Something few people seem to understand about war is that the military is an oligarchy. You are only accountable to the people above you and face criminal liability for criticizing them. The opinions of active duty servicemen in front of a news camera are not objective. On multiple occasions I personally witnessed Marines being told what to say in front of the news cameras. One time to the extent of being handed cards with questions they where supposed to ask the secretary of the navy.
In the Marine Corps every problem is expected to be handled through the chain of command. If you have a lazy or apathetic chain of command there is nothing you can do about it. If you complain they make it worse. If you ask for more they give you less. If you express a negative opinion about the Marine Corps they force you to recant. During the entire build up to deployment my unit had a variety of broken weapons and defective equipment. Despite multiple requests to have this gear replaced or fixed most of it never was.
Even during pre deployment inspections the Regimental commander was more concerned that not every one had sewn name tapes onto their back backs then the fact that so many of our machine guns and rocket launchers where broken. My unit made it as far as Kuwait before any field grade officers noticed how much of our gear was missing or broken. To add insult to injury they tried to blame us for breaking the equipment even though it had been broken before we got it.
In total I personally was deployed with a broken set of night vision equipment, a first aid kit with out a trauma kit, a $900 scope that didn't have the proper mounting equipment, and a rocket launcher with broken sights that misfired half the time. This is on top of the run down Humvee and a fleet of ships that kept breaking down in the middle of the ocean.
All these discrepancies did not go unnoticed. Someone, somewhere, with an actual sense of attention to detail instead of an obsession for order chose to use us as the theater reserve. Despite enduring a multimillion dollar training schedule to make our unit special operations capable, we where kept out of combat because of all our discrepancies.
At the time I felt cheated. I wanted to fight to prove my self as a marine. It didn't occur to me that if I went on a mission that was off road our Humvee would have got stuck in the sand and over heated. It didn't occur to me that if we went on a night mission that I would have been blindly shooting into the dark. I didn't fully comprehend that if I was shot I would have bleed to death because my first aid kit only had ace bandages in it. I felt cheated because I was denied the opportunity to prove my worth and move above the bottom run of the Marine Corps ladder.
For the rest of the deployment I would be stuck on ship for weeks at a time. To pass the time I read allot of books. Explosives manuals and weapons encyclopedias mainly, although I did read some fiction, and even some history. One book that struck me was an obscure editorial written by the legendary marine Major General Smedley Butler. His book was titled "war is a racket." I was shocked that a multiple Medal of Honor recipient would rite a book that was so critical of Americas Foreign policy.
But still I couldn't help but see the similarities between the corruption that went on near the turn of the century and the corruption that goes on now. Why do they buy more gear than they will use and issue less than we need? Why do they over spend on weapons systems and under fund veterans benefits? And worst of all why do they support dictatorships and call it defending democracy?
When we first got back to Camp Lejeune the local news crew was there. One of the NCOs' said "if they talk to you just say we accomplished our mission and it's good to be home." It was a lie, he hadn't accomplished our mission. Our mission had originally been to act as a floating deterrent to terrorism and to assist in Operation Iraqi freedom. When that fell through it was changed to training with friendly Middle Eastern militaries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. And after Jordanian terrorists fired a katusha rocket over the bow of the Ashland we stopped training missions too.
To summarize the deployment,
Zero terrorist attacks prevented
One terrorist attack provoked
Zero ships raided
Zero terrorist neutralized
Four liberty ports visited the only positive out come of the whole deployment.
When strangers stopped me on the street to thank me for defending freedom I would want to hit them at first. I thought they where making fun of me, then I realized they don't know. They don't know the military is a faade. We make America feel protected and we make our enemies feel afraid. Having one hundred thousand troops half way around the world does absolutely nothing to defend America from terrorists. They could just as easily go around Iraq or come here strait from Saudi Arabia or Egypt, just like the 9-11 highjackers did.
Around the time of this epiphany I started to loose faith in the things I had taken for granted for years. We had barely been back for a month before they started preparing us for another deployment. Most of my defective gear was never replaced. I began to question why we would waste weeks sitting in the woods getting eaten by bugs while none of us was fluent in Arabic. If we are going to be policing an urbanized Arab society, why does most of our training consist of running through the woods? And why the hell hasn't my trauma kit been replaced even after being reported 6 or 7 times?
At this point I was more afraid of my own chain of command than the enemy. The terrorist seemed like a remote and distant threat while my own chain of command seemed determined to set me up for failure. I developed severe depression and one day I started crying uncontrollably for 6 hours. I requested to see the Chaplin but he was unavailable at the time. I requested to see some one, but it was a month before I saw a one about my problem.
