I woke up today with a problem on my mind. This problem has been haunting me throughout the events I have experienced as a credentialed member of the G.I. Resistance. It is a problem that attacks my fragile sense of self when I am confronted with anyone viewing what we do from the outside. This problem is endemic to our culture and it will continue to be problematic as we extend the message of our rights and values.
This problem is a problem of agency.
When I first heard about “The Movement” and Combat Paper I was exhilarated because I felt as if I had found a group of individuals who were willing to claim the brand of Service as a point of pride and to utilize this position as a means to produce a valuable message about our plight in the heart of a corrupt world.
As the time has drifted onwards I have found that this movement has stagnated. Where at first there was a feeling that we were a strong and resilliant group of radical elements it seems that this status has been reduced to nursing broken equipment. There is a sense of mourning about our experiences that is often accompanied by pity. Instead of seeing us as disciplined and loyal to our cause our actions are interpreted as some extension of that ghastly acronym PTSD, a term which has apparently become synonymous with life as a veteran.
Therapists, healers, crafters and other breeds of witch doctors flock to our organizations and projects to extend an offer to fix us everywhere we present ourselves. They do this without understanding why this is offensive to our basic sense of individual worth. This sentiment has all but destroyed our capacity to make any real changte because we’ve been relegated to a barrens of worthless trauma driven self-pity.
I remember cutting up my uniforms with this fire inside of me that told me that I was taking command of my own life and excersizing my autonomy. There was a sense that being a veteran didn’t mean that I was doomed to be a fuck up, but rather that I had an ages old baton in my hand and the only challenge that faced me was doing the most with this baton before I passed it off to the coming ranks of veterans. This baton has been carried by innumberable generations before us who have done many amazing things with it. I am reminded most heavily of the absurdist revolution that occurred in Europe after the horrors of WWII which was frequented by many poets, painters, theorists and writers who had served their time gawking at the horror of war. There are the Abstract Expressionists which used their experiences with the war to undercut the value of human expression itself, making a point that our actions as humans are so absurd that no statement which we could make could possibly be true because we are the carriers of some terrible disorder.
I think that this cultural shift began to happen after Vietnam when the soldier was no longer a hero but a recovering mess who has done many horrible things and will never be right with the world again. During that decade the image of the soldier became inseparable from homelessness, drug addiction and crime. This is when the term veteran began to be used as if it were the classification of some disease which will never really go away.
Why is it us who are fucked up? We didn’t invent M-16’s, cluster bombs, interrogation booths, 50 caliber automatic rifles and tanks. We didn’t invent the Global War on Terror and the racism which made it possible. That was all you America. We did that together. Or at least we O,K.d the implementation of these terrible things. Why should we be any more broken than you? Maybe we are the only sane ones here because we know, and I mean really know, about the scale of the atrocities going on every day where you are still ignorant and too blissfully naive to confront your misconceptions.
Our sickness isn’t something that you can medicate away because the damage that was done to us was philosophical in nature. Well, at least the damage that happened to our heads. The ruptures in our world view is irreparable but it isn’t wrong. It is the rest of the world that is insane. It is the rest of the world which is in need of changing its views. Our work in that department is done.
I dream of a movement which accepts itself, which does not deny its right to the truth because we have bitter memories in our minds. These things make us more real. We need to own them to move forward.
You are not broken. I know that you may be suffering a great deal of pain. I have suffered that pain too. All I ask is that as a community we stop allowing crackpots and pharmaceutical spokespeople to be our voices. Take your life back. Put yourself together and pull yourself up so that you can be a part of the struggle to prove to the world that we aren’t the problem around here. The more we let these people capitalize off of our identities the further away we get from doing the history that we are now taking part in any justice. Take back that sense of agency in your life. You deserve it. You have proven that you can survive nightmarish obstacles with grace. You’ve proven that you can work harder than most people. You’ve proven that you know what it means to put yourself aside for the greater good. At some point you have probably exemplified all of the core values of the Armed Services.
Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity and Personal Courage. Put these things to use in your life, but do so in a way that is more accurate to the Dictionary’s definition of these terms than the loose interpretation that the military has instilled into them.
Fuck the quacks. Lets give them a little reality therapy by discontinuing the process of being whored out to various institutions for private gains. Haven’t you had enough of that shit already?
The Paper Trail 