Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  5

  The Other 1 Percent

  Christopher Aaron joined the drone program for idealistic reasons. Heather Linebaugh joined it for more practical ones. For her, the military was not a cause. It was an escape route, a one-way ticket out of the place where she feared she would otherwise be stuck for the rest of her life.

  Heather was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she lived until the age of six, when her parents’ rocky marriage ended in a bitter divorce. Afterward, she and her twin sister bounced around a string of makeshift residences with their mother before eventually settling in Lebanon, a small town surrounded by cornfields and dairy farms. Like Bethlehem and Allentown, Lebanon had once been home to a thriving steel plant. By the time Heather’s family arrived, foreign imports had decimated the steel industry, reducing the plant to an unsightly cluster of fenced-off brownfields that flanked the railroad tracks running through town. Other than steel, the town’s most celebrated product was Lebanon bologna, a dark, wood-smoked version of the popular deli meat. One New Year’s Eve, a twelve-foot-long, two-hundred-pound Lebanon bologna was hoisted into the air and dropped. Another year, a camera crew came to one of the smokehouses to film an episode of a TV series, showing viewers how the bologna was made. The series was called Dirty Jobs.

  A couple of diners, some strip malls, country roads that cut through the surrounding fields and disappeared into the rural hinterland: this was all there seemed to be in Lebanon and the adjoining counties. To Heather, an imaginative child who wrote poetry and developed a precocious interest in art, the town seemed dreary and lackluster, a provincial backwater where she felt like an oddball. It didn’t help matters that she and her sister were mercilessly teased at the local high school by their peers, farm kids who drove tractors and listened to country music. Heather gravitated to the more abrasive sounds of grunge bands and punk rock, music that appealed to her edgy sensibility and to the sense of alienation she felt.

  In a different town, from a different family, Heather might eventually have found relief from her isolation by attending a small liberal arts college. In Heather’s household, where money was always short, this wasn’t an option. After high school, she briefly enrolled at a community college in Lebanon, taking classes in the art program, which she came to feel was a waste of time (the quality of the classes was scarcely better than at her high school). She also got a job as a waitress at a local bar, which was where she met her boyfriend, a navy veteran who was among the regulars. When he invited her to move in with him, Heather leaped at the chance, figuring her luck was turning. “I was like, ‘oh, sweet,’” she recalled. A few months later, her boyfriend came home drunk and told her to move out.

  The breakup left Heather heartbroken and, even more so, petrified: that she would be trapped in Lebanon forever, cycling through an endless loop of bad relationships and dead-end jobs. It was this fear that led her to drive to a nearby strip mall one morning and edge her way to the counter of a military recruitment center.

  Joining the military had not figured prominently in Heather’s vision of the future, but she was desperate for a change of scenery and, she hoped, of fortune. Her initial plan was to join the navy, where her ex-boyfriend had served and which she figured would enable her to travel to far-off, exotic places, but there was no one at the navy desk that day. Instead, she struck up a conversation with a recruiter from the air force, who invited her to become a deployable ground station imagery analyst. Heather had no idea what this was, but it sounded faintly glamorous. After scoring high on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, she found herself on an intelligence base in a heat-drenched town in Texas, breaking down the feed from Reaper and Predator drones. In January 2009, she was transferred to Beale Air Force Base, an hour north of Sacramento, in the foothills of the Sierras. During her first week there, Heather shadowed a mission in Afghanistan with two staff sergeants, who homed in on a target making his way down a rutted dirt road. “We’re gonna take him out,” one of them said. Heather peered up at one of the computer screens on the wall of the low-slung trailer they’d squeezed into. She watched the screen flash and then saw the thermal signature of blood oozing from a corpse. It was creepy, but also exciting. “I thought, yeah—we blew something up!” she said.

  It fell to imagery analysts to help determine when such strikes were warranted and to provide reconnaissance for soldiers carrying out counterinsurgency missions on the ground. One night, Heather was chatting over Skype with a marine stationed in the area of Afghanistan that she was monitoring. Heather offered him advice on what to buy his girlfriend for Christmas. He thanked her for helping out his battalion. Then he asked her if she had read any of the intelligence documents describing the history and cultural practices of the region they were patrolling. When Heather said no, he sent her some of them, figuring it would enhance her ability to do her job.

  The documents Heather received were fairly anodyne—lists of Afghan surnames, descriptions of different dialects and ethnic tribes. Yet when she started reading them, a wave of unease washed over her. Until that point, her knowledge of Afghanistan had been drawn mainly from the jihadist videos she had watched during basic training, chilling footage that underscored the vicious cruelty of the Islamic terrorists with whom America was at war. “I thought everyone there was a member of al-Qaeda,” she said. Working as an imagery analyst reinforced this impression. The targets under drone surveillance never had specific names. Come to think of it, Heather never actually saw their faces. All she could make out on the video feed were hazy images of their bodies. Occasionally, Heather joked with her peers that they weren’t real people; they were gingerbread men.

