10/09/09 – Aaron Emery – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our first guest on the show today, it's Aaron Emery.
He's a member of the Campaign for Liberty, Ron Paul's peace and capitalism group over there.
He's a veteran of the Iraq War and occupation.
He's an advisor to Jake Town, who is an antiwar Republican running for Congress.
You can find him at the Nolan Chart and Campaign for Liberty online.
Welcome to the show, Aaron.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Let me just clear one thing up just before we get started.
Jake Town is actually running as an independent in Pennsylvania.
Oh, pardon me.
Yeah, I thought it was, he's a Republican there.
Anyway, I don't want to talk about that anyway.
I want to talk about war.
You were in Iraq for how long?
I was.
Let's see, we were there about...
Well, my situation's a little bit unique, and I'm sure we'll get into that.
I was there for about nine months.
I just came back in July of this year.
I think one of the things I read about is you talked about stop loss and some of the...
Was that you, that this happened to you, that you had been discharged and you were back in the real world, and then they came and grabbed you again and made you go back?
Yep, yep.
Basically how that works, I'm going to assume that there's probably several listeners that don't really understand how that goes, so maybe I can get into that a little bit.
I was in the Army.
I was active duty.
I was an infantryman for five years, and I decided that that was more than enough time, and so I got out in June of 2007 and then started working civilian jobs and enjoying not being in the Army.
In July of last year, I was recalled, and so I had to serve another 400 days, so I got sucked back in, and basically how this works, anyone who serves in the military, who enlists, all branches, all the branches, is obligated to an eight-year commitment.
So when you have a friend or someone that signs up for four years, they really signed up for eight.
They may serve for active duty, and if they don't enlist, they get out and go on to do other things, but they're still obligated to the rest of that eight-year term.
Now, how fine is that print?
Because I guess it sort of sounds like it's in the fine print, they can come and get you, but is this the kind of thing where everybody knows that going in, right?
Everybody knows it in general.
Now, that may not necessarily be the case, actually.
It's not, because I've talked to several people who—I was not a senior-ranking person by any means, but I was about two-thirds up the enlisted ladder when I got out, and I would have a lot of younger guys like privates coming up to me and saying, oh, I didn't even know about this, and it isn't in the fine print.
Some people are more aware, but the thing that's really the kicker is when you go to enlist, you have these career counselors, recruiters.
They tell you about it, and it is fine print, but they tell you about it, but they try to kind of just brush it to the side and say it'll never happen, and I do have friends who have actually been recruiters.
I actually have one living with me right now.
He was a former recruiter, and I've known several of them, and they can attest to the fact that basically when the question gets raised like, wait a minute, how does this recall thing work?
They basically—and what was told to me when I enlisted, they say, oh, well, that only happened if World War III breaks out.
So, oh, well, thank God we're not in World War III, right?
Yeah, it's not like our army is occupying anybody's country.
Yeah, right, right, right.
So it's acknowledged, but it's basically kind of just swept under the rug and just don't talk about it and just kind of just pretend it's not there.
And the thing on top of that is that you have 17, 18, 19-year-old kids signing up, and they're signing up not to potentially serve four years and then maybe four years on top of that if they get recalled.
They're signing up to serve four years.
They're not signing up for the potential to maybe get pulled out of life wherever they go after they get out and then serve again.
So the whole idea behind this is basically a loophole.
I consider it a backdoor draft.
I had an article published recently on the Campaign for Liberty.
It was called the Backdoor Draft specifically about it and how it kind of works and everything.
So if people want to look that up, they can probably just Google my name and find it.
But it's pretty much like a loophole, something that's there to be used in case we have an unpopular war like we do right now.
Not enough people are signing up because maybe some people don't want to participate in the war, so they pull veterans back in who have already served.
Like me specifically, I got out because I didn't agree with the wars anymore.
I didn't want to be a part of the machine.
So I got out, I did my time, got out, and then they sucked me back in.
And whether or not I agree with it or not, and I'm vehemently opposed to it, they still have that legal contract over me.
They say, well, if you don't come back, you're going to jail.
So you had already turned against the war before they stoplossed you?
Right.
And there's a difference between stoploss.
Stoploss is when you're still on duty, like you're still in active duty, and they prevent you from getting out.
