They Didn’t Know What They Were Getting Into The Cost of War American-Style

Information Clearinghouse – by Ann Jones

The last time I saw American soldiers in Afghanistan, they were silent. Knocked out by gunfire and explosions that left them grievously injured, as well as drugs administered by medics in the field, they were carried from medevac helicopters into a base hospital to be plugged into machines that would measure how much life they had left to save. They were bloody.  They were missing pieces of themselves. They were quiet.

It’s that silence I remember from the time I spent in trauma hospitals among the wounded and the dying and the dead. It was almost as if they had fled their own bodies, abandoning that bloodied flesh upon the gurneys to surgeons ready to have a go at salvation. Later, sometimes much later, they might return to inhabit whatever the doctors had managed to salvage.  They might take up those bodies or what was left of them and make them walk again, or run, or even ski.  They might dress themselves, get a job, or conceive a child. But what I remember is the first days when they were swept up and dropped into the hospital so deathly still.  

They were so unlike themselves. Or rather, unlike the American soldiers I had first seen in that country. Then, fired up by 9/11, they moved with the aggressive confidence of men high on their macho training and their own advance publicity.

I remember the very first American soldiers I saw in Afghanistan.  It must have been in 2002.  In those days, very few American troops were on the ground in that country — most were being readied for Iraq to fulfill the vainglorious dreams of George W. Bush and Co. — and they were not stationed in Kabul, the Afghan capital, but in the countryside, still supposedly searching for Osama bin Laden.

I was in the north, at the historic Dasht-i Shadian stadium near the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, watching an afternoon of buzkashi, the traditional Afghan sport in which mounted men, mostly farmers, vie for possession of a dead calf.  The stadium was famous not only for the most fiercely contested buzkashi games in the country, but also for a day during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when local people invited 50 Soviet soldiers to enjoy the spectacle at Dasht-i Shadian and slaughtered them on the spot.

I was seated with Afghan friends in the bleachers when a squad of Americans in full battle gear barged into the dignitaries’ box and interrupted play. Some of them insisted on riding the horses.  At a sign from the local warlord presiding over the games, Afghan riders helped the Americans mount.  They may also have cued their horses to bolt, race away, and dump them in the dirt.

A little stiffly, the soldiers hiked back to the grandstand, took up their rifles, and made a great show of laughing off the incident — of being loud and boisterous “good sports.” But a large audience of poker-faced Afghan men had taken their measure.  A friend said something to me that I never forgot in years after as I watched the “progress” of the war unfold: “They didn’t know what they were getting into.”

The next day, I spotted another squad of American soldiers in the city’s central bazaar.  In the midst of busy shops, they had fanned out in full battle gear in front of a well-known carpet store, dropped to one knee, and assumed the firing position. They aimed their assault rifles at women shoppers clad in the white burqas of Mazar and frozen in place like frightened ghosts.  The Americans were protecting their lieutenant who was inside the store, shopping for a souvenir of his sojourn in this foreign land.

I can’t say exactly when the U.S. military brought that swagger to Kabul. But by 2004 the Americans were there behind the walls of fortified urban bases, behind concrete barriers and gigantic sandbags at armed checkpoints, blocking traffic, and closing thoroughfares. Their convoys were racing at top speed through city streets with machine-gunners on alert in the turrets of their armored vehicles.  Women half-blind under their burqas brought their children to guide them across suddenly dangerous streets.

Enter the Warriors

I had come to Afghanistan to work for those women and children.  In 2002, I started spending winters there, traveling the country but settling in Kabul. Schools long closed by the Taliban were reopening, and I volunteered to help English teachers revive memories of the language they had studied and taught in those schools before the wars swept so much away. I also worked with Afghan women and other internationals — few in number then — to start up organizations and services for women and girls brutalized by war and stunned by long confinement to their homes.  They were emerging silently, like sleepwalkers, to find life as they had once known it long gone. Most of Kabul was gone too, a landscape of rubble left from years of civil war followed by Taliban neglect and then American bombs.

