Veteran as victim: how the military got on the good side of the counter establishment

In the Vietnam era, protest songs were all about the war and the military. In the imagination of the left, the symbol of all that was wrong with America was the military. Although hippies also weren't fans of "pigs," the protest songs of the era were far more focused on the military as the symbol of fascism than on the police. Maybe because the most iconic unrest from the Vietnam Era ended in violence at the hands of the National Guard and not the police, the anti-establishment gaze remained mostly fixed on the military.

To use one list of protest songs from the Vietnam Era as an example, there are no mentions of the police in any of the lyrics. Some of the songs don't have a villain, like John Lennon's "All We Are Saying." They're about peace in general. But in those that do have a villain, it's the military, usually personified by the generals who lead it and the politicians who put it to work. One song, Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" from 1970 (which didn't appear on the list I linked), likens generals to servants of Satan:

In the years since, the military has slowly taken a back seat to the police as the symbol of the oppressor. We've gone from reviling war pigs to just pigs. Partly, this has been the result of a change in who gets to have a voice in pop culture like music. In the 60s and 70s, most pop stars were white. A look back at the list of protest songs I linked above will show some melanin among the singers, but not a lot. One could argue that to a privileged, white, young audience in 1968, the threat of being sent over to a war that presented physical danger represented the most oppressive use of state power. But to those in black neighborhoods, which were still kept in a state of legal segregation by redlining policies at the time, the war was just one of a number of threats to physical safety, and not necessarily the most pressing one. As early as the 80s, when rap music became mainstream, white children like me started hearing about black rage toward the police. We were scandalized by it, helped along by the adults we knew who told us what to think of these lyrics, but we heard it.

But there's been something else, too. In Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," there was an appeal directly to what seems like an enlisted solider: "You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'." Even though generals and politicians were the main target, there were times when the common solider was fair game, too. Returning Vietnam veterans found themselves jeered and spit upon.

That all changed when America got involved in its first war I was old enough to remember. During Operation Desert Storm, the whole country seemed like it wanted to return to the good, old days when America still won wars. That meant "not having another Vietnam." We meant that in a lot of ways, not the least of which was supporting the troops. When I was a senior in high school, we wrote letters to the troops, held fund-raisers for their families, and the Pledge of Allegiance reappeared for the first time since I was in kindergarten. (I stood for it, but didn't recite it, which is a story for another time.)

We continued this tendency to support the troops during the Second Gulf War, what my friend who is a veteran of the first one calls "the one we started." Even though Gulf War II was fought on questionable grounds from the start, and even though it included terrible errors, both unintentional (drones hitting civilian targets) and intentional (sexual violence against prisoners for the sake of humiliating them), even the left that was against the war wanted to support the troops. We distinguished between the majority of good troops and the few rotten apples who did things like take involuntary dick pics of prisoners.

In fact, far from criticizing the troops, the left tried to capitalize on the sacredness of military members in the public imagination in two ways. One was calling out failures on behalf of the VA to take care of those who had served. The second was to make use of a refrain war opponents have been using for centuries: rich man's war, poor man's fight:

(For a much better review of protest music from the 00's, see Lindsay Ellis' excellent video on the subject.)

One thing about rich man's war/poor man's fight is that it turns soldiers from willing pawns of an evil overlord into victims of that overlord. They're as much the victims of war-hunger as the ostensible enemies of the rich who run their wars.

Iowa Review runs a contest, and I'm invited!

At the end of May, I stumbled across word that The Iowa Review, one of the top 20 literary journals in the country, was running a special contest for veteran writers. Although they said you could enter as long as you were a veteran and you could write about any subject matter you wanted, the examples they gave all wrote about something military-related. The only story I've written about my experience in the military, "Brokedick," has already been published, so I needed another one. I decided to sprint and write one quickly before the contest's due date at the end of May, because I figured that even a hurried story would have a better chance of getting me into The Iowa Review than I'd have under normal circumstances. It's incredibly competitive, and I hoped that maybe with the limiting factor of only veterans being able to enter, my odds would only be a hundred to one instead of five hundred to one, like they would be during a normal open period.