I was already out.
I was out for about a year, and then they recalled me.
So it's called the, when you're sitting in that pool after you get out, the pool of veterans who have the IRR.
The IRR, right.
The Individual Ready Reserve, right.
And that's not the regular reserves that people know at the drill, you know, two weeks during the year, a week and a month.
You don't do it at all.
It's just a pool of veterans who have not quite completed their eight-year term that they can draw back if they need it.
Well, now when they told you, all right, you have to go back, and you'd already become, you know, changed your mind about the war by then, how come you didn't say no?
Well, you know, I actually, I had had friends that started getting recalled a couple months before me, probably four or five of them, and I said, crap, they're going to come get me.
And sure enough, they did.
Before that, I told my friends and family, I told everyone, I said, you know, if they do, I'm going to stand up on principle, and I'm just not going to go.
And when the time came, unfortunately, I lost my nerve, and that's something that, you know, really still bugs me.
But I lost my nerve, and that's what happens with a lot of guys, to be honest.
I mean, I know I was recalled with about 30 other guys.
We were all in the same boat.
And a lot of people said, yeah, I didn't want to go to jail.
I mean, they've got that legal contract over you, which, again, is more reason for it to just be not very justified, to be honest.
So I wish I would have not gone, but I lost my courage, unfortunately.
Well, I mean, hell, at least you're a peacenik now, right, a public one, a writer on the subject.
Right.
And, you know, I was actually opposed to the wars when they first even began.
I enlisted in the spring of 2002, so, you know, a year before Iraq even started.
And, you know, when it started, I was a dumb private, basically, very fresh face to the world.
But I knew that something was wrong.
And you can't blame the military for wanting to go to war when it's presented to them, because they're trained to do that.
That would be like training someone to kidnap children and then releasing them on the public and then blaming them for kidnapping children.
That's the goal.
That's the idea of the military is to go to war.
So although I don't agree with it and people should stand on principle alone.
In fact, they do kidnap children.
Right.
So you can't expect everyone to stand on principle alone.
It's just really not going to happen.
But I was against it from the beginning.
I knew that, you know, we just weren't pursuing diplomatic avenues, if you will, with Iraq.
So as opposed to, I got in a little bit of trouble.
You know, I spoke out against it.
I got in a little bit of trouble, but not too much.
So as opposed to it from the beginning, maybe I was wiser than, you know, people a lot older than me in experience.
But it's, again, people try to blame the military a lot of times.
You know, I'm really interested in this mindset.
You know, a skater buddy of mine was telling me, yeah, I'm going back to Afghanistan.
And I told him at this time it was pretty bad in Iraq.
And I said, well, I guess at least you're not going to Iraq.
And he said, nah, the Afghanistan war is heating up, which, of course, I already knew to be true anyway.
But he said, nah, you know, I'm really worried about it.
I don't want to go.
But what are you going to do?
I signed up and I got a family.
They're dependent on the money I got to make.
This guy's a friend of mine.
You know what I mean?
That's why I bring him up is just because, like, that means he's not just some abstract person to me who is probably a decent guy, but he does this anyway.
This is a guy that I know and is a friend of mine.
But that's the mindset.
It's like, well, I guess I'll give me a rifle and off I go.
What the hell?
I seriously can't understand that.
I mean, we're talking about killing people, right?
Right.
And unfortunately, you know what happens is there's a classic case just like what happened in Nazi Germany.
People get stuck into this game of prisoner's dilemma.
You know what I mean?
Like, we had a lot of Nazi officers back then that disagreed with what they were doing.
They didn't believe in killing all the Jews and invading all these countries.
But you set up, the game goes on long enough, and every person has their rifle to the back of someone else's head.
And whoever isn't the first in line to do that is going in the gas chamber or gets shot.
You know what I mean?
So it's this game of prisoner's dilemma where if you don't do what the collective is doing, then your own self-interest is going to be detrimental to you.
So it's kind of like a prison almost.
And unfortunately, you know, I lost my nerve when it happened.
And that happens with a lot of people.
But that doesn't justify the fact that the government is perpetrating it still.
Yeah.
Well, and there ought to be a lesson here for any young people listening.
Right.
You know, they say it's all volunteer army, but they mean the day that you sign the thing.