After the Taliban fled those bombs, the first soldiers to patrol the ruined streets of Kabul were members of ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force established by the U.N. to safeguard the capital.  Turks, Spaniards, Brits, and others strolled around downtown, wearing berets or caps — no helmets or armor — and walked into shops like casual tourists.  They parked their military vehicles and let kids climb all over them. Afghans seemed to welcome the ISAF soldiers as an inconspicuous but friendly and reassuring presence.

Then they were supplanted by the aggressive Americans. The teachers in my English classes began to ask for help in writing letters to the U.S. military to claim compensation for friends or neighbors whose children had been run over by speeding soldiers.  A teacher asked, “Why do Americans act in this way?”  I had, at the time, no answer for her.

In my work, I found myself embroiled ever more often with those soldiers as I tried to get compensation, if not justice, for Afghans.  As a reporter, I also occasionally felt duty-bound to attend press briefings concocted by Washington’s militarized theorists of a future American-dominated world of global free markets, spreading democracy, and perfect security in the oddly rebranded “homeland.”

The Pentagon prepared PowerPoint presentations cluttered with charts and arrows indicating how everything was ultimately connected to everything else in an insulated circularity of hokum.  Subordinates based in Kabul delivered those talks to American journalists who dutifully took notes and submitted soon-familiar stories about new strategies and tactics, each guaranteed to bring success to Washington’s Afghan War, even as commanding generals came and went year after year.

To American officials back in that homeland, war was clearly a theoretical construct, and victory a matter of dreaming up those winning new strategies, or choosing some from past wars — Iraq, for example, or Vietnam — and then sending in the brash kids I would see in that stadium near Mazar-i-Sharif to carry them out. War was, in short, a business plan encoded in visual graphics.  To Afghans, whose land had already served as the playing field for more than 20 years of Washington’s devastating modern wars, it wasn’t like that at all.

Frankly, I didn’t like the U.S. soldiers I met in those years.  Unlike the ISAF troops, who appeared to be real people in uniforms, the Americans acted like PowerPoint Soldiers (with a capital S), or, as they preferred to be called, Warriors (with a capital W).  What they seldom acted like was real people.  For one thing, they seemed to have been trained to invade the space of any hapless civilian.  They snapped to attention in your face and spat out sentences that splashed your flesh, something they hadn’t learned from their mothers.

In time, though, their canned — and fearful — aggressiveness stirred my sympathy and my curiosity to know something about who they really were, or had been.  So much so that in the summer of 2010, I borrowed body armor from a friend and applied to embed with U.S. soldiers.  At the time, General Stanley McChrystal was massing troops (and journalists) in the Taliban heartland of Helmand Province in southwestern Afghanistan for a well-advertised “decisive” showdown with the insurgency.  I, on the other hand, was permitted to go to a forward operating base in northeast Afghanistan on the Pakistani border where, it was said, nothing was going on.  In fact, American soldiers were “falling” there at a rate that took their commanders by surprise and troubled them.

By the time I arrived, those commanders had become secretive, cloistering themselves behind closed doors — no more PowerPoint presentations offering the press (me) straight-faced assessments of “progress.”

For TomDispatch, I wrote a piece about that base and included one fact that brought me a deluge of outraged email from wives and girlfriends of the Warriors.  It wasn’t my description of the deaths of soldiers that upset them, but my noting that the most common disabling injury on that base was a sprained ankle — the result of jogging in the rocky high-desert terrain. How dare I say such a thing, the women demanded.  It demeaned our nation’s great Warriors. It was an insult to all patriotic Americans.

I learned a lesson from that.  America’s soldiers, when deployed, may no longer be “real people” even to their loved ones.  To girlfriends and wives, left alone at home with bills to pay and kids to raise, they evidently had to be mythic Warriors of historic importance saving the nation even at the sacrifice of their own lives.  Otherwise, what was the point?

