BLISTERING INDICTMENTS OF AMERICA’S PERVERSE PROPENSITIES
MUNDANE MADNESS AND GIGGLES OF GLADNESS
People always ask, “how do you get these stories?” My normal answer
refers to my “wide network of contacts,” with allusions to Andes
Mountains listening posts, agents under cover of disguise, etc.
Generally closer to the truth would be a simple statement. “I listen
closely and compassionately to the people you dismiss or derail before
they speak to you, whom you judge, in advance of their ability to share
important information.”
An example of such a miraculous interaction occurred during a recent
roommate search. My outreach, for someone to share domicillary
expenses, at first was desultory, not to mention at least occasionally
hilarious, involving the following flyer, which I posted hither and yon.
Housemate
EMORY AREA---
Great house, amazing price(plus or minus $450/mo), excellent
environment for optimist, or pessimist who’s willing to be the butt of
jokes. WARNING: ALL ARE WELCOME, BUT BOTH REPUBLICANS AND
FUNDAMENTALISTS SHOULD FULLY EXPECT TO LOSE THEIR FAITH, OR GO INSANE,
OR BOTH!!
Available more or less immediately(7/20+), as current housemate is
fleeing the madness to go to Canada, ahead of the draft, all of that
sort of thing. Call to arrange a chance to see it, negotiate, etc.
Needless to say, I gave my friends a good laugh, and I frequently saw
folks gawking and guffawing at it on the walls of a couple of coffee
shops I frequent. One freshman from the sub-continent, about to attend
Spellman, a famous local Historically Black College for women, came to
ponder both price and the madman who wrote such a come-on. She found
something cheaper and more comfortable. And one recent Georgia Tech
graduate, who contends he is “the only open Kerry engineer I know,”
thought he might find sympathetic company for a change, but a beer bash
with some young women led to altogether different, and arguably more
salubrious dorm arrangements, and I continued to seek.
Eventually, an ad in the local ‘free’ paper yielded a few more calls
and a meeting that introduces today’s story. My message machine blurts
a bit of doggerel, to which one young caller, who sounded Black,
responded with some verse of his own. I called back, to discover that
he was a sculptor, who also bought and sold graphics software and
hardware apps online, clearly a cool package for a potential housemate.
Amazingly enough, my less than punctilious housekeeping skills did not
put him off. “My Mom?” back in Miami, “always said I’d live with a
slob if I didn’t pick up after myself, but what the fuck? I don’t
care.” My new acquaintance called himself ‘Alex,’ “for gringos,” and
laughed. He didn’t seem thrilled that I envisioned availing myself of
chances to practice the Spanish that I am learning now; he winced when
I offered, “Quiero ablas Espanol!” When I suggested that, in exchange,
I could help him with text in his first presentation-catalog, however,
we returned to the copascetic byway we had been traversing.
Only one hurdle remained. My main rationale, after bufoonery, for
producing my original flyer was the procurement of an instrument that
would weed out Nazis and hyper-Christians who might not otherwise wear
their colors brightly enough for my anti-fascist and
anti-fundamentalisty radar, frequently clouded by my shyness, to
assess. In spite of his promises that anything political “wouldn’t be
a problem,” I pulled out the handbill and let him read it. He grinned
and said, “No shit!” a couple of times, set it on the coffee table, and
extended his hand. As we shook, he suggested, “We’re gonna get along
fine.”
YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW!!
“In fact,” he continued, “I got a story for ya,” even suggesting that I
could help him with the prose, while his brother, “back in Miami,”
worked on the screenplay. Our little exchange developed so as to
suggest the depth and extent of the viciousness that now
‘operationalizes’ America’s SOP. As this former infantry recruit’s
crazy and chilling recollection suggests, “Imperial America’s Killing
Machines” are processing young men into mighty platoons of desensitized
goons.
April, 1994, at Fort Benning, down the Chattahoochee a hundred miles
from Atlanta, was already sticky, steamy, and stinky, according to my
young compadre. “It was definitely an army of Juan,” said Alex, “with
even more Kareem’s, Kalik’s,” and some ‘do-what?’ “rednecks mixed in.”
He had just turned 18, when a G.E.D. test, a very persuasive bi-lingual
recruiter---who promised “pussy, travel, and college, in that order,”
and a general readiness to try something new, “anything new,” as he put
it, led him to sign up for a two year stint.
