War and Me
by Don Pelton
I’ve noticed recently that my revulsion and disgust with our war culture has increased in lockstep with the Biden administration’s unprecedented warmongering. And that in turn has caused me to remember how, indeed, this same instinctive revulsion has been a feature of my character for as long as I can remember.
Some six decades ago, when I was in my early twenties and looking for work, my older brother (who was at that time a manager at Lockheed) arranged for me to interview for a job with one of their projects, something called “Outlaw Shark.” When I learned the nature of the project (helping to build an “over-the-horizon targeting system” for missiles launched from submarines) I realized that it wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of, and so I turned down the job when it was offered to me. The whole experience surprised me and helped me understand myself a bit better.
A few years later, in the early 1960s, I joined the California Army National Guard, not out of zeal for war, but in fact, as a way to avoid the draft (well before I had thought much about the Vietnam War). There was a moment during boot camp bayonet training, when we were taught a call and response: “What is the spirit of the bayonet fighter?” we would all yell. Then we’d all answer “To kill! To kill!” I distinctly recall glancing around me to see if anyone took this seriously, hoping that everyone thought it was as silly as I did. I couldn’t tell.
In 1965, about six months after I got married, my National Guard unit got activated and sent to the Watts suburb in Los Angeles to deal with a riot motivated (according to one account) “by anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department, as well as grievances over employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty in L.A.”
One day, soon after we arrived in Watts, our platoon sargeant, a repulsive gung-ho ex-marine, came back to our sleeping quarters and happily boasted that our platoon would share “credit for the killing” of a young black man who was shot while looting a local store. As if, until that kill we were only playing at being soldiers, but now we were the real deal.
At about the same time, a group of us (white) guardsmen were chatting with a (white) L.A. cop who explained how he liked the riots because, for him, it was “open season on n***ers.” Those were his exact words (except for my inability to spell the “n-word” more offensively here).
Up until then, during my time at Watts, along with all my fellow soldiers I had been carrying (for the first time in my National Guard career) a loaded M16 rifle, with a bandolier full of live cartridges strapped across my chest. After listening to my boastful platoon sargeant and the L.A. cop, I surreptitiously unloaded my rifle. I remember thinking, “I wasn’t born into this life to kill anyone.” So, after that, I looked like a killer soldier from hell, with all those live cartridges decorating my chest, and a seriously frightening-looking M16 (though secretly unloaded) rifle in my hands. But I couldn’t have — and didn’t want to — kill anyone.
A month or so after we got back from Watts, we all received a battle ribbon, commemorating our service in Watts, a black and white ribbon, believe it or not. I threw mine in the trash.
(I described my experience in the National Guard helping to “quell” another riot, the 1969 “People’s Park” riot in Berkeley in the following article: “What I Learned at One of the First Occupations: People’s Park, Berkeley 1969).”
When I was a student at UC Berkeley in the early 1960s, I (as an undergraduate male) was required to take ROTC, a 1/2-unit semester course. After a few months of pointless marching around one of the football fields, I realized that my grades were good enouigh overall that I could afford to just blow-off the ROTC class, so I stopped going, taking a failing grade. After my first year at Berkeley, a counselor, reviewing my grades, told me that it looked like I could do just about anything I’d like to do, “except be a professional soldier,” he said.
That was a moment of pride for me.
The United States is a war culture. It is a war economy. Our media are war cheerleaders, proud that our empire is the “greatest military in world history.” Our politicans are sustained by millions of dollars from war industry lobbyists. Our wars are sustained by spending billions of tax dollara on proxies like Israel and Ukraine, who spend that largesse on our own warmaking industry, for wars we are losing, just as we have lost every war since WWII. It may even be true that losing wars is more profitable than winning them, possibly because they last longer so long as we continue to lose. Consider Ukraine, for example, where we have squelched every threat of peace. And in Gaza Biden is showing us that even genocide is profitable for the war industry.
To sustain this war culture and war economy we need wars. We need enemies. The latest enemy du jour is always evil like Hitler (as was Saddam, and now Putin, whom Biden, in a typical fit of diplomatic incompetence, has publicly denounced as a “thug.”).
Ka-ching.
“War Is A Racket,” as Major General Smedley Butler said almost a century ago (an example of one of America’s most enduring values).
Finally, each year on Memorial Day, I do my best to sum up my grief about war in this article, which I keep reprinting:
“IN PRAISE OF WARRIORS, BUT NOT OF WAR”
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