Those Who Would Otherwise be with us Today

By Anonymous / Spring 2022

Both my parents served in the U.S. Navy, that’s even how they met. They were both young people in need of a new path in life and met each other on that path. My dad had left his job as a surface warfare officer before I was born to take care of my older sister. My mom stayed in the Navy as part of hospital administration and we eventually moved to San Diego for her to work at the Navy Medical Center there. All this to say that the military, and the American perceptions of the military, had been made very normal to me growing up. I grew up in an area surrounded by military bases and went to school with many people whose parents were also military and was part of my high school’s Naval junior ROTC (reserve officer training corp) and was introduced to an honestly insane amount of culture and media surrounding pride and respect towards the military. My life was full of art of U.S. heroism, video games and movies depicting historical American conflicts, watching people parachute down onto my high school football field to celebrate Veterans Day, and the salutes my mom would get on every base we’d enter. It almost goes without saying that popular American media and culture is very familiar with showing off and supporting the country’s huge military force, but for me -and others in my environment- it felt especially the case.

All that being said, I could tell early on that my mom was pretty indifferent to all the fanfare for the military. To her it was the job that got her out of her hometown, got her years of higher education, and a decent amount of money. My mom eventually left that job around 2008. She had just been deployed to Afghanistan during the war there for a year and decided she didn’t want to put up with not being in control of her own life anymore. From my young 8-year-old perspective, I understood some of the reasons why. I didn’t like having my mom disappear for a year, only able to see her through jankey Skype calls. It took me a long time for me to understand even small pieces of what she went through.

Another normalized aspect to the military for me was the dead. After my mom’s deployment, a new annual routine was made for my family. Every Memorial Day weekend, my mom brings flowers for a friend of hers who died in Afghanistan. We go to the Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, where thousands of graves of military service members dot the top of Point Loma. While I was still young, I didn’t ever think much of this trip. I just knew it meant something to my mom to go there so I went and helped bring flowers. It wasn’t until my mom described to me the details of what happened and why, that my understanding and feelings deepened. Not just for my mom and how she felt about it, but the narrative of American celebration of the military. We use the holiday to pay respect to someone who could have been my mom, while there’s people who play ads on TV for Memorial Day weekend sales.

I remember the propaganda for the war in Afghanistan. The ideas of providing education and rights to women there and establishing a more western democratic government. Thin veils to get across the belief that we are the righteous and we’ll lift them up from their backwards society through invasion and military force. I have no doubt that there are those who went there with good intentions in their hearts, but in many ways this is ignorant of the failures of our own society and reduction of the many people of Afghanistan. Of course, in the end that ignorance mostly serves as a tool for the government to justify the American occupation of a country with anti-American organizations and beliefs. An insane amount of money and many people like my mom were sent in order to root out threats to the U.S. and pressure the country to be more in line with U.S. interests. After two decades and over two thousand U.S. casualties and tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties, what was accomplished? More hatred and fear of the U.S., and a lot more money for politicians who had stakes in private military companies.

For all the celebration and reverence for the U.S. military that I have seen in my life, it is disgustingly disingenuous with how the servicemen and women are treated like tools for the Government’s ends of looking tough and justifying billion-dollar industries built around war. I will always hold the deepest respect and love for service members and veterans, as that essentially means my parents and now many friends I’ve had. However, that respect for them now stands with a deep anger for the warmongers and politicians who voice pride and support for the U.S. military, and then make money and votes at the cost of the lives of those who would otherwise be with us today.