I was in and out of training for the next several weeks and I was given the ultimatum, I either had to get better or accept an administrative separation. Because the anti depressants barley worked and I doubted my units ability to keep my prescriptions filled during deployment I accepted the ad-sep.
After being discharge from the marines for a personality disorder I was first denied education benefits and then treatment from the VA for depression.
I applied for a disability rating even though I expected them to deny me for some sort of loop hole. I was still a trained killer and an explosives expert, now with a vendetta against the Government and a large collection of weapons I picked up while I was in the Marine Corps. Every day I contemplated the most haneus forms of brutal revenge. I tried to focus on my school work and keeping a dead end job on the grave yard shift for as long as I could.
One day I woke up and checked my bank account online to discover a $7000 deposit from the treasury department. My disability case had been approved and I was finally receiving back pay for all the time I had been out of the Marines. I would also get free anti depressants and therapy.
My out look on life began to change because the big, impersonal federal government finally acknowledged me as a person and give me the benefits I was entitled to.
It was around this time that I stumbled across Iraq veterans against the war and decided to join. Before my first meeting with them I was worried that it would only be disgruntled PFC's and lance corporals who where used as theater reserve. I was surprised to find retired staff NCOs' and officers among the group's members.
Later that year I testified at Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan Outside of Americas capital and I told a story very similar to the one I tell you today. I was shocked that not only where stories like mine commonplace, even worse stories or war crimes and atrocities being committed by American soldiers and marines where happening in Iraq. One marine from a unit stationed a few miles away from mine even had video of his unit demolishing a mosque with automatic weapons and tank cannon fire purely for revenge.
Our collective experiences fortified in my mind that the war in Iraq is immoral and unwinnable.
I get personally offended when politicians talk about "winning" Iraq. Winning implies that you are better off at the end then at the beginning. No possible out come could possibly replace the tens of thousands of American who have had there lives destroyed by fighting this war.
No amount of cheap oil could make up for the trillions of dollars that will be spent trying to pacify the people who rightfully own it.
And nothing can change the fact that American casualties are higher than the terrorists we are supposedly there to fight. American dead and wounded number more than 30,000 while a document released by the Army last year claims that insurgent casualties are roughly 20,000.
The only people who will gain any thing from the war in Iraq are war mongers and profiteer who haven't made any sacrifices for the war effort and make a fortune at the tax payer's expense. They have contractors, they have billions of dollars, let them fight there own damn war and bring our troops home now.
In the Marine Corps every problem is expected to be handled through the chain of command. If you have a lazy or apathetic chain of command there is nothing you can do about it. If you complain they make it worse. If you ask for more they give you less. If you express a negative opinion about the Marine Corps they force you to recant. During the entire build up to deployment my unit had a variety of broken weapons and defective equipment. Despite multiple requests to have this gear replaced or fixed most of it never was.
Even during pre deployment inspections the Regimental commander was more concerned that not every one had sewn name tapes onto their back backs then the fact that so many of our machine guns and rocket launchers where broken. My unit made it as far as Kuwait before any field grade officers noticed how much of our gear was missing or broken. To add insult to injury they tried to blame us for breaking the equipment even though it had been broken before we got it.
In total I personally was deployed with a broken set of night vision equipment, a first aid kit with out a trauma kit, a $900 scope that didn't have the proper mounting equipment, and a rocket launcher with broken sights that misfired half the time. This is on top of the run down Humvee and a fleet of ships that kept breaking down in the middle of the ocean.
All these discrepancies did not go unnoticed. Someone, somewhere, with an actual sense of attention to detail instead of an obsession for order chose to use us as the theater reserve. Despite enduring a multimillion dollar training schedule to make our unit special operations capable, we where kept out of combat because of all our discrepancies.
At the time I felt cheated. I wanted to fight to prove my self as a marine. It didn't occur to me that if I went on a mission that was off road our Humvee would have got stuck in the sand and over heated. It didn't occur to me that if we went on a night mission that I would have been blindly shooting into the dark. I didn't fully comprehend that if I was shot I would have bleed to death because my first aid kit only had ace bandages in it. I felt cheated because I was denied the opportunity to prove my worth and move above the bottom run of the Marine Corps ladder.
For the rest of the deployment I would be stuck on ship for weeks at a time. To pass the time I read allot of books. Explosives manuals and weapons encyclopedias mainly, although I did read some fiction, and even some history. One book that struck me was an obscure editorial written by the legendary marine Major General Smedley Butler. His book was titled "war is a racket." I was shocked that a multiple Medal of Honor recipient would rite a book that was so critical of Americas Foreign policy.
