A war president accepted the Nobel Peace Prize this week and with that acceptance laid out a defense of war as foreign policy. It is not my point in this piece to argue Barack Obama’s position on war. Instead, I want to take some time to think about the people who fight wars with little ability to nitpick the causes and justifications thereof. Soldiers. Men and women who fight and die in wars around the world.
Specifically, since I’ve been thinking about and writing about work, I want to talk about the military in a way it’s rarely mentioned: as labor. As a job.
In 2005, the Washington Post reported on Pentagon data that showed that more than half of new military recruits came from lower-middle-class to poor households in the rural U.S. Talking to a new recruit, the story notes that he called “the steadiest employer he knew,” and quotes him:
“I tried anything and everything” to land a job, Deal said, ticking off glass and furniture companies and a local telemarketing firm. “No one ever called back.” Divorced and the father of a 3-year-old son, Deal decided to call the recruiter because “it’s a job to do,” he said. “It’s something to make a life of.”
The military is a job. Yet it is a job where you may be asked to do horrible things, where you may see horrible things. It is a job that is sending more and more young people back home, their term of service done, leaving them struggling with the things they have seen and done, that happened to them in a war controlled by people well above them—people who never see a battle.
Just as we don’t (or shouldn’t) blame the auto workers for the pollution from the cars they build, we don’t blame the soldier for the creation of the war. We accept the logic of “Just doing my job” because we understand on some level that most people didn’t have a heck of a lot of choice in the matter. The military like no other job takes away your freedom—you sign it away for a few years, a decent salary and some pretty good benefits (if you make it through without crossing too many lines).
At the same time, we lionize and obsess over the soldier—fetishized like none other from uniform boots to the shiny gun. “Support the troops” stickers and magnets are plastered everywhere. Miriam Libicki, herself a former Israeli soldier, dramatized her experience in the comic “jobnik!” but also analyzed the soldier fetish in a drawn essay, “Towards a Hot Jew.” The soldier, at ends both “sexy” and “evil,” is an overblown caricature, not a person who may have simply needed a way to pay the bills, support a family, or go to college.
Susan Faludi, discussing her book The Terror Dream, said:
The myth is just as harmful for the people it designates as heroes as for the people it designates as victims. Men were given hero script in lieu of real support. Look at the firefighters, who were expected to settle for hero worship in place of the protections and tools they needed–and pleaded for–to be effective in their jobs. Or the US soldiers in Iraq, who are exalted as heroic while being denied the armor and medical care they desperately require.
George W. Bush famously slashed benefits for soldiers while escalating two wars, but Obama’s solemn promises to think hard and long before sending in more soldiers don’t begin to analyze the tension between who declares wars and who fights them, that “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers don’t pay for hospital bills and therapy and support. That similar to (but more intense than) the factory worker who only knows one way of life, soldiers are brought back home and expected to fit smoothly back into a world where there is probably not a bomb around every corner, with little help.
That being in the military is a job is being made ever clearer by the privatization of war, the existence of Blackwater and other “private contractors” who offer the same services as the army does, but by paid mercenaries, many of whom used to be in the U.S. military. Blackwater contractors make up to $1,000 a day, six or seven times more than soldiers, according to journalist Jeremy Scahill.
He notes:
“And that’s problematic when you give people an incentive that’s monetary to go and fight a war, that’s no longer about defending the nation-state. That’s private profit motive for being engaged in a brutal, bloody, offensive war.”
Private contractors and soldiers both may believe in the war they fight—but compensation figures into the decision in many cases, either way. The existence of the contractors exposes the inequality—and perhaps bursts a bit of the heroic myth bubble around soldiers.
The same way the cost of a union auto worker is more than just what they take home in their pocket, the cost of a U.S. soldier is far more than the cost of paying them. Blackwater and the like can send in their forces for less because they’re not promising benefits or support for workers that are sustaining all the injuries and traumas of regular soldiers. Sure, you can make $1000 a day—but what happens if you lose a leg? Scahill reports that US taxpayers are paying the compensation to the families of contractors killed in Iraq.
