Like my mother and many of my family members, I decided to find direction and purpose through military service following high school, so I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. I separated after my first active-duty enlistment, but circumstances surrounding the Great Recession compelled me to re-enlist in 2008, this time for the Colorado Air National Guard with whom I served six years and deployed to Iraq with.
After four years in the active duty and six in the Air Guard, I had no doubt the military was a shit-show, but I still felt proud to have served because to serve takes commitment and discipline. Serving turns you into a responsible adult. Serving teaches you work ethic and common-sense driven problem-solving skills. Serving teaches you teamwork, leadership, and humility. But I’ve gone through something in recent years that’s led me to re-evaluate everything in my life. Some might call it an awakening, others might call it a mid-life crisis, but I’ve lent a fresh perspective to my service, one far outside the scope of it being merely a character-building exercise. The conclusion I’ve come to—my pride about having served remains intact, but I’m not proud of the service I provided.
On the surface, the Stepping Out of the Blue photo set may seem to some to be about objectifying service women, but my motivation behind the composition is rooted in this absurd fantasy about how I wanted to be thanked for my service—coming home from Iraq to an appreciative wife donning the dress blues of a naughty airman, wanting to alleviate the pinned-up desires of a husband who’d spent the summer continuously launching combat sorties for a fraudulent war, in a country where even looking at a photo of a naked woman was expressly forbidden. The fantasy never came to fruition. I returned home to the Great Recession, a continued furlough from the railroad, a wife juggling feelings of abandonment, and to the VA denying my bid for the Post 9/11 G.I. Bill due to the apparent brevity of my deployment.
I was only 19 when I originally joined the active-duty Air Force. I was young and ignorant, clinging to my public-school education about the United States military, and the secondhand knowledge that had been passed to me by family members who’d served. I was a mere boy, fascinated by the majesty and power of military aircraft, blinded by the G.I. Joe glamor of it all. By the time I joined the Air National Guard, however, I’d already been disillusioned by four years of active-duty service. My eyes were open the second time around. I watched in silence and learned to read the subtext.
What I saw during my time at Buckley was a state militia operating aircraft the state couldn’t afford without federal funding, effectively making the Guard just and extension of the active-duty rather than a true state militia. I saw guardsmen squabbling over technician jobs that paid on a civilian federal-employee pay scale, jobs that could only be obtained by whoring yourself to a military board essentially manned by the squadron good-ole-boys. I saw the formal training of airman being neglected to reserve money to buy laser engravers, stainless steel refrigerators, hi-definition projectors, and Dyson vacuums. I saw pilots stuffing golf clubs into travel pods so they could catch a tee time during an unnecessary TDY (temporary duty yonder), I saw a command that flew sorties just to fuck off money so their budget would stay the same for the next fiscal year. And then I deployed.
I arrived a Balad Airbase in the summer of 2009 not knowing what to expect. We went in knowing we were getting combat pay because the base was under regular mortar attack, and ahead of our arrival, several backpack bombs had gone off outside of DFACs (dining facilities) on the installation. At our intake briefing, we were told that the mortar attacks weren’t actually in terrorist faction, but farmers. The explanation we were given—we’re American, so they hate us and don’t want us here. That simple. It wasn’t until after my deployment that I discovered the farmers were shooting at us because of our calamitous method of disposing of trash—the burn pits. Everything from everyday trash to dead bodies to unserviceable military equipment went into the burn pits. They put off toxic smoke that made people very ill, local Iraqis and American service members alike.
Learning about the burn pits, however, was last on the list of three major factor that soured my retrospection about the deployment. The first was the weapons of mass destruction fable. By the time we deployed, we already knew there were no WMDs, and that either lies and or gross incompetence from the Bush administration was behind the U.S. instigating that particular conflict—a second theater who’s opening ostensibly lost us the war in Afghanistan. The second factor that soured my retrospective was the realization that the war would not have been possible without the army of civilian contractors the government brought in to facilitate operations in Iraq. The people fighting and dying and doing the most dangerous jobs were American, but many of the behind the scenes support personal were not.
We arrived at Balad via combat landing in a C-130, donning helmets and flack vest as if we were flying into a war zone. But confusion about the apparent danger we were in quickly set in when a random civilian from the U.S. wearing jeans and a t-shirt picked us up in a cute little bus with curtained windows. The people who cleaned the bathrooms were local Iraqis, one girl working the cash register at the base exchange was Kenyan, the guards outside the DFACs where Ugandan, and many of these foreign contractors worked under the umbrella of the defense contractor KBR. I’d heard it said while I was in theater that if you didn’t know who KBR was, you’d never deployed to Iraq, and that you couldn’t get so much as a lightbulb changed on Balad Air Base without KBR getting involved. Not long into my deployment I’d drawn the conclusion that if not for the army of contractors, the U.S. would have had to institute the draft to support the wars on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with a draft in place, the government would have quickly lost public support for the war—a lesson the U.S. government learned the hard way in Vietnam.