You're not allowed to quit this job.
Right.
They'll put you in prison.
And, in fact, there was a big story that was all the news the other day about a guy escaped from the airport.
You wonder why we all regular civilians have to go through this complete police state at the airport.
And yet when one of their military guys tries to change his job and flees, they can't stop him.
That's the side issue.
The other thing is this guy's a wanted man now.
He's a criminal.
He's a fugitive.
And they're going to find him, and they're going to grab him, and they're going to force him back into the army, and then send his ass overseas to kill people again.
Right.
And I think the general idea is that this has only happened, you know, to a few people.
They're going to test firsthand, you know, not just myself.
But, you know, it's in my article if you want to look it up.
But there have been tens of thousands of soldiers.
This doesn't include all the other branches, just Army, that have been recalled since 2003.
And so it is very prevalent.
It's happening a lot.
When I got recalled, every single week there was a new group of infantrymen showing up every Monday.
You know, you'd have 30, 50, 60, 20, whatever, every week new people showing up that had gotten recalled.
So it's very prevalent right now.
And I think it's very indicative of the level of support that these wars do not have amongst veterans as well.
You know, if they supported it more, more people would reenlist.
And so it just shows that even these wars are not popular in the military.
In the military there's a lot of defense.
People just need to look at these things.
And I think that that's kind of a different way of looking at it, but I think it's very important.
Yeah, well, and it's a proven fact, right, that the civilians who control the executive branch and the officers lie to the enlisted men from morning till night.
I remember on the eve of the Iraq War, not even on the eve, during the early years of the Iraq War, maybe it was 2004 or something like that, seeing footage of American soldiers and they're hanging out in their bunk, and this guy's got a picture of September 11th on the wall.
And that's how he knows that he's in Iraq and he's going out on these missions killing people, but he's doing the right thing because this is what they did to us.
And this kid didn't make that up.
This is what his officers told him.
That's why we're here.
Revenge for 9-11.
Right.
It's very sensationalized.
And, again, what do you expect to happen when you have a military that's trained to go to war, to kill people?
I mean, that's the goal.
You know, we're in this idea now that we've got to win hearts and minds, but that's not what the military does.
They kill people.
So how can you expect anything else than that?
I'm interested in your evolution from military guy.
I guess you said you were skeptical about the war in the first place and everything, but now you're a full-blown Ron Paulian peacenik.
How does one thing lead to another there?
Well, I was opposed to it from the beginning, but I didn't have the founding.
I didn't have the understanding and the libertarian founding that I do now.
And I should say I'm a little L, not a big L.
But, you know, it was actually after I got out of the military.
I knew that I didn't want to be a part of the war machine anymore.
I didn't agree with it.
When I got out, something just clicked one day, and I decided to start looking into all these things.
It was actually right around the presidential primary, and I ran across Ron Paul's website.
I said, who the hell is this guy?
And everything he said made sense, and I said, yep, I agree.
I agree.
That makes sense too.
And it really got me starting to question not just what we should do, but the fundamental underpinnings of what's going on in our society, not just should we do this or should we not, but why are these things happening?
And so I started really getting into the libertarian movement in terms of the tenets of life, liberty, and property, those kinds of things.
And it all just spiraled from there.
And so as time goes on, I continue to learn more and get more experience.
And once you're here, once you're at the point that I've arrived to, it all makes sense, but someone that's not in it, it can be very difficult to understand these ideas because it's just not presented to you that way.
And I think of that as purposeful.
The government doesn't want you to specifically address the fundamental principles.
They just want you to think about the immediate impact of the now, and that's it.
So it's been an evolution of sorts.
It took a lot of reading and a lot of desire on my part, and I had to be willing to let go of some of the things that I just thought were true about the world in general.
And that's a hard thing to do, but if people open themselves up to it, that's the only time that you really get truth.
Well, you know, I guess everybody who is this much of a libertarian has got to always try to think back about what are the various things that got through to them, the best kind of arguments that really turn on the light bulb or whatever.
I guess I wonder what you would say to a 16-year-old or a 15-year-old who, think back, when you're 15, 18 is still a long time from now kind of a thing, right?
You could see how a 15-year-old, that's one of his possible futures, is joining the military.
