Patriotic Dissent

America in the Age of Endless War

Daniel A. Sjursen

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781597145220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This incendiary work by Danny Sjursen is a personal cry from the heart by a once model U.S. Army officer and West Point graduate who became a military dissenter while still on active duty. Set against the backdrop of the terror wars of the last two decades, Sjursen asks whether there is a proper space for patriotism that renounces entitled exceptionalism and narcissistic jingoism. A burgeoning believer and neoconservative, Sjursen calls for a critical exploration of our allegiances, and suggests a path to a new, more complex notion of patriotism. Equal parts somber and idealistic, this is a story about what it means to be an American in the midst of perpetual war, and what the future of patriotism might look like.

1.

I was an exceedingly odd child. My parents were far from scholarly types (though my father was a lay history buff), and my neighborhood hardly produced any college graduates at the time. Nonetheless, I learned to read—and love it—at a very young age. The public library was my spiritual home, my oasis from a world of kids (even friends) I found generally boring from kindergarten on. I tore through the adult sections voraciously, especially history and foreign affairs, by the time I was seven. There used to be a rule that each customer could check out only seven books at a time, but soon the sweet, encouraging female librarians realized that rule wasn’t designed for a kid like me. They learned my face and that of my mother and waived such arbitrary strictures for us. The summer before sixth grade, I read all forty books the local library had on Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars. Such topical obsessions have never ceased to be a key part of my personality.

Always sort of a double kid, I spent my youth performing as one person with friends and in the neighborhood—cool, extroverted, a partier—and another in private, sequestered alone with my cherished books. This duality has never fully left me. During my army career, the paradox only morphed and reemerged. At work I played the physically fit, macho, lead-from-the-front, type-A combat arms officer rather deftly. At home or alone in my office, I’d consume volumes on the Middle East, military history, US foreign policy, Islam, and Arab culture. Just as reading and intelligence weren’t valued by “popular” peers on Staten Island, scholarship and academic prowess weren’t particularly lauded in the traditionally anti-intellectual US Army. To some extent they still aren’t.

Before the deployment, I’d been busier than ever. The unit spent months, combined, in the field on training and maneuvers, and even office workdays regularly stretched to twelve hours. Add to that a young wife and the social necessity among junior lieutenants of hard-drinking party weekends, and suffice it to say, my usual reading load fell off. That all changed the minute we landed in Kuwait for a final two weeks of training and acclimation before moving into permanent quarters in Baghdad. What they don’t tell you—and what necessarily (if unfortunately) isn’t illustrated in action-packed Hollywood war movies—is that war is mostly boredom, punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror. Busy as the life of a scout platoon leader could be at the peak of the Iraq War, I quickly found that I had an inordinate amount of downtime. And so, as I always did throughout my youth, I filled my lonely hours with the love of my life: books.

I kept a count over those fifteen awful, life-altering months, fond as I’d always been of lists. As I recall, I read a total of 114 books, nearly all on the lead-up to the war, the history of Iraq, the theologies of Shia and Sunni Islam, and general regional studies. Additionally, my favorite interpreter, code name “Mark,” actual name Akeel Ali Jasem, taught me conversational Baghdad-dialect Arabic for an hour or two a day. Over this extended period of immersive study, alternating with real-world combat and diplomatic experience in the ancient city, what struck me was just how much I didn’t know that I didn’t know. More disconcerting was how few of my peers or, especially, the squadron’s more senior officers attempted—or cared—to learn even one-tenth of what I discovered. Ignorance, cultural obtuseness, I’d come to realize, was an American military trademark.

It turned out to be a brutal, ghastly deployment for my second platoon. Two soldiers were killed in combat; one killed himself while on leave, another after we returned home. Eight more were wounded, one paralyzed by a bullet through the spine. This was out of an original total of just nineteen scouts. Those lucky enough to emerge on the far end of the tour physically unscathed were all left riddled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), myself included. Then there was the horror that unfolded before the eyes of my soldiers: grisly corpses left in the streets from the previous nights’ tit-for-tat sectarian shootings, the aftermaths of suicide car bombs, dead Americans from fellow units. It shocked the conscience and, for me, shook what remained of my religious faith. Though I still mumbled a Hail Mary to myself before each patrol—a guilty, superstitious leftover, I suppose, from a Catholic upbringing—I couldn’t help but wonder how a loving, benevolent God could sit by while his creations did such horrid things to one another. I haven’t regularly attended any sort of church since.

