I Support Some of the Troops

The best way to support “the troops” is to work to bring them home and out of harm’s way. At least, that would be the case for the kind of troops that I would, in fact, support. I’m sympathetic to the poor, duped bastards who enlisted because they honestly believed that they would be defending their country and fighting for freedom. They had been told this from the moment of their birth by folks in authority, and they were so misinformed that they had little reason to disbelieve it until they found themselves in the insane misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even I, whose eyes have long since been opened, once enlisted on the basis of some seemingly noble and altruistic impulses. What a maroon I was. I tell every young person I know to avoid the military, and I hope that I will have made a difference in their attitudes.

It’s a little harder to be sympathetic to anyone who has enlisted in the last three years. If they are idiots, I am behind them. If they are murderous thugs who signed up to kill and terrorize people, then I cannot support them, because to support such troops would be to enlarge their opportunities for mayhem and carnage. Perhaps these are “the troops” that warmongers support with their ribbon magnets. They are the only ones who benefit from prolonged war.

I prefer to believe that most of “the troops” are the duped sad sacks that I can get behind. To support them means getting them out of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not enough to equip them better and leave them in the war zones. Every day that they are there is a betrayal of the impulses that led them to enlist in the first place. These men and women did not sign up to participate in illegal wars of aggression wholly unrelated to the defense of their country. They did not sign up to terrorize civilians in an occupation that does nothing to advance the interests of the American people, unless they happen to be war profiteers or neo-con office seekers.