One of my family’s favorite regular getaways is Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. The roller coasters are top notch, the shows are fun, and everyone is in a constant state of joy; it’s great. It’s also a veteran’s hangout. Every day when the park opens they honor all the veterans. We line up, march to the flag pole, and salute as we sing the anthem and say the pledge of allegiance. (I normally explain to people that the pledge is big-government socialist propaganda written by someone to the left of Bernie Sanders, but I make an exception for Silver Dollar City). I’ve even been the one to carry and raise the flag. It’s always nostalgic and fun to talk with other veterans, especially since I’m often the youngest one there.
One fun-filled day I had just finished a coaster with one of my daughters when we had to run from some rain. My wife and kids ran indoors to get out of the rain and grab some lunch as I spotted a scruffy guy with a submarine hat. I knew from the submarine number on his hat it was an old boat. I struck up a conversation, motioned to my own hat, told him I was a nuke electrician, and asked him what he did. He told me how he mostly loved his time as a submariner, and even somehow got to work on “pig boat” for a while – the very old diesel submarines characterized by their relatively short but fat shape. I don’t remember his original navy job, but he was also a diver. Navy divers come from a proud tradition, of course. He told me about their mine-sweeping operations in the rivers of Vietnam, and how he’d often volunteer to stand watch topside so that his buddies could take liberty. He liked the fresh air and dark nights. That is, until he didn’t anymore.
Where they were, sabotage was a rare, but realistic threat. So, they had to stay vigilant. Like any foreign war, this task is often challenging because you’re surrounded by civilians just trying to get by in the midst of war. In this area, people would come to the waterfront and collect plastic trash where the currents would pool heaps of it together. One night, he saw someone come up to the edge of the sub. They ignored his yelling, commands, and even warning shots.
He ended up killing a 12-year-old girl. Then, he said soberly, “They even gave me an award for it.”
As the rain continued to drizzle on us he said, “So I put a shotgun in my mouth.”
I missed a few of the following details, but I wasn’t about to ask him to tell it again.
Seeing the pain in his eyes cut me to the heart. “I’m so sorry that happened to you” and after a pause I said, “I’m pretty anti-war.”
“Me too” he replied solemnly.
Even before that moment, him and his buddies knew the war was pointless, but being away from the shooting and knowing there was nothing they could do about it, they made the most of it and didn’t complain. Of course, this changed everything.
He told me that many people didn’t support veterans the way they do today, even though the wars are just as stupid. Nonetheless, he took his honorable discharge and new lifetime pension and decided to do something honorable with it. He went to DC, wore his dress blues (he laughed about how against the rules it was) and protested the hell out of the war till the very end.
Like him, I was relatively safe tucked away on a submarine hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean. Although we were never shot at, the Navy often really sucked. Since my enlistment has ended, I’ve known multiple vets or active-duty sailors who have killed themselves. Sometimes people suggest that if we all just care hard enough, wear ribbons, or change the borders on our Facebook photos that fewer Veterans might kill themselves. The numbers are insane: The VA says around 20 veterans and active duty servicemembers kill themselves every single day; but another exhaustive 4-year-long study shows that an alarming number of suicides don’t get reported as veterans, so the number for veterans alone is most likely closer to 24 a day.
Sure, a large piece of this can be chalked up to how stressful military life is and how difficult it can be for many servicemembers to transition to the normal world again, but many of us are convinced that one of the largest factors is the overall culture and the sense of waste and futility in “the system” and the missions. Both externally and inside the military, many have little faith in the leadership at the top and the missions they generate. This includes military and political leadership.
I want to be very clear: in the Navy we knew what we were signing up for: deployments, impossibly long-hours, sleepless nights, and incredibly demanding challenges. When it was necessary for the mission, we gave it our all and did it with pride. Honestly, I loved a lot of it. Operating a mobile nuclear power plant underwater is pretty cool. What did bother us though, was when “the suck” was so clearly unnecessary or politically motivated. How much more frustrating and depressing would it be to be sent across the globe to a desert, told to “win hearts and minds” and told to build a foreign government while blowing things up and shooting at people in a country known as “the graveyard of empires”? We spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. It was clearly a futile, impossible task–a fool’s errand. Our leaders intentionally lied to us the whole time to keep it going. To top it off, soldiers couldn’t even really explain why they were there to their loved ones.
Missions void of clear goals still exist all over the world. Imagine being stationed in Somalia. Did you know we’ve bombed Somalia nearly 90 times this year already? I haven’t heard a single word in the mainstream press about Somalia. We’ve been in Somalia since 2001, and before that we were there from 1992 to 1994. Can you explain Somalia? Do you know who we’re bombing and why? I wonder how many soldiers have felt like the Medal of Honor recipient, Retired Major General Smedley Butler who wrote “War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
Yet, when loss of life comes at the hands of the state, it seems many people don’t even blink. The state gets to get away with murder. Right now, we’re blowing up speed boats off the coast of a South American country because they might have drugs in them, as if these speed boats are about to cross 2000 miles of open ocean and sell drugs to kids on South Padre Island or Miami. Even if we suspect someone is selling drugs in our hometown now, the cops don’t get to go up to them and shoot them in the head without warning! It’s so obviously murder by any definition, even if there were drugs in the boats. The ethics don’t change just because it’s on the ocean far away. And yes, it was wrong when Obama and Biden did it, too.
This brings me back to the conversation with the old submariner. His words have stuck with me, not because of the horror he described – though that would haunt anyone – but because of what it revealed about the system that sent him there in the first place. He wasn’t broken by the enemy; he was broken by the mission. He did everything his country asked of him, and it still left him shattered.
And we’re still doing it.
We’re still creating veterans who will come home hollowed out by the same kind of futility. The details change, the geography changes, the justifications change – but the result is always the same: young men and women return from foreign lands with invisible wounds, told to be proud of serving their country in a war no one can explain and no one expected to win.
And we don’t just do it to our veterans, we do it to the veterans of our proxies.
Here’s another hard truth: you’re not supporting Ukrainian warriors by cheering on an unwinnable war. Not only are the Russians steadily advancing, but the demographics are horrifying.
According to Ukraine’s own Prosecutor General’s Office, more than 250,000 men have been charged with desertion since the war began–more than a quarter of a million! Their own media report on the bleak truth that they continue to experience a manpower crisis on the front, and that their soldiers suffer from exceedingly low morale. Furthermore, western mainstream media have completely ignored the absolutely brutal conscription practices going on in Ukraine. Men regularly get ripped off the street and shoved into vans or short busses. Hours upon hours of footage, often from a loved one’s cell phone, exists of this “busification” of Ukrainian men, often with their wives screaming in horror and trying to fight the gang of “recruiters” in vain. There are more than a handful of stories of Ukrainian conscripts even getting killed in the process.
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