While contractors sign up to go into war zones for high pay rates, National Guard soldiers are shipped overseas now to fight a war that was never in their job description, and the vile process of “stop-loss,” the involuntary extension of a military contract beyond the end of the term of service, basically amounts to involuntary labor. Where else can one sign up for one job and then find yourself forced into another, not allowed to leave when your contract is up, and have to risk your life into the bargain?
We no longer have a draft, so most of us are insulated from the idea of going to war. An all-volunteer army means everyone made a choice to go into the military, right? Yet even in the days of conscription, the military was largely segregated by class. Dick Cheney and his cohort had better things to do than go to war; meanwhile Muhammad Ali was stripped of his titles for applying for conscientious objector status.
The waging of war and the treatment of soldiers are intimately linked to the treatment of working people—shrugged off too often as “labor costs,” told to do something else if they don’t like it, appealed to by political candidates who forget too soon their pretty promises on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, massive corporations make money off it all.
Obama’s speech, Nobel in hand, laid out a vision of a world where war is necessary and inevitable. I don’t share his vision, but while he and people like him accept war as inevitable it will continue to be so. Obama has also positioned himself as a better, more thoughtful alternative to George W. Bush, someone who will consider the consequences of war and treat returning soldiers better. If we cannot get rid of war, perhaps we can at least spend some time thinking about the people who do the real, hard, often horrific work of fighting it.
Great column.
To add to the facts presented in your column:
@ 5th full paragraph – “decent salary, … some pretty good benefits …”
For fiscal year 2009, entry-level (E-1) pay for the U.S. Army was approximately $16,800 per year plus further pay and entitlements. $16,800-plus-benefits is not poverty-level for a single individual, but it’s competitive pay only while unemployment is above, say, 7-8%. Given the current dangers of active duty in Iraq/Afghanistan, the current pay scale is unequal to the risks.
@ 8th full paragraph – “tension between who declares wars and who fights them …” (the following is not a criticism but simply additional commentary):
Actually, starting with the Vietnam conflict, no U.S. Government entity “declares wars,” despite the U.S. Constitution’s provision for sole Congressional authority to declare war. This now-normalized violation of the Constitution is actually what motivated the termination of the draft in 1973.
The U.S. now fights with an all-volunteer force plus mercenaries precisely in order to distance most of the U.S. civilian public from the human cost of wars that are unconstitutional, spuriously ‘legalized’ by Congressional resolutions rather than authorized by a formal Congressional declaration of war against a specific government or specific nation — and such resolutions are sometimes based on bogus information supplied by the White House.
The U.S. government now has normalized unconstitutional warmaking powers because, starting with Vietnam, the U.S. has been fighting wars in order to secure either oil/gas sources or oil/gas transit routes — the U.S. intervened in Vietnam in order to protect the oil routes from Indonesia to Japan, or so I was instructed in undergraduate Army ROTC courses in 1972. South Vietnam otherwise had no strategic value to the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ronald Reagan’s observation in 1980 that the U.S. should have declared war on the North Vietnamese government was not disingenuous — Reagan was providing a much-needed reminder of the constitutional limitations on the U.S. government’s warmaking powers. If, in 1965, Congress had insisted on its sole authority to declare war and refused to pass a resolution that effectively gave LBJ a blank check, LBJ would have had to allow a thorough and time-consuming review of the information that he had already presented about the Tonkin Gulf incident and about the supposed strategic ‘necessity’ for large-scale combat operations. Thus Congress probably would have uncovered the fact that LBJ’s claims about the Tonkin Gulf incident were bogus and would have refused to declare war.
Thus the U.S. employs all-volunteer forces plus mercenaries in unconstitutional wars entirely because such wars have, by design, ‘strategic’ value only for private oil companies. As is already understood in the U.S. government, such wars are
not, in fact, assumed for any actual benefit to U.S. national security, but only to secure the interests of private oil firms.
On a final note: The firms of mercenaries employed by the U.S. military do not swear an oath to protect the Constitution and obey the U.S. President or even merely to serve out the terms of their contracts. These firms are bound by contract only, and can legally cancel their contracts regardless of such cancellations’ strategic impact on combat operations (because they’re not bound by oath to serve the U.S. government). Thus unconstitutional wars not only have a moral and fiscal cost, but undermine U.S. national security as well.
Again, SJ wrote a great column. I just wanted to add the above comments. Sorry if this post was too long.