Over the course of the rather lengthy deployment, the days began to blur together. However, a grisly and almost absurd formula quickly emerged. Off I’d go on my daily patrols, often experiencing and observing vile events and increasingly living the utter futility of the mission. By mid-2007, after President George W. Bush defied the will of the American people—as expressed in the anti–Iraq War referendum-style midterm congressional election of November 2006—by increasing troop levels and appointing a new, enlightened, celebrity general, David Petraeus, reports (according to the new commander himself, of course) were that violence was down across the country.¹³ Maybe it was true, or maybe the military cooked the stats. Either way, any drop in attacks and casualties would prove ephemeral, little more than a brief tactical pause. In September 2007 Petraeus told Congress, and Bush told America, that we were winning. This seemed curious indeed for those of us living on tiny rugged outposts ensconced in Baghdad. From that lens, “victory”—whatever that even meant anymore—seemed as distant and ill-defined as ever.

So I’d experience all this firsthand, viscerally, each day or night and then return to my olive-drab vinyl cot and crack open the relevant books. What I read, increasingly, was as disturbing and indicting as what I lived out on patrol. The real history of Western, especially American, involvement with modern Iraq, up to and including the 2003 invasion and occupation that I was then party to, revealed a stunning record of nefarious intent and action and almost farcical and Kafkaesque US policies towards the country.

Knowledge and experience, the twin necessities for enlightenment, combined to prosecute a near-flawless case against the Iraq War in my brain. It all seemed so obvious by the time my tour was done. How had I not seen it? How hadn’t the ostensibly well-educated, highly informed elites in our government? And what of the people? Even if they (mercifully) hadn’t had to live the war firsthand, as I did, all this knowledge was a matter of public record. Where was the collective outrage, the mass protest, the 1960s-style street activism? And what about within the military? Surely, intelligent, intellectually curious skeptics had to exist in the force, or at least on the West Point faculty. Was I the only one who “got it?” Rationally, I knew that wasn’t literally true, but in Iraq, and especially after I left, I began to feel very alone in my knowledge, my analysis, my conclusions.

The horror, the futility, the farce of the war in Iraq was the turning point of my life. It was then, at twenty-four years of age, when I landed home in Colorado Springs, that I knew that war was at least built on lies, ill-advised, unwinnable, illegal, and immoral. This unexpected, undesired realization generated profound doubts in me about the course and nature of the entire American enterprise in the Greater Middle East—what was then unapologetically labeled the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Wasn’t it absurd for a sovereign nation to declare war on a tactic? Furthermore, if the majority of regular Iraqi folks I’d met regretted, on some level, the departure of Saddam and agreed that life had been—as was empirically true—safer, less chaotic, under Baath Party rule, might the same be said about other US military enterprises in the region?

When I got in my then-wife’s car just before midnight on December 31, 2007, and headed home from the welcome home ceremony held in the base gymnasium, American troops already occupied hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries. US soldiers killed, died, and propped up shaky local regimes from West Africa to Central Asia. Not a single one of those missions had, as of yet, succeeded, nor did victory seem close at hand in any one of them. For the most part, every US military adventure in this troubled expanse had been highly counterproductive. State Department statistics indicated, undeniably, that global terror attacks and the proliferation of Islamist rebel groups had both exponentially increased since American troops had begun to enter the region in full force.¹⁴ In 2008 the Taliban was resurgent in Afghanistan, a country that Washington had largely ignored, first as a result of the Bush team’s obsession with Iraq and then due to the utter collapse of security. After stewing over all this for a year or so, during which time I was promoted to captain, I entered my new unit, the Fourth Squadron, Fourth Cavalry, secretly opposed to the entire GWOT.