But still I couldn't help but see the similarities between the corruption that went on near the turn of the century and the corruption that goes on now. Why do they buy more gear than they will use and issue less than we need? Why do they over spend on weapons systems and under fund veterans benefits? And worst of all why do they support dictatorships and call it defending democracy?
When we first got back to Camp Lejeune the local news crew was there. One of the NCOs' said "if they talk to you just say we accomplished our mission and it's good to be home." It was a lie, he hadn't accomplished our mission. Our mission had originally been to act as a floating deterrent to terrorism and to assist in Operation Iraqi freedom. When that fell through it was changed to training with friendly Middle Eastern militaries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. And after Jordanian terrorists fired a katusha rocket over the bow of the Ashland we stopped training missions too.
To summarize the deployment,
Zero terrorist attacks prevented
One terrorist attack provoked
Zero ships raided
Zero terrorist neutralized
Four liberty ports visited the only positive out come of the whole deployment.
When strangers stopped me on the street to thank me for defending freedom I would want to hit them at first. I thought they where making fun of me, then I realized they don't know. They don't know the military is a faade. We make America feel protected and we make our enemies feel afraid. Having one hundred thousand troops half way around the world does absolutely nothing to defend America from terrorists. They could just as easily go around Iraq or come here strait from Saudi Arabia or Egypt, just like the 9-11 highjackers did.
Around the time of this epiphany I started to loose faith in the things I had taken for granted for years. We had barely been back for a month before they started preparing us for another deployment. Most of my defective gear was never replaced. I began to question why we would waste weeks sitting in the woods getting eaten by bugs while none of us was fluent in Arabic. If we are going to be policing an urbanized Arab society, why does most of our training consist of running through the woods? And why the hell hasn't my trauma kit been replaced even after being reported 6 or 7 times?
At this point I was more afraid of my own chain of command than the enemy. The terrorist seemed like a remote and distant threat while my own chain of command seemed determined to set me up for failure. I developed severe depression and one day I started crying uncontrollably for 6 hours. I requested to see the Chaplin but he was unavailable at the time. I requested to see some one, but it was a month before I saw a one about my problem.
I was in and out of training for the next several weeks and I was given the ultimatum, I either had to get better or accept an administrative separation. Because the anti depressants barley worked and I doubted my units ability to keep my prescriptions filled during deployment I accepted the ad-sep.
After being discharge from the marines for a personality disorder I was first denied education benefits and then treatment from the VA for depression.
I applied for a disability rating even though I expected them to deny me for some sort of loop hole. I was still a trained killer and an explosives expert, now with a vendetta against the Government and a large collection of weapons I picked up while I was in the Marine Corps. Every day I contemplated the most haneus forms of brutal revenge. I tried to focus on my school work and keeping a dead end job on the grave yard shift for as long as I could.
One day I woke up and checked my bank account online to discover a $7000 deposit from the treasury department. My disability case had been approved and I was finally receiving back pay for all the time I had been out of the Marines. I would also get free anti depressants and therapy.
My out look on life began to change because the big, impersonal federal government finally acknowledged me as a person and give me the benefits I was entitled to.
It was around this time that I stumbled across Iraq veterans against the war and decided to join. Before my first meeting with them I was worried that it would only be disgruntled PFC's and lance corporals who where used as theater reserve. I was surprised to find retired staff NCOs' and officers among the group's members.
Later that year I testified at Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan Outside of Americas capital and I told a story very similar to the one I tell you today. I was shocked that not only where stories like mine commonplace, even worse stories or war crimes and atrocities being committed by American soldiers and marines where happening in Iraq. One marine from a unit stationed a few miles away from mine even had video of his unit demolishing a mosque with automatic weapons and tank cannon fire purely for revenge.
Our collective experiences fortified in my mind that the war in Iraq is immoral and unwinnable.
I get personally offended when politicians talk about "winning" Iraq. Winning implies that you are better off at the end then at the beginning. No possible out come could possibly replace the tens of thousands of American who have had there lives destroyed by fighting this war.
No amount of cheap oil could make up for the trillions of dollars that will be spent trying to pacify the people who rightfully own it.
And nothing can change the fact that American casualties are higher than the terrorists we are supposedly there to fight. American dead and wounded number more than 30,000 while a document released by the Army last year claims that insurgent casualties are roughly 20,000.
The only people who will gain any thing from the war in Iraq are war mongers and profiteer who haven't made any sacrifices for the war effort and make a fortune at the tax payer's expense. They have contractors, they have billions of dollars, let them fight there own damn war and bring our troops home now.
pirateaffterall:
I know this was written almost a year ago, but this is an amazing entry.