09/11/09 – Adam Szyper-Seibert – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
You can go back to listen to the show.
Our first guest on the show today is Adam Zyper Seabert.
I hope I said that right, I think I did.
He's from CourageToResist.org.
Welcome to the show, Adam, how are you?
I'm good, thanks a lot.
Did I get your name right?
Yeah, pretty much, don't worry about it.
It's okay.
All right, close enough.
Well, I'll have you email me how to spell it later or something.
Anyway, to get exact for the post on Anti-War.com.
I don't want to guess.
So, hey, what an important thing you guys have going on here.
Support the troops who refuse to fight.
Yeah.
What a wonderful topic for a show on this September 11th here.
Talk to me first about the name I know on your list.
Aaron, what's your name?
Aaron.
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Aaron.
Aaron.
Now, I think the last I heard, he got away with it.
He's done, right.
He won.
He's done.
He won.
He got strung along by the Army way past when his contract was due, but the end result is he didn't have to do jail time and he didn't have to go to Iraq.
This is the first American Army officer who refused to deploy to Iraq.
And, you know, I've talked to his father on the show a couple of times, and I know that this deal was not just that he refused to go and participate in an illegal war, but he said, you know, look, I'm an officer.
I'm going to have these enlisted men under me, and they look to me for their leadership.
They're going to do what I say, and I'm not going to have them commit war crimes either.
No way, man.
Forget it.
You can lock me in prison.
I'm not going.
Well, not, he didn't, he didn't want to go to prison, but he definitely took a stand there.
Nobody wants to go to prison, but at the same time, he was willing to go.
He didn't because of some legal stuff, which was great for him and I'm very happy for him, but the sentimentality of having an officer refusing to give illegal orders to troops and have them go out and commit war crimes is, it's what America should be about.
I mean, it's the exact opposite of Nuremberg.
It's what we should be doing, and every officer should be paying attention to what he did.
Well, and he sure sets a high standard when it comes to all the argument about torture, doesn't he?
I guess I hadn't really thought of his story in the context of all the questions about prosecutions for torture and the Nuremberg defense being used, even by the attorney general who's announced the investigation, right?
Anybody who was following orders is safe, but anybody who went outside their orders, you know, might be in trouble or that kind of thing.
Well, here's Aaron Watada who, hey, he's just a, just an officer, right?
Nobody said he was born with 180 IQ or a heart made of pure gold or anything like that.
He's an army officer just like any other, and he said, I'm not going to follow, and I'm certainly not going to give illegal orders.
So where does that leave everybody who in fact went along with or gave illegal orders unlike him in the same circumstances?
Where does that leave them?
I think it leaves them suffering with their own conscience.
What you get is you get a lot of Iraq veterans returning, and IVAW is a great organization for that, Iraq Veterans Against the War, their winter soldier events and how they discuss the guys that come back that did follow the orders and the massive trauma they're suffering now.
Then what they're going through now, it's this generation's Vietnam, basically, in terms of the number of vets that are returning.
We have more vets killing themselves upon return to the United States every year than we have actually dying in combat.
It's, I'm sorry, I get a little bit worked up sometimes.
Yeah, no, no, it's okay.
It's okay.
And I mean, I saw, I got pretty upset myself when I saw the other day, I thought, I don't have it in front of me, but I believe the number is 450,000 soldiers, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have sought treatment at the VA for one thing or another.
And the general waiting list for that is about a year.
450,000 guys, and you know- 450,000 guys waiting to be treated.
They're not even, they're seeking treatment, but they haven't received it yet is the other thing.
They don't have, the VA is strapped, and I give them as much respect as they deserve, but they just don't have, we're not putting the finances there, we're putting the finances into the war effort.
And I can't tell you how many, I'm sorry, I still got this on the brain from the first segment of the show today, I can't tell you how many times I read stories, particularly back in 2003, 2004, where they're talking with American soldiers in Iraq, and they say, we're here for payback for 9-11.