  In the months that followed, Heather began to notice things she hadn’t before—a man patching together the wall of a house, a family gathered around a cooking fire. She also started to wrestle with internal doubts. A lot of U.S. soldiers had died in the missions she had monitored. So had a lot of people whose connection to terrorism she now began to question. In one strike she witnessed, the target appeared to be a man carrying a mortar. The victim turned out to be a woman cradling a small child in her arms.

  For a while, Heather dealt with the uncomfortable feelings these thoughts triggered by going to a bar after her shift let out and getting wasted. Eventually, she decided to consult a military psychologist. She told him she was beginning to question the point of what she was doing—even, she added, the morality of it. She wasn’t sure the drones always struck appropriate targets, she confessed. In fact, she knew they often did not.

  The psychologist called Heather’s first sergeant to suggest that she be transferred to a desk job for a while. The request was denied, on the grounds that she was needed on mission. Heather went back to serving as an imagery analyst, and her mood continued to darken. Sometimes after strikes, she would duck into the bathroom, lock the door, and cry. At night, she started grinding her teeth compulsively. One morning, she felt a piercing pain in her jaw; the grinding had cracked a molar. She went back to the psychologist, who, after assessing her deteriorating mental state, put her on suicide watch.

  “THE PRESSURE OF ECONOMIC NECESSITY”

  Heather Linebaugh began serving in the military at the end of 2008, shortly after the election of Barack Obama. She began serving, in other words, at a moment when the military campaigns launched after 9/11 started fading from the headlines and Americans stopped thinking about the endless wars that were being fought in their name.

  For the most part, the public did put these wars out of mind. But there were a few holdouts and exceptions. Sometimes on her way to Beale, Heather approached the entrance to the base and noticed a small band of protesters huddled near the gate. The protesters were mostly older—baby boomers with gray beards and walking canes, clad in fleece jackets and Birkenstocks—and they were trying to get her attention, chanting slogans, holding aloft banners, and, sometimes, clutching baby dolls splattered with fake blood.

  Among the regulars at these protests was
a woman named Toby Blomé. She lived in El Cerrito, a small city in the Bay Area, in a one-story house surrounded by hedges and festooned with peace signs. MOTHERS SAY NO WAR, read a poster on one of the windowsills of Blomé’s home. NO DRONE KILLINGS, NO ARMS SALES! declared a sign on the lawn. Even the front doorbell—RING ME FOR PEACE—confronted visitors with a message. After I rang it one afternoon, Blomé, a tall, fair-skinned woman in her late fifties, opened the door and invited me inside.

  Originally from Southern California, Blomé grew up during the era of the Vietnam War, a conflict she first learned about by leafing through mass circulation magazines like Time and Life, which published harrowing photos of Vietnamese civilians whose villages had been strafed and burned by U.S. bombs. The pictures made an indelible impression on her, but Blomé did not become politically active until much later. In 2003, she attended a demonstration in San Francisco against the Iraq War. While there, an activist from Code Pink, a feminist peace group, handed her a flyer that summoned women to spend a month in Washington, D.C., to do “antiwar work.” Blomé had never heard of Code Pink, but the message in the flyer called to her. After discussing the idea with her husband, she decided to take a monthlong break from her job (she worked as a physical therapist) and go to Washington.

  Ever since, Blomé had been organizing peace demonstrations in the Bay Area and beyond, she told me over tea in her living room, which was cluttered with peace signs and protest props, including an assortment of miniature caskets strewn across the floor, each one labeled with the name of a country (Somalia, Yemen, Iraq) where U.S. drones had struck. Draped over a table in the kitchen was a sheet of plastic next to a jar of paint that she’d been using to touch up another set of props: fifteen life-size cardboard figures, representing the victims of a recent drone strike in Afghanistan, that she was planning to haul up to Beale for a protest and vigil the following day.

  The protest would be small, drawing no more than a few dozen people, which Blomé attributed to a combination of apathy and disinformation. Unlike during the Vietnam War, Americans were no longer shown images of homes that were burned and destroyed by U.S. bombs, she said with a sigh. They were instead told about “precision strikes” in distant places that few people could locate. For a pacifist who thought every day about the harm these strikes could cause, this was a dispiriting thought. But Blomé refused to succumb to despair. She subscribed to the idea that peace came incrementally through small actions, she told me, judging each protest a success if it changed even one person’s mind. Among the people whose minds she most hoped to change were the desk warriors on the front lines of America’s new virtual wars. Blomé viewed the drone operators at Beale both as victims—targets of the “heavy-duty brainwashing” that persuaded young people to join the military—and as perpetrators who were responsible for pressing the buttons that could cost innocent civilians their lives. “They are the ones that are doing the killing,” she said, “so they have a responsibility.” One goal of the protests was to expose active-duty soldiers to critical information that might prompt them to do some soul-searching and, perhaps, experience a change of heart. This is why Blomé and her peers positioned themselves near the base’s entrance and confronted the service members reporting for duty with attention-grabbing banners and props. DO THE DRONES HEAR THE CRIES OF THE CHILDREN DYING ON THE GROUND? read a sign unfurled at one demonstration. A lot of the cars that passed by ignored their presence, Blomé acknowledged. But she had met former drone operators who told her they started thinking in new ways “when they saw peace activists outside.” At nearly every protest, someone would roll down their window to take a pamphlet or wave, she said.

