I got an interesting request recently. I’ve mentioned in past episodes that I was, for a time, enlisted in the United States Army as a propagandist, but I’ve never gone into depth on that experience. One of my patrons requested an episode covering that part of my life, and was actually not the first to do so, so I present that to you here, with all of the names changed to protect identities.
I’ll state here at the outset that my joining the military was a stupid decision, but not one that I regret, strictly speaking. It’s cost me a great deal and I could have decided to do any number of things which would have been less costly and objectively better for everyone, but it’s also resulted in me landing—after many years—in a life that is not always pleasant but which I think is at least respectable. I don’t know if that would have been the case had I not joined the Army.
I graduated high school in 1999 with no clear sense of who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. My upbringing had been quite privileged and I had never really attempted anything of any special difficulty. I didn’t think myself particularly intelligent and in fact had no idea of how to go about developing my intelligence or making proper use of it. I had studied music and was an adept percussionist but had few other skills. It didn’t make sense to me to go to college when I had absolutely no plan for myself but knew I needed to make money and so attended a trade school and got an associates degree in computer programming.
I graduated when the dot-com crash was in full force and was unable to find work. A good friend of mine decided to join the Army and so I started looking into that option myself. The 9/11 attacks had occured a couple years prior and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were underway. The recruiter was the one person to whom I had talked in the prior three years who presented me with some real options for my life and seemed excited about what I could contribute. This was all a sales pitch, of course, but I had scored extremely high on the Army’s standard aptitude test and that made available to me certain jobs for which most enlistees were unqualified.
What I wanted most was an opportunity to find myself, to test myself against difficult circumstances, to become someone whom others and whom I myself would respect. The recruiter promised me the opportunity to do exactly that, so I signed on the dotted line, choosing Psychological Operations as my MOS (Military Occupational Speciality, and I’ll say more about that further on) and shipped off to basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia early in 2004.
At Fort Benning, I was slotted into a platoon of 49 other recruits, all of whom had scored well on the aforementioned aptitude test and had signed up for one of two military occupations requiring high scores: Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs. While initially very difficult and painful—I was not at all prepared for the level of physical activity that would be required of me—I remember Basic quite fondly, despite my remaining somewhat embarrassed by my naïvity at the time. I bought fully in to the nationalist indoctrination and performed well or very well at most tasks (though I always struggled to pass my PT tests). After a few weeks, as my body strengthened, I began to feel a sense of personal strength that I had never felt before. On one occasional I remember being smoked by the drill sergeants—to be smoked or get smoked is to be punished with difficult physical exercise—and realized that there was nothing they could throw at me that I couldn’t withstand. I felt a sense of belonging and camraderie with my fellow recruits that I had never felt before. I felt powerful and purposeful.
At the conclusion of basic training, I was transferred to Fort Bragg to train in my chosen occupation. Psychological Operations (PSYOP; not “PSYOPS,” by the way) was developed primarily during the Vietnam War; for the most part, it’s exactly what it sounds like: the use of psychology as a weapon against the enemy and as a means of controlling civilian populations. The training at Fort Bragg was handled by members of the Special Forces, colloquially known as Green Berets, and was an order of magnitude more difficult and brutal than basic training. The drill sergeants at basic had been intimidating, but after a while their tactics had worn off and I realized that many of their threats were empty. The Green Berets, on the other hand, were terrifying, and I fully believed that they could, if they wanted to, kill me and get away with it. However, a substantial amount of the work was academic in nature and I was given a commendation for my performance on that front.
After graduation, I was assigned to a Psychological Operations company in my home state. At the time—I don’t know whether this is still the case—PSYOP units were organized like Special Forces units: battalions organized into companies and then into detachments and finally into 2- to 3-man teams. Upon deployment, the company would be assigned to an infantry division, each detachment to one of that division’s brigades, and each company to one of that brigade’s battalions. My detachment leader, Sergeant White, remains someone for whom I have a great deal of respect. He was intelligent, highly competent, and very confident, but also humble and personable. My team leader, Sergeant Rodriguez, on the other hand, is someone for whom I have a deep and lingering contempt. He was short, with a catastrophic case of baby face, and looked like a twelve-year-old. As a result, he had a severe Napoleon complex. He reveled in his authority and delighted in assigning his charges menial or demeaning tasks that served no purpose whatsoever. He was stupid, cruel, incompetent, abusive, lazy, and entirely ineffective at his job. He made frequent errors but never admitted to them, always shifting the blame to someone else, usually me. Over the course of the year between my graduating from training and my deploying to Iraq, three other soldiers had been assigned to the team and promptly transferred out again as a result of his leadership, or more properly, his lack thereof. I, being a mere Private, lacked the clout to be able to do so, so I was stuck with him, and in March of 2005, we deployed to Iraq as a two-man team in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, assigned to a battalion of the 4th Infantry Division.
