American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (44 page)

As the memorials to Tillman poured in, the military kept secret what it had known soon after Tillman’s death—he had not been killed in a firefight, he had been shot by his own men. The only uncertainty was whether he had been killed by accident or intentionally. Yet high-ranking generals worked with the Pentagon and the White House to mislead the Tillman family and the American public. They created a fraudulent combat narrative and awarded Tillman a Silver Star for a battle that never happened. They stuck to the lie for five weeks until forced to admit a tentative version of the truth—“Corporal Tillman probably died as
a result of friendly fire
.”

Tillman’s death did not match the propaganda, nor did his political views. He opposed the war in Iraq even while he was fighting there. An army friend, Russell Baer, vividly recalls a day when they were watching U.S. bombs fall on an Iraqi city and Tillman said, “You know, this war is
so fucking illegal
.” Though he was less critical of the war in Afghanistan, doubts rose there as well, and before he was killed he had contacted Noam Chomsky, the famous critic of U.S. foreign policy, in an effort to schedule a discussion with him after returning from Afghanistan. Shortly before his death Tillman told a friend that if he were to die he didn’t “want them
to parade me through the streets
.”

Though Pat Tillman was unable to return home to voice his objections to Bush’s Global War on Terror, his brother Kevin did. He served in the same Ranger unit as Pat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2006, on Pat’s birthday, Kevin wrote an antiwar statement in honor of his brother, in which he mocked the long list of justifications the Bush administration had offered for the war in Iraq:

Somehow we were sent to invade
a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created. . . .

Our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

The Pat Tillman story had once seemed such a perfect instrument for state propaganda: American volunteerism and patriotism at its finest with yet another bonus feature—a millionaire willing to serve his country for an enlisted man’s pay. But, in fact, as U.S. casualties mounted along with antiwar sentiment, privileged volunteers, always rare, became scarcer. Sheer economic need was increasingly the primary driver of enlistment. Yet even the hard-pressed young proved increasingly difficult to recruit.
Simply to replenish its ranks
, the military had to increase its recruitment budget from $3.7 billion in 2004 to $7.7 billion in 2008. The onset of the Great Recession made the job a little easier, though recruitment budgets continued to rise.

The post-9/11 military was full of people like the children of Carlos Arredondo. Born in Costa Rica, Arredondo came to the United States as an undocumented worker—an “illegal alien.” Through hard labor, primarily as a handyman, he carved out a life and began a family. “My two boys—they are my American dream,” Carlos often said. The oldest, Alexander, enlisted in the marines at age seventeen after graduating from a Massachusetts vocational high school. He was exactly the type of kid military recruiters target—a first-generation working-class child of divorced parents who might be enticed by the promises of the armed forces. There were, to begin, the economic incentives—offers of career training, future college tuition, and a $10,000 signing bonus. Then came the cultural and psychological pitch—the military would build your confidence, make you feel proud, surround you with a community of intense comradeship, help you develop a new and more respected identity.

Alexander Arredondo enlisted
one month before 9/11, with no war on the horizon. Three years later, in August 2004, on his second tour of duty, Alex was killed in Najaf, Iraq. When two marine officers arrived at his father’s home to deliver the horrible news, it seemed to Carlos as if they were speaking in slow motion. They “used only like three words, but
it was like the whole dictionary
. . . . My heart went down to the ground. I stopped breathing. I just couldn’t believe what they were saying.” Shattered by grief, Carlos grabbed a gas can and propane torch, climbed into the marine van, splashed himself and the van with gasoline, and lit the torch. As the van went up in flames, the marines pulled Carlos out. He was badly burned and nearly died. Nine days later, on a stretcher, he attended Alex’s funeral.

In the years that followed, Carlos became a fervent peace activist and, in 2006, an American citizen. A member of Gold Star Families for Peace, he often traveled around in a truck that was a “memorial on wheels” to Alexander and others who had died in Iraq. Carlos adorned it with every imaginable remembrance and relic of his dead son’s life—childhood toys, Winnie-the-Pooh, a soccer ball, flowers, angels, combat fatigues, boots, military medals, even a blown-up photograph of Alex at his wake, lying in his open coffin in his marine dress uniform. He also hauled around a full-size coffin covered in an American flag. Carlos was determined to confront people with the losses it was so easy for most to ignore. “
As long as there are marines fighting
and dying in Iraq, I’m going to share my mourning with the American people,” he told a reporter in 2007.

The losses, for the Arredondo family, only deepened. In 2011, just before Christmas, the second son, Brian, hanged himself from the rafters of a shed in the backyard of his mother’s house. It was not the first time he had attempted suicide. After Alex’s death Brian began a
long slide into depression
, drug abuse, and violent encounters. His suicide came one day after U.S. troops were officially withdrawn from Iraq.

On April 15, 2013, Carlos was in Boston to support fifteen National Guardsmen who were marching in the Boston Marathon with forty-pound packs in honor of American soldiers who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan. This “Tough Ruck” team began its walk at 5:00 a.m. and crossed the finish line moments before the bombings that killed three people and wounded hundreds of others. They immediately rushed in to help the victims. So did Carlos Arredondo.

He was captured in a photograph the media instantly declared “iconic.” It shows
Carlos in a cowboy hat
striding quickly alongside a wheelchair with his mouth open and his eyes fixed. His intense focus draws your eye. In the wheelchair sits a grievously wounded young man, ashen-faced and vacant-eyed. The man’s legs are clearly mangled, though most media outlets did not show the worst of it, cropping the photograph just below the knee so you can’t see that his lower legs have been blown away. If you look closely at Arredondo’s right hand you can see that he is pinching off an artery that is jutting from the young man’s thigh.