  * * *

  Given how disillusioned she became, one might imagine that at some point Heather Linebaugh was among those who waved good-naturedly at the Code Pink protesters. Instead, she glared through her sunglasses at them, bristling at their self-righteousness. Far from appreciating their presence, Heather viewed it as an affront, as if she and her peers needed a bunch of peace activists from Berkeley and San Francisco to have their consciences roused.

  “They assumed that we don’t give a shit, that we’re just a bunch of brainwashed, nonhuman robots,” she said. “They would say, ‘You know you’re killing people from across the world—you don’t care about it, you have no conscience.’ But they didn’t know us. They didn’t know what kind of shit we had to see; they didn’t know most of us wanted to go home and fucking kill ourselves.

  “There’s a reason that after work we’d all go and get trashed, then talk about how fucked-up mission was this week,” she went on. “I would go home and drive past these people protesting and then go have nightmares.”

  It wasn’t just the protesters’ blindness to her distress that upset Heather. It was also the air of superiority she felt they gave off, an impression inflected by differences in social class. The ranks of Code Pink were dominated by educated women from middle-class backgrounds who could afford to devote their time to protesting America’s wars without worrying about how to pay their bills or make ends meet: people like Toby Blomé. The ranks of the drone program were filled with people like Heather for whom this was an unimaginable luxury, high school graduates from depressed rural areas and hard-luck towns like Lebanon, Pennsylvania. As during the Vietnam War, when some soldiers returning home felt stigmatized by college students from more affluent families who had secured draft deferments, Heather bitterly resented the judgment of people who had the privilege not to be in her shoes. “I can guarantee that none of you has ever been put in a fucking situation where you have to kill someone or have people that you care about be killed,” she said of the Code Pink demonstrators. The protesters were equally blind to the power dynamics within hierarchical organizations like the military, she felt, shouting antiwar slogans at low-ranking enlistees who had little say over the scope of the drone campaign. “They’re personally attacking these people who have no control over what’s going on,” she fumed. “We have no control on that base over what’s going on with the drone program.”

  In fact, some might argue, Heather and her peers had a lot of control. If enough of them quit or became conscientious objectors, it would almost surely have gotten the military’s attention, not least because the high burnout rate in the drone program made staffing missions challenging. Unlike young people who had been drafted to fight in Vietnam, moreover, nobody had forced Heather to enlist in the military. She had chosen to do so, joining the all-volunteer military that emerged after the Selective Service ended the draft in 1973. Convention holds that Richard Nixon embraced this change to drain momentum from the antiwar movement, whose campaign of draft resistance became increasingly popular as opposition to the Vietnam War spread. But as the historian Beth Bailey has shown, although Nixon saw the political benefits of ending the draft, the voices that ultimately persuaded him to alter the system were not left-wing college students protesting the war. They were right-wing economists like Martin Anderson, a disciple of Milton Friedman’s who headed a White House commission that called for military service to be reframed as a matter of individual choice (Friedman was also on the commission). The free market would do a better job than the state of furnishing America with a professional fighting force, Anderson and his peers argued, a view that struck a chord among conservatives who saw conscription as a misguided form of government engineering and an infringement on individual liberty.

  Decades later, this argument didn’t just appeal to conservative economists. It appealed to many liberal college students as well, including the Ivy League undergrads who enrolled in the political philosopher Michael Sandel’s immensely popular course at Harvard, “Justice.” As Sandel noted in his book of the same title, when he asked students in the course whether they favored a draft or an all-volunteer army, nearly all said an all-volunteer army. It would be better for everyone, most agreed, if citizens served in the military by choice rather than compulsion. In the same lecture, Sandel posed another question: Would it
be fair to allow wealthy citizens to pay poorer citizens to fight for them in wars? As the students were informed, this was not a hypothetical idea. During the Civil War, hiring substitutes to serve in the Union army was legal and had enabled tens of thousands of affluent Americans—among them J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie—to avoid military service. Nearly all of Sandel’s students said this would be unfair, constituting “a form of class discrimination.”

  Sandel then posed one more question: “If the Civil War system was unfair because it let the affluent hire other people to fight their wars, doesn’t the same objection apply to the volunteer army?” The military recruits who served in the all-volunteer army were paid collectively by taxpayers, after all, receiving an array of material benefits (enlistment bonuses, educational opportunities) in exchange for their willingness to serve. In theory, those who elected to serve did so freely. But what if this choice was made disproportionately by citizens who otherwise lacked access to these benefits? “If some in the society have no other good options, those who choose to enlist may be conscripted, in effect, by economic necessity,” noted Sandel. “In that case, the difference between conscription and the volunteer army is not that one is compulsory while the other is free; it’s rather that each employs a different form of compulsion—the force of law in the first case and the pressure of economic necessity in the second.”