It was in the headline, one of the Blackwater murderers that's going on trial, at least according to the Justice Department, he said he was in Iraq killing people as payback for 9-11.
I remember reading about a soldier lying in his bunk, and he's got a picture of the burning towers posted on his, on a, you know, the little wall of his bunk there where he's staying, and that's why he knows it's the right thing to be in Iraq and go in on these seek and destroy missions and whatever.
And I just wonder, like, what percentage of the enlisted guys that invaded that country did so under the false belief, pushed on them mostly by their own officers, that what they were doing had anything to do with payback for the attack of September 11, 2001?
I don't know statistics in terms of the number, I do know that a lot, I mean, a huge amount of young men enlisted shortly after 9-11, then the enlistment numbers there speak for themselves, I don't have them on hand, but they're really huge.
I can also tell you that once people actually got into the Army, the ones that stopped and thought and looked around, Robin Long, he was the first American deported from Canada about a year ago.
He joined up post-9-11 because he wanted to serve his country and defend us against such a further attack, but as he was making his way through boot camp, as he was making his way through his training, he realized this didn't really have anything to do with 9-11, and the racism and the militaristic ideal that go out and kill anybody because we're mad, that started to get to him so much that he actually went AWOL and he went to Canada, and when he came back when he was deported from Canada, he spent 15 months in jail because he refused to go.
Not an officer, just a regular kid from Idaho, just saying, I don't want to go out and kill people just because my government is telling me to, and it has nothing to do with actually defending ourselves from 9-11.
As a matter of fact, as he was in Canada, and he was in prison, he was doing more and more studying, he realized that we're actually probably creating more insurgence and more hatred towards America, so instead of making our borders safer and making our country safer, it's actually making us more in danger.
Yeah.
Well, you know, here eight years later, there's a story in the Washington Post, I think it's today or maybe yesterday's Washington Post, about how there are high school kids now who, you know, they were little kids when September 11th happened.
They don't know the first thing about it, whatever.
These are the cannon fodder.
These are the guys who are the generation to be recruited, you know, come next May or whatever.
These are supposed to be the ones to join up to go fight, and they're, in their short lives, God, I sound like I'm old, I got two little gray whiskers on my chin, but in their short lives, they have no frame of reference to even what they're getting into at all.
This is what, when we hear about, you know, from Vietnam veterans and whatever, my country asked me to go do this.
The underlying premise there is that, look, I wasn't, I didn't know what the real score was.
I wasn't supposed to.
I trusted you grownups to know what the deal is and to only send me to a war if it was the right thing, not to exploit me and use me and throw, you know, use me to go kill people in a war that has nothing to do with anything and throw my life away.
That's what these kids can expect, to go to a war for reasons that they don't even understand at all now.
Yeah.
No, no.
I completely agree.
I remember on 9-11, 2001, I went and got my niece out of her middle school.
She was 11 years old, and now she's 20, and if she so chose to do so, she could actually join up and join the service now.
But when it all happened, she was just a little kid, and the generation we're asking to go and fight these wars, they're the 18, the 17, the 18, the 19, the 20-year-olds that we're asking to go out there and, hey, go out there and fight this war, because you remember what happened back when you were in sixth grade, right?
And with the Afghanistan ramp-up, that's exactly what's actually happening right now.
Afghanistan, the entire pretext for Afghanistan is 9-11, just like Iraq was when it first started was 9-11, even though it turned out that it was actually most likely about corporate greed and oil reservoirs.
Afghanistan, that Obama is now putting 35,000 more troops into and is probably going to be adding another 50,000 over the next year, the exact same premise there is the war on terror.
How do you fight terror, and how long does that war last for?
I think it's a war that's not going to end if we chose to pursue it as a war, as opposed to as a dialogue, as diplomacy, as an attempt to understand one another better.
A lot of the troops that we help out are starting to realize that, and they're starting to go, I refuse to actually go and participate in this continuation of endless war.
