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Approaching Veterans Day: Military Moral Injury, Violence, and the Parable of the Guinea Worm
Veterans? Who are they? And how in the world did they get a “day”? After all, here’s a curious fact: since World War II ended in victory, the United States, often seen as the greatest power on planet Earth, has indeed fought a seemingly endless series of wars from Korea and Vietnam in the last century to Afghanistan and Iraq in this one (and all sorts of more minor conflicts as well) without ever — yes, ever! — winning any of them. In May, it was clear enough that, at some deep level, Donald Trump had grasped that reality because he seemed eager to take November 11th away from America’s veterans and rename it “Victory Day for World War I” (with May 8th to be declared “Victory Day for World War II”). Admittedly, he backed down on that fast, but it still tells you something about this world of ours that, 80 years after World War II ended, when it comes to the country now heading for a trillion-dollar “defense” budget, there hasn’t been a victory in sight for decades.
And that hasn’t stopped Donald Trump and crew, whether in Somalia (yes, Somalia!), where his administration has launched a record 89 airstrikes so far this year, or in the Caribbean Sea, where it’s been ramping up American forces (including sending in an aircraft carrier task force) and making a habit out of blowing the boats of supposed drug smugglers out of the water there and in the Pacific Ocean, too, at least 18 of them as I was writing this (killing at least 70 people), and possibly preparing for an invasion not just of Venezuela, but also conceivably of various cities in this country.
And yes, you know that you’re in a new world when, with the government shutdown still ongoing, the president pays part of the salaries of the U.S. military with a $130 million donation from one of his billionaire supporters.
Welcome to his version of Veterans Day 2025. Now, let TomDispatch regular Kelly Denton-Borhaug give you some sense of how endless disastrous conflicts have affected America’s own troops.
Honor Veterans by Ending Wars
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.
Will the Taiwan Issue Stay Quiet During Trump’s Term?
President Trump professed to be extremely pleased with the results of his recent summit meeting with Xi Jinping in South Korea. Indeed, with his typical hyperbole, he rated it “a 12 out of 10.” Trump expressed special satisfaction with the conclusion of new trade agreements that significantly eased bilateral economic tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In what amounted to a casual comment, he also stated that he had received a pledge from Xi that the PRC would not take any military action to change Taiwan’s political status during the remainder of Trump’s term. Interestingly, neither the U.S. nor PRC documents summarizing the summit indicated that the Taiwan issue was discussed at all – a very surprising omission given the usual importance of the topic.
More-neutral observers were less overwhelmed by the summit’s results. Critics contended that the economic agreements amounted to little more than a temporary cease fire in the tariff wars that had raged between the two countries since Trump took office in January 2025. The new steps largely restored the status quo ante, with tariff rates mostly returning to the levels that existed before all the recent posturing and blustering by Washington and Beijing.
Trump’s comments about his alleged pledge from Xi are more interesting and potentially much more significant. If such a substantive “understanding” now exists between Beijing and Washington that the PRC will not take any military actions to change Taiwan’s political status, it would ease tensions in an especially volatile and dangerous global geostrategic hotspot. There are, however, some reasons to doubt Trump’s rosy interpretation. For one thing, the alleged pledge would be a sharp change in Beijing’s rhetoric and conduct for the past several years.
The PRC sought to strangle Taiwan in the global diplomatic arena throughout the 8-year tenure of former Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. In response to vigorous lobbying campaigns by Beijing that combined roughly equal amounts of bribery and threats, 10 of the 22 small nations that still maintained diplomatic relations with Taipei when Tsai took office in 2016 switched ties to Beijing. The attempted intimidation, coercion, and isolation of Taiwan occurred not only on the diplomatic front, however. Beijing also sharply increased the number and scope of its military exercises in the vicinity of Taiwan.
Both trends have grown more pronounced under Tsai’s successor, Lai Ching-te (William Lai) since he took office in May 2024. The PRC’s menacing military maneuvers are especially noticeable. Beijing dislikes Lai even more intensely than it did Tsai. She was a member of the “light green” (more restrained and pragmatic) faction of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Lai unsubtly favors the goal of formal independence that the “deep green” faction pursues. His confrontational course seems aimed at securing eventual international recognition of Taiwan’s (currently de facto) independence and a firm commitment from the United States and its allies to defend Taiwan from PRC coercion.