Still, I did my job, performed well, and remained loyal to the army or at least my own unit. My theory then was that “good” people needed to stay in the service, if for no other reason than to protect their subordinates, shield them as much as possible from the madness, and bring as many of these kids home from the next inevitable deployment. When I entered Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in February 2011, I no longer believed in anything we were doing. I was there to do a job and to be as competent and empathetic a leader as possible—to play the white savior and salvage American lives. Also, having truly fallen for the people of Iraq, I hoped to treat local Afghans as well with respect and dignity in the process. The truth is I was by then simply a professional soldier—a mercenary, really—on a mandatory mission I couldn’t avoid. Three more of my soldiers died, thirty-plus were wounded, including a triple amputee, and another overdosed on pain meds after our return.

If Iraq sowed these doubts and turned me, privately, against the wars, a particular moment in Afghanistan probably represented my breaking point, the pivot that led me almost inevitably to public dissent. One of my soldiers, a new kid I’d received just weeks before the deployment, had both legs blown off by a buried bomb and bled to death. Per tradition, I was obliged to give one of the speeches at his memorial ceremony at the squadron headquarters base. As I prepped my notes and as I delivered my remarks, it struck me that I hardly knew a thing about this young man. Perhaps that was a reflection of my increased rank and scope of responsibility, but I’m quite certain it was also a leadership failure on my part. In any case, I thought then and continue to wonder now, how in the world could I explain to his mother just what her son-turned-soldier had actually died for? I still haven’t bothered to try. That’s called cowardice.

A true man of principle, of courage, would have resigned immediately and joined the antiwar movement—such as it was at the time. What they don’t tell you in vacuous, soldier-worshipping America is that almost anyone can brave gunfire and bombs. It’s hard, terrifying, sure; but adrenaline and embarrassment keep most of us from outright cowardice in the face of the enemy. I did consider leaving the army, admittedly, but once again I hedged. I’d obsessively read my way through Afghanistan, to the tune of maybe seventy-five more books. I missed school, academia, professional learning—and I’d always dreamed that if I stayed in the army, I would return to teach history at West Point. So I applied for the rather competitive assignment while still in Kandahar. I made a deal with myself: get the position, stay in the service; get rejected, then resign. Deep down I probably knew I’d be accepted. And so I was.

The next stop was graduate school at the University of Kansas in the “People’s Republic of Lawrence, Kansas,” a progressive oasis in an intolerant, militarist sea of Republican red. It was the greatest assignment ever. I never had to don the uniform, I could grow some facial hair, and I received a full salary and benefits to do nothing more than focus on academics. There I studied American and military history, with a minor, of sorts, in imperial history. I read, skimmed, “gutted,” as we called it, hundreds of books. It was during this stint in a scholarly state of bliss that I learned the necessary language and frameworks to ground my own doubts about and opposition to US foreign policy. The failures of the GWOT, it became clear, were just part of the tragedy of American global relations, a historical record of debacle and deceit. The United States was, from the first, an imperial enterprise, and I had been carrying water for that empire during my time in Iraq and Afghanistan. It all clicked, all seemed so manifest.

Why, then, didn’t the average American see it, think it, believe it? Such things weren’t taught in public school or in most college majors besides maybe history or international relations. The trick, for the owners of this country—the corporate tycoons, the media moguls, and the politicians they controlled—was how to hide an empire, how to convince the populace that their government’s palpable imperium was anything but. That the US policy of global hegemony was a benevolent enterprise, the price of peace; that America was, as so many politicians repeatedly declared, “exceptional,” an “indispensable nation.”¹⁵ This hoodwinking conspiracy required, demanded, a whitewashing of America’s historical record: of native genocide, black slavery, the aggressive Mexican-American War, conquest and suppression of the Philippines, murderous campaigns in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and now the counterproductive bloodletting in the Greater Middle East.

I had another epiphany. Part of the reason, I surmised, why so few Americans “got it” was that they lacked my combined experience of fruitless combat duty and scholastic training. After all, no one reads what these ivory tower academics wrote anyway. Professors have for decades eschewed their vital role as public historians and sequestered themselves in university departments writing increasingly esoteric (though important) tracts for one another’s edification. I, again playing the savior, would remedy this. So, watching Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on C-SPAN one morning as he railed against President Barack Obama’s Iraq policies and ranted on about how the US military had all but won the war there, I absolutely lost it. After a few minutes of screaming and creatively cursing at the television, I retired to my bedroom with a laptop and wrote an angry letter. I had no idea what I’d do with it: was it an editorial, an article, actual correspondence for the senator?

