A veteran speaks

An absolutely fascinating piece has run in the Washington Post which I consider essential reading for anyone right at this particular moment — the author, William Quinn, who joined the Army a little before 9/11, served in Iraq for some time as a interrogator, then returned to the US to attend college at Georgetown last year and has since also joined the ROTC.

Many parts of his piece are almost overly familiar by default, not by intent. He speaks clearly of things that anyone who has been paying attention to the last few years will have known well — that readjusting to civilian life is extremely uncomfortable, that there is an almost willful lack of discussion about Iraq on the homefront, even/especially on a college campus (something I can more than agree with), and so forth. Nonetheless they’re important to see here as reminders to those who have missed it.

When he’s on a full roll with his piece, though, man he’s good. Consider (yes, once again) the question of torture and abuse, and importantly the role of an interrogator in a situation like his. For those still in love with waterboarding — or, shifting gears, for those thinking that all military members are monsters — these words can’t be clearer:

We were permitted to sit across from a detainee and talk to him — everything else was banned. This was a good rule. Torture is easy to justify. Interrogators assume that everyone they question is culpable; it’s part of the job. If a detainee can’t provide information because he has none, the temptation to slip into brutality is very present. Without rules in place, I might have been brutal, but I never so much as raised my voice to a detainee.

…

Over the next year, I spoke with hundreds of detainees. I spent my days with members of al-Qaeda, Baathists, Sunni nationalist insurgents and Shiite insurgents. I listened to their life stories, and I wrote hundreds of reports about their experiences. It consumed every moment of my day.

I wasn’t involved in the short interrogations where we try to learn where the next bomb is located or how many insurgents are in the next safe house. The interrogations I conducted lasted weeks and sometimes months. We were trying to understand the big picture: the support networks, the international connections and the enemy’s motivations. The long-term nature of our conversations forced me to see the men I interrogated as human beings. Most were Iraqi. Many were extremely intelligent, and some had had a great deal of formal education.

Their levels of cooperation varied. Some were forthcoming with information; some were not. Some seemed to enjoy the solitude of prison; some were led to despair by it. They all remain in my thoughts, and I’m sometimes surprised by my feelings. Recently, I read in the International Herald Tribune that a man I’d interrogated had been executed in Baghdad. If anyone ever deserved execution, it was he. But I still felt a pang of regret. His life, for all its horrors, mattered to me.

To say that this man is an anti-Deroy Murdock on the point is to understate. And damn if I don’t feel proud knowing that he served and did his job to the best of his abilities, to assist and help in a fraught, terribly complicated situation. We need more like him.

And we have them. Later in the essay, he sums up his thoughts on his fellow servicemembers in ways both rah-rah jingoists and anti-military ranters would find impossible to fully square with their cartoonish world views, explaining why he joined the ROTC:

I felt a bit guilty for having done only one tour in Iraq while friends of mine have done two or three. And I didn’t want to forget the war. I may be prejudiced, but many of my college peers seem self-absorbed. I didn’t want to end up like that.

You could rightly say a lot of negative things about soldiers. Many are crude. Some visit prostitutes; some commit adultery. I’ve known some who are bigots. It would be a lie to say that every soldier behaves honorably at all times. When I was stationed in South Korea from 2003 to 2005, I was often embarrassed by soldiers who were loud, obnoxious and insulting to Koreans. Men in their early 20s act like men in their early 20s, whether they wear a uniform or not.

Nonetheless, the Army’s values are important to soldiers. They may not always live up to them, but they do when it matters most. Soldiers are selfless; they are courageous; they are loyal. The most interesting intellectual conversations I’ve had have been with others in the military. They discuss things not to impress you but because they’re trying to figure them out. They’re faced with difficult situations, and they want to make sense of them. Though many privately question our government’s policies, they do their duty, which lies beyond the political debate.

This culture of duty is at odds with the culture of individualism and self-promotion that seems paramount here in college. And yet, the divide between my soldier friends and my fellow students isn’t the result of any fundamental differences between the people themselves. Many of my peers at school know much more about the world around them than my fellow soldiers do — international relations is a popular subject at Georgetown. My Army friends used to laugh when they saw me reading the Economist; my friends here think everyone should read it. Students talk about refugees from Iraq, North Korea, Burma and Darfur with sincere compassion. One of my friends told me: “I want to dedicate my life to educating people about the sufferings of others.”

That’s a wonderful goal, but I often feel that the words ring hollow. Students’ true priorities are demonstrated by their daily activities: They have friends to meet, parties to attend, internships to work at, extracurricular activities to participate in, papers to write and classes to attend. They’re under a lot of pressure to build a strong resume for whatever company or graduate school they apply to after college. They’re under no pressure to be concerned about those who are less fortunate — or those who fight wars on their behalf.

I’ve bolded those core words because they can’t be bolded enough. That is something that can’t be emphasized, repeated, understood enough. Right there — right in those few sentences above all else — you see something that puts the lie to shameless posturing that assumes that soldiers aren’t humans, aren’t thinking, lack the capacity to be informed citizens. This is no attack at just those who portray the military in the worst possible terms at all times, but also at those people who want their soldiers to be nothing more than tools for the Administration that they hold in a higher place in their hearts than the actual country we live in or the ideals it should stand for, who assume that soldiers are the ‘real’ patriots like themselves, who don’t want to hear that they too have their own doubts and questions.

Sorry, that has never washed. And this man will be the first to tell you that he’s not saying he speaks for all soldiers, or that all agree with his own beliefs and concerns. What isn’t he saying in that bolded section that is anything less than the ideal of, yes, debate — of discussion? I’ve spoken before about how I’m eternally grateful and proud of the fine upbringing my parents provided in terms of accepting and understanding how political debate and discussion can work, and the fact that my dad was a Navy man further underscored what I expected not simply to be a possible ideal, but a baseline of behavior. I claim no perfection on that point, but I recognize it where it exists, and Quinn has nailed it so thoroughly that I am vitally impressed, as a writer, as a fellow citizen.

Honor Veteran’s Day as you choose, I will do so honoring the military my dad served in and embodied, the one that Quinn speaks of — frank in acknowledging its flaws, proud in describing its ideals. I will take the complicated and self-aware picture over the cartoon, and so should we all.

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