I stand up.
I'm refusing to deploy to Afghanistan.
We've got a young man named Travis Bishop who is currently serving a year.
He was a sergeant.
He did two tours in Iraq, and he was in the Army, and he's just going, I'm not going to Afghanistan.
There's nothing there.
There's no reason to continue this war on.
And he stood up, refused to deploy, and he got a year.
Well, you know, that's the most important thing is leading by example.
You know, I remember I was in ninth grade during the first Gulf War, and I didn't know until years later that there had even been a single protest anywhere in America, that there was any organized group of people who thought they knew reasons why there shouldn't be that war.
I didn't even find that out until at least 92 or something, and it was just completely invisible.
And, you know, I'm from Austin where there were huge protests down at the Capitol, but it didn't make the local news that I saw.
No, it doesn't even make the national news.
I mean, the protests, even the anti-war protests now, they just don't make the news unless they do something drastic like shut down traffic, unless they...
Well, and I see that you guys are on Facebook, though.
I mean, you're going around this, and having the Courage to Resist, the website is Courage to Resist.org, everybody.
Having this, you know, as one outlet for, you know, especially these kids, I'm thinking of the kids who are seniors in high school right now who may be going into the military next year.
They need to see, especially, I think, they need to see that it's not all, you know, people in tie-dye shirts and peace signs and stuff who are against this, but here are people just like them.
Here are veterans of the war.
Here are people who've actually been there one tour and said, there's no way in hell I'm going back.
These are the kinds of people that they can relate to, that they can understand that, you know, this isn't like somebody that they can't relate to telling them that the war is wrong.
This is people who actually really know this is the kind of thing that could really save a kid's life.
Yeah, most definitely.
Our project director, Jeff Patterson, he was the first Marine to stand up and say I'm not deploying to the original Gulf War.
He stood up on the tarmac and said, I'm just not going.
I refuse to go to Iraq.
He was an artilleryman and shoot artillery shells into civilian populations.
This was during the Gulf War in 91.
Myself, I was a Marine myself as well, and I left the Marine Corps.
We aren't tie-dye wearing, liberal, hippie types.
I mean, we definitely have some progressive political opinions, but basically we don't want to see kids go out there and get themselves shot at.
We don't want to see the people we can remember being making mistakes just because they're told to go do it.
We work with a lot of veterans organizations and just the human toll, the kids that come back, the way they're changed, the ones that come back alive, the way they're changed, the way their mental states are changed, the way their psychology is changed, and their physical bodies.
It's all just this horrible toll that we're asking the youth of today to pay for for the next forever.
Because it's supposedly an all-volunteer force, you're not getting a lot of understanding coming from the middle class.
You're not getting a lot of recognition.
Very few people I know outside of my professional circle actually know anybody that's gone to Iraq or gone to Afghanistan.
We don't think about it as a society, who's going, what's happening to them when they come back.
You'll get more news about John and Kate Plus 8 than you'll get about the Iraq or Afghanistan war right now.
I think I'm starting to understand how it was that Korea was the forgotten war.
I grew up with MASH, which obviously doesn't show any actual combat or whatever, it's just the hospital.
So I grew up with the Korean War as something obviously that happened.
But there was a whole generation and a half or something there where it was called the forgotten war because people just didn't want to talk about that time that Harry Truman got all those people killed, man, and they just wanted to kind of block it out.
And I was kind of thinking, I'm not very good at keeping up with pop culture and TV shows and that kind of stuff, but I'm of the understanding pretty much that if you did a history of the first decade of the 21st century through pop culture, movie stars and TV shows and what the characters talk about in movies and these kinds of things, you just left out all the explicit George Bush references, you might not even know that there was an Iraq war at all right now.
You know, if you take like your average sitcom or whatever, I think the family guy is the only one to make a joke about, hey, what happened to your son?
He died in Iraq.
