts and weapon peddlers even wealthier. The people who join the military are nothing but gullible little pawns which do the dirty work for a few powerful and well-connected people that demand more wealth and more power for themselves. The cost is usually the lives of those who fight and those unfortunate populations to be subjected to the wrath of the Empire.
What do you get for your ‘sacrifice’ after you get injured for life? You get thrown in the gutter with the rest of the cripples and have to wait months for an appointment. Then they lose your paperwork and forget about you. This is the way it is and will get worse. Don’t count on that piece of scum in the white house. He will not help you! As a matter of fact, if that idiot says that he will ‘fix’ anything, you can bet its going to get even more fucked up. Better that things stay as they are. Don’t count on the democrats. These lying pricks are as much part of the problem as the Republicans. They said that they will stop the war but are now backpedaling so they can get their election-year handouts from the damn lobbies. Opposing the Iraq war has become nothing more than an election-year tactic to get votes, but these opportunistic bastards are not going to do a damn thing to stop it once they are elected. Both of these parties have failed this country. As long as they are in power fundamental changes that NEED to be made will not even be considered.
The invasion of Iraq is illegal and it is wrong. It is a violation of international law and the UN charter. Those who fought and are fighting it are not heroes, they are occupiers and aggressors. This war is a waste of lives, money and time and has already failed. In a just world the lunatics that started this catastrophic injustice would be prosecuted and then put to death or locked up for life. But since the US still retains great military and economic power the majority of nations are either too scared to confront the US or have been bribed to look the other way. Whichever is the case, the US is allowed to get away with murder and as a result the world becomes a more dangerous place to live since bad behavior and disregard for law and order goes unpunished.
Don’t waste your time and your life. Don’t join the military. Don’t be another little pawn in this sick-ass game. Stay out, go to school or learn a trade and lead a normal life. You don’t need to find out how to point a gun at people and pull the trigger. You don’t need to become a cripple, an amputee or messed up in the head for the rest of your life. You don’t need to be torn away from your family and friends and your life to go be an occupier and held in contempt by an entire country. You don’t need to be a casualty on the 10 o’clock nightly news. Life itself can be difficult at times, don’t put yourself in a position where that difficulty is multiplied ten-fold, it’s not worth it. Remember, there were misguided idiots on the civilian and military side during the Vietnam War who supported that mess and called all those who had a conscience ‘traitors’ and ‘cowards.’ Don’t mind these fools. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. And just like back then, those who stood against the war will in the end be seen as right and just while those who cheered it on will end up looking like naïve morons. Just wait, it will happen!
My words are angry, but I don’t hate the military. I just hate the rotten policies they are told to support and fight for, and the rotten treatment they are given and therefore I will not have any part of it. And in case you are wondering this essay was not written by some ate-up private who got kicked out because he was a problem soldier. Regardless of the bullshit and the challenges I encountered in the army I grinned and bore them successfully and got out with an honorable discharge and good conduct ribbon. I wasn’t an exemplary super soldier but I wasn’t a fuck-up either, but I’d say I was above average compared to many others. I never suffered an article 15 or any pay cuts. I don’t have an axe to grind against any one particular person. I simply went into the military expecting order, discipline, and competence and was expecting to fight for what is right but I was mislead and disappointed.
There are some who become conscientious objectors and some who just run and hide because they no longer want to be pawns in this damn ‘war on terror’ farce, and these are the right things to do. These are the real heroes.
The way I see it, by getting out of the army I cheated death. By staying out you can too.
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