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

And that may be the point: that there wasn’t one, not to this war of choice and revenge, or the one in Iraq either.  There were only kids in uniform, most of whom by that time knew that they hadn’t known what they were getting into, and now were struggling to keep their illusions and themselves alive.  They walked the streets of the base, two by two, battle buddies heading for the DFAC (mess hall), the laundry, the latrine, the gym. They hung out on the Internet and the international phones, in the war and out of it at the same time, until orders came down from somewhere: Washington, Kabul, Bagram, or the map-lined room behind the closed door of the base commander’s office.  As a result, every day while I was on that base, patrols were ordered to drive or walk out into the surrounding mountains where Taliban flags flew. Very often they returned with men missing.

What had happened to those boys who had been there at breakfast in the DFAC? Dead or torn up by a sniper or a roadside bomb, they had been whisked off by helicopters and then… what?

They lodged in my memory.  Unable to forget them, almost a year later, when I was officially not a nosy journalist but a research fellow at a leading university, I again applied for permission to embed in the military.  This time, I asked to follow casualties from that high desert “battle space” to the trauma hospital at Bagram Air Base, onto a C-17 with the medical teams that accompanied the wounded soldiers to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany — the biggest American hospital outside the United States — then back onto a C-17 to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and in some cases, all the way home.

Over the years, more and more of America’s kids made that medevac journey back to the States. Costsofwar.com has tallied 106,000 Americans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan or evacuated from those war zones because of accident or disease.  Because so many so-called “invisible wounds” are not diagnosed until after soldiers return home, the true number of wounded must be much higher. Witness the fact that, as of June 2012, 247,000 veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq had been diagnosed by the VA with post-traumatic stress disorder, and as of May 31, 2012, more than 745,000 veterans of those wars had filed disability claims with the Veterans Administration (VA).  Taxpayers have already spent $135 billion on medical and disability payments for the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the long-term medical and disability costs are expected to peak at about midcentury, at an estimated $754 billion.

Then there were the “fallen,” the dead, shipped to Dover Air Base in metal “transfer cases” aboard standard cargo planes. They were transferred to the official military mortuary in ceremonies from which the media, and thus the public, were until 2009 excluded— at least 6,656 of them from Iraq and Afghanistan by February of this year. At least 3,000 private contractors have also been killed in both wars. Add to this list the toll of post-deployment suicides, and soldiers or veterans hooked on addictive opioids pushed by Big Pharma and prescribed by military doctors or VA psychiatrists either to keep them on the job or, after they break down, to “cure” them of their war experiences.

The first veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq returned to the United States 10 years ago in 2003, yet I’ve never spoken to a damaged soldier or a soldier’s family members who thought the care he or she received from the Veterans Administration was anything like appropriate or enough.  By the VA’s own admission, the time it takes to reach a decision on a veteran’s benefits, or simply to offer an appointment, is so long that some vets die while waiting.

So it is that, since their return, untold numbers of soldiers have been looked after by their parents.  I visited a home on the Great Plains where a veteran has lain in his childhood bed, in his mother’s care, for most of the last decade, and another home in New England where a veteran spent the last evening before he took his own life sitting on his father’s lap.

As I followed the sad trail of damaged veterans to write my new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — the Untold Story, I came to see how much they and their families have suffered, like Afghans, from the delusions of this nation’s leaders — many running counter to international law — and of other influential Americans, in and out of the military, more powerful and less accountable than themselves.

Like the soldiers, the country has changed.  Muted now is the braggadocio of the bring-‘em-on decider who started the preemptive process that ate the children of the poor and patriotic.  Now, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, Washington scrambles to make the exit look less like a defeat — or worse, pointless waste.  Most Americans no longer ask what the wars were for.

“Follow the money,” a furious Army officer, near the end of his career, instructed me. I had spent my time with poor kids in search of an honorable future who do the grunt work of America’s military.  They are part of the nation’s lowliest 1%. But as that angry career officer told me, “They only follow orders.” It’s the other 1% at the top who are served by war, the great American engine that powers the transfer of wealth from the public treasury upward and into their pockets. Following that money trail reveals the real point of the chosen conflicts. As that disillusioned officer put it to me, the wars have made those profiteers “monu-fuckin’-mentally rich.” It’s the soldiers and their families who lost out.

