Veterans Speak Out, Part 2

Ross Caputi in Iraq.

by Ross Caputi

 Veteran Privilege

I worry that by using the authority and privilege of veteran voices to spread our antiwar message and deflect criticism, we in the antiwar movement have inadvertently made veterans into a kind of propaganda, packaging an antiwar message within a familiar warrior ethos. In effect, we are using the very same culture of soldier worship that we should be dismantling.

I worry also that the antiwar movement assumes a “truthiness” about veteran war narratives. The common refrain is that no one knows the horrors of war better than veterans. However, the experiences of veterans do not always lend themselves to a single antiwar interpretation. To assume that they do is just another iteration of what James Campbell has called combat gnosticism — “a construction that gives us war experience as a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows.”

The culture of the antiwar movement has created a kind of veteran identity politics that regards veteran voices as given goods. But combat gnosticism can be dangerous when it leads us to become uncritical of our soldiers, even the ones who share our political beliefs.

I’m not saying that veterans have nothing to offer the antiwar movement. I’m arguing that we should not rely on them as sources of informational or moral truth. This does not help us build a culture of critical, independent thinking, responsibility, equality, and antimilitarism.

An alternative contribution that antiwar veterans could make is to offer stories and self-reflection that renounce the authority and privilege we enjoy in our society, that recognize our moral agency, that confess our mistakes in enlisting and participating in unjust wars, and that announce our responsibility to our war victims. This would be a first step in a process toward full reparations that not only seek to repair the harm done, but that also address the root causes of the violence: power, privilege, and imperialism.

Ross is the cofounder of the Islah Reparations Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah. The full essay can be read at VeteranReparations.org

 

Veterans Speak Out, Part 1



Ross Caputi in Iraq.

Note from Kathie MM:  This post from long-time guest author  Ross Caputi begins a new series on ending violence; his focus is on the role of veterans in promoting repair as an antidote to violence.

Veterans Speak Out, Part 1

By Ross Caputi

Ever since I got out of the military, I’ve felt that those around me, conservatives and progressives alike, have bent over backwards to give me an opportunity to talk about my experience in Iraq. I think many people do it because they think they owe me this courtesy.

But others seek me out and ask me to speak about my experience because they know and I know that veteran stories accomplish a lot of political work. I always accept, because I have an agenda to push.

I want to end war and prosecute war criminals.

But I’ve always felt uncomfortable with using the authority of my voice as a veteran to accomplish anti-war work. It’s a strange corner that I feel backed into where I have to identify myself as a former soldier so that I can try to undermine our culture of soldier-worship. And I can’t help but feel troubled by the contradiction between the means and ends of this rhetorical strategy.

No doubt, the privileged status of soldiers/veterans in the US is a major reason why we play such an important role in the anti-war movement. Our biggest contribution is that we help civilians navigate support-the-troops jingoism and accusations that anti-war ideas are unpatriotic. For whatever historical reasons, veterans enjoy a near sacred status in US culture and society. We carry with us an enormous amount of symbolic capital, and our voices are privileged like none others. We then bring this symbolic capital and privilege with us to the antiwar movement.

Simply by letting us make short speeches at anti-war rallies, or even letting us wear our cammies in an anti-war march, organizers know that audiences will be more willing to listen and less likely to criticize. In short, veterans help legitimize anti-war ideas by vouching for them.

But we can do more than that. Stay tuned.

Ross is the co-founder of the Islah Reparations Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah. The full essay, from which this post is excerpted, can be read at VeteranReparations.org.

 

Investing in Moral Repair, Part 1, by Ross Caputi*

I read Nancy Sherman’s book Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers (2015) as a veteran of the US-led occupation of Iraq and as a board-member of the Islah Reparations Project. The intuitive answer to my own moral injury was to bring reparations to the people I helped hurt, and that has been my life for the past decade. For that reason, Nancy Sherman’s notion of “moral repair”—“repair” being the root word in “reparations”—was immediately attractive to me.

Lieutenant General (Dr.) James M. Dubik notes in the foreword that one of this book’s most important contributions is an expansion of our understanding of the jus post bellum beyond discussions of ending war justly.