My opinion at the time on the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were based on ignorance and blind nationalism. The invasion of Afghanistan was justified, in my mind, by its having been used as the base of operations for staging the 9/11 attacks, and while it was clear enough by the time we arrived that Saddam Hussein’s regime had not been in possession of any weapons of mass destruction, it still seemed to me that the invasion was a good thing, an opportunity for the Iraqi people to be freed from a brutal tyrant. The benevolence of the American military had already been called into question as a result of the Abu Ghraib incident, in which Iraqi prisoners of war were discovered to have been tortured by their American military police jailers. Nevertheless, that seemed to me to be an isolated incident rather than an indication of a broader culture of cruelty and dehumanization.
The situation into which Sergeant Rodriguez and I entered was a hornets’ nest of internecine conflict and violence. Saddam Hussein’s regime had been quickly toppled by the initial invasion, creating a power vacuum in which different groups vied and battled for control. The main players were, 1) the Sunni Muslim Arabs, a religious minority among the nation’s Arab ethnic majority who had enjoyed political favor during the reign of Saddam Hussein; 2) the Shia Muslim Arabs, the religious majority who had been violently oppressed by the Sunni; 3) the Kurds, an ethnic minority, linguistically and culturally distinct and often at odds with the nation’s Arab Muslims, both Sunni and Shia; 4) the neighboring nation of Iran, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Arabs but religiously aligned with the Shia Muslim Arabs; and 5) the occupying military alliance led by the United States. The Sunni sought to retain their prior state of control and were largely opposed to the occupying military which had toppled their government; the Shia sought to establish control which they believed, as a majority population, was rightly theirs to begin with. They were allied with the occupying forces, but cautiously so, as President George Bush Senior had broken promises made to them in the first Gulf War. The Kurds, being ethnically, culturally, linguistically distinct from the Arabs, were separatists who wanted their own Kurdish nation, or at least some degree of autonomy; they were, for the most part, strongly allied with the occupying forces. The Iranians were allied with the Shia Muslims to a degree but also wanted to destabilize the country in order to weaken the United States and secure their own interests. And the foreign military occupation wanted to install a liberal democratic government favorable to Western business interests.
And that’s just the top level. Within each of these groups (including the occupying forces) were militias or subgroups with their own competing interests, over a hundred of them in total, and other groups existed as well which didn’t quite fit in to those five groups, such as the reclusive Yezidis. For the most part, each of the major groups had its own territory, with the foreign militaries co-occupying all of it except for Iran (though Iran controlled at least one militia in Iraq, composed of both Iraqi Shia Arabs and Iranian nationals). Those territories intersected at Diyala Province in northeastern Iraq, where I was stationed. The population was split almost exactly in thirds between the Sunni and Shia Arabs and the Kurds. Each had their own enclaves and violence erupted frequently. My team’s job in all of this was primarily to follow the infantry around on their missions and talk to the local civilians to get information about their lives that could be used in propaganda campaigns to manipulate them to our ends, as well as to collect and analyze propaganda distributed by the various militias with whom we were fighting.
What became clear to me very quickly was that the occupying militaries—the Coalition forces, as they were called—had absolutely no clue what they were doing, both in terms of their being a security force and in terms of their being an ostensible state leading the Iraqis into a new era of democracy and freedom. The military leadership was experienced in and had been trained to fight in army-to-army battles; they were not trained to combat the kind of guerrilla warfare being waged by the militias, and the ordnance they had brought over, such as tanks and heavy artillery, were good for terrorizing the local populace but little else. The operations were stunningly incompetent, to the point of being comical were it not for the fact that they often resulted in injuries or deaths.
Just as one example, the commander of the battalion to which I was assigned once had the idea of placing a storage container near an intersection where militias had been placing IEDs—improvised roadside bombs. The container was modified with windows and cameras and overall made to appear like an observation post. It was placed at the site and surrounded with razor wire. It wasn’t intended to actually be manned, only to appear as though it were. The patrol that placed it continued on their way, stopping back by on their way back to base, less than an hour later, to find that the entire thing had been stripped, leaving nothing but the container itself. The commander’s reaction to this was to make another attempt, changing absolutely nothing. The results were exactly what you’d expect.