By the end of the first day, “I knew it was the biggest mistake of my
life.” The brutality bazaar started when he showed up unshorn. “I
wanted, you know, like, a ceremony for cutting it all off,” and he
pointed to the middle of his back and suggested a pony tail as he
spoke. The NCO in charge asked him about it, and, apparently
dissastisfied or otherwise nonplussed by Alex’s reply, questioned his
heterosexuality, his virility, and any competency “at anything other
than scratching (my) ass.”
‘Not altogether unexpected,’ an onlooker might imply, nor particularly
mean, albeit admittedly a little spooky, sizing up so much about a man
on the basis of his hair-length. “He was serious,” said Alex. The
entire process of boot camp, as a matter of policy and design, is a
brainwashing and physical conditioning exercise that begins before it
supposedly starts.
His paperwork snagged at some unknowable point in the entry protocols,
“and it took almost two days” for him to get in the field. “I met a
lot of the Fourth Platoon guys,” all the “broke dicks,” in the process.
“These are guys who I could’ve been friends with,” he discovered, and
some of their stories impelled him to reassess the combination of
resignation and ‘what-the-fuck?’ that caused him to enlist.
When he got through the bottleneck and began the conditioning, however,
the first weeks demanded so much energy that no one had anything left
for anything other than “eating, shitting, sleeping, and drill.” Now
drill means running, calisthenics, obstacle courses, marching, weapons,
“and constant talk about killing.” That’s the job, the occupational
specialty, of infantry, to be lean, mean, killing machines.
Some young men came, explicitly, for the license to pillory people. “I
mean psychos, real sickos, guys who’d just say, ‘I came in for
confirmed kills,’ or ears, you know, they wanted ear necklaces, and you
don’t know whether they’re serious or just being macho.” After Alex’s
fitness blossomed under the regimen, “I mean I was pretty good, seventy
push ups, you know,” he could pay more attention to the message, the
men, the scene. “They were building us into a killing machine,” and “I
just didn’t join the army to kill people.”
So Alex began to ask any ‘broke-dick’ from Fourth Platoon who would
talk to him how a person got out of selling his soul to the devil. He
got some information this way, although people were very wary of spies,
since malingering might lead to a court-martial, prison, dishonorable
discharge, a world of very deep shit.
“I went to the chaplain, you know?” figuring that preachers had to give
spiritual succor and a chance to redeem an ill-considered pledge. “I
just told him that I didn’t want to kill anybody---I didn’t know, they
never told me---but they were all in the Army, and mine told me that
‘no, ya hafta stay fer yer two years,” and quoted a passage from what
Alex remembers as “Luke” that “Christ values the soldiers-of-God” who
stay stalwart enough to fight to the end.
He also witnessed how not to attempt extrication. One fellow, whom he
liked a little as a pal, “just decided one day he was gonna tell ‘em he
didn’t want to work any more, and that, it turns out, was not a very
smart way to try to get outta the army.” “So you’re tired o’ this and
you refuse to train, huh?” asked one of the giant, scary, lethal Drill
Sergeants. When the hapless youth agreed, the DI smiled a killer grin
and had him sit down at a desk in the staging area, “with his feet up
on the desk and his hands behind his head, you know, like he was
lounging.” When the captain found him and heard the explanation for
the posture, “He got all pissed off, really bad.” A general court
martial quickly ensued.
The young man ended up a fine example to all and sundry. A short time
later, “they got everybody together, the whole camp,” and paraded the
protester-turned-prisoner, hobbles and all, through the yard. The leg
irons connected to chains that cuffed his hands, and three M.P.’s
escorted him into a prison van, “and he went to Leavenworth, to go to
jail and get a dishonorable discharge.”
I mentioned the work of Riane Eisler to Alex, as a researcher who has
documented the programmatic dehumanization that the U.S. military uses
to train its troops. Her books, The Chalice and the Blade, and Sacred
Pleasure, as well as her work at the Partnership Institute, detail the
manner in which various sorts of selective and instructive
victimization serve to “capacitate human beings to willingly kill other
human beings who have done them no harm.”
“I got some stories,” noted Alex, that put meat on Dr. Eisler’s ideas.