But other than that, it's just, it has nothing to do with any of the modern memes and narratives and zeitgeists and whatever that people are into.
It's just not part of the story anymore.
It's gone.
Yeah.
No, no.
It very much is the same time that it's gone.
We do have over 1.2 million people who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past nine years, 1.2 million people.
That's not a small portion of society.
I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's a lot of men and women that have gone over and, and gone to war.
Some of them returned fine.
Some have returned the 450,000 of the people that are actually seeking help from the VA.
God knows how many people aren't, need help and aren't speaking because they no longer trust the government.
And then you get, um, the people that have gone over and served, you get a small portion that are going, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I resist, I'm refusing to deploy.
I'm refusing to fight.
And they'll either stand up against the army or they'll just leave because they're afraid that if they stand up, they'll get hurt.
I mean, I'm not even talking like going to jail.
I'm talking actually from their unit commands, they'll be physically assaulted.
They'll be verbally abused.
The people that stand up and say, I'm not going to do this anymore, are showing such intense, such intense courage.
It's just amazing.
Well, how many, how many people have fled to Canada so far to escape?
You know, and in fact, I want to go ahead and kind of preface that a little bit, even though it's too late, but, um, I read something, I think it was on your site where it was a story about one of these guys who refused to resist and, and some lady is saying, Oh, you're a big wimp.
And how dare you?
And I hope you get what you deserve.
And how dare you try to get out of something when you signed up for it?
And I just wanted to point out that if I sign up for any other job, I can quit whenever I want.
And even if I have a contract with them, all that means is I've broken the contract.
They don't have to keep paying me or something according to the contract, but they cannot have the state force me to keep working at antiwar.com until they're, they decide to let me go.
Usually the military is, you know, pseudo conscription like that, where once you sign up, you're not allowed to quit.
But why shouldn't someone be able to change their mind and quit?
Well, I'm, I'm not really, I'm not a good legal scholar, so I can't really argue for against that.
I understand the reason why they have a contract at the same time when you sign that contract.
Most people who signed a contract are 18 or 19 years old.
They're not trusted to drink.
They're barely trusted to drive in California.
You can't even drive with people in the car that are under 18 until you're over 18.
You're not considered an adult in terms of other choices you make.
But when you sign that contract, it's legally binding somehow.
So that's the first thing we need to establish is how can we trust an 18 or 19 year old or 20 year old to sign this contract when government, the same government that's asking to sign away four years of their life is saying, you can't drink.
You don't have the judgment to decide whether or not you can drink, but we're going to let you sign away your life for four years.
That's the first, that's the first thing.
The next thing is in terms of the fleeing the candidate, you signed a contract, et cetera.
I think the same argument that Erwin Tata makes applies here.
Yes, they signed a contract.
They signed a contract to do a service.
At the same time, when you take your oath, when you go through bootcamp, when I went through bootcamp, when you go through your training, the entire time you're taught to respect our constitution, the Geneva convention, there have been numerous, numerous sightings of Geneva convention violations by the United States government, military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and Afghanistan.
The responsibility of the soldier, the Marine, the airman, the sailor in that situation is to refuse the orders.
That's, that's the responsibility that was passed down to me when I was in the Marines.
That's the responsibility passed down to every service member when they go into the Marines into the service total is to refuse an illegal order.
You're supposed to refuse an illegal order.
However, if you do so in a combat situation, you're risking summary execution.
You're risking a nonjudicial, non, non under the radar punishment from your unit that could include friendly fire death.
You're risking all of these.
Let me, let me stop right there.
I want to make sure I understand when you say summary execution, you mean murder, not that it's still legal to put a soldier up against the wall for desertion right in the middle of a battle.
Is it?
It is.
Oh really?
We haven't done it in forever, but it's legal.
Yeah.
Wow.
There, there hasn't been a single recorded case that since world war one, but it is still on the, in the, in the military books as legal.
Yeah.
