Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  When the drone program was created, it seemed to promise to spare soldiers from the intensity (and the danger) of close-range combat. But fighting at a remove could be unsettling in other ways. In conventional wars, soldiers fired at an enemy who had the capacity to fire back at them. They killed by putting their own lives at risk. What happened when the risks were entirely one-sided—when the ethic of survival that prevailed on the battlefield (“it’s either kill or be killed”) didn’t actually apply? In his book Killing Without Heart, M. Shane Riza, a retired U.S. Air Force instructor and command pilot, cited a dictum attributed to the French philosopher Albert Camus: “You can’t kill unless you are prepared to die.” By making them impervious to death and injury, unmanned aerial vehicles turned warriors into assassins, Riza averred, a form of warfare that was bereft of honor. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired army colonel and former chief of staff to Colin Powell, shared this view, fearing that remote warfare eroded “the warrior ethic,” which held that combatants must assume some measure of reciprocal risk. “If you give the warrior, on one side or the other, complete immunity, and let him go on killing, he’s a murderer,” he said. “Because you’re killing people not only that you’re not necessarily sure are trying to kill you—you’re killing them with absolute impunity.”

  Unlike conventional soldiers, drone operators were not eligible for Bronze Stars or combat pins adorned with the letter V, which stood for “valor.” In 2013, the then defense secretary, Leon Panetta, announced that a special “Distinguished Warfare Medal” would be awarded to remote combat operators who had made important contributions to national defense. The proposal elicited a flood of complaints from military veterans, with some dismissing the decoration as a “Nintendo” medal. In the face of this backlash, the military shelved the plan, eventually agreeing to award cyber warriors pins with the letter R, which stood for “remote.” The negative reaction underscored how, within the military as in society at large, the “joystick warriors” in the drone program were seen as less honorable and courageous than real soldiers who stepped on the battlefield and put their lives on the line. It also underscored an irony, which is that this inferior status derived from the very thing that made drone warfare appealing to politicians and the public—namely, the fact that it enabled America to carry out lethal operations in other countries with no risk of incurring more casualties. Drone operators who killed from afar were very much the agents of a society that, after the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, wanted to have the military conduct its business at a minimal cost in blood and treasure, at least for our side.

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  Langley Air Force Base in Virginia is home to a division of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Wing, a unit of six thousand “deployed in place” cyber warriors. They work on what is known as the ops floor, a dimly lit room equipped with a riot of computer screens streaming footage from drones circling over numerous battlefields. Many of the enlistees arrayed around the screens are in their twenties; were it not for their military boots and combat fatigues, they might pass for stock traders or Google employees. But the decisions they make have far weightier consequences. According to a survey by a team of embedded air force researchers who surveyed personnel at three different bases, nearly one in five ISR analysts said they “felt directly responsible for the death of an enemy combatant” on more than ten occasions. One analyst told the researchers, “Some of us have seen, read, listened to extremely graphic events hundreds and thousands of times.”

  “Overall, I.S.R. personnel reported pride in their mission, particularly supporting successful protection of U.S. and coalition forces,” the survey found. But many also struggled with symptoms of distress—emotional numbness, difficulty relating to family and friends, trouble sleeping, and “intrusive memories of mission-related events.”

  As at Creech, steps had been taken to try to mitigate the stress: shorter shifts, softer lighting, embedded chaplains and psychologists. But the workload of ISR analysts had also increased as drones assumed an increasingly central role in the battle against the Islamic State and other foes. According to Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Thurman, who was the unit’s surgeon general during the time I visited, the number of acknowledged missile strikes ordered by Central Command in the United States rose substantially between 2013 and mid-2017, even as the size of the workforce remained unchanged. “You’ve got the same number of airmen doing the same number of mission hours but with a one thousand percent increase in those life-and-death decisions, so of course their job is going to get significantly more difficult,” he said. “You’re going to have more moral overload.”

  A bald man with a blunt manner, Thurman sat across from me in a windowless conference room whose walls were adorned with posters of squadrons engaged in remote combat operations. Also in the room was Alan Ogle, a psychologist who was an author of the survey of the 480th Wing. On the PTSD scale, Ogle said, members of the unit “didn’t score high,” owing to the fact that few had been exposed to roadside bombs and other so-called life-threat events. What seemed to plague them more, he told me, were some forms of “moral injury.”

