A U.S. Army carry team moves a flag-draped transfer case containing the remains of Major Sorffly Davius, 46, of Cambria Heights, Queens, N.Y. at Dover Air Force Base on Monday in Delaware.Win McNamee/Getty Images
Zak Jones is a dual Canadian-American citizen who served as a medic in the U.S. Army, and the author of the novel Fancy Gap.
It happened 15 years ago, but I’ll never forget the excitement of one young U.S. Army private when he found out our unit might be gearing up to go to war. We’re already at war, I thought, as I watched him hoot and holler, smacking the armour on the side of his .50-calibre gun turret and spinning it around in circles atop our Humvee.
The mere possibility of a new conflict invigorated the enlisted soldiers conducting field training exercises that day in Fort Drum, N.Y. We didn’t know much – just radio chatter about new threat levels, and orders to escalate our combat readiness immediately and report to headquarters for a briefing – but our commanding officers mused that we were about to be called up to deploy following recent air strikes in Libya.
But there wouldn’t be boots on the ground in Libya – at least, not our boots. What had actually occurred was that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a top-secret raid, and the rest of the military was catching up after the fact. We – the one unlucky unit that happened to already be in simulated combat readiness – were being ordered to stand guard at the base, in case there was blowback to the al-Qaeda leader’s killing.
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But the young soldier’s excitement about the devastating hypothetical of war stayed with me. Did he really want to fight the people of Libya? Or was he, like so many American soldiers, looking for war to give some kind of meaning to his service, no matter how crass – or to find a mythic narrative for his life, or an understanding of how he might be entering history?
That potential for eventual understanding is what separates living, breathing soldiers from the increasingly automated weapons systems deployed alongside them. They will have to contextualize the complex reality of their military experience, and square it with how history writes the narrative of their time in service. An AI missile system will never know the lifelong anguish of trying to reconcile the moral grey zones, the duty to obey, the pride in service and the guilt in violence – this struggle between ideology and circumstance.
The millions of American GIs who fought in the protracted, loosely defined, primarily ideological wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq grappled with the same existential questions: Why am I here? Who am I helping? Why are these people my enemy? Where is all this going? Is any of it righteous?
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Today’s soldiers heard Donald Trump’s campaign promise of “no more wars,” which may have tipped the risk-benefit scale for many current enlistees seeking the benefits of military service without the violence. Now, they are seeing the President’s words be exposed as a blatant lie, with the U.S. executive branch sending troops to or launching strikes in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Iraq and, most recently, Iran. That latest war, still unauthorized by Congress, has prompted Tehran to respond with missiles aimed primarily at U.S. military bases in 12 Gulf and Middle Eastern nations. Even more military engagement could be coming in Cuba.
At the time of writing, at least seven U.S. military service members have died in the Iran war. In response, Mr. Trump lamented: “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.” But as callously as he phrased it, the President is sadly correct: This war, no matter how brief, will bring more death, more displacement, more disruption abroad, and a generation of ideological fissures at home.
So many military members are young and impressionable, and these veterans of tomorrow will be shaped by their experiences today. This generation of soldiers will want their service to mean something, and when they return home from yet another unpopular, brutal conflict, they are just as likely to embrace the cynical, “America First” ideology propelling these current wars as they are to reject it.
U.S. President Donald Trump salutes on Saturday as an Army carry team moves the flag-draped transfer case containing the remains of U.S. Army Reserve Sergeant Declan Coady of West Des Moines, Iowa, who was killed in a drone strike at a command centre in Kuwait.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
After all, we’ve seen the likes of Vice-President JD Vance and War Secretary Pete Hegseth (the latter of whom called the rules of engagement “stupid”) mould U.S. defence policy around their respective resentments about the public’s response to the military during their time serving in America’s previous unjustified wars.
So we need to understand how today’s soldiers will make sense of the Trump administration’s arguably illegal wars of vanity, because they threaten to shape American culture and society in an extreme way for generations.
Often, an American’s decision to enlist is made out of an earnest desire to defend and serve their country, but sometimes it comes from quiet desperation for opportunity. U.S. military service is seen as a pathway to advancement, one that provides educational benefits, a steady paycheque, an opportunity to “see the world,” a pathway to citizenship for recent immigrants, and health care. The “thank you for your service” culture in the U.S. also perpetuates the notion that, despite the potential risk, future veterans will be appreciated for their bravery.
Of course, this isn’t always the case. The crises of homelessness, suicide, incarceration and joblessness among veterans suggest there are blind spots in America’s ostensible support for its troops. There’s a blind spot, too, to the fact that the U.S. military tends to recruit from low-income communities and from high schools and community colleges, where young people are unlikely to have an informed understanding of themselves, of geopolitics and martial history, or of how their military experience may affect them in the future.
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Most members of the lower enlisted ranks, which comprise the bulk of the U.S. military’s fighting force, do not arrive to basic training or boot camp with a complete understanding of what constitutes a lawful order, where Iran is on a map, or that the post-9/11 “forever wars” resulted in 4.5 million deaths and displaced at least 38 million people. I certainly didn’t, when I enlisted in 2009. But all these years later, I still have difficulty squaring my service with my sense of justice and morality and my small place in history.
I wish I could warn today’s soldiers about the spiritual and existential stakes of their actions. I wish I could tell them what I know now: that wars of unbridled aggression make it hard for even the most earnest Americans to come home good. Thousands have been killed – mostly civilians – and hundreds of thousands displaced by the Iran war in just two weeks. And the soldiers caught up in such conflicts will be changed, with an instinct to retroactively justify their involvement when the dust settles – the start of another generation of moral dissonance in America.
This war won’t end when the aggression stops. America has finally fully demolished the trust of the international community, and sparked a new cycle of suffering at home and abroad. I suspect that those behind the guns aren’t yet aware of their role in setting yet another fire on this already smouldering globe – nor of the years of moral and spiritual searching that will come.