In general, the commanders believed that the local civilians were stupid yokels, even as their plans were repeatedly foiled and as they suffered significant losses while making zero progress towards the mission objectives of securing the territory. They were completely ignorant of Arab culture and the religion of Islam and were often quite racist, referring to the locals as “haji,” a term of honor in Arab culture which they had turned into an ethnic slur. The strategic leadership of the coalition forces believed that liberal democracy was a natural and obvious good that the Iraqis would immediately and gratefully accept—if they had taken that into account at all; it’s entirely possible that that was nothing more than a sales pitch to get the American people on board with the invasion. But even if that were the case, the generals and other high level commanders were certainly surprised to find even our allies among the Iraqis ignoring or subverting democracy at every turn.
At the time, I wasn’t much better, but I at least recognized what I didn’t know and understood the disadvantage that ignorance conferred. I don’t want to describe Arabs or Muslims or Iraqis as any kind of monolith, because that’s far from the case, but speaking very generally, liberalism and democracy have never been part of those cultures. For many Muslims—and this is something I learned from speaking to them while I was there—the kind of individual freedom we value in the West is unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst. Laws and governments, they believe, should adhere to the Quran, which prescribes a very specific way of life. Departure from that way of life is, by definition, un-Islamic, the word Islam itself meaning “submission.”
For the most part, the Iraqis, even those ostensibly allied with us, saw us as duplicitous and deceitful, and not without good reason. After all, the United States had supported Saddam Hussein’s regime in its war with Iran in the 1980s, turning against him only when Hussein threatened American interests by invading Kuwait. Just after the end of the First Gulf War, President George Bush broadcast speeches to the Iraqis which inspired an uprising which was met with brutal reprisals bordering on genocide. The Iraqis with whom I spoke said that they had believed that the West would back them up and they felt betrayed when that didn’t happen. The sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations Security Council after the First Gulf War drove the nation into crushing poverty, which impacted our potential allies far more than our enemies. And while the Quran advises tolerance towards other religions—though this is not universally practiced—for infidels to conquer and rule over a Muslim nation was a point of deep humiliation. So few of them trusted us and most worked with us only to such a degree as they believed it would serve their own ends, or to such a degree as they believed God was using us to accomplish some divine plan.
Regardless, I found the Iraqis to be honest and honorable people, almost without exception. Anyone in a position of power was invariably corrupt but the rest were trustworthy and hospitable. The infantry could kick down their doors, invade their homes, and terrorize their families, but once they dust had settled, they’d offer tea. A healthy distaste for imperial oppression was no excuse for bad manners, it seemed, though that didn’t prevent them from saying exactly what they thought about the situation, even with guns pointed at their heads. They might be inspired to go out and try to kill some of us on the battlefield afterwards, but they wouldn’t hide that sentiment. Intelligence personel frequently offered cash to civilians, possibly amounting to months worth of wages, in exchange for information. Many refused and said that they would not help us, and maintained that position even when threatened with arrest. Those who took the money could be considered fully reliable. All in all, they didn’t blame us as individuals except in terms of our individual actions.
I mentioned earlier that part of our job was to analyze enemy propaganda, something I quickly discovered I had a talent for. I had been trained in propaganda analysis at Fort Bragg but at the time it was just another skill, another box for me to tick. But one day Sergeant Rodriguez and I were resupplying at the larger base where our detachment headquarters was stationed. Sergeant White had accumulated a large quantity of propaganda that had been distributed by various militias in the detachments area of operations; being a more administrative job, most analysis was done at the detachment or company level. Sergeant White’s assistant detachment leader showed it to me—a digital folder of documents, images, and videos—by way of exemplifying the work she was trying to get through, just part of a casual “so what’ve you been up to” kind of conversation. She pulled up an image, the cover of a pamphlet distributed by an insurgent militia, and it immediately made sense to me: the colors, the symbolism… I understood why each element had been chosen and what it represented. I couldn’t read the Arabic but made educated guesses at what it said; she pulled up the translation (an image of a handwritten document made by a translator) and found that I was largely correct.
After that, the propaganda found by my team or by any of the other teams working under that detatchment got sent my way and I wrote up reports on it, reports which, I was told, got summarized and then included in broader reports given to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. I found I quite enjoyed it. I was even given a medal for my work; not one of any special note, but as I discovered, awards are based mostly on rank and many officers and higher ranking non-commissioned officers received Bronze Stars despite their jobs being almost entirely administrative.
