‘I don’t want to be here anymore’

August 25, 2007

Last weekend, the NYT published an op-ed from seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division, who will soon be returning home frustrated and jaded. The piece, “The War as We Saw It,” was a sweeping condemnation of everything we’ve heard of late from the Kristol-McCain-Lieberman-O’Hanlon-Pollack crowd. For reasons that I still don’t understand, most news outlets treated the striking op-ed with a collective yawn.

Among those war supporters who deigned to respond to the piece, the most common refrain was that these seven troops are unusual in their discontent. Most of the men and women serving in Iraq, conservatives said, are committed to the still-vague mission and are filled with confidence.

There are ample reasons to believe otherwise.

In the dining hall of a U.S. Army post south of Baghdad, President Bush was on the wide-screen TV, giving a speech about the war in Iraq. The soldiers didn’t look up from their chicken and mashed potatoes.

As military and political leaders prepare to deliver a progress report on the conflict to Congress next month, many soldiers are increasingly disdainful of the happy talk that they say commanders on the ground and White House officials are using in their discussions about the war.

And they’re becoming vocal about their frustration over longer deployments and a taxing mission that keeps many living in dangerous and uncomfortably austere conditions. Some say two wars are being fought here: the one the enlisted men see, and the one that senior officers and politicians want the world to see.

“I don’t see any progress. Just us getting killed,” said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, one of those in the dining hall in Yousifiya, 10 miles south of Baghdad, as Bush’s speech aired last month. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

The problem becomes even more painful when one considers that the Army’s suicide rate is now at its highest level in 23 years. What’s more, in a series of mental health surveys, released in May, 45% of troops ranked morale in their unit as low or very low, as compared to seven percent who ranked it high or very high.

The signs of frustration and of flagging morale are unmistakable, including blunt comments, online rants and the findings of surveys on military morale and suicides.

Sometimes the signs are to be found even in latrines. In the stalls at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty, someone had posted Army help cards listing “nine signs of suicide.” On one card, seven of the boxes had been checked.

“This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second,” a soldier in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, wrote in an Aug. 7 post on his blog, www.armyofdude.blogspot.com.

“The only person I know who believed Iraq was improving was killed by a sniper in May,” the blogger, identified only as Alex from Frisco, Texas, said in a separate e-mail.

With all of this in mind, when I see severely misguided lawmakers like Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) argue that the troops have “earned more time” in Iraq, I can’t help but wonder, why would anyone think a longer occupation is some kind of reward for hard work?

We have loved one in Iraq, on their second and third tours of duty. They are “good troops”.

Those words, “good troops” carry tremendous meaning, and combine elements of loyalty to the people in their unit, a deep understanding of the chain of command, and a patriotism that most of us don’t truly understand.

Their report is apocalyptic, and has been since they received orders to return to the meatgrinder. They hate Bush in a visceral fashion, and blame him personally for every divorce, every attempted suicide, every failure of his chain of command.

They are most cynical about the mercenaries, who disrespect enlisted personnel, and earn ten times their salaries.

Bush, Cheney, and the kleptocrats are war criminals.

  • Among those war supporters who deigned to respond to the piece, the most common refrain was that these seven troops are unusual in their discontent.

    I find it ironic that the war supporters themselves refuse to recognize how unusual their view is among the general public. A more natural hypothesis is that opinions among soldiers reflect what everyone else thinks. That’s not something that can be assumed, but it’s stupid to blindly take the opposite to be true.

  • Not congruent with The Narrative. So it never happened.

    On the tombstone of the Republic will be the epitaph “Killed by a Story Arc”.

  • To believe that the troops don’t want to be there, to acknowledge the increased suicide rate, the rising divorce rate, the crushing emotional toll this occupation is taking, is to take the troops from their vaunted position as mythic heroes to that of ordinary people. To reduce them to ordinary people puts them on the same level with you and me and every other citizen – it means we hear their individual voices, the pain and the torment and anger, that what they say matters and they are no longer the One Voice that only speaks via whichever general is in front of the cameras.

    This is why the NYT op-ed was largely ignored. This is why the Freedom’s Watch propaganda campaign is being endorsed in the media markets where it is being launched, and why you couldn’t get an opposition campaign on any radio or TV station, or in any newspaper, if you were willing to pay 10 times the going rate. No, the only money that matters is that which is being spent in service to the administration, and my guess is that these ads would be running as PSA’s were it not for the fact that the stations would be forced to run opposing PSA’s – and we can’t have that.

    Not only is this debacle breaking the military, in the sense that the institution is no longer able to perform as it needs to, and is no longer able to meet new challenges, it is also breaking at the individual level. As individual GIs break, their families also break, so the damage spreads.

