Racism in the U.S. Military Part One: The Effect

Aside from making us laugh, lessening tension, and relieving stress, comedians play a much more integral role in society that usually goes unnoticed. They intertwine their humor with the truth, or at least some postulation of the truth, in order to make it more palatable to an otherwise inert audience. This phenomenon dates as far back as the appearance of the Court Jester, who was the one figure with enough leeway to criticize the King because he used comedy to do so. In the modern era, however, the archetype of the Court Jester manifests itself in numerous ways, from political talk show hosts like John Oliver, to stand-up comedians like Louis C.K. If you really analyze the content of their speech rather than consume it passively, you will sometimes pick up on the subtle lessons they are teaching us. I do not know if it is always intentional to push whatever message they happen to be pushing; it often seems as if it is unintentional. But regardless of intent, the veracity of their lessons is still valuable, or else they would struggle to evoke laughter. It can be very funny when someone points out some nonsensical aspect of our zeitgeist that we either take for granted or think about behind closed doors, but are never willing to admit publicly.

Doug Stanhope is one such comedian who illustrates this beautifully in a performance in 2004 when he questioned the near-universal assumption that we should support the troops.

“You’ve gotta support the troops, right?” To this, the audience cheered, only for Stanhope to cut them off a few seconds later.

“Wrong again,” he said chuckling at their moans. “I’m not saying don’t support the troops. I’m saying I support people on an individual basis. I’ve gotta meet the troops first.” 

Later, he continues, “But some troops are dickheads. You know them, some are fucking assholes!” He then tells a story of one soldier in a bar who wanted to hammer Doug’s head flat because he knocked over his beer.

You should check out his performance for yourself. It is really funny because he nails that blind spot in American culture perfectly. We constantly criticize each other for not “supporting the troops,” or “respecting our nation’s veterans,” but rarely does anyone stop to ponder whether or not the person in military fatigues sitting at the cafe is worthy of adulation before thanking them for their service. But the comedy, of course, is mostly theoretical. If you scrutinize the U.S military more critically, you will discover that there is a remarkable contagion of bigotry and hatred among its ranks, and it must be dealt with at a systemic level.

Bravo Company, Afghanistan, 2010

A Rolling Stone article details the case of a group of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan in 2010.  Jeremy Morlock and Andrew Holmes, both members of Bravo Company’s Third Platoon, diverged from the rest of the group while their Platoon Officers were busy talking to one of the village Elders. They were in a farming village in the Kandahar province suspected of housing Taliban insurgents, but there did not seem to be any signs of terrorist activity. The two soldiers found a boy at the far end of the village working in a poppy field. He was wearing a cap, a green jacket, and a welcoming expression. One soldier commanded him to stop, and both men crouched behind some cover. With only a few other soldiers off in the distance standing as sentries and no other Afghans in sight, Morlock and Holmes lobbed a grenade in the boy’s direction and then began firing at him with an M4 carbine and a machine gun.

Why did they do this? 

By their own admission, it was just for the sake of killing an Afghan. Long before the crime, many soldiers in Bravo Company had fantasized about killing a Haji, a pejorative term for a Muslim used in the U.S. military. But it was more than just two rogue idiots involved in this vile racism. After the shots rang out across the village, Morlock feigned panic over the radio, exclaiming that he was under attack. Hearing this from a position on a nearby hill, Adam Winfield explained to his partner that it was probably just a staged attack and not to worry.

Back at the scene of the murder, one of the local village Elders broke out in an enraged paroxysm, trying to inform the Company Staff Sergeant, Calvin Gibbs, and the other troops that Morlock was the one to throw the grenade. But they all ignored him. In fact, an officer ordered one of his men to ensure that the boy was dead by pumping a couple rounds into his head rather than administering medical support. Later when the soldiers were performing a routine examination of the corpse, stripping it naked to check for tattoos and taking fingerprints, Holmes decided he needed a bit of celebration. He took pictures holding the bloodied boy’s head up by the hair like a trophy. Even Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs moved the boy’s arms and mouth like a puppet to make it appear as if it were talking, then cut off one finger and gifted it to Holmes.

It turned out that when they brought the body to a village Elder for identification, he recognized it. It was his son, 15-year-old Gul Mudin. 

Emboldened by the experience, the soldiers of Bravo Company embarked on a killing spree for the next few months, killing several more Afghans.

The Cover Up

Staged killings were supposedly a common topic of conversation among the Company, and were understood to be illegal by “pretty much the whole platoon,” according to one soldier. The only reason this story broke was that a whistleblower named Justin Stoner, who, despite his ironic last name, told everything to higher authorities after some of the murderous soldiers beat him for complaining about them constantly smoking hash in his tent. In the wake of the news, the Pentagon cracked down on any information having to do with the killings. They barred any sergeants from giving interviews; threatened the soldiers with solitary confinement if they spoke to the press, and even visited homes of their family members in the States to retrieve any photos that may have been sent. 

The entire story was framed by the military as just a few rogue soldiers breaking the law, subsequently arresting only a dozen low-ranking troops and no officers, though internal military records and interviews by investigators revealed a much different story.

Even if you disregard the explicit testimony by soldiers in the company that the higher-ups were well-aware of the atrocities, the blatant, ubiquitous culture of killing Afghans would have been impossible to ignore. The soldiers took plenty of photos of severed fingers, heads on sticks, and mutilated bodies, sharing them with each other like baseball cards. They even took videos of Afghans being gunned down and stored them right alongside UFC tapes and “Iron Man 2,” with one of the videos featuring the death of some Afghans with a music soundtrack overlaid. They frequently shared stories of cold-blooded murder with other soldiers, even some they had never met before because they were so confident and unashamed. The acceptance of such horrific crimes was pervasive, and the commanders were almost certainly complicit, but some of them were eventually promoted rather than punished.

