The Chris Hedges Report: Soldiers speak out against America's misguided wars

now you talk about terror [Music] what about for me [Music] i've been terrorized [Music] all my days [Music] andrew basovich a retired army colonel who fought in vietnam and danny sherson a retired army major who did tours in iraq and afghanistan have just published paths of dissent soldiers speak out against america's misguided wars baseevic and surgeon west point graduates like many writers in the book come out of the military culture they began as true believers embracing the myths of american goodness and virtue and the military honor code pounded into them as young cadets at the military academy the reality of combat as it has for generations exposed the lies told by the generals and politicians we are not a good and virtuous nation god does not bless us above other nations victory is not assured war is not noble and uplifting the clash between the reality of combat and the disney fied version of combat consumed by the public one that propels many young men and women into war creates not only dissonance and moral injury but an existential crisis an existential crisis combat veterans at least those who are self-reflective must cope with for the rest of their lives joining me to discuss the themes in the book paths of dissent soldiers speak out against america's misguided wars is andrew basovich so at the introduction of this book uh these are series of essays many of them incredibly powerful uh you write that the book offers insights into how and why recent u.s military efforts have gone so badly astray flagrant malpractice by those at the top inflicted untold damage on the troops we ostensibly esteem on populations u.s policymakers vowed to liberate and ultimately on our own democracy the adverse effects of war are by no means confined to the immediate arena in which fighting occurs um but i want to ask you isn't this true from philip td's to usarian isn't this the old story of war i suppose so that said um you know we undertook our post 9 11 wars wars of choice we should emphasize uh at a moment when our political leaders insisted and most americans i think believed that we had acquired built the best military force in all of history and therefore we believed we told ourselves that military force employed by the united states had a particular utility effectiveness with the events of 911 providing the basis of then putting force to work that's what we sought to do after 9 11. and the contributors to this book that danny and i uh put together were among those who raised their hands and said yeah i volunteer i'll serve and therefore experience the consequences um i just before we get into all of the all of the writers in this book are from the current wars you yourself served in vietnam but just before we get into what they have written uh this again is you writing uh you say i concluded that classifying vietnam as either a mistake or a tragedy amounts to little more than subterfuge to use those terms is to evade a much deeper and more troubling truth in fact from its very earliest stages until its mortifying conclusion america's war in vietnam was a crime uh why a crime well let me acknowledge first of all that my own perspective on vietnam it's been a half century since i served there has evolved over time and and at one point i was certainly a true believer i don't think that that lasted terribly long but i think i have come to believe that the dishonesty that provided the context for american intervention and the further dishonesty that actually grew deepened over the course of the conduct of the war was so fundamentally wrong and the the absence of voices from within from from inside whether they were policy makers or generals was so disturbing that in retrospect i think criminal is the the right the right term to describe the entire enterprise would you use the word criminal to describe the enterprises in iraq and afghanistan libya well first of all it's important for us to distinguish between those two wars we tend to lump them together i think that a case can be made that there was justification for intervention in afghanistan in the wake of of the 9 11 attacks the justification being that it was important for the united states to demonstrate that anyone collaborating with terrorists who were conducting who would conduct an attack on us was going to pay a heavy price so yes there was i think a a reasoned political argument for punishing the taliban it doesn't follow that there was a reasoned argument for staying there for 20 years and trying to rebuild the place so it became a criminal undertaking the iraq case is different saddam hussein had nothing to do with with 9 11. i firmly believe that the iraq war stemmed from the intentions of the george w bush administration to embark upon a preposterous effort to re to remake the entire greater middle east so it was deeply flawed from the outset i think it was illegal and yes it was a criminal undertaking so the first essay is by eric ed strome who also went to west point wrote a very good book that i read uh and just a couple points he makes in his essay i want to ask you about uh he writes military indoctrination is the voluntary surrender of one's own identity to join a profession that often takes away the human dignity of others by force through repetition service members have their values behaviors and identity recalibrated with the ultimate aim of making them willing to kill or be killed in political violence without thinking about it too much it is the construction of blind faith in the state and the deconstruction of any critical thinking that could stand