Towards the midpoint of my deployment, the company commander sent out a memo strongly recommending that we enroll in remote learning courses. I suppose that it was part of a broader Army campaign and that high enrollment numbers would make him look good. I selected a course on new religious movements, which discussed movements and organizations commonly described as “cults,” such as the Branch Davidians. I found it quite fascinating and I’m certain that that experience—as well as my broader encounter with the completely foreign religious tradition of Islam—was a significant influence on my present work in this project. Lacking other sources of entertainment, I also read a great deal, ordering books off Amazon which took only a couple weeks to arrive.
But despite the diversions, the long deployment—fourteen months in Iraq with a month of paperwork and training on either side—wore on me. I was only in a handful of firefights but spent hundreds of hours in a humvee on missions and patrols, an activity involving constant stress due to the threat of roadside bombs, ambushes, and the occasional sniper. There were more than a few near misses, roadside bombs detonating just before or after our humvee had passed; some of those, I was close enough to feel the jolt of the shock wave, which I’ve learned can have the effect of partially liquefying one’s brain. Insurgents would often fire mortar rounds or rockets into the base, a few of which landed on the roof of the bunker where I was quartered. The bunker is an interesting story in itself, part of a base built by the British during their occupation of the country in the 1920’s and used by the Iraqi Army until they were ousted by the Coalition invasion. The room in which I was lived had hooks in the ceiling and drains in the floor. Towards the end of my deployment, my waking experience had begun to seem surreal and dreamlike, likely a result of the mild traumatic brain injury (as they call it) inflicted by close-proximity explosions. I began to believe that my room had been used for torture and that it was haunted by those who had died there. My dreams became vivid nightmares. The Army had been giving me a regimen of pills—ostensibly to prevent malaria, though they never said exactly what they were—and I wonder whether those were responsible to any degree for what I was experiencing.
But I made it home unscathed, at least physically. For a few months I was quite elated. I was in the Reserves and not required to report right away, so I was free of the Army for a time. Then winter set in, quite a cold and snowy one, a marked contrast from the dry heat of the desert. I had gotten a job as a low-level manager for a private security firm. I worked the graveyard shifts, my job to drive around the city and check on the various security guard posts. I drank heavily, about two fifths of 100-proof liquor every three days, which amounts to a literal gallon of the stuff every week. I awoke after sunset and went to bed before sunrise, never seeing the sun, and the nightmares continued. I began to honestly believe that I had in fact died in Iraq and was now in Hell, or at least some kind of purgatory. And when the Army called me up again to report for duty I… didn’t.
I ignored them, going AWOL—Absent Without Official Leave. It wasn’t at all real to me at the time, but it turns out that’s something the Army takes quite seriously and they made serious threats to make my life considerably worse than it already was. Fortunately, one of my fellow soldiers recognized what was going on with me and appealed to the company commander on my behalf. The commander, who had recently been assigned and had learned of Sergeant Rodriguez’s incompetence and cruelty, was sympathetic, and offered me an administrative discharge, basically a get-out-of-jail free card. I took him up on the offer, and after a few months of waiting around for the paperwork to go through, I was out. I decided to go back to school, studying music, and in the process took a class in the philosophy of religion in which I encountered the work of William James, which initiated a process of shifting away from the hard-lined atheism I had held for much of the prior decade. After graduating, I travelled to Nepal (a journey I covered in another episode), and that began to shift me away from my existing religious practice of Zen Buddhism. I continued to study philosophy, and as my religious ideas continued to shift, I bought a Bible in order to make a proper study of it, which led to me starting this project in 2018.
So it all worked out well enough for me, but the same can’t be said for Iraq. The invasion and occupation had destabilized the country, and after the withdrawal of Coalition forces from the country in 2011, one of the militia groups, calling itself the Islamic State, took control. By 2015, the Islamic State controlled much of Iraq and parts of the surrounding countries, brutalizing the civilians in territories under their control and commiting genocide against the Yezidis. The territory is now controled by the US-endorsed Republic of Iraq, but the country remains unstable, dangerous, and deeply impoverished. To make matters worse, Iraq is now suffering some of the strongest effects of climate change, with prolonged drought, desertification, and heat in often in excess of 50 C. The Halliburton Company and other defense contractors were substantially enriched by the invasion of Iraq—given that Vice President Dick Cheney spearheaded the military action only a couple of years after resigning as Halliburton’s CEO, this was likely a major motivating factor for the invasion in the first place, a flagrant example of the military-industrial complex in action. Everyone else lost out, and the number of those who lost their lives during or as a result of the conflict is likely in the hundreds of thousands. As I said at the top of the show, my own outcome is mixed, but I can’t say that it’s something that I’m proud to have been a part of and I can only wish that I had known better at the time. If nothing else, I can give people a first-hand account of the stupidity and the enormous cost of war.