What do you say to him?
Well, I mean, that's a difficult scenario because you're, again, relying on people to have an understanding of themselves outside of what they've just been institutionalized into.
And it takes a lot of self-effort.
You're never going to get it just from secondary sources.
You have to be open to it.
We could make an argument or have many arguments.
We could talk about all sorts of different platforms on why we just shouldn't do it.
We could talk about it's unconstitutional, it's illegal.
So why would we do that then?
Why would we break our own laws?
But that doesn't fly with people generally.
Oh, the Constitution is antiquated, whatever.
It's just a suggestion.
Okay, so that doesn't fly very far.
The thing that I found to be most effective is just look at the blowback, look at the consequences.
People say, well, we're there now, we have to be there now.
We can't have done it in vain.
But it's all in vain.
How long do we have to continue to save face is basically the idea there.
Well, but the other thing here though is, Aaron, as we discussed, it's possible to be against the war and still go ahead and join the Army and go anyway.
I've got to figure the mindset of the average 17-year-old or somebody right around the age where they're considering this kind of thing.
Basically, all of what you're talking about, that's somebody else's business.
That's for people who are older to decide and whatever.
We hear it in the language of returning soldiers, especially like from Vietnam.
Hey, I serve my country.
My country asked me to do this.
So this is what a kid thinks, right?
A kid thinks I'm not going to sit here and analyze foreign policy and agree with this peacenik or that warmonger or whatever.
That's not my thing.
My thing is that the president is supposed to know and do the right thing, and the American people apparently are going along with this because they agree with him that it's right.
And so my job is to go be a soldier, not to be arguing all these politics.
And even if somebody convinces them that the wars are wrong, as you pointed out, you might still just go right on over there.
So what do you say to the kid to keep him from joining?
And that happens.
Well, you have this, it's all sensationalism, isn't it?
You have this idea, I serve my country.
Even if it was wrong, I serve my country.
But you're not serving your country because the United States is not the federal government.
The United States is an idea of freedom and liberty.
So you're serving not your country, you're serving your government when you join.
And that's it.
Because if your government is opposed to the people, you're just still serving the government, not necessarily the people or the country.
So make no mistake to anyone listening, you're not serving your country, you're serving your government.
And that doesn't mean it's entirely wrong.
Obviously you would have to have a military.
Just because we perpetrate unjust wars doesn't mean that someone can't do the same to us.
I mean, I think we all understand we have to have a military.
It's an unfortunate aspect of reality.
But, you know, kids listening right now, they've got to realize that they're going to be used and they're a number.
They don't care about you as a person, you're just a number.
And I just really hope that sinks in with people because that's real.
Well, all the propaganda on TV, I mean, aside from the fact that basically the commercial says, you know, join the Army and you'll get to play with remote-controlled planes all day and it'll be hilarious.
Aside from that, they say this is what turns a boy into a man.
This is how to, especially, you know, they had a whole series like this and it couldn't have been an accident.
I mean, it was very deliberate that if you are black or brown in this society, you cannot be a fireman, you cannot be a helicopter repairman, you cannot be anything where you get paid a decent living and, I don't know, dress nice or whatever, like on the commercial, unless you join the military first.
And they had a whole pitch like that that just went on and on and on.
This is how to get your life together.
Are you 17?
You don't know who you are or where you're from or where you're going, what to do?
Join the Army.
We'll give you a purpose.
We'll make a real man out of you.
And then when you come back, you'll be a leader.
And whichever field you join, you'll be great.
And you'll just get up at 5 and work all day and it'll be awesome.
And yet, you know, when you look at the homeless on the side of the road, it's certainly more than half of them are veterans.
You read stories, you've got to go to, you know, magazines and, you know, things that are kind of, you know, off of the main focus of the radar screen.
But you can read all about how what really happens when American soldiers get home with the post-traumatic stress or severe brain injuries or whatever, is the VA, that is the U.S. state, takes them and throws them in the garbage.
They prefer that you blow your brains out than come to them asking for help, these people.
They don't care about you.
They don't want to make a man out of you.
They want to use you to kill other men and then throw you away.
Right.
And they're great marketers, aren't they?
They've got the best that Madison Avenue can possibly come up with.