But, and then, but as you say, there'd be plenty of instances of kind of off the books enforcement of the same sort of thing.
Yes.
Off the books enforcement.
The other thing, the army and the military in general, the army and the Marines are the biggest, um, the biggest people doing this right now is they'll keep a unit together.
They'll keep you and your 25 or 30 buddies together for your entire four year enlistment.
And then they're saying, you're not going back to help the country.
They're not going back to help the service.
You're going back to take care of your buddies.
Right.
And when, when you, when you put it like that, it's not even peer pressure.
It's, it's, you've had this bond developed with these young men and women that you've developed through some of the most intense circumstances that most Americans can't even begin to imagine what you've gone through for three months, six months, nine months, a year, 14 month deployment.
And then they say, Hey, reenlist or Hey, don't leave.
Hey, continue doing these illegal things because your buddies need you to do it.
And if you leave, then you're leaving them in a lurch.
And you know you are because you've seen new guys come in and they can't do the job as well as you can.
And you know that they can't take care of your friend or your friends as well as you can.
Right.
So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, and that's the, that's the pitch they're using now.
It's not serve your country.
It's not serve the army, serve the Marines.
Help your buddies.
Well, and I guess that's from just, you know, 200 years of warfare straight, the guys who run West Point finally figured out that that's really the best way to, that's, that's a, I guess even, you know, to read Chris Hedges, when people talk about the virtues of war, that's really the number one virtue of war, right?
Is that you're closer with your best friend from that battle you guys were in or those battles you guys were in than you are with your own brother now.
Right.
And that's, that's glorious.
That's beautiful.
Yeah.
That, that, that's, that's the fraternity of man.
I understand that some people that go through fraternities feel the same way.
I don't understand that mentality of it being glorious and beautiful.
I think it's more regret that that's how you had to form your friendship.
I think a lot of, a lot of kids nowadays, I don't know, I'm in here, I'm saying like, oh man, I got more than a few gray hairs on my little beard.
A lot of kids today are seeing through that.
They're seeing it as, as the crap that it is.
They're seeing it as, as propaganda and they, they feel bad.
I mean, and they go back and help their buddies, but they keep, but I don't know, it's, I think every generation, the kids grow up faster, at least that's the way it seems in a lot of ways for the past, like 50 years, the United States.
Our 18, 19, the younger generation right now, the generation that's just turning into adults right now are more mature and more able to see through marketing and media and, and salesmanship than I think any generation before them were.
And they're getting smarter about it.
And whereas they still get their heartstrings pulled, there's more of a cynicism and a jadedness that goes along with it that, that you're seeing.
What I'm also seeing with a lot of people that are enlisting right now is the economic reasons for enlisting.
If you can't afford to go to college, if your parents can't afford to go to, put you to college and you can't get a job in, in, in a small town or a medium sized town, what do you do?
Yeah.
Or in a great recession, even if you're from a big city, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the economic draft there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, that's right now the army and the Marines both have record high enlistment numbers.
They haven't had enlistment numbers this high since eight years ago at 9-11.
Yeah.
Well, that'll certainly serve to kind of counteract that cynicism in the youth that you're talking about there.
But I guess that kind of goes back to pointing out just how long ago this attack was and how long this war on terror has already been, where we're talking about you know, people who from the time that they were little bitty kids, America has always been at war their whole life.
They'd never even known what it means to have peace time.
So whether that makes them grow up to be extra, uh, you know, malleable to the state or whether that makes them extra cynical and, and harder for the state to reach, you know, I guess I'm not sure what the effect is.
I guess you're saying it's really jaded the kids.
Thank God for that, man.
You know, it's jaded them, but at the same time they understand they're entering, entering contracts for financial reasons.
Um, there's a guy up on our website right now, his name is Leo Church.
Um, and he was just imprisoned, um, in Fort Lewis for a year for going AWOL right after finishing his advanced individual training, uh, to go help out his kids and his wife who had just been made homeless by a home foreclosure.