Lai also is waging a bitter internal political war with the more moderate Kuomintang Party, which favors a decidedly softer, less confrontational policy for dealing with Beijing. The DPP and its rival have both adopted highly questionable tactics to undermine the other. It is an increasingly tense political environment with Lai holding the presidency but a KMT-led coalition controlling the legislative branch. In July, 2025, voters rejected an effort by Lai to purge targeted opposition legislators through an unprecedented recall vote.
US To Build Base On Gaza Border – Thousands Troops To Support Ceasefire
This story is developing…
The Hebrew news outlet YNET is reporting the United States will spend $500 million to establish a base on the Gaza border in order to ensure implementation of the Gaza peace deal negotiated by The White House. The location is reported to host ‘thousands’ of American troops.
In related news, YNET is reporting Hamas is regaining control over the Gaza population as residents move to camps in Gaza due to the inability of residents to live amongst the rubble.
The next stage of the Trump plan envisions a further IDF withdrawal beyond the yellow line, creation of a transitional governing authority, deployment of a multinational force to replace Israeli troops, Hamas’s disarmament, and the start of reconstruction. But no timelines or enforcement mechanisms have been agreed upon. Hamas refuses to disarm, Israel opposes any Palestinian Authority involvement, and uncertainty persists over the multinational force.
“We’re still working out ideas,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said this month at a security conference in Manama. “Everybody wants this conflict over, all of us want the same endgame here. Question is, how do we make it work?”
America First? For DC swamp, it’s always ‘War First’
The Washington establishment’s long war against reality has led our country into one disastrous foreign intervention after another.
From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, and now potentially Venezuela, the formula is always the same. They tell us that a country is a threat to America, or more broadly, a threat to American democratic principles. Thus, they say the mission to topple a foreign government is a noble quest to protect security at home while spreading freedom and prosperity to foreign lands. The warmongers will even insist it’s not a choice, but that it’s imperative to wage war.
These “War First” ideologues across Washington have recycled their experiments in regime change for decades, with only instability, chaos, suffering, and resentment to show for it. But no matter their recent failures, they promise that the next regime change will work, that the next country in the crosshairs will soon be a beacon of human freedom and aspiration. If anyone questions this narrative, they are warned of some hypothetical alternative that is always worse, but never real. It’s a geopolitical game of: Heads, they win. Tails, we lose.
We are assured that only drug smugglers are the target of U.S. operations in the Caribbean, but these assurances don’t reflect the growing reality in the region — that is, unless the U.S. plans to attack small drug boats with the overwhelming power of an aircraft carrier, which is perhaps akin to killing a housefly with a steamroller. But with over 10,000 U.S. troops, eight warships, a Virginia-class submarine, and a dozen F-35s already in the Caribbean, and now the USS Gerald Ford Strike Group surging toward the region, the stage is clearly being set for something larger.
It is the height of arrogance to think we can forcibly remove the dictatorship in Venezuela and expect anything different than history has already shown. Liberty cannot be imposed at the point of a foreign bayonet.
Overthrowing Maduro risks creating more instability, not less. The breakdown of state authority may create a power vacuum that even the drug cartels themselves may fill. A generation of purges within the ranks of the Venezuelan military makes them a wild card in the event of an actual war, and we cannot assume they will fold and happily serve a new government preferred by the United States. Think of the anarchy that followed our wars in the Middle East. Do we really want to risk creating similar conditions in our own backyard?
There are assumptions made that, if the U.S. does pursue regime change, it would be an overwhelming victory. But what if an airstrikes-only strategy doesn’t push Maduro out? What if the country is split or spirals into civil war? Will we have to escalate further and further until Maduro is toppled?
US Bombs Somalia for the 90th Time This Year
US Africa Command said in a press release on Monday that its forces launched an airstrike in Somalia on November 8, marking at least the 90th time that the US has bombed the country this year.
AFRICOM said the strike targeted the ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region and that it was launched about 40 miles southeast of the Gulf of Aden port city of Bosaso, a remote area of the Cal Miskaad mountains. The command offered no other details about the strike, as it had stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments on civilian harm earlier this year.
“Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security,” the command said.