  Two members of the ISR Wing described to me how their work had changed them. Steven, who had a boyish face and sensitive eyes, was originally from a small town in the South and joined the military straight out of high school. Four years later, he told me, he no longer reacted emotionally to news of death, even after the recent passing of his grandmother, with whom he was extremely close. The constant exposure to killing had numbed him. “You’re seeing more death than you are normal things in life,” he said. On the ops floor, he’d watched countless atrocities committed by ISIS. During one mission, he was surveilling a compound on a high-visibility day when ten men in orange jumpsuits were marched outside, lined up, and, one by one, beheaded. “I saw blood,” he said. “I could see heads roll.” Ultimately, though, what troubled him most was not bearing witness to vicious acts committed by enemy forces, but decisions he had made that had fatal consequences. Even if the target was a terrorist, “it’s still weird taking another life,” he said. Distance did not lessen this feeling. “Distance brings it through a screen,” he said, “but it’s still happening, and it’s happening because of you.”

  Another former drone operator told me that screens could paradoxically magnify a sense of closeness to the target. In an unpublished paper that he shared with me, he called this phenomenon “cognitive combat intimacy,” a relational attachment forged through close observation of violent events in high resolution. In one passage, he described a scenario in which an operator executed a strike that killed a “terrorist facilitator” while sparing his child. Afterward, “the child walked back to the pieces of his father and began to place the pieces back into human shape,” to the horror of the operator. Over time, the technology of drones had improved, which, in theory, made executing such strikes easier but also made what remote warriors saw more vivid and intense. The more they watched targets go about their daily lives—getting dressed, eating breakfast, playing with their kids—the greater the operators’ “risk of moral injury,” his paper concluded.

  This theory was echoed by Shira Maguen’s findings. In one study, she discovered that Vietnam veterans who killed prisoners of war had especially high rates of trauma. Maguen believed the reason was that the victims were not strangers to them. “When someone is a prisoner of war, you get to know them,” she explained, “you have a relationship with them. You are watching them; you are talking to them. It may be that with drone operators they also know their subjects fairly well: they have watched them, so there’s a different kind of relationship, an intimacy.”

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  For Christopher Aaron, the hardest thing to come to terms with was that a part of him had enjoyed wielding this awesome power—that he’d found it, on some level, exciting. In the years that followed, as his mood darkened, he withdrew, sinking into a pro
longed funk shadowed by shame and grief. He avoided seeing friends. He had no interest in intimate relationships. He struggled with quasi-suicidal thoughts, he told me, and with facing the depth and gravity of his wounds, a reckoning that began in earnest only in 2013, when he made his way to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, to attend a veterans’ retreat run by a former machine gunner in Vietnam.

  The weather during the retreat was rainy and overcast, matching Chris’s somber mood. The discussion groups Chris sat in on, where veterans cried openly as they talked about their struggles, were no more uplifting. But for the first time since leaving the drone program, Chris felt that he didn’t have to hide his true feelings. Every morning, he and the other veterans would begin the day by meditating together. At lunch, they ate side by side, a practice called “holding space.” In the evenings, Chris drifted into a deep slumber, unperturbed by dreams. It was the most peaceful sleep he’d had in years.

  At the Omega Institute, Chris struck up a friendship with a Vietnam veteran from Minnesota, whom he later invited up to Maine. In the fall of 2015, at his friend’s suggestion, he went to a meeting at the Boston chapter of Veterans for Peace. Soon thereafter, he began to talk—first with members of the group, later at some interfaith meetings organized by peace activists—about funeral processions he’d witnessed after drone strikes where more coffins appeared than he expected. It was painful to dredge up these memories; sometimes his back would seize up. But it was also therapeutic, a form of social engagement that connected him to a larger community.

  At one interfaith meeting, Chris mentioned that he and his colleagues used to wonder if they were playing a game of “whack-a-mole,” killing one terrorist, only to see another pop up in his place. He had come to see the drone program as an endless war whose short-term “successes” only sowed more hatred in the long term while siphoning resources to military contractors that profited from its perpetuation. On other occasions, Chris spoke about the “diffusion of responsibility,” the whirl of agencies and decision makers in the drone program that made it difficult to know what any single actor had done. This was precisely the way the military wanted it, he suspected, enabling targeted killing operations to proceed without anyone feeling personally responsible. And yet, if anything, Chris felt an excess of remorse and culpability, convinced that targeted killings had very likely made things worse.

  The relief Chris drew from talking about his experience would not have surprised Peter Yeomans, a clinical psychologist who trained with Shira Maguen and who ran an experimental treatment for moral injury that was rooted in the sharing of testimonials, initially at weekly meetings where veterans came together to talk among themselves. After ten weeks, the treatment culminated in a public ceremony that the participants invited members of the community to attend. One goal of the treatment was to help veterans unburden themselves of shame, Yeomans told me. Another was to turn them into moral agents who could deliver the truth about war to their fellow citizens and, in turn, broaden the circle of responsibility for their conduct.

