Guest Editorial

Interview With U.S. Special Forces Sergeant

Q: Thank you Stan, for taking the time to do this interview. Your extensive military background, certainly qualifies you to speak on military matters. It seems unusual for a former US military man, especially those from the Special Forces, to come out strongly as you have against military measures. From your book I sense that that you are as much a social commentator and analyst as you are a former military man. Can you give our readers a short reason for this? How did you come to speak out as you’re doing and, briefly, what is your main message?

A: I’ve always been intellectually restless, as I think anyone is who truly is interested in what is going on around them. Not interested in appearances, but interested in how things work and damn the consequences. The military actually exposed me to some of the most educated experiences around, not the least of which was travel and an occasional obligation to live among at the level of poor people in peripheral countries. Measuring my own experiences against a lot of reading and studying led me to the left in a pretty gradual but inevitable way. I don’t hold my views because of some religious devotion to an idea, but because leftist analysis conforms most consistently with my own experience. That doesn’t mean that it conforms with my comfort level. But when we stay comfortable, we stop growing. So I try to stay a little uncomfortable intellectually, an important thing for an auto-didact.

And a friend of mine who died recently said that soldiers are natural political scientists, because politics can be a matter of life or death to them. If I have a main message, it’s that I’m from inside the military system, and now I am from inside the political left, and I want to build a bridge between the left and the military. Not militarism, but the people in the military.

Q: Tell us about your background.

A: My parents’ families were from Arkansas and Michigan, but I moved a great deal when I was a kid. My dad followed work where it took him. I was actually born in San Diego. I lived outside of St. Louis when I joined the army at 18. Both my parents worked at McDonnell-Douglas as riveters on center fuselage of the F-4 Phantom close air support aircraft.

Q: How did you start off your career in the military?

A: I just hung around doing spot work and learning to get into trouble right after I graduated high school in 1969. After a few months, I started to see myself stuck in St. Charles, taking a job on an assembly line at McDonnell. I believed the whole official narrative about the world communist conspiracy and its evil, so I enlisted in the US Army in January of 1970.

Q: What conflicts did you fight in?

A: My first duty assignment was in Vietnam. It was 1980s before I worked in any more conflict areas. They included Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Somalia and Haiti.

Q: I realized that you’ve written about Haiti in your fascinating book, "Hideous Dreams", but could you tell us anything briefly about any of the other conflicts?

A: Well, there was a common denominator that it took me a couple of decades to figure out. We have engaged in conflicts against poor people. I didn’t realize this at that time – Haiti was the watershed actually – but this is the military role in an imperial state. While the national chambers of commerce in these places, with their own eager compradors, assisted by US corporations to drain the value out of these countries, the US military’s job, often through the local surrogate militaries of the "host nation" as we called it, is to stand guard against all those masses of people in the "host nation" from whom the value was being drained in labour and resources. If you steal enough from the people, they hit a point where they become rebellious, and to continue stealing, you have to use people with guns, ad that’s where we come in.

Aside from that sort of macro-analysis, one thing that stands out in my mind is how badly many of our operations went, and how important for US military to spend huge sums of money on arms and high technology. Grenada and Somalia are prime examples. Real emblems of stupidity in planning and in its execution. That’s why I tell the people not to buy into the hype about US military invincibility. Person to person, and dollar for dollar, the US military is the most inefficient in the world. And the most fragile. They are fragile because of all their overwhelming dependence on high technology, and fragile because the troops come out of a pampered consumer culture, overwhelming dependence on high technology, and fragile because the troops come out where real physical hardships are anecdotal. Sustained hardship, as we are seeing now in Iraq, devastates morale.

Q: What kind of a commander were you?

A: I was never a "commander". That title is reserved for commissioned officers. I was a non-commissioned officer, a sergeant. I did however act as the senior enlisted member of the infantry and special operational units. I had a very good reputation overall. I had an aptitude for planning and operations. And while I’m pretty small, I was pretty wiry and I had a very good physical endurance. I was well respected by my subordinates, my peers, and by officers.

Q: When did you get into the Special Forces?

