“These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children,” he continues. “More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.” They went to war “predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation…. Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting today in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover they might actually be leading a grab for oil. In a way, they almost expect to be lied to.” “We’re like America’s little pit bull,” one Marine wryly told Wright. “They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.”
The mindset Wright described in Generation Kill is displayed in much greater detail in Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero, the battlefield memoir of Iraq veteran Marco Martinez.
A product of a military family from Albuquerque, Martinez enlisted in Latino street gangs as a teenager. He was “rescued” from a life of private-sector gangsterism through a federally funded, police-supervised school program called GREAT (Gang Resistance Education and Training), which eventually led him to enroll in the ROTC program at his High School. This curriculum prepared Martinez for a career as a state-authorized gang-banger.
“Salvation from a civilian existence is through these doors, boys,” Martinez and several other enlistees were told as they assembled at the local recruiting station. Like most gang-bangers, Martinez was susceptible to an appeal based on tribal and territorial loyalties, so he was an apt pupil at boot camp. Discipline refined his instinct for violence; training enhanced his capacity to inflict it; and the potted platitudes of nationalism sanctified his urge to kill into something he believed was noble.
Reciting the Rifleman’s Creed “got me so fired up that it put me into a blood lust,” Martinez recalls. “I wanted to kill America’s enemies. I could see and taste it.”
That opportunity came in April 2003, one month after George W. Bush ordered the assault on Iraq. Corporal Martinez was part of a 42-man Marine platoon that was dispatched on a “contact patrol” in the town of Al-Tarmiya, a predominantly Sunni town about sixty miles north of Baghdad.
A “contact patrol,” Martinez explains, “is the most coveted of infantry patrols…. Marines on contact patrol become human wrecking balls, leaving maximum carnage in their path, as any person encountered, armed, is to be considered hostile and killed at will.”
This was not the first time Martinez had carried out a mission of that kind. As a street thug, he and his buddies would often go out on “contact patrol” by rolling into a rival gang’s turf, seeking to provoke a firefight by throwing gang signs and calling out their “sets” at their enemies.
“You are to take out anybody displaying any type of aggression toward U.S. forces,” explained the lieutenant commanding Martinez’s platoon prior to the mission in Al-Tarmiya. How residents of a neighborhood could be guilty of “aggression” by displaying hostility toward armed invaders, the lieutenant didn’t explain. In any case, the rules of engagement were clearly intended to bring about the result Martinez described: The Marines were being sent into Al-Tarmiya to provoke a firefight and kill as many people as possible.
Shortly after the platoon was deployed, Martinez’s squad was ambushed by a group of guerrillas. The squad leader was severely wounded. Martinez identified the source of the gunfire, threw a grenade into the nearby building, then stormed in and gunned down four Iraqis.
That this was an act of individual courage is impossible to deny. Martinez’s actions saved the life of his squad leader (who was left crippled by his injury, and actually became a public opponent of the Iraq War after leaving the military). But the word “heroism” isn’t appropriate here – unless we could apply it just as accurately to similar actions taken by a street-level gangster in an inner-city turf war.
“All those times that I’d carried a gun as a teenager had been for sh*t,” insisted Martinez in Hard Corps. “My friends at the time and I were prepared to shoot and get shot at over girls, cars, money, or something as stupid as the way somebody looked at us…. But my Marine buddies and I carried weapons to defend our nation against its enemies. We, like millions who came before us, used the awesome might of America’s military power for liberation, not conquest….”
It takes a formidable gift for self-delusion to refer what was done to Iraq as “liberation,” and a complete hostility to the truth to suggest that the invasion of that country was in any sense a defensive act. Martinez’s rationalization for the state-mandated criminal violence he committed could have been adapted from the hymnal of the Soviet Cheka secret police: “To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles….”
Even when it is fought for purely defensive purposes, war is an unqualified curse. As James Madison famously warned, war is the greatest of all “enemies to public liberty” because it “comprises and develops the germ of every other.” This isn’t only the case with corruption of public policy and the consolidation of political power; the principle applies just as well to matters of individual morality on which the preservation of freedom ultimately depends. This is why Madison lamented the “degeneracy of manners and morals” that inevitably ensues whenever a country goes to war, however briefly – and why he emphasized that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Those facets of war most abhorred by Madison were considered by Karl Marx to be most admirable. Writing in 1851 to his disciples, Marx extolled the revolutionary “virtues” of generational war: “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power.”
How do people who pass through this revolutionary curriculum behave? What does it mean to be people Marx would describe as “fit … for the exercise of political power?” And what would America look like a generation from now – if not sooner – as a result of being immersed in “continual warfare?” One appropriate answer could be found in examining the people who embodied the revolution Marx and his heirs inflicted on Russia – the agents of the Soviet Cheka secret police, the chief instrument of Soviet terror.
The ruling ethic of Lenin’s regime, recall, is that the fundamental political question is not defined by the Golden Rule, but rather “who does what to whom” – and the Cheka, being the enforcement arm of the “Who,” saw no reason to restrain itself in plundering, torturing, and slaughtering those unfortunate enough to be part of the “Whom.”
“This organization is rotten to the core,” observed Bolshevik official Serafina Gopner in a March 22, 1919 letter to Lenin. Those who enlisted to be the “sword and shield” of the revolution were, almost without exception, “common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t like. They steal, loot, rape … practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money.” (7)
“The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately,” reported a Bolshevik regional secretary in Yaroslavl on September 26th of the same year. “Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors.”
A dispatch to Moscow dated October 16th informed Feliks Dzherzhinsky, the head of the secret police, that “Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty, but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close surveillance.”
If those reports from a century ago have a strongly contemporary flavor, this is not entirely coincidental. If we could peel away the veneer of “respectability” from those who rule us, we would be rewarded with a spectacle at least as squalid as the ones described above. More ominous still is the fact that the degenerate elite presuming to rule us has effectively eradicated every significant institutional, legal, and social impediment to the exercise of total power. And they are filling the enforcement apparatus with people who subscribe to the nihilist’s credo “Respect yourself and no one else” – the hip-hop culture’s updating of Lenin’s “who/whom” formula.”