Officially, only a few murders were committed by Bravo Company, but the real number is likely extremely higher, given the photos of dead Afghans that went without any explanation or investigation. The government does not treat these kinds of offenses with the same seriousness when they occur on foreign soil, and it is incredibly easy to spit out some half-assed alibi about self-defense that will pass without much scrutiny. But even if it was only a few dead civilians, the impact would be much larger than the unimpressive number would suggest. 

The central rule in any counterinsurgency campaign is that you must gain the support of the local population. That is how you collect intelligence, which will allow you to execute precise attacks on the terrorists without collateral damage to the innocent. If the civilians are hostile to the foreign government suddenly marching through their streets, then they will withhold information, assist the insurgents, or even join them. The U.S. did not do this effectively in Vietnam for example, where almost the entire infrastructure was obliterated and the civilian population exterminated, sometimes for sport. 

The book, “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife,” by John Nagl shows how the British military carried out a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya during the 1950s using tactics designed to earn the support of the locals. Just imagine yourself for one moment, sitting at home wherever that may be, as Russian troops roll into town in tanks and helicopters claiming to be trying to help by eliminating the gangs that have recently been killing people. If word spread around the community that those Russian forces have executed tons of harmless 15-year-old boys -- the same boys who went to school with your own, the same boys who bought food from you at the store, the same boys who were your children or your neighbor’s children -- you would be furious. Hell, I would support an insurgent group if it meant removing the Russians from the community and exacting vengeance for those dead boys.

I focused on the case of Bravo Company because it paints a picture of what wartime atrocities look like in detail. They obviously do not represent the entire military, but data I will present in part two suggests that this kind of problem is not limited to just one rogue platoon. There exists an institutional culture that permits horrific counterinsurgency policy, does not question authority, ignores red flags, and hides controversy from the public. This needs to change.

How Not to Repress an Insurgency

In Afghanistan, the local population sometimes did create an uproar over a single death. While Bravo Company was patrolling a village a few miles from base, three men broke off and found a compound with a man presiding over some children inside. One of the soldiers later reported that he seemed friendly and had no animosity towards them, but that didn’t matter. They pulled him from the building, forced him to his knees in a field, sprayed him with bullets, and then planted a grenade on his body. It turned out the man was a peaceful Muslim Cleric, and after his wife and kids were removed from the scene, screaming, one soldier took a finger from the corpse as a memento. The village was indignant; the district’s leader complained to the top commanders, who completely dismissed the incident and accepted the soldiers’ story of events without question.

Before joining Bravo Company, Sergeant Calvin Gibbs worked for the personal security detail of one of the top commanders in Afghanistan, Colonel Harry Tunnell, who  openly derided the counterinsurgency strategy as being better suited for “social scientists,” and said that, “political correctness dictates that we cannot talk about the oppressive measures employed during successful counterinsurgency campaigns.” 

One can speculate how many other military officials were influenced by the stupidity of this man and subsequently passed that stupidity down the hierarchy. This is a prime example of how a pathological culture develops; respectable figures spew total nonsense, their inferiors don’t question them, and then it becomes normal.

Bravo Company was deployed in Afghanistan in an effort to pursue the Taliban, but when their patrols consistently found nothing, frustration swelled to an unbearable degree. Soldiers who had witnessed friends incapacitated by IEDs needed revenge, so killing Afghans indiscriminately became an outlet for that rage. They reportedly devised many different plans to stage murders, including dropping candy outside of their truck, then gunning down the children who run to pick it up.

One technique the group settled on was to stage an attack while they were traveling in armored vehicles. One soldier would throw a grenade out the top so that it exploded nearby, sending shrapnel into the vehicle. Then, he would shout, “RPG!” to which the entire platoon unleashed a barrage of indiscriminate gunfire into the neighborhood of huts across the road. This occurred multiple times, and since no damage assessments were ever conducted, it is impossible to know how many casualties and wounded there were as a result.

Another technique they used was to simply plant weapons on the bodies of the Afghans they killed, and then report it as self-defense. In one case, Staff Sergeant Gibbs executed a random man, planted an AK-47 on his body, then claimed that he shot at Gibbs until the gun jammed. A lieutenant arriving on the scene discovered that the gun was not jammed, and was later told by locals that the accused man was deeply religious and would not have known how to operate a firearm. Despite this, no investigation took place. 

In another incident, the Platoon was driving down a road at night when they caught sight of someone idling on the side of the road. After stopping, shining their lights at him, and ordering him to lift up his shirt to show he had no explosives, the man began walking towards the convoy. They opened fire, later discovering that he was deaf and possibly mentally impaired. It was a simple, tragic misunderstanding, but the sinister part of the story comes after the shooting. One of the commanders ordered the troops to search the area for a weapon they could plant on the body, and eventually, someone retrieved an AK-47 magazine they had stolen from a wrecked police vehicle on another occasion.

After the Pentagon tried to cover up the gruesome details of this racist story, and the military did almost nothing to hold anyone higher than an inch up the totem pole accountable, Morlock summed up the attitude among troops in Bravo Company quite eloquently.

“None of us in the platoon – the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant – no one gives a fuck about these people.”