And I think this is why we read reports occasionally, again, only never big things on Brian Williams on TV, but you can read in a local paper somewhere like in Houston where they had a rash of recruiters killing themselves because the kids that they lied into going over there to war were coming home in coffins.
And they couldn't take what they had done.
Right.
You know, we've got to remember the military is the government.
It's part of the government.
It's part of the DOD, federal government.
So, of course, these things are going to happen.
And some statistics for you here, currently there's 320,000 veterans suffering from brain injuries, whether that's severe head trauma, retardation, these kinds of things.
That's a huge amount.
And I think the current estimate is that 18 vets are killing themselves right now, which is an astronomical percentage.
You know, 18 a day in a population of 300 million is not much, but there's only 20 million something like that veterans right now.
So the percentage rate is very high right now.
You know, I had a friend who was a recruiter, and he very vehemently opposed to the war.
He would actually talk kids into not joining.
So I commend him for that.
I like that.
How long did they let him keep doing that before they finally got rid of him?
Your numbers are really low here, Dave.
Yeah, he got fired from it.
So obviously not long, but you're right.
It is viewed as like a rite of passage almost.
It's a very carnal thing.
Be a warrior, you know, and be a leader of society.
But it's just not realistic.
Like, there's no glory in it.
But, you know, kids have this idea that, you know, you see war movies, they feel that when they're going to be there, there's going to be a shower of bullets and pyro everywhere and dramatic music playing, and, you know, their girlfriend is going to be crying at home for them, but everything is going to work out in the end.
That's not reality.
There's no music.
There's no glory in it.
There's just people dying.
That's it.
You know, the end, end of story.
Boy, and, you know, for one example here of just how twisted the mindset is for kids who spend their lives in government school and in front of, you know, what might as well be state-run media in this country.
Here's a story in the McClatchy newspaper about American soldiers in Iraq who are just bored to death, and they can't stand the fact that they have to sit on the base and do nothing all day, train Iraqi soldiers all day.
They want to go out and kill people.
Damn it.
Yep.
And, again, what do you expect them to do when that's what they're trained to do?
Of course they're going to want to do that.
Yeah, and I love it, too, as the article begins about First Lieutenant Bianca Filson, this bloodthirsty young woman.
Right, right.
Somebody's daughter.
Somebody's cute little baby daughter over there going, I can't stand it that I don't get to go out on missions like, you know, in the early years of the war when things were better.
Well, and the military is its own culture.
It is not civilian life in uniform.
It's not the same.
The military has its own indoctrination program so that you think like them.
And because it's very cyclical, you know, you go from being raised in that system.
Eventually you're the leader there.
You're the one that's, you know, doing that with kids as they come in.
So it's a very cyclical kind of culture.
And it's viewed in the military that if you haven't been in combat or been deployed that you're not really doing what you're supposed to do, that you're just kind of shamming out and not really, you know, accomplishing anything.
So it's bred, it's ingrained within, you know, service members that they're supposed to be going to war.
Well, and, you know, it's funny too because that actually makes sense, right?
That the purpose of the Army supposedly ought to be not occupying helpless civilians in their own countries forever and ever and nation building and all these things.
Our Army ought to be sitting and doing nothing at Fort Hood until the day that Europe attacks us or something.
And then the job is to sink their Navy, to shoot down their Air Force, to bomb their capital city or whatever until they stop attacking us.
And that's it.
That's the job is actually fighting battles.
You know, tanks versus tanks out in fields, things like that.
And under that thesis it would probably be a good thing to have soldiers being bored, right?
But it's different when they're bored because we're occupying countries.
I think it's a great thing if we're bored because there's nothing to do on the homeland because everything's peaceful and that would be great.
But we go to other countries so that we can have that because it's not going to be boring.
But you're right, there is, I mean, a lot of people who go to Iraq, they think it's going to be, you know, firefights left and right.
It's just not like that.
Most people never fire a weapon or get fired at.
Yeah, so why bother joining?
You can't even kill anybody over there anyway.
Yeah, right, right.
All right, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Aaron.
Hey, not a problem, Scott.
Everybody, that's Aaron Emery, new contributor to the Campaign for Liberty.
And I think that's C4L.org and also just CampaignForLiberty.org, something like that.
You know, Ron Paul's group.