Soon There Won't Be Veterans
Let me start by saying that I am a vet. I served for 6 years in the 2010's and got out with a newly discovered distaste for war and the people who make it. First, let me establish my moral position on war:
Every person who makes war, from the politician, to the Lockheed Martin engineer, to the general, to the soldier is responsible for the death they make. If there is a heaven, then no soldier who willingly participated in a war of aggression will find themselves there. War is the craft of demons in the flesh of men. God may make exception for the rich man; A camel may yet fit through the eye of a needle. No such exception exists for the demon.
To be clear this is my position as it relates to myself, and being someone who believes in universal value systems, it must surely apply to others. My participation in the U.S. military and the myriad evils I watched it commit were enough to condemn me in the eye of any benevolent creature watching. How could such wrongs be forgiven? I believe they cannot. Christ offers redemption to all who seek it, but have I sought it? Have I attempted to repay my debts to those who my actions have harmed? No, I am not forgiven because I was never truly sorry. I take my veterans discount and I take the my benefits. I do not pay this forward to the communities I worked to destroy. I use it for myself, selfishly, despite the fact that I could give it up and still manage to survive just fine; Much better, in fact, then the people whose lives I destroyed to make that money in the first place.
To be clear I am not a Christian. Growing up in America, however, my view of morality and the world is colored by Christianity. I once heard someone (somewhat derisively) describe a worldview like mine as "naive materialism," and this is the way I've thought of myself ever since. There is no soul, no zodiac, no god. What there is, is my obligation to others and to the world; My obligation to create a world that is better than the one I joined. Failing that, my obligation is to try. And if I cannot find some decent philosophical reason to do so, then I will do it for my daughter.
When I was in the Army, I was usually stateside. I would visit the PX on base and sit at the food court with my brothers and sisters. We would crack jokes and take about how poorly run everything was. Implicitly, we knew we would do better in the positions of higher ups. We would waste less, resist poor incentive structures and make the decisions that were best for everyone, not just our personal careers.
There would always be an old man somewhere, wearing a hat that marked him as a veteran of a particular war. He would always be talking to staff; Presumably he had nothing better to do. I am not trying to be derisive. Retirees often have little to do, and going to chat with people in public is a cool and good thing to do, so good for him. However my brothers and sisters agreed, that the hat was very, painfully, cringe.
The other day I watched a video sent to me by a friend. It was hosted on Reddit, which subreddit I cannot remember. The video was of several Russian soldiers, presumably somewhere near the front line in Ukraine, running into a building. It appeared they were carrying a wounded brother. The video cuts to some time later, to a shot of a drone ominously floating into the same building. A second later, the building is turned first to fire, then to ash, in the span of about 2 seconds. The comments were, of course, gleeful, celebrating the deaths of these invaders.
On October 7th 2023, Hamas launched a massive attack on Israel. Israel had been struggling with PR for sometime. It was a slow slide downward, but the demographic information was clear. Where 90% of older people supported Israel, only 50% of young people did. For Israel, this was a demographic issue, and would only become real over the span of decades. The October 7th attacks, while tragic, were also an opportunity for Israel to course correct their failing PR in the West, to garner sympathy from the next generation of future supporters. Instead, Israels support among all Americans is lower than ever among nearly every demographic.
Wars of aggression and their producers, from the politicians to the soldiers on the ground, are less popular than ever. Watching the deaths of invading warmakers isn't complicated, it's sport. The Russians carrying their dying comrade are vaporized and onlookers celebrate the deaths of these young conscripts with an almost masturbatory glee. Israel, a nation of people who eat pizza and McDonald's, is attacked. The old media machine goes into overdrive, manufacturing consent. Any other time, Israel could have expected a massive jump in support. Instead, the reality that Gaza's population is subjected to is available. People start to think "Yeah, I'd take up arms as well." The death of civilians isn't sympathetic, it is the simple cost of being a warlike, genocidal society. It is understood that if you don't want to pay that cost, you should not be warlike and genocidal.
George W. Bush is increasingly remembered with an undeserved fondness as the U.S. sinks to new lows. The war that W. prosecuted is less present then his goofy antics. But his war killed a million people, and included in that number is some thousands of Americans. It cost everything and produced nothing. Mostly, American deaths were the ones we talked about. Those were the deaths the news bothered to cover, and those were the deaths that were real. To the extent that Americans knew people in Iraq and Afghanistan had died, it was seen as a sort of cruel but just payback.
Lets imagine the next war, with this new context; It doesn't particularly matter where that war might take place. The people we make war against will have high definition cameras. They will capture their own grizzly, careless deaths. Many they will manage to broadcast. The American public will absorb these deaths. They will see children blown apart, or see their skinned scorched black while they scream in agony. They will wonder why every year they make less and less, and pay more taxes, and they can't have childcare or healthcare or functional public infrastructure, but somehow there's always a spare billion in the couch cushions when we need to turn 150 young girls in a school into painful memories. They will think of their own kids in their schools.
Then the other half of the war will begin to appear. Cheap drones finding the hiding spots of American invaders and turning them into hamburger. The top comment will be pithy and masturbatory, emphasizing the fault of the Soldier. There will be a deleted reply, and another reply under that one that says something to the effect of "If he didn't want to be blown up he shouldn't have signed up." This reply will have a decent number of upvotes.
There will be plenty of arguments. America's place in history will be re-evaluated. Of draftees, people will ask "Why not just... not go? Why not just go to jail? Is going to jail really worse than killing innocent people?" The morality of a volunteer soldier will be brought into question. The idea that we should mourn someone who said "Yes, I will go kill people I do not know, for reasons I do not understand, for money" over and above the 150 school girls he helped to target will be rightfully questioned. The idea that you can be an employee of Raytheon and also qualify as some kind of innocent bystander will be laughable. Carrots and sticks like jail time, college, free healthcare, will all understood to be less valuable than the human life they were given in exchange for.
Even attacks on American soil, assuming the targets are "correct," will be seen by the public as the cost of war. Images of young professionals blown to bits by a drone on their way into work will be contrasted alongside the images of the children those same young professionals helped to murder. The news will interview grieving mothers, and those clips will show up on Tiktok, the comments section filled with derision. Why didn't you raise a better child? Why didn't you warn them that this is the cost of war? Your tears are meaningless next to the stack of bodies your child got paid to add to.
In this future there won't be veterans, at least not among liberals or progressively minded peers. There will be people who join the military for this benefit or that, but they will not show up to Olive Garden on Veterans Day. Images in uniform won't find their way into profiles. Stickers won't find their way to the backs of trucks. Such things will be hidden from potential partners, and painfully confessed later to mixed results. Around bases it may be trendy to identify, isolate, and beat potential military personnel, posting it for clout. A young child wanting to be a Soldier when they grow up will be like saying they want to join ISIS when they grow up; It will be discouraged.
I do not mourn this lost world, only my participation in it. That's all I really have to say. Thanks for reading.
Source: Soon There Won't Be Veterans