Ann Jones has a new book published today: They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books project in cooperation with Haymarket Books. Andrew Bacevich has already had this to say about it: “Read this unsparing, scathingly direct, and gut-wrenching account — the war Washington doesn’t want you to see. Then see if you still believe that Americans ‘support the troops.’” Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, is also the author of two books about the impact of war on civilians: Kabul in Winter and War Is Not Over When It’s Over.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out Nick Turse’s Dispatch book The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Ann Jones

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8 thoughts on “They Didn’t Know What They Were Getting Into The Cost of War American-Style

  1. I went to Iraq on a lie. After one month in that hell hole, I realized that I was not there for my country. After that it became clear that I was only there to do my time and keep my troops alive. There was nothing patriotic about it. In 2004 I came back. I never went back to Iraq. I know people who have been there numerous times since then. Nothing had changed when they went back. If anything it had gotten worse. The military has a way of bribing troops to continue to do this crap. They now allow you to re-enlist earlier for a bonus. They dangle a $20,000 bonus for a 6 year re-enlistment as a temptation. But they dont explain that you only get half up front and then they tax the crap out of it. But these guys make crap for money and to them it is alot of money still. They pay off bills or get a new car and then get sent back to Hell. Then before you know it you are over ten years in the Army. Then it becaomes a matter of being too close to retirement to quit. They throw a medal on you and promote you just enough to keep you going.
    Before you know it you are stuck. It is a vicious cycle that the bastrds that run the show know is going to destroy people, but they dont care. They are in the same boat, but just on a higher level. I am sure this was the same way of doing things during Vietnam. That war almost destroyed our military. These will be no different.

    1. bulldog…in some ways it was worse during Vietnam….I was drafted after graduating from college….if one did not go, you basically went to jail for resisting…one could apply for a conscientious objection status and if the draft board agreed…then one got a pass…..so drafted youth who really were slaves did most of the killing and dying…most I ever got paid was 120.00 a month…and spent my time and got out quick as i could…..as luck would have it for me, i did not get shot up…..although i was in combat manning twin electric 50 cal machine guns on river patrol guard boats on the Saigon river….Vietnam was a real hell hole for fighting it was not like iraq and AFgh….a little here and there…Vietnam was on combat fire every day for years on end….
      The US Military never really came home from the second WW….That was the problem….Pres Eisenh warned of the coming Mil-Ind-complex fact he is credited with originating that term….and warned that this group must not be allowed to take over the US! What happened? That’s exactly what happened…….it’s still that way….
      Very few in the military/civilian authorities who run this killing machine care about those who served as you did, as I did, as the people who died in the Korean war, did….Perhaps its going to come to armed revolt here and the people in the Military are going to have to once and for all, decide if they are Americans or Not Americans….and all those who are not may have to be wiped out one way or the other………..just so our country can survive and attempt to be itself before the 1913 time period when the Fed and other things came in and began destroying our land…….
      It is a situation I shake my head over because it certainly is grave…
      Best to you Bulldog, Henry and all on this site…and the hard working crew of fromthetrenches

      1. rbeason,
        Nothing but respect for my brothers who were sent to Vietnam. Yall got a bad deal during and after that one.
        I agree that this time the military is going to have to chose. If they chose to fight the traitors and UN bastards, I will welcome them. If they chose to go against America, they are my enemy and will be treated as such.

  2. I USED to have a lot of respect for the military, as I was once a civilian trainer for SEAL/BUDs, but I’ve completely lost whatever respect I had.

    Your ‘oath’ is a joke, as about .0000001% of you has stood up – HONORABLY – and said “THIS IS BULLSHIT”.