He left to go get a job that could pay for, for them to actually have a home, three kids and a wife.
He left the army so he could actually go and get them food and clothing and shelter.
And now he's serving a year in prison with no pay.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, it's, well, it's better than killing people, right?
I think so much.
I agree 100% with that.
Um, and I think that a lot of the kids right now that are serving time in prison agree with that.
They think they'd rather spend a year, 15 months, two years in prison than spending 14 months overseas killing people.
I think also what you're talking about, about the war going on for so long, for eight years of the war on terror, and I think it's actually longer if you go back to the Clinton administration and attacks on Somalia and, and in response to the coal bombing, um, in 98.
But if you look at it as the war on terror, it's a war and we're definitely in a time of war, but the way that generationally we think of war, we think of world war two, we think of the battle of the bulge, we think of midway, we think of these gigantic forces moving across maps.
And what we have is actually a series of low, what the military calls low intensity conflict.
Yeah.
Occupations.
Occupations.
It's not necessarily war.
It's more of an occupation because we don't have these huge land battles.
We don't have tanks versus tanks or aircraft carriers versus aircraft carriers.
We've got is 14 or 15, 19 to 25 year old kids on foot walking through a neighborhood, walking through a neighborhood.
It's very similar to Oakland or East Dallas or the ninth ward in Louisiana, just in terms of being rundown and being, but still urban, still modern.
You can still see signs for Coca Cola.
You can still see a cell phone kiosks it's, and they're walking down the street.
These 13, 14 kids looking for people with weapons that want to shoot them or looking for roadside bombs.
But that's not war.
That's not the war we think of when we think of war.
You don't have columns of tanks marching on other columns of tanks.
It's not.
Well, and you wonder why people got so much PTSD.
It almost, well, hell, I don't know anything about it because I knew better than to join the military when I turned 18, but not like they probably would have let me in anyway.
But it seems like, you know, the, the post-traumatic stress as they call it now, the shell shock seems like the stress of urban combat and occupation like that maybe just as bad or worse than actually being in a big ass battle and living through it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Going through a big ass battle also, you have a sense of right now, whether or not you agree with the war in particular, or whether or not you think that, that, that going tank versus tank is, is, is right.
That that's, that's, that's more of an ethical choice and a decision that you make intellectually.
But I think on a very visceral emotional level, and this is speaking in no authority whatsoever, just my own personal opinion and a little bit of experience from being in the service, when you're going tank against tank, you're fighting other soldiers.
You don't have the sense of, of being an invader, of invading people's homes, of terrorizing women and children and, and the elderly.
I mean, a lot of these kids come back and they say, the worst thing I did is I knocked, as I kicked an entire family out of its home so we could take it over as a base or because we were looking for insurgents, and we handcuffed them, we sent them to a prison, and I don't know what happened to them after that.
But you can hear them, they get choked up when they start talking about a nine or ten year old little boy or little girl that they put in a handcuffs who all they're doing is just screaming for their mommy.
They don't understand Arabic, but it's obvious that what that little girl, little boy is saying is mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, help me.
That right there, I think has got to be a huge impact, whereas a tank blowing up your tank or your tank blowing up another tank, at least you have the sense that you're doing something that's equal.
Well, you know, I think it was, I actually haven't read the book, but I've read all about it, I've been told all about it, On Killing, I think it is, where they talk about what you referred to before about how to get soldiers to do it is not to tell them about patriotism and evil and whatever, but to make them, have them fight for each other's lives and whatever.
I think he also said in there, or one of the versions I heard, I heard of this anyway, is that the shell shock a lot of times is about hate.
And so that the people of Germany who got completely firebombed off the face of the earth by FDR and Churchill didn't really take it personally.
Like they basically saw that, well, you know, the Nazis got us into this and this is the way it goes kind of thing.
And it was horrible, of course.
But they didn't really hate the Americans for it.
And they didn't really feel that the Americans hated them.