in opposition to the state's aims he went to west point you went to west point is that a correct assessment of what you are taught or we can use the term indoctrination which you are fed at west point yeah i he states it more sharply than i think i would you just use the term indoctrination i think i i prefer to use the term socialization that number i'm referring here to to people who go to the service academies not people who enlist in the marine corps and go to boot camp or enlist in the navy and and you know learned the skills of a sailor but my experience at west point uh exposed me to a very sophisticated and tested program of bringing imparting a very particular world view to me and to my classmates to all of us collectively and individually and the world view centered on the sacredness of the united states constitutional order centered on the belief that the united states army was the most important institution in the united states that the well-being of the republic the survival of the republic rested on whether or not that army was properly supported and whether it did its job so i left i think we all left deeply imbued with that that that way of thinking uh and you know when you when you undergo that process beginning at age 17 it sticks uh and i think it took a long time for me probably it really took until after i got out of the army 20 some years later to begin to distance myself from those notions to think critically about those notions to achieve some amount of intellectual independence and i think my learning process testifies to how comprehensive and persuasive that process of socialization can be eric writes about visiting a close friend who had been seriously injured by an ied in afghanistan he arrives in the intensive care burn unit in san antonio uh this he's six foot four is mummified he writes in gauze only the portion of his body needed for intravenous tubes were exposed uh parts of his face raw and marbled as if a psychopath had flayed him with a cheese slicer and then worked him over with a blow torch uh ears and nose were charred black stiff breeze would have made them crumble to dust lips were split covered in greasy ointment uh and that's a very important moment for him uh and i wondered if uh it had a parallel when i covered the war in el salvador uh the first photographer who i knew who was killed suddenly changed the whole nature of war for me and i think that's what eric in many ways is the same but i wonder if you could speak to that experience well mine was different it was i think the beginning of my junior year at west point and my best friend from high school he would become my brother-in-law he's my my wife's brother dropped out of college enlisted in the marine corps deployed to vietnam and within a month of arriving in country stepped on a mine and blew his leg off and and there began a journey of decline that was destined to go on for quite some time and i remember asking if i could he he was he was uh sent to the philadelphia naval hospital and i asked for emergency leave so i could go visit him uh and they allowed me to go and i did so i was able to at least reassure myself that he was still alive but that was a moment of awakening although you know i was still undergoing that process of socialization so i don't know that that moment as powerful as it was really had the the impact that it would have were i at that time living in a somewhat different environment but yeah i remember that eric also writes about how he said in the decade following graduation the number of my friends injured or killed crossed into the double digits it kept going some were shot to death others were blown up one died in a helicopter crash a couple committed suicide many more were maimed and horrifically disfigured nearly all of us harbored internal demons i want to ask you about those demons well i'm not going to confess to my own uh so my west point class uh i believe we lost a dozen classmates i meant them the numbers may be slightly wrong but about a dozen a far larger number wounded some terribly wounded some subsequently suffering from ptsd quite severely to include a classmate that i did not know when we were cadets but who came to be a very close friend after i moved to where we live right now in massachusetts and my friendship with him taught me showed me gave me an appreciation of ptsd uh he had had a terrible tour as a platoon leader in west point and carried with that suffered from that for many years thereafter until through his own courage was able to get his life on track i mean the past was never forgotten the past never really went away but through his own courage and determination he was able to put his life back together and i think that because of our friendship i gleaned a a deeper understanding of how these injuries moral injuries uh in some respects are you know i don't want to say worse than the physical injuries but uh are comparable uh in terms of their devastating impact on people one of the things i think i've become to come to appreciate about our more recent wars is the extent to which because we we do have a better appreciation now of of ptsd uh of appreciation of of soldier self-abuse former soldier self-abuse suicides drugs we know about that i think that the country is still insufficiently aware of the afflictions that our veterans bear not all not all but that many veterans bear as a consequence of what they experienced in uniform and of course to my mind what makes it all the more tragic or perhaps i should say reprehensible is that the wars themselves are stupid not worth fighting i i want to talk about moral injury matthew hoe writes