“You need to look at everyone as if they’re trying to kill you, but you cannot treat them that way.”
Jake Everett said this is Rule #1 of the Marines when dealing with the populace. After getting back from two tours of duty in Iraq, as well as being A Dude I Know, I decide to make him the subject of my third part in this little dig-in to the military team that’s coming back to our fine red white and blue land, back from Troubles Abroad.
As P.J. Kennedy said in the last installment 6 months ago that I’m sure you all remember so well (if you don’t already have it waiting on the wings right next to this article already. I’ll wait…), “there’s going to be a lot of injured people coming back”. There’s roughly 300K coming back, as the holy Pedia of Wiki was kind enough to inform me last time.
With rules like that one, I was reminded of something I ALSO said in the last issue, basically that there are rules that a large contingent of the populace are told to follow from the day they’re born to the hour they die. That is definitely not one of them. What happens to the ones that learn things like that when they’re told to stop thinking those things?
Talking with Jake, I felt like a heel. Imagine if someone who you’ve only known for the better part of 4 months started jamming a tape recorder in your face and asking you about that time you killed all those people. And he was right neighborly about it, cause when I wrote The First Article, about pissing myself while sitting at a Perkins restaurant 10 feet from men armed in M-16s, I never thought I’d ever consider going out of my way to get a real soldier to read the fucking thing. I asked him to, and he complied with reading my original spew, an angry letter from one of the fiancés in retort, and The Parts one and two.
“I guess it’s easy to overreact if you’ve never talked to somebody about what it’s like, but it’s not a big deal, for most people. But the majority of people aren’t that dark, depressed, angry guy from what they’ve seen.”
But one of the things that I hadn’t counted on was that he’d tell me I hadn’t actually been too far off the mark in one of my manic lines. I’d originally said that the 9 soldiers at the table were “trained killing machines”, and the woman in the retort had taken me to task on that, claiming that I was being prejudiced. That there were plenty of humanitarian efforts that soldiers engaged in that didn’t involve destroying lives. I was surprised that Jake seemed to lean towards my side, at least as far as he’d experienced.
“You said everyone’s a trained killing machine, and actually, in the marine corps, there’s a saying, ‘Every marine a rifle man.’ So regardless whether your job is a mechanic, or whatever, down to the bare-nothing bolts, you’re a shooter. In boot camp they said, ‘We’re professional killers. That’s what we do, that’s the bottom line. We exist to kill people.’ That’s our job.”
So I wasn’t that far off the mark? Regardless. Ignore what I said, she said, he said, who’s right. There’s something else. Look at the qualifier—and pay attention now, cause I’m about to have one of those amazing insights to share with you all—“in the marine corps”. Not the army, not the air force, not the Violent Service Industry. Whatever you want to call it, these aren’t all the same types of people. Jake was especially careful to mention multiple times that he has no experience in the other branches of the American military. Most of the time, what Jake and I talked about was the difference between types of people. Reserves and professionals, marines and infantry, civilian and soldiers, American and Iraqis, us and them. When you get down to it, not only is Jake’s every answer only 1/300,000th of the story, there’s the other 285,700,000 of us to take in to account. When Jake tells me about dickheads in a bar who ask, “Hey man, did you ever fucking kill anybody?”, and war protestors who do everything short of giving him a foot massage right on a sidewalk cause they think he’s so sad and pitiful—“Have a hug!”—I don’t know how bad I feel when I hear the United States military is using what basically amounts to Functional Prejudice like the rule at the beginning of this fine piece of journalism.
“I wouldn’t really call the dehumanizing of Iraqis racist. It’s not meant to be racist, it’s a mechanism to help us kill people, without suffering more bad side-effects. Cause you can’t kill people if you think of them as people. Whenever the military goes over to a country to kill people, we dehumanize them. That’s why the Vietnamese were called gooks, that’s why the Japanese were Japs, the Germans were Krauts, the Iraqis are hajjis. And I’m not saying we just go around and look at everybody and treat them like shit. We treat them really nicely. But at the same time, if you’re friendly to people and really nice to them, if you have to kill somebody later, it’s a lot harder. And actually, I had a class on it. It’s not something that we just do, the military knows that we do it, the military wants us to do it. It’s a good thing. If you’re killing people, that can be bad. But if you’re just killing hajjis or gooks or Japs or something, then it’s different.”
Hmm, I say. Government Endorsed Battle Bigotry. Intriguing. Classes, you say? Teaching you “A mechanism to help you kill people.” Without this prejudice, the result is hesitation on the trigger finger, no? Relaxed vibes. Daydreaming. Dead soldiers. So take your pick, perhaps? Equality, or more people coming back home. The military allows prejudice to ferment to the extent necessary to get the job done, and certainly not impede it. “Winning hearts and minds” includes being friendly enough to make acquaintances with the towns folk so they DO see YOU as a human, and hopefully tell you which real asshole has the C4 taped to his chest. You don’t make informant-friends if you’re ass searching the whole block at gun point because you think the only good towel head is a dead towel head.
Ah, but the point of these beautiful little things I write has never been to judge the military, has it? Not what job they do, or how they do it. It’s about how they come back.
So, one rule for the Folks of Normalcy (that’s you, me, everyone who hasn’t been in the military), is that racism equals bad. A group of other people (that’s the soldiers) have a job that says racism is good, and very very important. Then they come here and have to deal with alcoholic frat boys who expect blood stories, war protestors who expect them to have night terrors, and a shitty opinion-column writer who thinks soldiers might someday kill his unborn children. They’re coming back to an anti-racism program that is clearly not doing that great of a job cleaning us up.
A lot of soldiers kill people. Most of them, I’d guess. I’m still curious what the effects are of that bag of mental fun. But it’s fairly clear, to me at least, that nothing’s really served by calling the kettle black this time. I don’t know how much fault I could summon to throw on soldiers who stay alive by doing something everyone everywhere does everyday anyway, except the Normals seem to just do it out of pure laziness. Not much of an excuse. The only way out is to research and write enough articles to choke a war criminal about your quest to become entirely knowledgeable on something you once had a wrong preconceived notion about. But this is the kind of work you go through when you get caught having wrong facts, and actually want to make an effort improving and dissolving your prejudice. Well, maybe not you, but definitely me, apparently. Equality’s not a 3 hour session, folks, that’s for sure, however you might do it. I swear to god I’m probably going to end up volunteering for the Sand Dunes before this series is all over.
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