WJ Astore
W.J. Astore Few people will be surprised to learn that the U.S. military is about conformity. Uniformity. Heck, it's one reason why we wear uniforms to begin with. To a certain extent, individuality is tolerated but only if it's harmless and doesn't interfere with unit cohesion or performance -- and, not just performance but image.I can't count the number of times I heard about my Air Force "family" when I wore the uniform, with the message I had to go along to get along; we're all family, so stop grumbling and enjoy your "family" time. A heavy stress on conformity can be a particular burden to civilian spouses, however, who didn't necessarily think they were enlisting when their partner signed up and donned a uniform. In the bad old days, wives of officers were especially burdened with expectations. If they didn't join officers' wives' clubs and otherwise "support" their husbands, they might find themselves ostracized from the "family." Their husbands might see their careers suffer as well, not exactly a dynamic that promotes family values and amity at home. Those bad old days are not entirely over, notes Andrea Mazzarino at TomDispatch.com, and being the wife of a U.S. Naval officer, she should know. I urge you to read her article here at TomDispatch. Nowadays, pressure takes new forms, notably on social media, that crazy 24/7/365 world, with email, Instagram, and Facebook posts (among other social sites) being scrutinized incessantly for right-thinking and right behavior, as judged by the self-anointed keepers of conformity and uniformity. Militaries, again you won't be surprised to learn, are not known to embrace criticism and non-conformity, which is why they should be kept as small as possible within a democracy that is supposed to celebrate or at least tolerate critiques and eccentrics. But here's the rub: The more America celebrates its military and feeds it with money. the more it reinforces anti-democratic forces and tendencies within our larger society. And that's not a good thing in a country where money is speech, i.e. where the richest already rule. (Which is no surprise to military members, as we all know the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.) Here's a substantial excerpt from the article by Mazzarino'. Believe me, she knows of what she speaks. TOMGRAM Andrea Mazzarino, My War on Terror, Up Close and PersonalPOSTED ON [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a small reminder that, for a few more days, you can still get a personalized, signed copy of TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg’s superb new book, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump. (Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright calls it “a valuable and original work of scholarship that focuses a new lens on American history from 9/11 to the January 6 insurrection.”) To do so, just go to the TomDispatch donation page and contribute a minimum of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.A.) and, while you’re at it, you’ll be helping this site stay afloat in an impressively grim world. Tom] It’s hard to imagine how I would have done my work at TomDispatch over the last decade without one crucial resource: Brown University’s Costs of War Project. After all, that website has offered a remarkable look at America’s misbegotten twenty-first-century wars. Since it was launched in 2010, it’s been a constant source of crucial information on this country’s forever wars — with a focus on their costs (in every sense of the term). If you visit that site now, for instance, you’ll find out that a reasonable (if breathtaking) estimate of the cost of those wars over the last two decades would be $8 trillion (not including the $2.2 trillion needed to care for the American veterans of those conflicts over the next 30 years); that the now-ended war in Afghanistan alone cost the American taxpayer $2.313 trillion; that, by the estimate of that project’s researchers, close to a million people have already died in those very wars, including almost 400,000 civilians; that those same conflicts have created at least 38 million refugees and displaced people and so, thanks to growing streams of desperate migrants, helped change the politics of the planet (for the worse); and that this country has conducted counterterrorism operations in 85 countries. And mind you, that’s only to begin to summarize the work produced by the Costs of War Project. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the way the interests of this website and that project have intersected, TomDispatch pieces have regularly cited information from it and, in the case of Stephanie Savell and today’s author, Andrea Mazzarino, have even featured some of the leading scholars and researchers there. Strikingly enough, Mazzarino, a military spouse, therapist, and TomDispatch regular, was one of the founders of that crucial antiwar website and has never hesitated to express her own critical views of America’s disastrously damaging conflicts. In her latest piece, she offers a deeply personal sense of what it’s felt like to hold such views and still remain associated with the U.S. military — and how, in the post-9/11 years, that military has become part and parcel of a distinctly all-American “surveillance” culture. Tom Eyes Are Always on YouLife in the Post-9/11 MilitaryI know what it means to be watched all too carefully, a phenomenon that’s only grown worse in the war-on-terror years. I’m a strange combination, I suspect, being both a military spouse and an anti-war-on-terror activist. As I’ve discovered, the two sit uncomfortably in what still passes for one life. In this country in these years, having eyes on you has, sadly enough, become a common and widespread phenomenon. When it’s the government doing it, it’s called “surveillance.” When it’s your peers or those above you in the world of the military spouse, there’s no word for it at all. Now, be patient with me while I start my little exploration of such an American state at the most personal level before moving on to the way in which we now live in ever more of a — yes — surveillance state. A Navy Wife’s Perspective on Military Life, Post-9/11 “The military sounds like the mafia. Your husband’s rank determines how powerful you are.” That was a good friend’s response, a decade or so ago, when a more experienced Navy wife shamed me for revealing via text message that my husband’s nuclear submarine would soon return to port. Her spouse had been assigned to the same boat for a year longer than mine and she headed up the associated Family Readiness Group, or FRG. Such FRGs, led by officers’ wives, are all-volunteer outfits that are supposed to support the families of the troops assigned to any boat. In a moment of thoughtless excitement, I had indeed texted another spouse, offering a hand in celebrating our husbands’ imminent return, the sort of party that, as the same woman had told me, “All wives help with to thank our guys for what they do for us. It’s key to command morale.” She had described the signs other wives had been making under the direction of both the captain’s wife’s and hers, as well as the phone chain they had set up to let us know the moment the boat would arrive so that we could rush to the base to greet it. In response to my message, she’d replied in visibly angry form (that is, in all capital letters), “NEVER, EVER INDICATE IN ANY WAY OVER TEXT THAT THE BOAT WILL BE RETURNING SOON. YOU ARE ENDANGERING THEIR LIVES.” She added that I would be excluded from all boat activities if I ever again so much as hinted that such a return was imminent. Alone in my apartment in a sparsely populated town near the local military base, my heart raced with the threat of further isolation. What would happen because of what I’d done? And yes, I’d blundered, but not, as became apparent to me, in any way that truly mattered or actually endangered anything or anyone at all — nothing, in other words, that couldn’t have been dealt with in a kinder, less Orwellian fashion, given that this was a supposedly volunteer group. It was my first little introduction to being watched and the pressure that goes with such surveillance in the world of the military spouse. Years later, when my husband was assigned to another submarine, an officer’s wife at the same naval base had burst into tears telling me about the surprise visit she’d just been paid by three women married to officers of higher rank on other boats stationed at that base. Sitting across from her in their designer dresses, they insisted she wasn’t doing enough to raise raffle money to pay for a military child’s future education. Am I really responsible for sending another kid to college? That was her desperate question to me. Unable to keep a job, given her husband’s multiple reassignments, she had struggled simply to save enough for the education of her own children. And mind you, she was already providing weekly free childcare to fellow spouses unable to locate affordable services in that town, while counseling some wives who had become suicidal during their husbands’ long deployments. I could, of course, multiply such examples, but you get the idea. In the war-on-terror-era military, eyes are always on you. Married to the Military (or the Terror Within) On paper, the American military strives to “recognize the support and sacrifice” of the 2.6 million spouses and children of active-duty troops. And there are indeed gestures in the right direction — from partnerships with employers who have committed to hiring military spouses to short-term-crisis mental-health support. Talk to just about any spouse and she’ll — and yes, we are talking about women here — tell you that the most effective and reliable support comes from other wives who volunteer their unpaid time to run FRGs and similar activities. Unfortunately, in the post-9/11 era, as anthropologists Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger have pointed out, ever more aspects of military family life, once thought of as “volunteer,” have become “voluntold” — as in, we’re watching you and you’re expected to do it. Otherwise, your husband’s career won’t advance. Worse yet, all such voluntold activities tend to sweep you into a world of informal surveillance geared not just toward making