In those days surrounding my deployment, I would sometimes stop at the grocery store on the way home from drill and people would walk up to me and thank me for my service. I in turn was thankful that Americas had learned to support its service members and not treat the vets of a wasteful geo-political goat fuck like shit. But I often wondered if those people would thank me if they knew how the military fucked off taxpayer dollars, if they truly understood just how wasteful the military is. I separated from the military for the final time in 2014, but over the years my retrospection about my service continued as my personal journey to become more knowledgeable about history went on. The more I learned, the worst my outlook became. The conclusion I came to is that of a true Sigma—an uncomfortable and infuriating truth not for the faint of heart—that we are more often than not lied to about our military being the protectors of democracy; that the military is a black hole for our country’s wealth; that the military is the strong arm of a racist, imperialist power; and that there are no clean or righteous wars, not even the one that was ostensibly the most righteous, WWII.
At the onset of WWII, most of the developed nations of the world were going through of period of nationalism which historically has always been intwined with fierce racism. Germany had it in for the Jews, American was living in a system that was identical in practice to apartheid while the Klan was running rampant in the South, Britan and a whole host of European countries were committing atrocities in African, and Japan really didn’t care for the Chinese too much. Even after the war, America swallowed the implication that the Nazis borrowed the doctrine of moving Jews into ghettos from how they were treating blacks, and they held on to segregation with a clenched fist, while Britan and its European peers were highly reluctant to let go of their colonies.
As WWII began, all the major players in the conflict were without a doubt racist imperialist, and many of them had been directly involved in the slave trade and the scramble for Africa. By the end of the war, American found itself, for the second time, pulled into an international conflict of epic proportions. At the war’s end and with the U.S.S.R. deciding it wasn’t going to surrender any territory liberated from Germany, the U.S. decided it could no longer sit on the sidelines, and we inherited a permanent war-sized military, something that for the majority of human history was far too expensive and resource intensive for most nations to pull off. From this conflict of racist, imperialist nations nearly destroying the world, emerged the U.S. as a global military superpower that self-perpetuated by causing wars to occupy its permanently bloated military. As Americans struggle with the cost of food, health care, childcare, education, gas, electricity, housing, and everything else under the sun, we’re told to tighten our belts while our country’s wealth and resources are being consumed on one of the few things that we remain good at—making war.
Let me give you an example of the staggering amount of resources our military consumes. I don’t drive very much nowadays and put about 10 gallons of gas a week in my car, so around 520 gallons would last me the entire year. Conversely, one F-16 flying a training sortie out of Buckley typically caries two 750-gallon fuel tanks (one under each wing) in addition to an internal load of fuel of 1100 gallons. That’s right, one external fuel tank carries more than a year’s worth of fuel for my car. That F-16 will burn both external fuel tanks and a majority of it’s internal load in a two-hour sortie—the equivalent of 260 weeks or 5 years’ worth of fuel for my personal use. At the time of my separation from the Air National Guard, Buckley was flying 8 of these jets with the same fuel configuration twice daily. That’s sixteen sorties and roughly 42,000 gallons of fuel per day.
By my calculations, it would take me roughly 81 years to consume the equivalent of a single flying days’ worth of fuel at ten gallons per week. And here’s another interesting fact—yes military aircraft are fast, but most conventional military aircraft capable of supersonic flight cannot maintain faster than sound flight without lighting afterburners, and an F-16 with afterburners lit has approximately six minutes of fuel remaining. It’s estimated that the U.S. military has thirteen to fourteen thousand aircraft in inventory, many of which use considerably more fuel than an F-16. And we’re only talking fuel consumption of military aircraft. There’re tons of other military equipment out there that requires oceans of fuel to keep in service. Ahead of the railroad, the U.S. Navy is the largest consumer of diesel in the U.S. and perhaps in the world. The military literally uses thousands of years of fuel… every single day.
I could go on and on about the wastefulness and inefficiency of the military, but I’m not trying to write a book here. One thing is clear though, the U.S. military isn’t going anywhere, and our fate is inextricably linked to it. Thousands of defense contractors are interwoven into our economy and there’s little doubt that our economy would collapse if the military ceased to be. Though I’m proud to have served, I’m not particularly proud of the role I played in keeping the war machine going. I dream of a military that’s more like the Paw Patrol than anything else: a military that arrives in force when there’s a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis; a military that builds, protects, strengthens and aids; a military that is what government propaganda purports it to be—the warrior’s sword that protects the right and the shield of democracy I would be proud to hold fast in my country’s defense.
I want to end by apologizing to any veterans that I might have offended with this post. It wasn’t meant to belittle your service, only to help those who feel the way I do make sense of it. I’m an honorably discharged veteran and my family and its extended members have a combined 150-years of military service. My people and I certainly don’t need any lessons in patriotism, but I think our government certainly needs a lesson on how to employ and honor of the patriots who serve it. That was certainly on my mind as I registered my car today and was compelled to pay and extra $50 for honorably discharged veteran plates.