The US backs local security forces in Puntland, as the US-backed Federal Government, which is based in Mogadishu, doesn’t control the territory. In 2024, the Puntland government withdrew from the federal system in response to President Hassan Sheikh’s move to amend the constitution.
The Puntland government has come under criticism recently over reports that the UAE has been shipping weapons to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan through an air base in Bosaso. The RSF has been accused of committing genocide in Sudan, and its fighters committed atrocities against civilians after it took the city of El Fasher in Sudan’s western Darfur region in October.
The US has been providing Puntland with significant air support in its war against Somalia’s ISIS affiliate. At the end of October, AFRICOM conducted airstrikes in Puntland’s Caal-Miskaad mountains for three consecutive days.
The President’s Murder Spree Continues
The Trump administration murdered six more civilians in the Pacific:
The United States struck two alleged drug-carrying vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Sunday, killing six people on board, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday, as calls mounted for investigations into the strikes.
The U.S. military has murdered more than 70 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific over the last two months. The president and the Secretary of Defense have given illegal orders to kill civilians on these boats at least 18 times and every time the orders have been carried out. The president wants to use the military as his own assassins, and it appears that no one is willing to refuse that assignment.
The government has a secret list of 24 organizations that it considers “designated terrorist organizations.” At least one of the groups, the so-called Cartel de los Soles, doesn’t really exist. Others have little to do with the drug trade. The rest are drug cartels that have nothing to do with terrorism. One thing they all have in common is that they aren’t engaged in an armed conflict with the United States. The “conflict” is completely made-up because no one is attacking or threatening to attack the U.S. or American forces in the region. The administration’s justification for the murder spree is a lie built on top of a lie built on top of another lie.
The Intercept spoke to Brian Finucane about the administration’s secret list, and he said this:
“The administration has established a factual and legal alternate universe for the executive branch,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “This is the president, purely by fiat, saying that the U.S. is in conflict with these undisclosed groups without any congressional authorization. So this is not just a secret war, but a secret unauthorized war. Or, in reality, a make-believe war, because most of these groups we probably couldn’t even be in a war with.”
The administration’s own briefings have confirmed that they don’t know who the people on the boats are, and they aren’t interested in finding out. Thanks to news reporting, we are slowly getting a better picture of who the president’s murder victims are. The Associated Press investigated earlier U.S. boat attacks and mostly found poor men trying to make a living:
One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.
The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs.
Many of these men may have been criminals, but they were at most small-time smugglers looking for ways to make a little more money for their families. They had done nothing that could possibly justify killing them, and they were no threat to the military that blew them up. To call these men “narco-terrorists” is a lie, and to murder them because of that lie is utterly despicable.
Ukraine’s state-owned energy company says all of its power plants are down after Russia’s ‘largest-ever attack’
All thermal power plants (TPP) operated by Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Centrenergo are down following “the largest Russian attack” which targeted all of them, the company announced on Nov. 8.
According to the company, the same thermal power plants that had been restored after attacks in 2024 were struck again, with multiple Russian drones targeting them “each minute” overnight on Nov. 8.
Ukrainian forces downed 406 out of the 458 drones, including Shahed-type attack drones, launched by Russia overnight, the Air Force reported. Russia also launched 45 cruise and ballistic missiles, nine of which were downed, the statement said.
Centrenergo operates three thermal power plants, which were essentially all the company’s assets: Trypillia in Kyiv Oblast, Zmiivska in Kharkiv Oblast, and Vuhlehirska in Donetsk Oblast.
Last spring, Centrenergo announced that the Zmiivska thermal power plant had beed completely destroyed. On July 25, 2022, Russian troops occupied the Vuhlehirska thermal power plant.
The recent attack destroyed all restored capacity, leaving the plants generating no power, the company said.
“For safety reasons, we remained silent, but we did everything possible to ensure that Ukrainians got through the last winter with electricity and heat, overcoming hellish challenges to successfully start the current heating season,” Centrenergo said.
What You Won’t Read About Ukraine in Your Newspaper
There is much of significance happening in Ukraine right now that is being reported either lightly or not at all by the mainstream Western media in an apparent attempt to harmonize their reporting with Kiev’s narrative in order to keep hope high and economic and military support flowing.
