If you are a young man wondering what to do with your life, you may consider enlisting in the military. Don’t. Yes, the military has its appeal, or seems to. You may need a job. The uniform looks good. There can be adventure. You might get laid by Asian lovelies in foreign countries. These things have their appeal. They did for me as a young Marine. But they aren’t worth being mutilated, blinded, or spending the rest of your years in a wheelchair. This can happen. It does happen. And Washington doesn’t give a damn.
Recruiters won’t tell you of this. They are liars. They lied to me. They will lie to you. At the very least, they will talk only about good things that might happen, about college money and job training you might get but probably won’t. They will make you feel welcome. You are joining a team of brothers, they will say. You are a patriot. You are defending your country.
Don’t believe it. The US military does not defend America. The last time it did this was in 1945, at the end of World War Two. Since then, American soldiers were sent for twenty years to Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan America? No. Was it, is it, important to America? No. Then Iraq, Syria, Iraq again, and Serbia, bombing helpless cities. Iraq isn’t America. In my day–I’m an old guy–it was Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where 63,000 Americans died, and killed huge numbers of peasants who did nothing wrong–for no reason. Washington is now getting ready to start a war with China. China is on the other side of the world.
Let me tell you what the military does to young men, what Washington does. Long ago I was driving a truck near the Marine base in Danang, Vietnam. A bullet came through the windshield. The glass spatter went into my eyes, filling them with blood and blinding me for, as it turned out, several months. I lay for maybe an hour beside the road until a chopper finally came to take me to the Naval Support Activity hospital. For a couple of weeks a Viet nurse gave me a large injection of penicillin every few hours because if the blood got infected, that would be it for my vision.
Across the corridor from me were two Marines whose tank had been hit by an RPG, rocket-propelled grenade. It ruptured the hydraulic lines and the hydraulic fluid had exploded into flames. The two crewmen across from me had gotten out somehow, though horribly burned. I was told they were covered with a plastic sheet that dripped with evaporation from their burns, but I don’t know. The other too had cooked alive, burning, burning, in agony, skin sloughing off, unable to breathe in the flames, desperately trying to find the hatch. The two across from me said they could hear them screaming. It is what the military did to them. It is what the military will do to you.
A recruiter might tell you that I am an old guy, and things have changed. No. They have not. The military still uses tanks, rifles, land mines, bombs, flamethrowers, artillery. Aircraft carriers, important for the upcoming war with China, still carry large quantities of jet fuel and explosives. They are barbecues waiting to be lighted. You can have your bowels blown out, or burn alive, as easily now as then.
SIDEBAR—Editor's Note
And then there's the painful conscience. the personal demons, you have to deal with, as this closing scene in Hal Ashby's COMING HOME (1978), one of the best Vietnam films ever made, makes clear. Jon Voigt won a well-deserved Oscar for his role as disabled Vietnam vet. Too bad he later became a semi-deranged reactionary.
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Did Vietnam have anything to do with America? No. It’s on the other side of the freaking world. Likewise Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq. So why does the military, why does our government do it?
Answer: So the arms industry can make money. And so Washington can try to control the world. Are you willing to die, to spend your life in a wheel chair, to wear a colostomy bag full of your own shit and never have a date because you were gut-shot–so Lockheed-Martin’s stock shares will go up? Don’t do it. Don’t let the bastards use you.
The wars never stop because the money is sweet, the profits enormous. Washington just finished twenty years of killing in Afghanistan , meaning twenty years of juicy contracts. How did this defend America? Now we have Ukraine, so far costing taxpayers over a hundred billion dollars. Is Ukraine America? The United States is falling apart as anyone can see and Washington sends money to Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, Russians and Ukrainians, have died there, for nothing. But of course most of that money going to Ukraine is used to buy weapons from the arms companies. Follow the dollar.
For Washington, for the arms industry–they are almost the same thing–long wars in distant places are desirable because companies like Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon can keep selling the Pentagon missiles, tanks, helicopters and simple things like gasoline at jacked-up prices. War is about money. Washington cares about money. It does not care about you.
Don’t let them use you.
I’ll tell you another story. I spent about a year on the eye ward, 4B, at Bethesda Naval Hospital as it was then called, just outside of Washington. In hospital wards you see what the military really does to people. There was a guy blind because a defective rifle grenade detonated on the end of his rifle. Another fellow had taken an AK round through the jaw, shattering the bone. The fragments had to be removed, leaving the flesh where his jaw had been hanging down in a formless blob like a wet sock. He ate through a nasogastric tube going through his nose. We called him Jawless.
Military wards are full of such. The one I most remember was a young Marine from Tennessee, maybe nineteen. One side of his face was grotesque hamburger. He was stone blind. I was nearby when his high school sweetheart, maybe seventeen, came to visit him.
“Johnny…Johnny…Oh, Johnny.”
So much for the marriage, I figured. What young high school senior wants to tie herself for life to a blind horror that she will have to lead around?
The war in Vietnam was lost, of course, but it wasn’t in vain. It made unimaginable profits for the arms industry. Why do you think American wars last so long? If America wins the war, the money stops flowing. If it loses the war, the money stops. Keep the war going, and the money flows.
This is the military the recruiters don’t tell you about. It is the real military.
-want to know the lousy medical care the Pentagon gives the wounded? An incompetent military eye surgeon managed to destroy my remaining good eye years later. To see the kind of thing that happens, read this at the Unz Review. It will show you what you can expect.
Think what, if you enlist, you will really be doing. Let’s say that you are ordered to fire artillery at some city or village. In your impact zone, a little girl of seven, hit by shell fragments, looks down in surprise as her intestines fall from her stomach, and begins crying, then screaming. This happens, frequently. What do you think hot jagged shrapnel does to a soft young belly. She holds out her arms to mommy for help, this being instinct with the very young, before collapsing from profuse bleeding. Large blood vessels are found in the abdomen. Her mother goes stark bugfuck crazy, desperate to save her daughter but watching her die. It is how we defend America, see.
This is what the military is, what it does. It is what you will be used to do, directly or indirectly.
Those in Washington who will send you to kill people you have never met, and to be mutilated, do not themselves go to war. Rich young men do not enlist. Students at Harvard and Yale do not enlist. The military preys on, takes advantage of, ordinary kids, usually high-school grads, often from the South.
If you are twenty years old, what I am about to say will be ancient history, but I ask you to think about it. The same thing is going on today.
The following men were all of military age during Vietnam, and they now rule the country or did: President George Bush II, Bill Clinton, John Bolton (of whom you have probably never heard, but a major warhawk), Biden, Trump All avoided military service. All now want to send you to wars. To express it clearly, they see you as suckers. Think about it.
I tell you, as one who has been there, who has seen it, don’t let them use you.
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