sure you don’t spill the beans on classified troop movements, but averting possible PR crises over looming military realities like family violence and the rising suicide rates among the troops. After the birth of our second child, a woman with zero mental-health training typically called me weekly to “check in.” She wanted to make sure, she insisted, that I was caring properly for our baby. If I refused to talk with her — and I found her oppressive indeed — she threatened to call in child protective services. I was in graduate school studying to become a clinical social worker, I told her, and knew perfectly well that she had no basis to report me. I wondered, though, what spouses with fewer resources went through when they received such “surveillance” calls. Believe me, national security has gained a new meaning in such an atmosphere. Once, for instance, my husband was confronted by another officer because I’d written a post on an anonymous blog about military life I was then authoring — my identity had just been discovered — describing the unhealthy diet that officers were forced to eat on his submarine. Even this was considered a threat to national security, because I was “undermining morale.” Sometimes, it seemed as if those tasked with waging this country’s never-ending war on terror had a deep urge to create yet more problems of every sort, while validating the assumption that we all lived in a world of ever-present danger. Just a week after my husband and I moved to a new duty station with our toddler, for instance, he approached me one evening in our still empty house after a 16-hour shift on base. His face was pale when, with fists clenched, he said, “I have a favor I need to ask of you.” His new commanding officer wanted me to come by one night so that he and a group of senior officers and their wives could discuss what was “appropriate behavior” in spouses’ groups. Apparently, the spouse of an officer leaving the command had not gotten along with the other officers’ wives. Because my husband’s rank was the same as the departing officer’s, I was to be preemptively warned based on nothing more than the rank of the man I’d chosen to marry. “Yeah, I’ll talk to him,” I said. “But I have some things I’d like him to consider, too.” If I was going to attend such a meeting, I had my own set of topics to discuss — among them, that families shouldn’t be expected to pay $50 a ticket to attend the annual ball and that new mothers shouldn’t be called weekly by the command ombudsman and asked about their parenting skills. The next day, my husband told me his commanding officer felt “like you’re forcing his hand.” His nerves frayed, he took a breath and then whispered (so our toddler couldn’t hear him), “Look, he said if you don’t just come to his house, anything could happen to our family. Anything.” I never did visit that captain’s house, nor participate much during the two years we were at that base. And yet the captain’s ambiguous threat to our family hung over our home the whole time. There were moments at night when I jumped at every noise outside our windows. At a moment when I was alone with our toddler and once again very pregnant, our house was indeed broken into and I even briefly wondered whether the captain was to blame (before quickly dismissing the thought). I started to feel as though the terror of that period was coming from within the military itself. No one attacked my family, but it would prove to be a difficult two years. For example, one evening shortly after my husband returned from a grueling deployment in which his sub had collided with a civilian ship, he shared a text from the captain voicing disappointment that spouses like me had not chosen to go to more events, including the Navy ball. Thanks to families like ours, the captain insisted, command morale was paying a price. We were, he implied, being watched and not only was my husband’s career at risk, but the recent life-threatening crash at sea from which we were all reeling had somehow been caused, at least in part, by lack of spousal participation back here at home. Despite my best feminist efforts to dismiss such a ludicrous suggestion, I felt watched, crushed by guilt, powerless to reverse what seemed like an endless string of negative events affecting our family. Most of all, I felt increasingly lonely. And as it turns out, I was anything but alone in that sense of constant surveillance and my reaction to it. According to a 2021 independent survey conducted by fellow military spouse Jennifer Barnhill, more than a third of spouses felt direct pressure from commanders or indirect pressure of other sorts to participate in spousal group activities. And yet, a majority of spouses surveyed sensed that they had little influence over the way the military actually ran. In other words, spousal groups often provided not much more than a veneer of legitimacy for the claims of military leaders that they cared about families. My Personal War on Terror Terrorism can be anywhere. That’s the message repeatedly conveyed to me by my military community since the war on terror began. In these years, a chilling, if