Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  In a society where access to education and jobs was relatively equal, the pressure of economic necessity might not determine who ended up serving in the military. In a highly unequal society, it was another story. “Only if people have a reasonable range of decent job options can it be said that the choice to serve for pay reflects their preferences rather than their limited alternatives,” Sandel submitted. He went on to quote Congressman Charles Rangel, a Korean War veteran who published an op-ed during the Iraq War that called for reinstating the draft, on the grounds that the enlistment bonuses and educational opportunities offered by the military appealed disproportionately to poor people and people of color who otherwise lacked access to these things. In New York, Rangel noted, “70% of the volunteers in the city were black or Hispanic, recruited from lower income communities.”

  How typical was this? The Pentagon did not track the socioeconomic status of individual soldiers who had been killed or wounded in America’s wars. After the United States invaded Iraq, the scholars Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen began tracking that status on their own, collecting data dating back to World War II on the socioeconomic conditions in the counties from which military casualties hailed. During World War II, the median family income in communities with high casualty rates and communities with low casualty rates was roughly the same, the data indicated. By the Vietnam War, a gap had emerged, with casualties concentrated in communities where the income was eighty-two hundred dollars lower on average. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars fought after the draft was abolished—the gap expanded further, to eleven thousand dollars (in inflation-adjusted dollars). The disparity was equally pronounced when it came to injuries, with citizens from the poorest communities absorbing “fifty percent more non-fatal casualties than the nation’s wealthiest communities.” Because wounded vets were more likely to return to poorer communities, their residents were far more likely to see and feel the impact of war than their affluent counterparts.

  The ideal of shared sacrifice was deeply embedded in American culture, affirmed as far back as the colonial era by the likes of Thomas Paine, who declared that, when it came to answering the call to serve one’s country, “it matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold.” In contemporary America, it actually mattered a great deal, Kriner and Shen concluded. There were “two Americas of military sacrifice,” they argued: working-class communities that shouldered the burdens of war, and wealthy ones that were increasingly shielded from these costs. A key feature of this inequality was that it was invisible, their study found, unnoticed by the large number of Americans (including 57 percent of self-described Republicans) who, in a survey they conducted, expressed the belief that sacrifice was evenly spread across all socioeconomic groups. Most of the respondents who subscribed to this view believed that military service was purely a matter of individual choice, unrelated to socioeconomic conditions.

  To be sure, the ideal of shared sacrifice had never been honored as faithfully in practice as in theory. During the colonial era, more than two hundred laws were passed that exempted citizens from serving in the militias fighting the British army, measures that “benefited the economically successful and the socially well-positioned,” noted Beth Bailey, leaving the burden disproportionately on “the poor and poorly established.” But shared sacrifice was not simply a popular fable. During World War II, scores of famous athletes and celebrities served in the military, as did thousands of Ivy League students, including 453 Harvard students and graduates who died in uniform, a figure only slightly below the number from West Point. Military service during World War II was guided by what the historian Andrew Bacevich has termed “Patterson’s Axiom,” the principle articulated by Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson that in a democracy “all citizens have equal rights and equal obligations” and that the duty of defending the country “should be shared by all, not foisted on a small percentage.” After 9/11, this axiom gave way to a new arrangement that mirrored the inequality in the rest of society, argued Bacevich in his book Breach of Trust, which pointed out that just one in one hundred citizens has actually served in America’s more recent wars. This was the “other 1 percent,” Bacevich submitted, veterans whose fortunes seemed inversely related to those of the plutocrats on Wall Street with whom the term “1 percent” came to be associated after the 2008 financial crash. As Bacevich noted, the 1 percent who bore the burdens of national defense rarely overlapped with the 1 percent at the top of the income scale. “Few of the very rich send their sons or daughters to fight,” he observed. “Few of those leaving the military’s ranks find their way into the ranks of the plutocracy.” A retired U.S. Army colonel whose son died in Iraq, Bacevich was unmoved by the expressions of gratitude these elites sometimes showered on veterans at sporting events, thanking them for their service—a service that, according to a poll he cited, ranked third among the “ten worst jobs” in America.

