That first time, I was one of the few white people in a deteriorating Chicago public high school on the far south side of the city. A teacher is escorting me down multiple broad, shabby hallways to the classroom where I was to speak. We pass a room decorated with a total of eight American flags, four posted on each side of its door. "The recruiting office," the teacher says, gesturing toward it, and then asks, "Do they have recruiting offices in the suburban schools you talk to?"
"I'm not sure. I haven't spoken to any on this topic yet," I reply. "They certainly didn't have an obvious one at the public high school I went to, but I do know that there are 10,000 recruiters across the country working with a $700 million a year advertising budget. And I think you're more likely to see the recruiters in schools where kids have less options after graduation."
At that moment, we arrive at the appointed classroom and I'm greeted warmly by the social studies teacher who invited me. Photos of Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and other revolutionary black leaders hang neatly on a wall. He first heard about my desire to talk to students about my wartime experiences through Veterans for Peace, an organization I belong to. "There is no counter-narrative to what the kids are being taught by the instructors in Junior ROTC, as far as I can tell," he says, obviously bothered, as we wait for the students to arrive. "It would be great if you could provide more of a complete picture to these kids." He then went on to describe the frustration he felt with a Chicago school system in which schools in the poorest neighborhoods in the city were being shut down at a record pace, and yet, somehow, his school district always had the money to supplement the Pentagon's funding of the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training) program.
The kids are just beginning to filter in, laughing and acting like the teenagers they are. I'm not encouraged.
"Okay, everyone, settle down, we have a guest speaker today," the teacher says. He oozes confidence of a sort I only wish I possessed. The volume in the room dies down to something approaching a hush. They clearly respect him. I only hope a little of that will spill over in my direction.
I hesitate a moment and then start, and here's a little report from memory on at least part of what I said and what happened:
"Thanks," I begin, "for having me in today. My name is Rory Fanning and I'm here to tell you why I joined the military. I'll also talk about what I saw while I was in that military, and why I left before my contract was up." The silence in the classroom stretches out, which encourages me and I plunge on.
"I signed up for the Army Rangers to have my student loans paid for and to do my part to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11... My training was sometimes difficult and usually boring... A lot of food and sleep deprivation. Mostly, I think my chain of command was training me in how to say yes to their orders. The military and critical thinking don't mix too well..."
As I talk on about the almost indescribable poverty and desperation I witnessed in Afghanistan, a country that has known nothing but occupation and civil war for decades and that, before I arrived, I knew less than nothing about, I could feel my nervousness abating. "The buildings in Kabul," I was telling them, "have gaping holes in them and broken-down Russian tanks and jets litter the countryside."
I can hardly restrain my amazement. The kids are still with me. I'm now explaining how the U.S. military handed out thousands of dollars to anyone willing to identify alleged members of the Taliban and how we would raid houses based on this information. "I later came to find out that this intelligence, if you could call it that, was rooted in a kind of desperation." I explain why an Afghan in abject poverty, looking for ways to support his family, might be ready to finger almost anyone in return for access to the deep wells of cash the U.S. military could call on. In a world where factories are few, and office jobs scarce indeed, people will do anything to survive. They have to.
I point out the almost unbearable alien quality of Afghan life to American military officials. Few spoke a local language. No one I ever ran into knew anything about the culture of the people we were trying to bribe. Too often we broke down doors and snatched Afghans from their homes not because of their ties with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but because a neighbor had a grudge against them.
"Most of the people we targeted had no connection to the Taliban at all. Some even pledged allegiance to the U.S. occupation, but that didn't matter." They still ended up with hoods over their heads and in some godforsaken prison.
By now, I can tell that the kids are truly paying attention, so I let it all out. "The Taliban had surrendered a few months before I arrived in Afghanistan in late 2002, but that wasn't good enough for our politicians back home and the generals giving the orders. Our job was to draw people back into the fight."
Two or three students let out genuine soft gasps as I describe how my company of Rangers occupied a village school and our commander cancelled classes there indefinitely because it made an excellent staging point for the troops -- and there wasn't much a village headmaster in rural Afghanistan could say to dissuade history's most technologically advanced and powerful military from doing just what it wanted to. "I remember," I tell them, "watching two fighting-age men walk by the school we were occupying. One of them didn't show an acceptable level of deference to my first sergeant, so we grabbed them. We threw the overly confident guy in one room and his friend in another, and the guy who didn't smile at us properly heard a gunshot and thought, just as he was meant to, that we had just killed his friend for not telling us what we wanted to hear and that he might be next."
"That's like torture," one kid half-whispers.
I then talk about why I'm more proud of leaving the military than of anything I did while in it. "I signed up to prevent another 9/11, but my two tours in Afghanistan made me realize that I was making the world less safe. We know now that a majority of the million or so people who have been killed since 9/11 have been innocent civilians, people with no stake in the game and no reason to fight until, often enough, the U.S. military baited them into it by killing or injuring a family member who more often than not was an innocent bystander."
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