Veterans Day is About Working Class People, Not Glorifying the Empire

I joined the Navy in 1987 because I had burned too many bridges, desperately needed a job, and the Air Force wasn’t hiring. The Army and Marines sounded like way too much work, not to mention far more dangerous. I was 28, with a Bachelor’s Degree, but too old to join as an officer. I signed on as a Seaman, or E-3, with a promise to be automatically promoted to Petty Officer Third Class, or E-4, upon completion of Electronics Technicians School at Great Mistakes Lakes Naval Station, in Chicago.

I went to boot camp in San Diego, where they put me and a bunch of other older guys into a drill team company, meaning we marched around in a band. It was much more fun than marching around with useless World War II leftover M-1 rifles, but it resulted in an odd sort of enlightenment for both us recruits and the Recruit Training Command brass.

Boot camp drill instructors know how to get inside an 18 year old’s head. When the average age of the boot camp company was 25(thanks to one off the Reagan recessions), the old tricks simply didn’t work. The loud wakeups, the screaming into faces, the constant swear-word vocabulary, just seemed silly to most of us. Plus, the fools had told us about the Uniform Code of Military Justice and even handed out the code itself.

When the drill instructors, all chief petty officers, broke their own rules, we called them out on it. We went through three of them in six weeks, were not allowed to play our instruments at graduation as an intended(and laughable) punishment, and were then sent off to schools or ships, no doubt to the great relief of the CPOs who longed for younger recruits who wouldn’t bother to insist the Navy’s own rules be followed.

My ship, USS Lynde McCormick, by Point Loma, San Diego Harbor, photo US Navy

After spending a year in school in Chicago, I was assigned to a destroyer, which was promptly sent to the Persian Gulf to escort oil tankers through it. It seems the Iranians were messing with them, so somehow it was up to us to keep them safe. For anyone wondering why, some thoughtful sailor had donated Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket to the ship’s little library.

It was a popular read. Old salt sailors said the old jarhead got it right—we were just mercenaries for Big Oil or Big Whatever, get used to it, have some fun when you can, learn from, protect, and rely upon your shipmates if you want to live, and decide whether this Canoe Club is the right career for you.

For most of us, myself included, the Navy definitely wasn’t what we wanted to spend our adult lives doing, so we didn’t re-enlist. There were no hard feelings from those who did; it was little different from putting in notice at a civilian job, but we were called veterans when we got out.

Aside from the little bit of a GI Bill I used to get a paralegal certificate(dead end career #5 for me, at least), and the VA home loan requiring no money down to win the prize of paying a bank a mortgage at a fixed rate for my house, and preference points for local government jobs, I got exactly zero other benefit for my 4 years as a member in good standing of the national war canoe club. My experience is common.

IOW, I went into the Navy because I was working class in a lousy economy, and when I left I was still working class in a lousy economy that has only steadily declined since.

I saw and experienced things I never would have otherwise serving the US Empire—Filipino squalor, the transient atmosphere of British Hong Kong, the unnaturally clean fascistic utopia of Singapore, a good Mexican restaurant run by a Texan in Thailand, dolphins leaping and pacing the ship off of Baja California, the sand fleas of the Persian Gulf, the brightness of the Milky Way on a moonless night in the middle of the Pacific, the power of a typhoon, the feeling of righteousness when our skipper threatened to fire on an illegal Japanese whaler, the gratitude and obvious intelligence of the sperm whales who cavorted around us after the whaler sensibly fled.

My time in the Navy was not wasted.

There is a perception in America, especially among liberals and some socialists, that active duty military people are mindless, indoctrinated servants of the state who will always follow orders. Worse, some say they are depraved, immoral murderers who never would have joined in the first place if they were decent human beings.

They’re mainly just working class Americans, and the time will come when they have to pick a side. It is the responsibility of all who want to see our corrupt, grasping, and failing imperial oligarchy overthrown to keep this fact firmly in mind.

The English Revolution succeeded because of the New Model Army, which also gave us the Levellers whose ideas later helped spur the American one. The French Revolution succeeded because the rank-and-file refused to obey the orders of bubbleheaded aristocratic officers, the Bolshevik Revolution would not have happened without the support of ordinary Russian sailors.

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When things fall apart and the mythical center disappears, it will be the rank-and-file of the US military who will either side with a reactionary regime, stand aside to wait and see, or to decide their duty to the Constitution and their fellow Americans requires them to join their working class brethren in a real revolution against those who expend their own lives for profits and power.

It is the responsibility of real leftists, be they Marxists or anarchists or just plain little-d democrats, to educate and embrace them, not to alienate them. Remember that a plurality of them voted for the Libertarian over both Trump and Hillary. Remember they are working class Americans with minds of their own, and that an awful lot of them are more aware of what is going on than what you are told to believe by the powers that be.

Thank you for reading, but don’t thank a veteran for serving you. Thank a veteran for having enough intelligence to figure out just whom they were serving, and the common sense to realize that they have more in common with you than anyone in the ruling class.