A: Actually, Special Forces were a late interest for me in the military. I started out as an infantryman. I gravitated into the US Rangers, which is a highly disciplined force of specially trained shock infantry that is part of the Special Operations community. I worked for a year as a tactical instructor at the Jungle School in Panama, then I went to try-out for Delta Force. Delta is designed as a "Special Forces Detachment", but is not Special Forces, that is not part of the 18 Branch, the Green Berets everyone hears about. Delta is a very small, very specialized and highly secretive unit that does almost exclusively direct action missions that are politically very sensitive. Its known as a counter-terrorist unit, a military SWAT outfit if you will. It’s a unit that puts a very high premium on skills for entering man-made structures like buildings and vehicles, and places a very strong emphasis on precision marksmanship. After Delta, I taught Military Science for a while at West Point. Then I had a break in service, where I went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee and trained SWAT teams at the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility.

I re-entered active duty, with a loss of rank in 1998. Then I went through Special Forces Qualification Course. I spoke Spanish, so I was assigned to the 7^th Special Forces Group, who are responsible for all of Latin America. I left the 7^th Group to be attached to the 75th Ranger Regiment in 1993. and then I accompanied them to Somalia that year. There I was promoted to Master Sergeant. After that to the 3rd Special Forces, a Sub-Saharan Africa and Caribbean Group, and went with them to Haiti in 1994. In December of 1995 I went on leave and was officially retired February 12, 1996.

There, you have my whole career before you!

I should say that I retired under a cloud, and the whole tedious story is in my first book, "Hideous Dream".

Q: What do you do now?

A: I have been working in the non-profit sector, mostly on political and social justice issues. Right now I am a field organizer for an environmental group concerned about nuclear energy risks, I am not a liberal because most liberals I find are really conservatives who want to be forgiven.

Q: How do you feel about those years in the military? How do you feel about the US military now?

A: I’ve written quite a bit about how I felt about various aspects of my military life. There’s not one monolithic impression. I like the travel part, the economic security, the exposure to other cultures. Other aspects of it I hated. The very heavy hand of bureaucratism, the institutionalized stupidity. The hegemonic sexism and homophobia. Lots of people like to stereotype the military. These people say that we live in a system that needs the army for protection, but they don’t really believe it. In their hearts they bought the whole bourgeois narrative about personal responsibility, individualism, the history of kings and generals, - all of it. Now that someone understands the nature of that system, and they are in the military, well, then you’ve got a genuine role conflict. And that’s my issue with the US military. It is an instrument not of defense, but of control, exploitation and plunder of peripheral peoples.

Q: What do you think about Bush’s build-up of the military?

A: Bush is making one political mistake after another and they are fatal. His so-called build-up of the military is one of them. He is not in fact building-up the military, depending on how you define that. He is building up the weapons industry, at the behest of his mad military advisor, Donald Rumsfeld – a weird man who has convinced himself without a grain of evidence to support it, that he is a military genius.

Rumsfeld has convinced himself that technology can replace human leadership and ingenuity on the battlefield, so he is prevailing on his intellectually challenged boss to buy lots of expensive toys. I write a lot about this Rumsfeld Doctrine in my "Full Spectrum Disorder", the book that’s coming out this December from Soft Skull Press. This whole trend is being reinforced within the administration by his coterie of neo-com economists who think they can replicate the Reagan era recovery of the US economy through military Keynesianism. Like I said, the sum of these errors will be far greater than their parts. Unfortunately, other people will pay with treasure and blood, and the whole US clique will retire in comfort to write their bullshit memoirs and give well-paid lectures. The military itself, if you look at the humans who populate it, is undergoing the same kind of attacks on its living standards as the whole rest of American working class, in order to pay for Rumsfeld’s killer drones and super-subs.

Q: What do you think about him reducing veterans benefits? What do you think about him giving tax cuts to the rich while reducing vet benefits?

A: I think that it will bite him in the ass at the end of the day. The problem is that US is trapped on a run away train of their own economic nostrums, their own overwhelming rich-white boy hubris, and a very real, very deep crisis of capitalism itself. In response to a column I wrote recently taking Bush to task for his inane "bring ‘em on" comment, I was flooded with supportive e-mails from pissed off veterans and military families. They were all talking not only about the hypocrisy of this faux-cowboy preppy daring people to attack soldiers while he sits in the air conditioned White House, they expressed a profound sense of betrayal at the benefit cuts, for active duty people and veterans. Bush’s entire neo-com hallucination about world domination is based on the projection of military power, yet he manages to alienate the very people who will lay it all on the line.

Q: What do you think about the invasion of Iraq?