  The exemption from shared sacrifice wasn’t merely unfair. It was also a key reason “good people” were so disengaged from the wars that other, less affluent citizens fought on their behalf. Like Sandel, the historian David M. Kennedy wondered how different this was from the system of paying substitutes that prevailed during the Civil War. “A hugely preponderant majority of Americans with no risk whatsoever of exposure to military service have, in effect, hired some of the least advantaged of their fellow countrymen to do some of their most dangerous business,” he observed, “while the majority goes on with their own affairs unbloodied and undistracted.”

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  Soldiers who risked their lives on the battlefield were at least accorded some respect for carrying out this dangerous business. Their wounds and sacrifices were honored and recognized. The recognition rarely extended to cyber warriors who sat at computer terminals and whose psychological and emotional wounds were more hidden. Not long after Heather Linebaugh got to Beale, she was assigned to provide over-watch for a mission in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, alerting the marines on the ground to threats—improvised explosive devices, insurgents plotting ambush attacks—that could be spotted on the cameras affixed to the Global Hawk. The work was stressful, not least because a carefully camouflaged fighter or IED could easily escape the camera’s eye. During one shift, a group of marines disembarked from a helicopter and stormed a compound that appeared to be clear of danger. After they entered it, insurgents ambushed them. Heather watched the attack unfold in real time; then she saw one of the marines bleed out.

  A few months later, another convoy fell under attack after an IED exploded, igniting a fuel truck that caused more “friendlies” to die. Once again, Heather watched the live feed in real time. At home afterward, she surfed the internet and clicked on a news story about the incident. The article listed the names of some of the soldiers who had been killed, including one who had a wife and young son. When Heather read this, she began to sob.

  A week later, at a party for her unit, Heather broke down again, this time in front of her supervisor, who tried to comfort her by reminding her that she was “fighting the good fight.” The slogan had been drummed home to Heather during basic training, when new recruits were told their mission was to save lives and to protect America from “terrorists” and “towel-heads.” For all her alternative inclinations, Heather had internalized this message. She believed that she and her peers were fighting the good fight. But at the party, the words of her supervisor rang hollow to Heather, who wondered whether the mission—which had ended disappointingly, with no progress made in rooting out the Taliban—had been worth it. “Nothing was accomplished by that convoy,” she said later. “Those guys died for absolutely nothing.”

  Whether innocent Afghans might also have died did not yet cross Heather’s mind. “I only felt bad about the guys that maybe we would have saved if we somehow had better technology,” she said. “It wasn’t out of any sympathy for the so-called enemy. It was out of self-preservation for our people.” This began to change after the mar
ine whom she befriended over Skype forwarded her documents about the area in Afghanistan she was surveilling. Like Christopher Aaron, Heather was responsible for conducting surveillance operations rather than coordinating strikes. But what she reported could determine whether a missile would be fired, and it now dawned on her that innocent civilians could die as a result. Sometimes, what disturbed her most was not the strike itself but the aftermath, as the smoke cleared and she watched survivors gather up remains or pick through the rubble. “We can’t just bomb someone and fly away,” she said. “We have to follow through. The bomb hit and [we’d] wait for it to cool down a little bit, and then you can see the body parts. You can identify, like—that could be the lower half of his body, that could be a leg, and then sometimes you’ll stick around and watch family come and get them … pick up the parts and put their family member in a blanket.”

  In addition to grinding her teeth at night, Heather coped with the discomfort these images stirred by talking to her mother, who started calling regularly to check in on her. The phone calls drew them closer, not least because they were both struggling. During one conversation, Heather learned that her mother had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. By this point, Heather had taken to drinking herself to sleep to numb the distress she was feeling. Shortly after learning of her mother’s condition, she requested an early hardship discharge so that she could go back to Pennsylvania, both to care for her mother and to alleviate her own agony.