unspoken, corollary to that thought developed: anyone whose lifestyle and viewpoint the military did not agree with or approve of was a danger. Over the last decade, I’ve felt as if the tiny community of discontented, activist-minded spouses I’ve associated with and the mob-like structures of the military conformists who eternally try to rope us in or dismiss us seemed to recreate post-9/11 America in a microcosm. A deep and ever-present fear of whistleblowers and dissent was increasingly pervasive in our world. It was typical of those years that, in 2010, Army Private Chelsea Manning was convicted — by a military judge — of 17 charges, including violations of the Espionage Act, and sent to jail after she provided more than 700,000 classified military documents to Wikileaks. Among other things, they detailed evidence of American military leaders failing to investigate hundreds of cases of rape, torture, and abuse by the Iraqi police; a 2007 U.S. Army helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters journalists; and secret counterterrorism operations in Yemen that, in my opinion, Americans should have been informed about. In 2013, I watched in similar horror the attack on whistleblower Edward Snowden for leaking classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) on its staggering global and national surveillance activities. He also revealed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s order for Verizon and other major telephone companies to provide the NSA with the phone records of ordinary Americans on a daily basis. This was not the country I had ever imagined myself living in or my husband defending. Snowden found himself stranded in Russia in the face of a possible lifetime behind bars here for revealing the true nature of the national security state’s version of post-9/11 America. I had, by then, helped co-found Brown University’s Costs of War Project to offer a more accurate picture than most Americans then had of the nature and price (financial and human) of this country’s never-ending war on terror. My colleagues and I were working, among other things, to raise awareness here that we were increasingly subject to an all-encompassing kind of surveillance that would undoubtedly have impressed some of our favorite foreign authoritarian leaders — maybe even Vladimir Putin himself. After all, the dust had barely settled around the collapsed Twin Towers in New York City when the administration of President George W. Bush began conducting electronic surveillance of a growing range of Americans without a warrant in sight. In 2008, Congress would allow that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve such programs without any prior indication of individual wrongdoing. As of this year, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. government has more Americans under electronic surveillance through wiretapping and the bulk collection of communications without probable cause than it does through wiretaps based on likely involvement in criminal activity (the standard for such surveillance prior to 9/11). In the war-on-terror years, the FBI’s powers to secretly compel the release of information on individual bank and Internet use have dramatically expanded (no individualized suspicion necessary). The FBI also sweeps information from tens of thousands of people — citizens and non-citizens alike — into its databases, which then becomes available to tens of thousands of government employees, potentially marking a person for life as a suspected terrorist. Similar developments are taking place at the state and local levels. Some police departments, for instance, have adopted tactics resembling those of a police state. Since 9/11, the New York City Police Department, the largest in the country, has typically used facial-recognition and license-plate-reader cameras to monitor heavily trafficked areas on a constant basis, in the process effectively gaining information on Americans protesting in public. For instance, the New York Times reports that, based on a recent Amnesty International analysis, a person participating in a protest in part of downtown Manhattan “would be captured on the Police Department’s array of Argus video cameras for about 80% of that march.” The Department also uses software to sweep social media sites and store information on individuals without a warrant. In Minneapolis, according to former FBI agent Terry Albury, now serving prison time for leaking classified information, FBI agents mobilized local citizens of Somali background, along with local law enforcement, into “Shared Responsibility Committees.” These were ostensibly to help ensure neighborhood security by identifying young people at risk of radicalizing, while actually encouraging committee members to report on one another. PLEASE READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE ON TOM DISPATCH's MAIN WEBSITE Copyright 2021 Andrea Mazzarino William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is regular contributor to TomDispatch and also the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac, 2005). |
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