Arredondo’s life experience makes vividly clear that many people who “support the troops” can also be deeply critical of the wars they are sent to fight.
Cindy Sheehan
is another example. She, like Carlos, joined Gold Star Families for Peace, having lost her son Casey in Iraq. In August 2005, Sheehan and some 1,500 other grieving parents and supporters set up a camp near President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in Crawford, Texas, while he was enjoying a five-week wartime vacation. She was there to demand that Bush offer a plausible explanation for the war in Iraq, since every public pretext had proven false. She wanted Bush to admit that we were in Iraq for oil and to assert U.S. imperial power in the Middle East.

Cindy Sheehan and Carlos Arredondo had actually become by then more representative of the nation—of “who we are”—than President Bush. The prior year, 2004, a CBS
/New York Times
poll found that
only 18 percent
of Americans believed Bush was telling the full truth about Iraq.
By June 2005
, nearly 60 percent told pollsters the war in Iraq was not worth fighting and almost three-quarters said the casualties were unacceptable. A year later, in 2006,
72 percent of U.S. troops
in Iraq said the United States should withdraw within a year. From August 2006 until U.S. military disengagement from Iraq in December 2011,
at least 60 percent
of Americans said they opposed the war. In many polls, opposition climbed to the high 60s.

That level of dissent is remarkable given the stunning initial impact of 9/11. Many people favored immediate retaliatory aggression. Just a few days after the horrifying attacks, Congress passed a resolution called the
Authorization for Use of Military Force
with only one dissenting vote. It gave the president the power to use “all necessary” force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” It was, in other words, a blank check allowing the president to wage war anywhere he decided.

But most Americans were not willing to defer to the president indefinitely. In the months before Bush launched his “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq, millions of protesters came together in small town squares and major cities throughout the United States and the world to demonstrate against the impending war. These massive demonstrations—the
largest global outpouring of antiwar dissent
in history—were an unprecedented effort to stop a war before it could start.

Opposition soared despite one of the most intensive sales jobs in U.S. history. The Bush administration made its pitch for war with
unequivocal arrogance
. It said it knew with absolute certainty that Iraq possessed vast stockpiles of hideous weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate and dire threat to global peace. The WMD included, it claimed, “thousands of tons” of mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas, anthrax, botulinum toxin, and possibly smallpox. Iraq had all that and more, the world was told, with nuclear weapons just around the corner. Anyone who challenged those claims was ridiculed.

Oddly, however, U.S. war planners did not seem especially worried about what all those WMD might do to their own troops. Having described Iraq as a lethal threat, they berated those who thought the war might be costly. As one adviser put it, victory was assured; the war would be a “
cakewalk
.” There would be no need for an enormous force of three or four hundred thousand troops. Nor would U.S. casualties be high. Nor would the war be expensive—“something under $50 billion,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced. When Vice President Dick Cheney was asked if he worried that an invasion of Iraq might lead to a long Vietnam-like war against a hostile populace, he replied: “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators . . . I think it will go relatively quickly . . . weeks rather than months.”

The flagrant contrast between the administration’s prewar lies and arrogant assurances and the war’s daily realities of car bombings, firefights, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and every possible form of human insecurity and suffering led to a rapid decline in public support. Although dissent was at least as broad as it was during the Vietnam era, there was not the same level of visible public protest. One reason is that the Internet provided so many semiprivate forms of protest. Instead of taking to the streets, people could go online to sign petitions, send around antiwar articles, or write their own. The 2011 Occupy movement was vivid and surprising in part because so many people were willing to come together in public protest and stay there.

Another explanation is that military service fell on such a small fraction of Americans,
less than 1 percent of the population
. Many troops served multiple tours of duty. It was easy for most Americans to ignore the war even while opposing it. Casualties mounted, but many Americans did not know anyone who had died or was wounded. Nor did most young Americans have to worry that they, too, might be ordered to fight. There was no draft looming over their lives. During the Vietnam War, that threat had haunted an entire generation. Since the adoption of the all-volunteer force in 1973, it was possible to forget about distant wars altogether. They were outsourced to others.

Nor were older Americans asked to contribute anything to the Global War on Terror. In fact, even as President Bush was initiating the war in Afghanistan and planning one against Iraq he encouraged citizens to get back to the “business of America.” Better yet, they should “fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots.
Get down to Disney World
in Florida,” the president urged. “Take your families and enjoy life.”

Citizens were not called to service, they were sent on vacation. It was an especially strange message at a time when pundits were claiming that 9/11 had “changed everything,” that the country would never be the same. And it clashed with the president’s post-9/11 foreign policy—the Bush Doctrine—which seemed to suggest that the business of America was not to “enjoy life” but to prepare for a future of unlimited military interventions.

The apparent contradiction was resolved by a single obvious fact: the public was not to have anything to do with the president’s foreign policy. The public had no role, but its exclusion included a payoff—it would be expected to do nothing. It would not have to fight. It would not even be expected to pay higher taxes to pay for the war. The Bush tax cuts would be preserved and the trillions of dollars required by the Global War on Terror would be paid with loans. The rich would continue to get richer. As the United States depended on an ever-smaller minority to do its fighting,
the richest 20 percent
came to own 84 percent of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 60 percent owned less than 5 percent.

During the Vietnam years, there was a powerful political movement to address the most blatant economic and racial inequalities in American society. Though LBJ’s Great Society never had the reach or funding to achieve its most ambitious goal—“to end poverty in our time”—it did help
reduce the number of very poor Americans
from 22 percent in 1963 to 13 percent in 1973, precisely the period when the American war in Vietnam was fought. The recent wars have been fought in a time of broadening inequality and economic crisis, capped off by the Great Recession, which began in 2008.