They didn't feel like it was being done to them out of real hate, but just as kind of a means to an end.
And so the shell shock was much lower.
But then you take Vietnam or something where you have a VC running at you with a bayonet and he's screaming in Vietnamese, I hate you, you son of a bitch, I'm going to try to cut your guts out right here or whatever.
That's the kind of thing that'll really mess a guy up for the rest of his life is having someone else or in fact, many, many people really hating them that much.
That's what really screws human brains up there.
Oh, yeah.
It seems like that would be the problem of occupying Iraq.
Being hated and hating back also.
The army did this really interesting psychological study.
World War Two, four out of 10 men were unlikely to fire their weapon during a conflict.
They just didn't have, they weren't able to get past that moral roadblock that says thou shalt not kill.
I mean, they were in World War Two, they were heroes, they did a lot of liberation, did a lot of great things, but four out of 10 were unable to fire their rifles during combat.
And post World War Two, the armed services started a new regime, a new regimen of training during boot camp and during infantry training.
And a lot of it came down to yelling, kill, kill, kill, and blood, blood, blood.
Maybe you've seen Full Metal Jacket.
It's a pop culture reference.
Sure.
Right.
That Marine Corps training, what makes the grass grow, blood, blood, blood, getting men to shout that in unison.
And by Vietnam, the training program had gone so much that nine out of 10 men were firing their weapons whenever they engaged in combat and were screaming they wanted to kill and having this idea that killing for your country was glorious.
They managed to sidestep or step over the moral imperative of thou shalt not kill and give the trained soldiers a sense of united hatred, which is the reason that we get more PTSD and more horror from Vietnam on than we did in previous conflicts.
I mean, there was shell shock in World War Two, there was shell shock in World War One.
We had a lot of people that were, that had, I think it was, it wasn't shell shock, what was it, battle fatigue.
They started calling it PTSD after Vietnam.
But you get more and more with the way the training works.
People talk about how video games desensitize you to violence.
This is supposed to desensitize you to violence.
The training that you go through in the military these days is supposed to desensitize you to violence.
You get, what you get is some people are going, okay, I really don't like being taught this.
And then that's when you get people standing up and saying, I'm not going to go, resisting deployment and saying, nope, not going to happen, no more, not going to do it.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, there's that famous George Carlin bit about shell shock and how they kept renaming it.
Yeah, that was actually, that's what I was referencing.
Thank you.
Well, I'm actually, I'm going to try to see if I can, if I can pull this clip up here to play.
Oh, here it is.
I'll play this at the end of the show though, cause it's pretty long, but yeah, no, I think that's really important.
I mean that there's a science to where officers sit around and figure out how do you make a 17 year old kid from the neighborhood into a killer and you have to use all this engineering and all this, they've used all this practice and figuring out how it is that you can get people.
In fact, democracy now had a thing last week where they talked about how the game halo two or halo three or whatever.
One of these first person shooter games was developed with a million dollar grant from the military.
And it has a thing right on the, on the, uh, you know, press a go button, uh, menu, uh, that says, you know, click here to go to army.com.
You know, I guess the PlayStation three can get online or whatever.
Click here to go to army.com, you know, right.
And they paid a million dollars.
The U S army paid a million dollars for one of these games that, you know, kids probably from what, you know, 10 and up are playing this thing.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Talk about brain, talk about the science of brainwashing people into killing for the state.
It's just like that movie toys with Robin Williams and Joan Cusack.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a game, but unfortunately it doesn't work.
If it works, we wouldn't be having PTSD.
We'd have a bunch of, of, of my numb zombies, or we'd have a bunch of people that didn't mind what they were doing.
But with 450,000 people seeking help from the VA and only about half of them seeking help for physical disabilities, it hasn't worked.
Well, although if we look at the numbers, I mean, if that's, I think you're assuming that the Pentagon cares about what happens to these kids after they've been in the war, but it does work to get them to do the fighting, right?