Though the mainstream media has begun to report on the Russian encirclement of the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk, it is failing to report on how dire and how ominous the situation is. The reporting suggests that the battlefield situation is being stabilized, that the Russian losses are enormous, and that the loss of Pokrovsk would be strategically insignificant. None of those claims is true.
Russia’s chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov, reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Russian armed forces are “advancing along converging axes” and “have completed the encirclement of the enemy” in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.” His Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Syrskii, said the report does “not correspond to reality.” Ukrainian officials “insist,” The New York Times reports, “that special units are clearing Russians out of the city.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky boasted that “in Pokrovsk, we continue to destroy the occupier.”
Though the Ukrainian armed forces may have temporarily pushed the Russian forces partially back, the Russian forces have retaken a large part of Pokrovsk and now control about 80% of it. The pincers that are steadily closing around Pokrovsk are now just a kilometer apart, a gap that is difficult and dangerous for Ukraine’s best paratroopers to escape through. Though Ukraine continues to deny the encroaching encirclement, admitting only that the situation is “difficult,” the narrative won’t change the reality on the battlefield. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Pokrovsk now “risks becoming a graveyard for Ukraine’s finest.” The Kyiv Independent assesses that “saving the city from falling in the short term looks to be a daunting, and likely impossible task.”
The Western media also reports that Russia’s gains are coming at a greater loss. The Times reports that “Russia’s incremental advances have come at an immense cost. While Ukraine wants to hold on to Pokrovsk, military commanders argue that the large losses it is inflicting on the Kremlin’s troops there will hurt the Russian war effort more broadly.”
But The Times exaggerates Russia’s losses in the war more broadly by at least three times and shrinks Ukraine’s losses by the same amount. As far as Pokrovsk goes, analysts have noted that the attrition of Ukraine’s forces in the war have led to a situation in Pokrovsk where Russia’s forces are taking the fortified city without huge losses in troops or equipment.
And, according to The Times, “the military significance of losing Pokrovsk may be relatively small for Ukraine.” But, the loss of Pokrovsk means, not only the loss of a critical strategic hub for supplying Ukrainian forces in the east, but also the possible loss of control of Ukraine’s defensive line of linked fortification in Donetsk.
Perhaps even more lacking in Western reporting of the battlefield is that a number of military analysts have pointed out that singular focus on Pokrovsk misses the larger picture that that the Russian armed forces have entered or partially encircled several cities in Donetsk, threatening a larger encirclement of the area, and that for the first year in the war, the Ukrainian armed forces have been unable to launch any kind of offensive in 2025. Those two battlefield realities combine to create a larger context that is more ominous still. It suggests that Russia’s war of attrition has depleted Ukrainian troops to the point that they are no longer able to attack Russia or to defend themselves.
Ukraine’s desperate situation on the battlefield has led to two more underreported events. The first was the simultaneous explosions at oil refineries in Hungary and Romania. The fact that both refineries process Russian crude oil and that Ukraine and Europe seem to have shifted their strategy from defeating Russia on the battlefield to cutting off Russia’s oil revenue to drive them to the negotiating table, have led to speculation that Ukraine was behind the two acts of sabotage.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said recently that the explosion at Hungary’s oil refinery could have been caused by an “external attack.” The external actor is unlikely to be Russia. They lack the motivation to sabotage their own customers at a time when U.S. sanctions are attempting to strangle its exports of oil. That seems to leave, as a consensus among analysts suggests, Ukraine or its partners. Ukraine has offered no comment on the explosions, and the silence of the Western media adds to the suspicion. It is alarming that the mainstream media has not a word to say about seemingly coordinated attacks on two European countries that could have enormous consequences in the post Ukraine war world.
Ukraine’s desperation has also led to an underreported crisis at home. Ukraine is losing troops, not only to Russian attacks on the battlefield, but to desertion. As part of the solution, Ukraine has turned to forced mobilization in which men are abducted, often aggressively, against their will and bussed off to recruitment centers. From there, they find themselves on the battlefield with very little training.
Once on the front, troops have deserted in the thousands. Though little reported in the mainstream media, in the first months of 2025 alone, more than 110,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted. As many as 20% of Ukraine’s armed forces have deserted. Since the war began, the number of desertions may be as high as 200,000, and it is getting worse by the month.
Hellbound and Down 
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