  Perhaps sensing she no longer wanted to be there, the military obliged. In March 2012, three years after she arrived at Beale, Heather packed up her belongings and returned to Lebanon, emotionally fragile and, to her mother and twin sister, physically unrecognizable. She had left Lebanon a baby-faced nineteen-year-old, with round cheeks and luminous blue eyes. Now her face was gaunt and angular, the jawline taut, the cheeks sunken, the eyes drawn and ringed by dark circles that made her look permanently sleep deprived. The lack of sleep was caused by the nightmares she’d started having. In the dreams, evil creatures were stalking her. Like the targets in the drone videos, the creatures looked vaguely like gingerbread men, with thick stubby limbs and chubby bellies, and they possessed mysterious powers, including the ability to follow her around without physically materializing. The invisible creatures were jinn, she was convinced, demons made of smokeless fire that appeared in some Middle Eastern folklore and that Heather now imagined coming after her to exact revenge, both by hovering over her and by revealing the source of her anguish to the people she most loved. In one version of the dream, Heather found an anonymous letter pinned to the windshield of her car. The note was addressed to her father, a computer programmer who lived in the town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and whom she regarded as “crazy wise.” Heather’s fondest memories of childhood were of the times they’d spent together, hiking through the snow-draped woods or fixing up the siding on his house. Kindly and nurturing, he was “the person who taught us about moral obligation, how to make moral decisions, how to respect other human beings,” she said. “Does your father know what you did?” read the note pinned to her windshield in the dream. “Who the fuck wrote this?” Heather wondered. Then she screamed, realizing that one of the gingerbread men was lurking nearby.

  “GRAY, AMBIGUOUS PERSONS”

  Working in the drone program was not the only job that could exact such a toll. In 2008, the same year that Heather enlisted in the military, Francisco Cantú began training to work in a different kind of war zone. Its front lines were not in Iraq or Afghanistan but on the southern border of the United States, where agents of the U.S. Border Patrol policed the flow of drugs and migrants streaming in from Mexico and Central America. Before Cantú took the job, his mother, a former park ranger who was Mexican American, tried to dissuade him, reminding him that his own grandfather had crossed the border a century earlier to flee the tumult of the Mexican Revolution. Cantú was undeterred, drawn to the austere beauty of the landscape and to a job he was convinced would enable him to understand the border in a way nothing else could. If he did end up apprehending migrants, he told his mother, his bicultural heritage would be an asset, enabling him to offer them comfort “by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home.”

  In a memoir titled The Line Becomes a River, Cantú described how this belief unraveled during the three and a half years he spent on the border. When he began training for the job, an instructor flashed lurid images of police officers who had been executed by Mexican drug cartels and warned the would-be agents in the room, “This is what’s coming.” In the field, what Cantú encountered instead were “the little people”: mules transporting drugs for narco-traffickers who ruthlessly exploited them; women and children who crossed the border to escape desperate poverty and violence, often at risk to their lives. In the desert, agents sometimes found migrants who drank their own urine to avoid dehydration. They came across others whose rotting corpses were covered in ants. Cantú was good at tracking down migrants and hauling them into custody, but his proficiency came at a cost. He began grinding his teeth compulsively and having strange, eerie dreams, littered with images of dead bodies and of a wolf that hounded him.

  As he struggled to make sense of these visions, Cantú consulted various books. Among them was What Have We Done, by the war reporter David Wood, about a battalion of Iraq War veterans burdened with moral injury. “Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized not by flashbacks or a startle complex but by ‘sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion’ that manifest not in physical reactions but in emotional responses as subtle as dreams and doubts,” the book explained. The concept resonated with Cantú. “One does not have to be in combat to suffer from moral injury,” he concluded in his memoir, which was published in early 2018. When it appeared, Cantú braced himself for criticism from his former colleagues in the Border Patrol. Instead, the criticism came from the opposite end of the political spectrum. At readings in cities like Austin, immigrant rights activists showed up to call for boycotting his book. Some labeled him a “Nazi.”