  One evening, I attended a ceremony in a small chapel on the third floor of the VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, where Yeomans worked. Seated on a stage in the chapel were a number of veterans, among them a slightly built man with an unkempt brown beard who sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap. His name was Andy, and when invited to speak, he told the audience that he grew up in a violent home where he watched his older brother and baby sister endure abuse, which made him want to “protect the defenseless.” After high school, he enlisted in the military and became an intelligence operative in Iraq. One night, on a mission near Samarra, a city in the “Sunni triangle,” a burst of sustained gunfire erupted from the second-story window of a house. Andy said he “called air” to deliver a strike. When the smoke cleared from the leveled home, there was no clear target inside. “I see instead the wasted bodies of nineteen men, eight women, nine children,” Andy said, choking back tears. “Bakers and merchants, big brothers and baby sisters.

  “I relive this memory almost every day,” he went on. “I confess to you this reality in the hope of redemption, that we might all wince and marvel at the true cost of war.”

  The room fell silent as Andy went back to his chair, sobbing. Then Chris Antal, a Unitarian Universalist minister who ran the weekly meetings with Yeomans, invited members of the audience to form a circle around the veterans who had spoken and deliver a message of reconciliation to them. Several dozen people came forward and linked arms. “We sent you into harm’s way,” began the message that Antal recited and that the civilians encircling the veterans repeated. “We put you into situations where atrocities were possible. We share responsibility with you: for all that you have seen; for all that you have done; for all that you have failed to do,” they said. Later, members of the audience were invited to come forward again, this time to take and carry candles that the veterans had placed on silver trays when the ceremony began. Andy’s tray had thirty-six candles on it, one for each person killed in the airstrike that he called in.

  Yeomans and Antal told me over dinner afterward that they believed audience participation in the ceremony was crucial. Moral injury, they suggested, was exacerbated by society’s growing disengagement from war, which left veterans like Andy to struggle with the costs and consequences on their own. Antal added that, in his opinion, grappling with moral injury required reckoning with how America’s military campaigns had harmed not only soldiers but also Iraqis and civilians in other countries.

  For Antal, broadening the scope to include these civilians was both a spiritual mission and a personal one, because he bore a moral injury of his own. It was sustained when he was serving as an army chaplain in Afghanistan. While there, he attended ceremonies in which the coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers were loaded onto transport planes to be sent home. During one such ceremony, held at Kandahar Airfield, Antal noticed drones taking off and landing in the distance and felt the flicker of conscience. The contrast between the dignity of the ceremony, during which the fallen soldier’s name was solemnly announced as taps was played, and the secrecy of the drone campaign, whose victims were anonymous, jarred him. “I felt something break,” he told me. In April 2016, Antal resigned his commission as a military officer, explaining in a letter to President Obama that he could not support a policy of “unaccountable killing” that granted the executive branch the right to “kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, for secret reasons.” In a doctoral dissertation he later submitted to the Hartford Seminary, Antal reflected on the “moral hazard” created by the covert drone program and the growing reliance on special operations forces, which enabled civilians to “know less, risk less, and thus care less” about “the violence inflicted in their name.” Consequently, he wrote, “veterans are often the ones left holding the pain society would rather ignore or forget. Meanwhile, the US military has a presence in almost every country on earth, and has more funding and greater kill capacity than ever before.”

  The secrecy of the drone program made it all the more essential that the public heard more from service members about what they saw and did. But it also made it riskier for people who had served in the program to share their stories. Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer for national-security whistleblowers, told me that several former drone operators she represented had suffered retaliation for talking about their experiences (she said one client had his house raided by the FBI and was placed under criminal investigation after speaking on camera with a filmmaker). When Christopher Aaron began speaking publicly about his own past, he contacted Radack, fearing the same thing might happen to him. Initially, nothing did happen. But in June 2017, after someone hacked into his email, a stream of anonymous threats began flooding his inbox. The hostile messages, calling him “scum” and warning him to “shut his big blabbermouth,” were also sent to his father, whose email was likewise hacked. The barrage of threats eventually prompted Chris to hire a lawyer to try to identify who was behind the hara
ssment (the attorney he worked with, Joe Meadows of Bean Kinney & Korman, specialized in internet defamation), and to contact both the FBI and the police.

  The experience left Chris shaken. It did not stop him from continuing to speak publicly about his experience. On one occasion, Chris was invited to speak at an event titled “Faithful Witness in a Time of Endless War.” It took place on the campus of a Mennonite high school in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, in a small auditorium whose stage was festooned with a drone memorial quilt. The quilt had thirty-six panels. On each one was the name of a person who had been killed by a U.S. drone strike. Chris approached the lectern wearing a brown blazer and a subdued expression. He reached forward to adjust the mic and thanked the event’s organizers for inviting him to tell his story. Before sharing it, he asked for a moment of silence “for all of the individuals that I killed or helped to kill.”