My wife was in the USAF for 22 years. Went from airman to retire as a Major. We witnessed the hollowing out and gradual decline of the military to the dreck it is today. All along, entering the military meant setting aside one’s civil rights in exchange for the Code of Military Justice. This means one’s Constitutional rights are suspended while one is in service, so service members can better defend those rights for others. That’s the logic, although it’s really more about control.
As the right wingers and xtian zealots took over, though, with their calculated infiltration and attainment of rank, we saw this system abused more outrageously at each turn. Gone were honorable traditions of restraint and avoidance of political activism. Gone were fair systems of questioning superiors and redress for wrongs. In came right wing ideology and inflexible, hateful top-down abuse.
So we quit.
Since then, we’ve seen earned, promised, contracted benefits whittled down, stolen, canceled, and otherwise twisted so they mean virtually nothing. We’ve seen the treatment of veterans become so abusive and spiteful we wonder how there are not uprisings among the ranks.
Answer to that? Propaganda to the max. They keep those young recruits so brainwashed and isolated from reality they all think they’re gung-ho super patriots and invincible and impervious to harm. Then they hit the shit and find out, uh-oh, maybe it’s not exactly like that… but by then, all they have is their unit camaraderie to keep them alive, so they make a psychological switch from family and country to unit. They experience a form of Stockholm Syndrome, and this explains why they’ll go back time after time into horrific war, and cannot adjust back into civilian life.
Suicide’s the most common reason for American soldiers to die. None of their deaths, in combat or fragging or by their own hands, are acknowledged by the public; we’re not even allowed to see their flag-draped coffins. We’re seeing USA wage invisible wars, with denied results and consequences, so these recruits are Invisible Men like Ralph Ellison wrote about. They’re not able to come back to civilian life because no one has a clue what they went through. Only their camrades.
Anyway, our military is now an arm of the ideological right, to too large an extent, and must be clipped, reigned in, and made rational again. This will require purging the brass ranks of ideologues and ridding the war colleges and military academies of morons stuck on the Punic Wars who teach out-moded lessons and prepare us to fight several wars back because they cannot think and refuse to learn. It’ll require unhitching the defense contractors from the military, so it’s no longer the Military-Industrial Complex for Obscene Profit No Matter How Many Must Die.
Those are for starters. It would be complicated and take a long time, but it could be done. If there is the political will from the people.