“Coupla things were what made me stop being wishy washy; I knew I just
had to get out.” Whatever that required had to happen. The first
situation was another “major piss off” about something. “They had a
hundred of us, all packed so close together we couldn’t even ‘assume
the position’” for some unknown quantity of push-ups. “We were all
bumping into each other and everything.”
And another youngster, also not necessarily as wise as circumspection
might direct under the circumstances, whispered “this is fucking
stupid” loudly enough for one of the D.I.’s to hear. “What was that?
So you think this is stupid, huh?” Having hunted down the offending
recruit, the Sergeant had him stand “’and go tell the captain you think
his drill is stupid.’”
In the charnal pit of ache and torture that followed, every
ripped-muscle drop and guttural lift required a count, “One, two,
three, Sir!!” until the sergeant began to chant between counts, “Make
it little softer now,” until the call and response were just hundred
barely audible whispers joining the cicadas of early June. As this
ghostly, gruesome counting exercise came to its close, panting young
men whose voices had become softly aspirated croaks, the Drill
Sergeants circulated and whispered as they sweat, “keep it quiet now,”
until the troops too took up this call, “keep it quiet now,” and for
the final set of ten, amidst this panoply of sweat and sotto vocce
“keep it quiet nows,” the Sergeants took up a final chorus. For every
strangled call of the troops’ whispered lines, “keep it quiet now,” the
NCO’s offered their punctuation: “Just like child abuse, Just like
child abuse, Just like child abuse,” so that the song they sang for
their own ears alone was an eery, “Just like child abuse, Keep it quiet
now.”
The second event occurred right after the first, “and the whole feeling
was, ‘this is it! now we’re gettin’ to the good stuff. The Drill
Sergeants loved the shit.” They were on a run, they always ran,
wherever they went, and then “we just went running, too, four, five,
six miles.” Summer had just begun on the calendar, but swelter had
already settled on middle Georgia like a sodden blanket of fetid fog,
simmering just below boil.
And the Army loves order so much that just about everything happens by
the numbers. So with the runs. “One, Two, Three, Four, shut the
motherfucking door,” and on and on and on. The Non-Coms had all
indicated that the day was special somehow, and about halfway through
the circuit, “this big, Italian Sergeant, really handsome and a good
singer,” started on a new verse. This was the clincher, the evidence
Alex “couldn’t ignore anymore, or pretend maybe I could grit it out,
you know what I mean?” He had to get out, to find a way out, any way
out, whatever means necessary.
The stomp of boots in unison syncopates the Italian Veteran’s baritone,
“We’ll go out to the local playground!” and stomp, stomp, stomp leads
to one voice, “We’ll go out to the local playground!” Three
double-time beats now elicit, “Where all the kiddies play,” and stomp,
stomp, stomp, and the obedient “Where all the kiddies play” follows
smoothly. “We’ll take out our machine guns,” commands the conductor
next, and without missing a beat young throats deliver up the line, as
they do without hitch or noticeable chagrin at the final order of
battle for the United States Army Infantry’s scientific construction of
killers. “And we’ll let those fuckers spray” completes the rhyme as
fit boys and trained men jog over hill, over dale, dusty trail now
awash in the blood of the future.
One category of “broke dick” that was obvious was physical injury or
malfunction. “Although all the Sergeants hated it,” in these days of
modern times, so to say, even the Army couldn’t wantonly cripple and
kill the citizens who gave themselves to its cause. “I hurt my
shoulder real bad in high school,” running into a goal post on a diving
header that would have meant a shot at the Florida State Soccer
Championship. When Alex enlisted, in fact, attentive to liability if
not responsibility, the military insisted he receive a clean bill of
health and a waiver from an M.D., who had duly expressed his
professional opinion that rigorous training would be fine, “so long as
no reinjury or aggravating circumstance were to occur.”
My new young acquaintance wanted an exit that acknowledged his
principles, not his craftiness, however, so until the ‘final straw’
scenario noted above, he hadn’t acted on the chance that was implicit
in the documented facts of his medical condition. “That would be great
advice for enlistees, who maybe go in a little unsure about whether
they want to stay in the Army”--- have a physical ailment that offers a
chance to exit without penalty. In the event, nonetheless, his
shoulder problem served admirably.