    So while generals are being fired (yes, a nuke REALLY WAS SET OFF on the east coast – the ‘earthquake’. The proof? Millions of dead fish “mysteriously” began to cover the beaches, days later = ‘Dupont fishing’, it was named in Vietnam, by throwing a grenade in the water), I see NOT A SINGLE EFFORT by ANYONE in the military to move on Washington, since you’ve ALL violated the same oath that fraud in the White House does – nearly every day.

    You’ve ALLOWED yourselves to be shat on, used, abused, lied to, humiliated….and tossed aside.

    If you seek help for your involvement in the killing and destruction of innocent people and their country, then you sit meekly by, hand out, trying to get help – and let them take you weapons away, since you’re “unfit”.

    veteranstoday.com is a joke. NOT A SINGLE CALL TO COME TOGETHER AND RIGHT THIS HORRIFICF#@KINGWRONG that was once called America, now called “the Homeland” – Zeig Heil!

    Your point about “warriors” is WHY American military WILL fire on Americans in the coming revolt. And, oh YES, it will happen, but it will be aided by very few ex-or-current soldiers. They prefer to terrorize those WITHOUT weapons.

    “….. in the war and out of it at the same time, until orders came down from somewhere: Washington, Kabul, Bagram, or the map-lined room behind the closed door of the base commander’s office”.

    …….or Israel, the Clintons, Goldman/Sachs, DICK CHENEY’S Halliburton (noooooooo….No conflict of interest there, nope), or a military contractor, anxious to try a new ‘toy’.

    And yet stupid, fu&*in&, gullible Amerikans STILL believe we are there, “fighting for democracy and to protect America”. What happened to the “global war on terror” sales pitch? I read a LOT of internet sites each morning, and the feeling is STILL that;

    9/11 was real, as were Boston, etc., we ‘won’ in Iraq (this is almost hard to believe, but that’s good propaganda for ya), and that the economy is “doing fine”.

    No, this country won’t stand up – and ESPECIALLY it’s “warriors” until it is COMPLETELY LOST, and there are ‘checkpoints’ every few miles, guns drawn down on civilians, and posse comitatus is a vague memory.

    I’ll leave you with the immortal words of H.L.Mencken;

    “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people”.

    1. Everyone speaks of the oath that the people of the military have taken and shunned. In my opinion, every American National has the same oath to uphold. Not the part about enemies foreign, but the part about the enemies domestic. What is the diiference in an American National doing nothing about the communist takeover or a soldier doing nothing about the same? Why is the military the only group that is expected to stop these crimes? All able bodied men have a responsibility to save our Republic. Many, especially those on this site are ready to stop the traitors. But most will sit back and wait for some general to lead a division against the traitors.

      Not every troop is an evil bastard that goes after innocent people without guns. That is a falsehood. Pilots and drone boys may enjoy killing innocents from above, but I personnally have never met a ground troop that enjoys killing. That stereotype was brought on by AJ, et al. We may have unknowingly participated in an illegal war, but we dont run around killing unarmed people on a daily basis. Alot of us woke up to what was going on and left the military.

      As far as oaths, my personal oath as an American National is far more important to me than one I took in the military.

      There are alot of troops with their hands out for help. I am not one of them. I took nothing from the government after my time except hate. They will never take my guns, even if they attempt to label me as unfit.

      1. That double edged sword can be an unforgiving son of a bitch and you are 110% correct.
        The people who are doing the pissing and moaning are just as responsible to right the wrong as the soldier.
        And that oath does apply to every able bodied man. And it is not just domestic enemies, it is foreign as will be witnessed when we start fighting the foreign armies quartered within our own borders.
        And finally, it will be our veterans and active duty soldiers who step up as Americans who will save the day as the skills they possess are invaluable and absolutely essential to saving our Republic.

        1. Henry,
          You are right about the foreign bastards coming here.
          Since coming to your site and Liberty Tree Radio, I have also found that there are also alot of Americans that didnt go the military route that have more than enough knowledge, skill and motivation to stand side by side with the best trained military guy. I would stand with anyone on this site and fight the treasonous bastards and UN enemies

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