Patriotic Dissent, page 10
The son of an influential Congressman, raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker pacifist schools, he served in nearly all of America’s major and minor “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Medals of Honor, he retired as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.
He was a teenaged officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the 1900 Chinese Boxer Rebellion and later became a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he served in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, or advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and, again, China. Although he showed early signs of skepticism about some of these imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called then by critics, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations—military campaigns waged on behalf of US corporate business interests—he remained the prototypical loyal Marine until he retired.
Only then did Smedley Butler change his tune radically and begin to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d recently been a prominent participant. In 1933, during the Great Depression, he claimed in what became a classic memoir passage that “war is just a racket” and added: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service . . . . And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero had transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were uncommonly anti-interventionist years in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what for America were fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”
Nonetheless, Butler must still be rated as unique, for that moment and certainly for our own, in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, from the military establishment, and from the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and, later, France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to US intervention in World War II wrong.
Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant have been shown to be historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time.
Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day were in certain ways different sorts of organization from today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities among the careers of Butler and today’s generation of American forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in mostly unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions east from West Africa to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.
Yet whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Butler, the hyperinterventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters greatly and illustrates much about the US military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.
When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of just three Marine Corps major generals, holding a rank (just) below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, despite the military counting about nine hundred generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including twenty-four major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost nineteen years of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the forty four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are actually more of them today than there were at the height of the Vietnam War, even though the active military as a whole is now about half the size it was then. But adulated as many of them are, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.
Instead, the principle patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me) and enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us either. I consider it disturbing, as should every concerned citizen, that I know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars. These are, almost to a man or woman, incredible people, true servants, but, like myself, they simply fail to garner the mainstream media attention or make the potential public splash of a vocally antiwar general replete with his star-studded bling.
Something must account for veteran dissenters seeming to top out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of serious antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps it is not too big a surprise to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image—officers whose careers look like theirs.”63 At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, and this, given America’s wars, should be considered something of a disaster, as well as breed potential dissidents.
Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in the current era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized surge in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of the selection committee. The reason was that he wanted to ensure that a twice-passed-over colonel, a protégé of his—future Trump National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster—earned his star. It took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of the time to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels stonewalled until then by Cold War–bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters-with-stars of any serious sort, let alone a crew of future Smedley Butlers.
Behind this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create a not-so-all-volunteer force. The elimination of conscription, as critics predicted at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide even as it increased public apathy regarding American wars by erasing whatever skin in the game most citizens had.
More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military in general and of the officer corps in particular ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks like former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Mark Milley. The latter may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.
As I write, one group of generals reportedly has it out for President Trump, but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Instead, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on how to wage war forever and a day. Sadly enough, in the age of Trump (and, to be fair, Obama and Bush before him), as numerous polls demonstrate, the US military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold to galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical.” Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity.64
FINALLY, THOUGH IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY THAT A SENIOR, nationally famous retired general like Smedley will rise in modern times—and unsurprising that a similar figure didn’t grow out of the Vietnam era—it remains important, finally, to consider the profound role of dissenting veterans (if usually lower-ranking ones) in the doomed Vietnam War, which, before the “war on terror,” had some claim to having been America’s longest-ever conflict. Frankly, it would be an exaggeration to assert, as some do, that the student-based antiwar movement—or that of late-stage GI resistance—was the preeminent reason that the US finally withdrew from that ludicrous war. The sad truth is that most Americans supported the Vietnam War way after the mission was hopeless and clearly immoral. Nonetheless, there was an important aspect of the end of that war that’s been largely suppressed.
Late in the Vietnam conflict, significant numbers of American soldiers, many of them draftees, began to resist the war. By 1970, subversive underground GI newspapers began to proliferate. Furthermore, entire squads and platoons began to refuse to patrol, to place themselves in harm’s way in a war that by that point was clearly unwinnable and unethical. Perhaps the most extreme behavior, not all that uncommon late in the war, was the regularity of “fragging”—the practice of lower enlisted soldiers rolling grenades into the tents of superior officers or otherwise assassinating them. Consider the statistics: in 1970 alone there were 209 documented incidences of fragging.65 The army, totally unprepared for such overt manifestations of indiscipline, didn’t even begin annotating instances of fragging until 1969. Nevertheless, the practice increased in regularity and severity as the war wound down. In the first eleven months of 1971, some 215 incidents resulted in 12 more deaths. As of July 1972, when the last American soldiers were leaving Vietnam, there had been 551 reported fragging incidents, killing 86 and injuring more than 700.66
Perhaps this extreme behavior was justified by the absurdity and immorality of the Vietnam War; empathy demands that one recognize the logic of such actions. But then again, the murder of fellow Americans, be they motivated officers or not, strikes this author as abhorrent. This much is certain: in the Vietnam War—maybe the last conflict in which this was true—antiwar veterans were a vital part of the dissenting movement. Veterans for Peace (VFP) and About Face: Veterans Against the War, originally called Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), are two of the most prominent. I’m proud to be a part of this nascent movement. Nevertheless, VFP and About Face combined pale in comparison to the numbers, significance, and power of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) of the previous generation.