about it uh i think quite eloquently in the book but it's different from ptsd define moral injury i do i don't know that i can matthew ho's essay is spectacularly good but i i and so i don't know exactly how he would define it but i but i think it is to come away from the experience of war with your with the with the moral sensibility that you carried with you from your childhood and into uniform shattered and therefore left without a moral compass to to guide you that would be my definition but again i'd have to go go look at matthew's uh essay in the book to remind myself of how he defined it um one of the writers joy uh damiana if i'm pronouncing the crime so she ends up in the public affairs unit as a army journalist which is great because i think it just exposes the totalitarian system that the army is and the kinds of she said you were never allowed to use the word failure in print never hinted at the possibility that every victory was actually a loss never even technically lied it was a propaganda of omission we the government's very own uniformed journalists didn't overtly fabricate we just diligently told only the news deemed appropriate for team spirit uh i mean the liable mission still a lie but talk about uh the language that the military uses to describe itself and the uh kind of inbred censorship inside the military uh you know what it projects outward uh and and what's happening internally yeah i i'm not sure that i would single out the military for being uniquely at fault and it seems to me that institutional journalism that is to say journalism produced by institutions for internal consumption is necessarily an exercise in in fraudulence whether we're talking about uh working for you know coca-cola uh or or your local hospital so so military journalism i think very much conforms to to that pattern and therefore the consumer should should be wary of what he or she is is is reading uh it's it's not it's not to be trusted i mean quite frankly we should be wary of what we read in the new york times in the washington post as well uh but but perhaps more so uh when when the news is being created by an institution to serve the needs of the institution although they do fabricate there's an essay by pat tillman's brother and they fabricated completely he was killed by friendly fire and they and then jessica lynch uh who becomes a kind of female version of rambo's completely untrue so they will fabricate um there's a passage by vincent emanuel that i found very interesting uh because it sounded more like vietnam than iraq i'm just going to read it and then have you comment morale continued to drop during the second deployment in western iraq we started smoking weed on patrol and doing coke while setting up observation posts we brought most of the drugs with us when coming over i remember emptying the first aid kit latched to my flak jacket and filling up the pouch with as much weed as i could most of those drugs lasted only the first few months of deployment though we'd plan to stretch out our supply to the end but it didn't stay secret for very long that we had good share with us and how could we deny anyone the pleasure of getting stoned under the brilliant unprecedented uh unprecedented mesopotamian sky the deployment turned sour quickly with several marines including some of our commanding officers killed in the first 72 hours after that things went from bad to worse we shot at non-combatants we tortured prisoners we blew up civilian structures we ran over mutilated and took pictures of dead iraqis as one headline and maxim magazine put it al qayam was the wild west of iraq uh frankly we didn't we did whatever the f we wanted 18 year olds with machine guns rocket launchers and a license to kill talk about that well first of all i think that with regard to drug use i didn't serve in iraq i can't testify to what happened in units there i did serve in vietnam and although i didn't use the drugs there's no question that particularly in the latter part of the war drug use was you know everywhere a lot of heroin in particular uh in the unit one particular unit which i which i served now with regard to the the terrible accusations that he wields with regard to his unit and its misconduct again i'm not in a position to judge i don't i i dare say he is telling the truth as he understands the truth the only thing i would say is that it is important to recognize that units differ that the climate within a unit within unit a may well be different from the climate in unit b and therefore even if we take at face value i do take it face value uh the charges that he is making i would be very careful about assuming that similar conditions existed in every other unit in the theater an essay that you have incited by buddhica jayahama who i know pretty well after his time in the army he became a professor at the air force academy with a phd in political science from northwestern i mean an astonishing up from the bootstraps achievement j-mann as he is known served in the 82nd airborne division as an enlisted soldier as an enlisted soldier in a unit that was assigned to conduct nighttime raids targeting so-called high-value targets i take his testimony as truthful and what he what he says is that his unit had was well disciplined had high morale enlisted soldiers respected their leaders his dissent however and this is why his essay is important to the book is that the entire effort was fundamentally misguided because the effect of the effort was to was for the americans to take the war away from the iraqis to make it basically an imperial enterprise we will win the war for you and what j-man and his colleagues