  Had Cantú written a book glorifying the Border Patrol, the condemnation might not have been surprising. But the portrait he drew was an unsparing one. In one passage, he described members of the Border Patrol urinating on the personal belongings of migrants. In another, he listed the dehumanizing terms—“scumbags,” “POWs” (“plain old wets”)—that some agents used to describe the people they rounded up. The activists who appeared at Cantú’s readings detected no sign of contrition in these passages, much less any desire to expose the toxic effects of institutional racism. They saw it as evidence of personal depravity and directed their anger at him.

  The effort to discredit Cantú unfolded amid the furor sparked by Donald Trump, who assailed undocumented immigrants as “rapists” and “animals” and openly encouraged Border Patrol agents to treat them inhumanely while dispatching Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to round them up. Cantú’s memoir appeared just as the news surfaced that under a policy known as “zero tolerance” more than twenty-seven hundred migrant children, some of them infants and toddlers, had been separated from their parents. Court documents would later reveal that the parents of 545 children, including 60 who were younger than five, had still not been located more than two years later.* In the face of a public outcry, the Trump administration eventually rescinded the family separation policy, but the use of harsh methods of deterrence along America’s increasingly militarized border continued. In December 2018, two Guatemalan children died while in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol. The Trump administration later adopted a new policy, “Remain in Mexico,” which forced tens of thousands of Central American asylum seekers to wait in makeshift Mexican encampments as their cases were processed. Against this backdrop, some outraged critics came to see all Border Patrol and ICE agents as irretrievably evil, an “American Gestapo” staffed by jackbooted thugs with blood on their hand
s.

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  The outrage was understandable. But before one labels Cantú and other Border Patrol agents “Nazis,” it is worth considering the reflections of a writer who experienced the depredations of the actual Nazis. In an essay titled “The Gray Zone,” the Italian novelist Primo Levi turned his attention to the division of labor in the death camps, where the most sordid and degrading tasks—sweeping up ashes, participating in lethal selections—were often delegated to prisoners, who performed them in exchange for special privileges (an extra scrap of bread, the hope of being spared death). One reason the Nazis resorted to this strategy was a shortage of manpower. Another was moral. As Levi observed, it wasn’t enough for the Nazis to murder their victims. They also wanted to defile them, “to burden them with guilt, cover them with blood, compromise them as much as possible, thus establishing a bond of complicity so that they can no longer turn back.”

  In Levi’s view, this was “National Socialism’s most demonic crime,” orchestrated to rob the victims of their innocence inside a “gray zone” of coerced collaboration where “the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero.” How should the “privileged prisoners” who carried out these functions be judged? The more willful collaborators were “the rightful owners of a quota of guilt,” Levi submitted, having allowed themselves to become “vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt.” Ultimately, though, Levi called for judgment to be suspended, advising that we reflect “with pity and rigor” on their desperate circumstances and the unenviable alternatives they faced.

  The situation Levi described was extreme and, to some extent, unique. In nontotalitarian environments, the room for moral choices is infinitely greater and the price of refusing to collaborate far less severe. But the “gray, ambiguous persons” who were the subject of his essay, pressed into compromising roles by virtue of their abject circumstances, were not so different from the rest of humanity, Levi took pains to emphasize (their spirit was “mirrored” in all of us, he observed, “we hybrids molded from clay”). “The Gray Zone” was also a meditation on power, which “exists in all the varieties of the human social organization,” he noted, and could be wielded in any environment to ensure that defiling tasks were allocated to comparatively powerless groups and individuals. Levi arrived in the camps “hoping at least for the solidarity of one’s companions in misfortune”—hoping, in other words, that the experience of powerlessness would fortify the prisoners to band together and resist collaborating with power. He left with the opposite view. The desperation of his fellow prisoners made them more rather than less susceptible to the blandishments of the authorities, Levi concluded, in ways that sometimes blurred the line between victims and perpetrators. As extreme as the circumstances in the camps were, his essay invites us to consider how disparities in power can lead people at the bottom of any social order to serve as “vectors and instruments” of unjust systems: because their lack of power heightens their desire to exercise it; or because they feel constrained by more subtle forces than the ones that the prisoners of the Nazis faced, such as the pressure of economic necessity.