Drawing on her background in ancient philosophy, particularly the stoics, and her training in psychoanalysis, Sherman describes for us with impressive clarity the emotional worlds of veterans and all the what-ifs and should-haves that anguish them. She then makes a persuasive case for extending our notion of post war responsibility from being the task of government to the duty of individual citizens, assigning them an essential role in the healing process of our veterans.

Sherman advances two main arguments in this book: That civilians have a responsibility to veterans, a responsibility that is grounded in their causal contribution to starting and facilitating war—through voting, paying taxes, participating in public debate, and lobbying—and, hence, to sending our armed service members into harms way. And that moral injury is a poorly understood, under-treated condition that veterans suffer from upon returning home. The conclusion is that civilians have a responsibility to engage with veterans upon their return, because veterans need a sympathetic and dependable community to return to. Sherman sees her book as a convocation, as “a manifesto for how to engage in moral repair, one on one, with individual service members and veterans so that we can begin to build a new kind of integrated community” (19).

She believes that two main obstacles are preventing the sort of communion between civilians and veterans that she advocates. The first is the “gaping disconnect between those who wear the uniform and those who don’t” (18). And the second is shallow gratitude, which is expressed most clearly in the ritualistic “Thank you for your service.” The “military-civilian gap” refers to what active duty service members and veterans perceive as the relative normality of civilian life during war time, and the lack of understanding amongst the general population of what veterans have experienced abroad (29). However, there are several scholars who argue for the opposite, that civilian life is being increasingly militarized. One such argument comes from Nick Turse in his The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (2008). But Sherman takes it on assumption that there is in fact a military-civilian gap without arguing for it or addressing the arguments against it.

*This review by Engaging Peace Board member Ross Caputi is reprinted from the American Book Review, Volume 36, Number 5, July/August 2015.

Ross is currently on the Board of Directors of ISLAH. He is also a graduate student and a writer. In 2004, he was a US Marine in the US-led occupation of Iraq. His experience there, in particular his experience during the 2nd siege of Fallujah, compelled him to leave the US military and join the anti-war movement. His activism has focused on our society’s moral obligation to our victims in Iraq, and to the responsibility of veterans to renounce their hero status in America.

American Sniper, Part I

By guest author Ross Caputi. This is the first in a series discussing the implications of the new film, American Sniper.

What American Sniper offers us — more than a heart-wrenching tale about Chris Kyle’s struggle to be a soldier, a husband, and a father; more than an action packed story about America’s most lethal sniper — is an exposure of the often hidden side of American war culture. The criminality characterizing American military engagements since the American Indian Wars, and most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, is hardly noticeable in this film. And that’s exactly my point.

Chris Kyle built his reputation as a sniper during one of the most criminal operations of the entire occupation of Iraq, the 2nd siege of Fallujah, yet American Sniper doesn’t even hint that Chris Kyle did anything in Iraq except kill bad guys and defend America. This speaks volumes about how little we understand the wars our country fights around the world.

Perhaps my argument seems strange — that the most significant part of this film is what is not in it. I believe the omissions reflect more than what the director decided was irrelevant to the plot. They reveal an unconscious psychological process that shields our ideas about who we are as individuals and as a nation. This process, known as “moral disengagement ,” is extremely common in militaristic societies.

What is fascinating about American Sniper is how these omissions survive in the face of overwhelming evidence of the crimes in which Chris Kyle participated during the 2nd siege of Fallujah — an operation that killed between 4,000 and 6,000 civiliansdisplaced 200,000, and may have created an epidemic of birth defects and cancers. That he can come home, be embraced as a hero, be celebrated for the number of people he killed, write a bestselling book about it, and have it made into a Hollywood film is something we need to reflect on as a society.

Ross Caputi, a regular writer for engagingpeace.com, is a former Marine who participated in the 2nd Siege of Fallujah. Today he is on the Board of Directors of the Islah Reparations Project.  He is also the Director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah  Ross holds an MA in Linguistics and he is working on an MA in English Studies at Fitchburg State University. Read his blog here.