under came to understand was hey if this thing's going to be one they've got to win it on their own my point in giving that little anecdote is that we need to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush i would argue that one of the strengths of this collection is that the perspectives on offer vary widely we've got we've got anti-war perspectives people who basically argue that all war is wrong we've got anti-iraq or afghanistan wars perspectives people arguing that those wars were ill-advised or or ill-conducted so these dissenters these military dissenters as we as we uh refer to them came to their perspective the hard way through their own personal experience with war with military service and and in this volume share with the reader what they experienced what they learned what it all means to them well i i think that's true in every war i've covered i mean you uh for me one of the uh most important elements of a unit if i was with a combat unit if they didn't go back and retrieve their dead and they're wounded i immediately got out as fast as i could because it showed a disintegration within that unit which is something that uh victor obviously experienced so you're right it does in every war i've covered but uh that that was a reality within iraq i found interesting he writes at the end that he's about to be redeployed i promised myself that if i were forced to deploy for the third time i would kill as many of my commanding officers as humanly possible fragging was a very real uh experience in the vietnam war i think some people estimate as high as 25 of uh us officers were killed by their own uh soldiers if i have that number right uh matthew ho beautiful essay um i cannot emphasize enough the destructive effects moral emotional and spiritual of moral injury were speaking about before it is believed by many to be the primary driver of combat veteran suicides it is much more than mere guilt shame and regret what it incorporates but supersedes in its manifestations and sim symptoms the deaths of both iraqis and americans the ongoing suffering of the iraqi people the anguish of american families bereft of their hoped-for futures were a burden on my soul and i had not only witnessed the slaughter but taken part in it too my hands have been covered in blood and brains fragments of ligament and bone i was a perpetrator uh and and that uh and he was i mean i love matthew i know him and i admire him tremendously um but that and that's the difference between myself and i never i had bodyguards but i never shot anyone and i think that's a big difference yeah there's no doubt about it it's a bipartisan effort this is again ho he said it soon became apparent the only difference between the iraq war and the afghan war is that one had been run by a republican and the other by a democrat now you have written to this but on an issue like war just like trade deals or anything else there's really no daylight between the two ruling parties it's unquestionably true until we get to donald trump yes well he has that that's he's created his own party it's uh i don't know what we call it uh it's a cult uh but certainly among the established among the establishments no no there's no question i mean with regard to national security uh there is a consensus uh i think basically dating from december 7th 1941 that has only rarely been challenged and has never been toppled again my war was the vietnam war i think as that war went badly as opposition and protest uh grew there was a challenge to the foreign policy consensus know there was a insistence that there should be no more vietnam's uh and that notion i think survived for a brief time uh after the fall of saigon and yet by the time we get to the presidency of ronald reagan it vanishes but is isn't andrew that the difference between vietnam and the 20 years of warfare in the middle east is that we did ask questions about ourselves as a nation as a people that we had not perhaps confronted before in the wake of vietnam that there was a kind of reckoning if people like westmoreland were not necessarily held accountable they were certainly exposed and that seems to be completely absent now i don't fully agree with you chris i mean in my view uh we squandered the moment for real accountability about vietnam remember in 1980 we elect uh ronald reagan president well i'm thinking of the immediate aftermath you know what was said on the fall of saigon was 73. 1975 to 1980. yeah no it was a brief time period but it was there fair enough in a way that it's not there now absolutely agree i mean what we have now is let's forget about iraq and afghanistan hey let's talk about ukraine right which is the new quote-unquote good war i don't think it is a good war i think it was an unnecessary a necessary war but uh it's amazing to me how quickly the the scandalous departure from kabul uh that occurred uh early in the biden administration which touched off a furor of of of anger within the united states it's amazing to me how quickly that has that anger has diminished and uh you know the establishment has moved on quite frankly the media has moved on great i want to thank the real news network and its production team cameron grenadino adam coley dwayne gladden and kayla rivera you can find me at chrishedges.substance.com [Music] you

Channel: The Real News Network

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Keywords: military, US foreign policy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Veterans, Real News, PTSD, war crimes, war on terror, Vietnam

Id: dwhW8avrCng

Length: 32min 42sec (1962 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022