It occurred to me that "veteran" is the only special category I, as a white, cis-male, will ever be able to claim. Journals often run special periods for historically marginalized voices, or at least they specifically call out that they are looking for these voices. The voices they are looking for are BIPOC or LGBTQIA+, for the most part. I'm not here to complain about journals making extra room for those voices. This isn't a white man complaining about affirmative action in literature. For the most part, this focus on new voices is a good thing, and it's brought needed shifts of focus in our culture. There are still plenty of places I can publish my work. I'm only interested here in the fact that at least in some way, "veteran" is a category considered disadvantaged enough to at least occasionally sneak into the list of people who deserve special amplification of their voices. It puts veterans alongside historically marginalized groups. Why?

One of the reasons for this is the new focus on PTSD. Virtually any depiction of a veteran in the last ten to fifteen years has focused on the difficulties of readjustment. Even when we talk of the occasional wrongs that military members carried out while deployed, we tend not to focus on blaming them. Instead, we talk of "moral injury" they have endured by being ordered to do what their moral senses told them was wrong, or by making mistakes of judgment under the fog of war.

Trying to have it both ways

Anti-establishment critics want to both rage at a machine that is oppressing us but also avoid being too harsh toward the popular emblems of that machine. You can see this in the System of a Down video above. On the one hand, the song is saying that the poor are victims of the establishment, driven by economic necessity to play a hand in the military. But at the same time, the video shows a mindless army of automatons marching to uphold the will of the establishment. Presumably, these are the poor people whom the song seems to take the side of, but visually, the poor seem to share in the blame for their lack of critical thinking (which the band members, like Neo in the Matrix, have red-pilled their way out of). We could maybe think that the ones marching in the video are contractors for Halliburton, but the reality is that the video is trying to play it both ways, both excusing the human tools of the state and also blaming them.

Currently, a lot of anti-establishment voices are doing the same thing. The police are extremely unpopular, while the military is still trusted. Partly, this is because the military has been smart enough to keep itself out of the current anti-police uprising. Some military officials have pointed out the constitutional issues with using the military to stop citizens from protesting, which, in one sense, is just the military clinging to rules and regulations to stay out of trouble, something it's good at, but has the effect of making it look like the military is opposing a Trump-led would-be dictatorship.

I've also read a lot of veterans writing that the problem with the police is that they aren't held accountable the way the military is. In the military, they write, even an accidental discharge of a weapon gets investigated, meaning the military is very cautious about using force. And when a military member does wrong, he or she is punished.

This dual track is disingenuous. There is no place on Earth that can waste money like the Department of Defense. And that money is hard for watch groups to track. It's easier for the DoD to hide what it does wrong than it is for the police, which is part of the reason why we still trust it a little bit. Most of the worst part of America's occupation of Iraq took place before smart phones were ubiquitous, but we still got plenty of examples of wrongdoing that made it through. What would a U.S.-led occupation look like now, if we could see all of it?

If you're going to be in the ACAB camp (All Cops Are Bastards), but you're not willing to say the same about the military, then you're using a double standard the facts don't call for. Police and the military are made up of the same demographics. A lot of police are themselves veterans. Nobody has statistics on how many, but when I was in the Marine Corps, a lot of the people I knew said the reason they'd joined was to get experience so they could become cops (or fire department) after the service. Veterans get hiring preferences for a lot of police jobs. Of the five police I know personally, four are veterans. Psychologically, the same kinds of people who join the military are the people who are likely to become police. And contrary to the "military are trained not to do bad things" narrative, at least one study shows that police with military experience are more likely to fire their weapons than those who never served in the military

Both the military and the police are products of a society that wants order and wants to be strong, but doesn't want to be terribly inconvenienced to obtain those things. Both are asked to provide difficult products in order to satisfy voters while not costing enough to greatly aggravate those same voters. Both are asked to clean up the messes created by our society not thinking deeply about how to fix problems.