    It’s no wonder they’re starting to desert, to refuse to go back. And as they do, and as fewer decide to re-up, we’ll see the same thing at the bottom level as we do at the top – only instead of just getting rid of those who won’t play along, which is what happens at the top, we’ll just be filling more and more of the need for ground forces by taking people who just really like the whole idea of killing brown people for sport, and have no problem with killing women and children. We’ll tell them they would go to prison for doing it here, but go into the military, and they can do it legally. Hot damn! What a deal! No disconnect there – and just imagine the fun when they’re set loose on the streets of a city near you once their enlistment is up…

    This is the price we’re paying for not listening to those who have views and opinions that do not align with the WH. That we’re paying with the lives of real people, and allowing this president to spend with no control, is a travesty that will haunt us for generations.

  • the troops have “earned more time” in Iraq

    If this dipshit thinks being in that hell hole is a reward then he should go over and join the fun.

    Nice to know the ReThugs don’t have a complete monopoly on arseholes.

  • I don’t think it’s incumbent on the soldiers to know a lot about the broader context of the war or to critically think about the war’s viability or political merits. I think a solider can be a good soldier by- within limits- just being concerned with the practical portion of his/her job (doing good at it), and being obedient (and not so concerned with investigating or thinking about political or moral questions, or with being a super-patriot). Right now, our soldiers being too mercenary or too disengaged isn’t the problem, I think. To sum up, I think it’s more the solider’s duty to be a good, loyal soldier and more our duty to make sure they don’t get thrown into a stupid or useless war. So I don’t fault the soldiers who, just because they focus on what they’re being asked to do and on doing a good job at it, don’t come to these same conclusions about the war, or don’t have low morale (however, those guys aren’t necessarily better soldiers even though I just “diplomatically” characterized them as focused- there’s such a thing as being focused to the point of distraction, and there are people whose focus doesn’t improve their performance over the less-focused performance of others).

    That said, I think what these soldiers are saying here and how they’re acting really says a lot about the viability of this war and whether or not it’s a good idea.

  • I hope that our Armed Forces Veterans are receiving treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when they need it. Although I certainly am not a veteran, I speak from experience that a process known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) works wonders. If you know anyone who needs help with PTSD, please refer them to this breakthrough treatment.

    Also, here is an excellent speech by Iraq Veterans Against the War. We must continue to resist American Imperialism. I am thoroughly convinced, the Bush Laden Crime Family are war criminals.

  • How much longer do we have to take this? Day after day we watch Bush parade some war supporter who doesn’t fight in Iraq who tells us how great it is going there. We don’t believe him but we have to just stand there and take it. Soldiers are being “forced” to fight and die and when we the people hear their pleas we want to protect them, to bring them home. Our congress members who feel the same way are the only ones fighting terrorism because the terrorists are Bush and Cheney et al. Everyday is more death that doesn’t have to be, coming from a man who was never really “elected” to be commander in chief, who is terrorizing us and our soldiers by removing our freedoms and forcing our soldiers to fight and die refereeing a civil war all under the guise of fighting terrorism. They are the terrorists. They are the ones praying for another terrorist attack. They are the ones we live in fear of. Every day I live in fear of my president…of what he might do next. Don’t you??

    How much longer do we have to take this flood of war-terrorist propaganda? Hiding behind the theory of freedom is the reality of a wall of lies. The truth is because we love our soldiers we need to protect them from this president who has become so obsessed with being right in Iraq that he will destroy our Army and our treasury and our constitution before he will admit his involvement there needs to end.

  • The question that needs to be asked is how did the lop-sided media playing field come to be? Why is it that only WH propaganda, paid for or free, gets to be seen and heard, and an eloquent NYT OpEd piece, presumably written by on-the-ground military men, gets ignored? How have the right-wing, the neocons, and the WH gotten such a strangle hold on the perception creating machinery of the country? Until this is better understood we are in peril of losing what little of our civil rights remain.

    I’ve had a hard time believing that piece was written by the guys whose names are on it, but that doesn’t mean the sentiments, observations, and conclusions in it are any less valid. It represents to me a warning from some elements of the military brass that they can’t continue the charade for very much longer.

  • Remember how in 2000 Florida allowed Repugs access to voter registeration lists to send absentee ballots to over seas Repug military, and how they illegally counted the mlitary votes that arrived after the absentee mail in deadline?

    I hope that all the military are facilitated to vote in all elections and that all their votes will be counted. And that the media is watching this closely.

  • This is all explainable by the psychological concept known as cognitive dissonance. Whatever contradicts your worldview, or “story” (or narrative, as Machina says) is denied or in some manner dismissed. It really is that simple.

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