Suffice it to say, I kept writing, and four months later I had ninety thousand words, a full, if accidental, book. The original letter morphed into its own chapter, titled “Shouting at Lindsey Graham.” Once I realized my stream-of-consciousness rant had become a book project, I decided my monograph would be the one that bridged the gap between academic knowledge and accessible, experiential narrative. It would be the perfect book about war, at once memoir and policy analysis. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing. So, after googling, “How to publish a book?” I was lucky enough to find an agent and a medium-sized press, and I began to visualize my work on the shelf at Barnes & Noble.

Writing and publishing anything, a book or even just an article, while on active duty as a military officer is a tricky matter. The regulations stated that I must clear the entire monograph with the local public affairs officer (PAO) to ensure that, first, I’d revealed no classified information (I hadn’t) and, second, I hadn’t misrepresented the official policies of the US or been “contemptuous” of the president or any superior officer in my chain of command (this was more debatable).

Nonetheless, West Point’s PAO was overworked, swamped with material to review, and basically told me to double-check my own work and bring any questionable sections to him for a quick review. The ease with which the book, titled Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge, passed the censors and gained “approval” was as remarkable as it was astonishing. Truth is, besides one full-bird colonel in the West Point Center for the Professional Military Ethic (CPME) who randomly called me to his office to tell me he hated the book and admonish me for being a poor leader in Iraq, there was almost no blowback. Of course, that’s probably because hardly anyone bought the damn thing. My “perfect” book hardly made a splash. How naive I’d been.

The United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, many are surprised to hear, is, despite its many flaws, hardly an institution that simply indoctrinates automatons. It is a serious, if imperfect, academic body. Should one choose a liberal arts major and approach class seriously, West Point provides not just a free education but a remarkable one. I taught in the American history division of the Department of History, then under the enlightened stewardship of the respected Vietnam War scholar Colonel Gregory Daddis. Under his leadership, we instructors were coached to apply the up-to-date knowledge we received in graduate school, pursue continuing education, and teach our cadets according to the cutting-edge scholarly trends in civilian academia. He also gave us enormous independence, latitude, and room to experiment.

What also may surprise many Americans is how rarely he or other superiors in the department actually observed—or sought to control—my teaching. At most, I could expect a visitor to my classroom maybe twice per semester, out of a total of some 160 sections taught. So it was that I brought my own dissent, coupled with the prevailing frameworks and analyses of academia, into the classroom for the future officer students at the US Military Academy. It was the joy of my professional life. I taught them what a consensus of serious historians has long believed: that the English colonies and their successor, the United States of America, constituted a settler-colonial empire from the first, built on the displacement—by its very nature—and destruction of native peoples. The nation these cadets would soon serve was, at the very outset and still, defined by four core characteristics, original sins of sorts: racism, genocide, exploitative classism, and continental, followed by overseas, imperialism.

There was, as one might expect, some initial—and in some cases semester-long—pushback from the largely upper-middle-class, hyper-patriotic (in the traditional sense) cadets. That early skepticism, unsurprisingly, was strongest among the majority white male cadets, especially those from the South and Mountain West. Today’s cadets are far more racially, religiously, and sexually diverse than at any time in the institution’s history, even compared with my relatively recent tenure as a student (2001–2005). This has undoubtedly improved and widened the scope of social and scholastic discourse in the barracks and classroom alike. Still, cadets—and even more so the soldiers they’ll someday lead—tend to be more conservative, rural, southern, and likely to come from a military family legacy than their civilian peers. Nonetheless, even I was pleasantly surprised by my ability to reach them, to elicit astute questions and cultivate critical thinking. By the end of each semester, I never ceased to be amazed by their collective progress tow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Prologue
• 1.
• 2.
• 3.
• 4.
• 5.
• 6.
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author