Undoubtedly, former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry’s finest hour was his own role in the VVAW movement, specifically his testimony before Congress in the famed “Winter Soldier Hearings.” Whatever flip-flopping, Iraq War–supporting nonsense that later defined his political career, no one can take away the profound eloquence of Kerry’s plea as a recent, decorated combat veteran on Capitol Hill in 1971. Before the Senate, he spoke the following erudite words:
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? . . . We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country—the question of racism which is rampant in the military . . . in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.67
Even a cursory glance at his record demonstrates that Kerry peaked in 1971. But that doesn’t undo all the good he did and represented, and it doesn’t erase the importance of Vietnam veterans in the antiwar movement, in the tradition of patriotic dissent.
Even if it didn’t exactly bring the war machine in Vietnam to a grounding halt, the GI resistance of the era absolutely terrified the militarist powers that be in a variety of institutions: senior career military officers fearful for systemic discipline, commanders in chief from both major parties—Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were both horrified by the antiwar movement—and corporate defense industry leaders worried deeply about the dissent within the military. In fact, that was part of the motivation to end the draft—a move that was supported by just about every powerful lobby in government: the army, the Pentagon, Congress, and the Oval Office. Most, however, had little idea of the long-term consequences of this Faustian bargain.
Since the establishment of the AVF, dissent within the military establishment has dissipated to such an extent as to seem irrelevant or even nonexistent. In an all-volunteer force, as mentioned, it is rather easy to discredit an active-duty or veteran dissenter: “Hey, you volunteered,” many pro-war militarists will counter. Forget for a moment the inherent logical fallacy at the root of such invalidation; the point is that the ready parry is effective.68 Furthermore, without mass, representative service in America’s wars, today’s recruits are simply—demographically and statistically—less prone to dissent in general. Most see the military as either a dutiful calling or a socialistic (though they’d hardly use the term) meal ticket replete with housing, health, and pecuniary benefits. Because ironically for a military full of Ron Paul69 libertarians,70 especially in the officer corps, who at least theoretically hate socialism, its members serve in the most socialist institution in the United States.71
Still, neither motivation is liable to generate antiwar dissenters. Indeed, though the vast majority of my West Point classmate friends still serving have long since recognized the hopelessness of contemporary wars, most obediently resign themselves to continued combat deployments—not any longer because they believe in the mission, but rather since they see it as a “job” to be done, a professional obligation first and foremost. Today, my former peers and dear friends remain ensconced in Afghanistan and Iraq or repeatedly deploy their units as a “show of force” to “counter” Russia in Eastern Europe. None of these interventions are particularly advisable or likely to succeed, yet my former fellow officers have mainly accepted that. They’ve long since stopped asking questions about their own role in perpetuating and enabling a counterproductive American inertia-driven warfare state. They are mainly apoplectic, tired, and resigned by this point. And who can blame them, after two decades straight of deployments to these quagmires? Most military professionals aren’t exactly ripe for dissent or, as is necessary, for forming the vanguard of a revitalized antiwar movement.
Against all odds and institutional impediments, however, there are still a handful of important public military veteran dissenters, mostly retired, who remain in the arena. That I know nearly every single one personally and can count them on the fingers of both hands without the assistance of toes is undoubtedly a disconcerting indictment of the military wing of modern patriotic dissenters. Still, they exist. Andrew Bacevich was, I suppose, the first of the prominent post-9/11 “war on terror” skeptics. In that sense, he was an example, a motivator, and eventually a mentor to me and many other later-stage veteran dissenters.
The roll now includes other distinguished voices, such as Matt Hoh, who served as a marine and did two tours in Iraq before entering the State Department and then resigning from his post in opposition to Obama’s failed surge in Afghanistan. Matt, a dear friend now, nearly drank himself to death and even planned out his own suicide at one time.72 No one ever said the path of conscientious, patriotic dissent was easy. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, another colleague and now a friend, deployed four times—twice each to Iraq and Afghanistan—during a twenty-one-year career and then famously blew the whistle on the absurdity of the Afghan War upon his return from his final tour in 2012.73 A classical Republican of an older mold, Danny even occasionally appears on the rather mainstream Fox News to criticize America’s endless wars. Both Matt and Danny fit squarely within the long, storied tradition of veterans’ patriotic dissent; nonetheless, few Americans have heard of either of them, which is a tragic disgrace.