Yeah.
It works to get, it works to get something to go fight.
Yes, it does.
And that's, that's very sad.
But in terms of taking care of them afterwards, right.
Yeah.
That's a whole other matter.
Yeah.
Actually, I just found the name of the guy that, that, that started doing the new training program for any of your listeners that want to Google him is it's a U S army brigadier general, S. L. A. Marshall.
And he served after World War II and found the number of pacifists as they were defined who weren't firing their weapons.
And then he implemented the training program that's now in place and, and gets people to do all that killing and shooting that hasn't jumped up so much from World War I and World War II.
Crazy.
All right.
Now to wrap up here, why don't you tell us one more story of some of these resistors that you have featured on your website?
Again, it's courage to resist.
What I'd like to tell you about as a group of individuals, uh, we're the one we're featuring most of our website is a gentleman by the name of Dustin Stevens.
However, there's a group of people in, um, North Carolina at Fort Bragg, um, that are part of the 82nd airborne division.
They're called the 82nd replacement detachment.
And they're in an, in a platoon called echo platoon.
There are 50 odd, give or take on any given day, um, men that have gone AWOL or have had medical reasons for not being able to deploy that are being warehoused in subhuman conditions and being given a chance to get amnesty for going AWOL if they, if they agree to deploy to Afghanistan.
Oh, because that's the, that's the better war than the Iraq war.
Is that it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Afghanistan is supposedly the good war, but I don't see how.
Um, like we were saying, it's, it's just a continuation of the idea that we went to war in the first place for nine 11 when everybody knows it's actually not the case anymore.
Um, but Afghanistan is still somehow considered the good war.
Um, right now, Dustin Stevens, um, has been warehouse there from ways for almost six months of the six months there, uh, eight months and without actually ever facing charges.
He's basically being held without charges, um, on restriction on the army base.
Well, does he have a lawyer?
Oh yeah.
We've, we've got him a lawyer.
He's not an enemy combatant or anything, is he?
No, no, no.
No, no, no.
No.
He was, he was a kid that was in the airborne who said, I don't want to fight anymore.
Well, how is it that he, uh, is still sitting there not facing charges?
Is it, is there no recourse yet in a civilian court to make the military court get into gear here?
Uh, basically we've been helping him out.
Uh, you can read about it on our website at www courage to resist.org.
Um, we've been helping him out and now he's actually got a lawyer and he's actually getting charged.
But there have been people in that same platoon that were there for over a year with no charges.
This is, this is some blatant constitutional ignoring of, of the idea of a speedy trial.
They say, we don't want to fight.
Okay, fair enough.
You don't want to fight here.
Go to jail.
Instead they're going, okay, you stay here while we're going to hand you over to some guys are a treat.
You let crap going to wake up with garbage cans and, and, and splash water on you and you're going to live in, in these buildings that should have been condemned a long time ago.
You have to live there cause we're the army and we say so, and we're not going to do anything for you.
So we've been working together with, um, the gentleman in Echo Platoon, we've been working together with some lawyers and some support groups and we're trying to get things changed.
We've been publishing articles online and in, um, progressive news outlets and it's actually starting to change for the better.
So that's, that's one way that we actually help impact the gentlemen and women who choose to fight, the reason we refuse to fight, choose to resist, oh my goodness, my words get all mumbled.
Yeah, no, we know what you mean.
No.
And that is really good too, that, uh, that these guys are, that there is someplace where they can get a helping hand.
And, and again, I think it's so valuable that you guys are leading, uh, from, uh, the front, you know, by example on this kind of thing and showing people, you know, it is the courage to resist.
It's not about, uh, you know, being a wimp and refusing to go cause you're scared.
It's about being brave enough to stand up to your military bosses and tell them no, when they're trying to get you to do what you know is wrong.
Exactly.
Exactly.
All right.
Right on, man.
Well, thanks a lot, Adam.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you very much.