And here's what you may not want to hear: Trump isn't lying about being somewhat popular in both groups. It's different, of course, among educated military members than uneducated ones, just as it's true in general in America that educated voters--even white male ones--are less likely to vote for Trump if they have a college education, a fact people seem to keep glossing over when talking about the racial politics of the Trump era. My friend, a Marine Corps officer who went to Harvard and doesn't like Trump, was recently reassigned to work with an infantry unit. He told me that when Trump's ad came on during the Super Bowl, nearly the entire two thousand or so people in the mess hall in 29 Palms broke out in a roar. Just because some officers are saying things that show their break with Trump doesn't mean it's unanimous in the military. Yes, about half the military now has an unfavorable view of Trump, but the numbers are different among the parts of the military likely to end up as police.

The moment you try to do anything good, you become a victim

I hated the Marine Corps. I know that's a strange thing to hear come out of a Marine's mouth, but I did. I hated it because it espoused high-minded ideals, while undermining those ideals in a practical way every day. I hated it because I do not think medieval ideas like a caste system between officers and enlisted have any problem in a modern democracy. I hated it because I do not see how one can defend all the freedoms we care about by joining an organization where you are stripped of many of those same freedoms. Old school military believe this is the only way to maintain good order and discipline, but as the military's greatest legal mind has shown, "good order and discipline" is just a phrase justifying a lazy avoidance of answering questions about why some old regulations still exist.


I'm not a victim, though. Maybe I'd think I was if I hadn't been in during the 90s, when there were no wars to fight. But I didn't go into the Marine Corps because I was poor. My parents weren't rich, but they were far from poor, and I could have avoided the military and still gone to college. I joined because I had romantic ideals about doing my part. I thought it was wrong of me to let others do the hard work and enjoy the fruits of their labor. What I discovered while enlisted was that the real work of America is being done mostly by people who don't have a clue. There are perennial problems that never get fixed, because everyone is just trying to survive and move on, and nobody really knows how to fix the problems, anyhow.

I learned that America's most important institutions are held together by duct tape, wishful thinking, and abuse of the good will of young people. That doesn't make me a victim, it just makes me wiser. I wanted to be part of making America stronger, and I learned the truth of what that means. The police are in the same boat. A lot of anti-police sentiment acts like the police have some master plan they're carrying out on behalf of a carefully constructed plot to maintain the status quo and keep historically disadvantaged people in their place, not realizing America is the last country on Earth capable of organizing something so concerted. America is what happens when chaos is barely held in check by the best of us. It is not a place where masterminds control puppets behind the scenes. When police act like they don't know what they're doing, it's not because someone really knows what they're doing and are disguising it. What you see is a reflection of reality. We have massive problems caused by our own laziness, bad policy, and unwillingness to do the hard work to fix anything difficult, and we throw those problems on people like Marines, police, social workers, and teachers. We ask them to fix it, cheap, and if they can't, we'll hold them accountable.

Any of these front-line civil servants, the ones most in the vicinity of the worst problems we face, are there for a variety of reasons. Maybe they care about the world. Maybe they need to pay the bills. Most likely, it's a mix of those things. All are trying their best to operate in a world that's not just imperfect, it's barely functioning. Part of that dysfunction is the outrageous behavior of some co-workers, behavior that is hard to know how to respond to when it seems like the whole world is against your group and the only people you can trust are within it.

I was lucky when I joined the Marine Corps. I passed tests that allowed me to go to school to learn Korean, rather than go carry heavy artillery pieces until my back broke. It was just dumb luck I ended up where I did, and maybe a little bit of privilege that my background got me ready for something other than the infantry. But I might very well have ended up a grunt (infantry) or a police officer. If I had, I can guarantee that me at twenty-three had no idea how to deal with the things police deal with. The world sees me as a veteran, and therefore someone to admire or possibly pity, but if I'd followed the Marine Corps with a second act as a police officer, I'd have lost all that respect.

We've accepted the military because we've learned to see them as us. They're not bad people who went off to kill Vietnamese peasants, they're ordinary people who joined because they needed the money for college and got in over their heads. I don't know why we don't afford the same suspension of doubt for police, other than the military does its things it's not proud of overseas, where we don't have to see them.