“I fell one day on a run two days after the ‘machine gun’ chant; in
soccer, back in school? I was famous for being able to fall so the
other team’d get a red card. We’d get a penalty shot, and” some
significant portion of his team’s success folks ascribed to his ability
to fall like he was about to die. He tripped on a random rock on a Ft.
Benning course, came up holding his shoulder, and was in the infirmary
later that day.
“I was in Fourth Platoon, a ‘broke dick’ at last,” the next day. Once
there, the others about to make good an escape were more likely to
explain and advise. People still took great care, to say things in
such a way that they were just talking about facts and not talking
about their own cases. “The military is half spies, one way or
another,” and everyone with a brain watches out for that
But he learned that all he had to do was to continue representing that
his shoulder wouldn’t work right, at least not without pain and the
apparent likelihood of profound injury, and the army would sluff him
off after a time. “They couldn’t have a bunch of ‘b.d.’s’ hanging
around goofing off,” or morale among the ever-present waverers
elsewhere would plummet.
The Army tried a standard litany of tricks on everyone in 4th platoon,
either to induce, seduce, or otherwise traduce a voluntary return, or
to cause a malingerer to incriminate himself and provide the leverage
of a possible court martial to bring about performance according to
plan. One of the Drill Sergeants, “they called him ‘Mr. Clean,’ he was
from Samoa or something, just a fucking huge man,” and he had always
favored Alex---he liked Latinos, as well as the ones who didn’t look
like they had much grit but who could really produce results. He was
the first one to call him into an office for a chat.
“He tried to get me to ‘open up,’ to talk about understanding not
wanting to be a killer,” and on and on and on, “good cop to the max,”
but Alex just stuck to the script. “’Yeah, sarge, but my shoulder’s
just killing me.” Finally, he told his theretofore protege to “get the
fuck out of my office and stay the fuck out of my sight.”
Al’s own platoon NCO, “a big Black guy, coulda played linebacker for
the Dolphins” due to his smart and joyous sadistic tendencies, was
tougher when he conducted an interview. “He said from the go he knew I
was faking, and all I gave him back was, ‘you’re entitled to your
opinion sir, but that’s not true.’” Finally, he grinned and mellowed.
“Well, this was just the ace up your motherfuckin’ sleeve, wasn’t it?
Ya’ll go on, then, get your ass a job in some fast food restaraunt and
I’ll go out and do the stabbin’ and killin’ for ya, to keep your ass
safe and secure; prob’ly get my ass killed protectin’ the sorry likes
of a piece of shit like you.”
Other attempts occurred, but nothing diverted my possible future
housemate from his course of extrication. He was going to get his soul
back from the devil. “The Captain asked me what I was gonna do, and I
told him, ‘I dunno, college maybe.’” The Company Commander snorted at
that, before offering a final dig: “don’t you go gettin’ any pussy now,
you go to college. It’d probably make you fall over dead, got hold of
any real pussy.” A week later, they let him loose. Instead of a cog
in the links of the killing machine, Alex became a piece of gritty shit
that managed to come out and fertilize his own life---as an artist, a
thinker, as a human being who believes now that we had better think
about selling our souls to the devil in order to feel a little bit
safer from terror. “We’re the terroists now, far as I can see, as much
as anybody else on earth.”
MARTIAL PROFICIENCY AND THE PREVALENCE OF RAPE AND PILLAGE
The U.S. military represents, fully accounted for and fleshed out, the
second or third largest economy on earth. Its sway extends over tens
of millions of people directly, and indirectly, it controls the fate of
all six and a half billion cousins alive today. In the social arena,
its effect on us is sinister to consider.
Michael Moore’s “Bowling For Columbine” makes this point proficiently.
As mentioned above, Riane Eisler and many others show the two-sided
manner in which militarism encourages the degradation of the female on
the one hand, and offers up her degraded body, on the other, as a
reward for expert savagery. In future postings, various aspects of the
military conundrum will continue to appear in these pages.
Analysis and politics and policy, ‘hard’ data and formal logic, so to
speak, provide useful ways for investigators to look at the social,
political, and economic costs of militaristic tendencies. Wisdom,
however, a sense of alternative, a glimmer of hope that successful
resistance is possible, absolutely requires the anecdote, the story,
the vignette of someone like Alex, who shows up on the doorstep one day
and just happens to be in the right place to tell the tale. As always,
dear friends and readers, “THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!”
This article was written by JIMBO