A: I think that it has turned into a tremendous tar baby. And the more he fights this tar baby, the deeper he will become stuck in it prior to 2004 election. People know that it has something to do with oil, but they don’t understand the complexities of oil.

Americans are not critical thinkers by and large. We suffer from a collective socio-genic learning disability based on the complete commodification of our daily consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to complete denial.

So, understanding what invading Iraq had to do with oil takes a little study. They didn’t just go there to steal. There was a confluence of factors that were economic, strategic and political. The main point is that the US economy has been converted into a credit and debit scam aimed against the whole world, and backed up by military force. But the scheme is falling apart as the rest of the world is losing the ability and willingness to pay. The US economy is dreadfully weak, with the real material economy now gutted by parasitic speculation, and the only source of strength left is the military, which they are trying now to use to gain control over the world’s energy supply.

Q: What about the fact that we know now that Bush lied about the WMD’s?

A: Everything this US administration has told the public has been a lie from the very beginning. The way you determine whether the Bush cabinet is lying, is whether or not their lips are moving. They started with a fraudulent election, consolidated by a right-wing judicial fiat. They had planned the invasion of Afghanistan as a first step for developing a standing military presence in the region in the summer prior to 9/11. They had even informed the Pakistanis of their intention to invade in October. Then the 9/11 hijackers fly in like a scourge against the nation. But, like Santa Claus for the Bush’s neo-con clique. All the plans were then put fast forward, and the pretext was now available for advancing the very aggressive domestic agenda for the development of a police state infrastructure. September 11^th was a neo-con wet dream.

Q: What about Afghanistan?

A: Afghanistan and now Iraq have fore-grounded the just deserts of overwhelming pride and plain imperialist racism. They completely underestimated their putative enemies, failed utterly to understand the cultures they were invading, and maintained an unshakable faith in the ability of high technology to deliver stable apolitical military victories. Now the US has a dual quagmire.

Q: What about bin Laden? About the fact that we didn’t find him and now no one is even focused on him at all?

A: That’s because he was never the issue. Controlling the region as a way to position yourself for economic war against Europe, former USSR and China was…and is.

Q: What about the present US Patriotic Act? What about the Military Tribunals? How about the Guantanamo Bay detainees in Cuba? Unlawful enemy combatants? Do you thing the Bush administration is violating the US Constitution? What about the Geneva Conventions?

A: This is the most lawless US administration in living memory, and that’s a real accomplishment given the parade of arch criminals who have occupied the Executive Branch of the White House for the last 100 years. There is a wealth of material available on the Internet and elsewhere, warning us about The Patriotic Act. The Patriotic Act has one major flaw. Once the decision is made to apply it generally, instead of against scapegoat populations, the US government will be faced with the most heavily armed population in the world. There’s a certain grim poetic justice there. The tribunals and detentions are just plain exercises of impunity against every internationally recognized standard of legal practice in the world. This is also well known. The Geneva Conventions forbids unilateral invasions in the absence of a real and immediate threat. Period. It’s unequivocal. People say that we should be cautious with using the term fascism. I agree. We are now faced with a winnable fascist administration. They would do well to recount how Mussolini and Hitler ended up.

Q: How do you feel about Bush’s war on terror?

A: Bill Blum once said that the difference between a terrorist and a superpower is that the latter has an Air Force. This whole slogan "war on terror", is used to tar any government that fails to comply with the US diktat. They still allege that Cuba sponsors terrorism. That’s preposterous, and everyone damn well knows it.

Q: You’ve aware of allegations that Bush went AWOL while he was enlisted?

A: I’ve read them. It is irrelevant but even if Bush had a chest full of combat ribbons and medals, Bush is wrong and he is a military hawk, and a danger for the US and the world.

Q: Do you think that these wars are race-biased?

A: Politics is economics by other means, and war is politics by other means. Let’s get this straight right now. Our entire US system was constructed from day one on the subjugation, the exploitation, or extermination of whole peoples. There has to be a cover story about that kind of practice, a justification. Racism provides that justification. Frontal racism, like slavery and Jim Crow, and implicit racism like "the white man’s burden" and "exporting democracy". In that sense, not only these wars, but our whole society is race-based.

Q: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

A: Just that we need to bring all the US troops home immediately. And allow the Afghans and the Iraqis to determine their own future. And that we need to try, in every way possible to destroy the Bush government. They are both stupid and reckless, and that is a dangerous combination.

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