They were forced to do things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives
It took courage for such veterans to go on camera and offer the unvarnished truth about the disastrous wars they helped to fight. They are, of course, far from alone, but as one of the producers of the film told me, many veterans are reluctant to discuss such feelings and insights publicly. Some don't want to reflect on the idea that the wars they fought in were disastrously misguided and didn't end in anything resembling an American victory. Others fear political retribution. Still others prefer to keep such conversations among their fellow vets, in large part because they feel that people who haven't served cant fully understand what they went through.
Its little wonder that many vets keep their feelings about their long years in service within a close circle of friends and other veterans. But whether they choose to speak out publicly or not, a striking number of them are now either antiwar or war skeptical, questioning whether some of our recent conflicts were faintly worth fighting in the first place.
Don't misunderstand me on this. There are indeed veterans speaking out against such unnecessary, unjust wars (past or future). Fifteen of them, for instance, contributed chapters to Paths of Dissent, a volume edited by Quincy Institute co-founder Andrew Bacevich and U.S. Army veteran Daniel Sjursen. A description of a 2023 webinar marking the release of the book caught its main theme perfectly:
[T]hese soldiers vividly describe both their motivations for serving and the disillusionment that made them speak out against the system. Their testimony is crucial for understanding just how the worlds self-proclaimed greatest military power went so badly astray.
There are also entire organizations, including Veterans for Peace (VFP), Common Defense, and About Face: Veterans Against the War, devoted to ensuring that such endless wars remain over and crafting an American foreign policy grounded in diplomacy and defense rather than in a quest for global military dominance. (And, of course, they are distinctly not dedicated, like President Donald J. Trump, to ever more regularly blowing boats out of the water in the Caribbean.)
Common Defense, in fact, goes beyond an antiwar stance to address the underlying ills that make such wars so much more likely. Its members describe themselves this way:
We are the largest grassroots membership organization of progressive veterans standing up for our communities against the rising tide of racism, hate and violence. We vow to organize together against those who seek to divide us so they cannot rig our systems and economy for their own gain.
As for VFP, one of its members, Chris Overfelt, offered a succinct summary of the groups stance in a 2019 House Budget Committee hearing organized by the Poor Peoples Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival. He noted that he had indirectly participated in the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. He then reflected on the consequences of those all-American wars, adding, Neither of these countries will likely recover from that devastation in my lifetime. Nothing I can do will make up for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children killed in these useless wars.
About Faces current campaign, Keep the Military Off Our Streets, reaches out to the 35,000 or more National Guard and military personnel that President Trump has already deployed to U.S. cities and the Mexican border area, offering assistance in exploring your options. As that outfit puts it, If you are a National Guardsperson or active-duty member and you're concerned about the moral, ethical, or legal implications of your situation, you're not alone.
Nor is opposition to such fruitless, devastating conflicts limited to progressives. Trump himself used his 2016 election campaign to hammer Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for supporting the disastrous 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq. And then there were statements like the one that he made at a September 2024 campaign stop in Mosinee, Wisconsin, in which he said, I will expel the warmonger from our national security state and carry out a much needed clean-up of the military-industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to put always America First.
The president has, of course, not faintly fulfilled that pledge, but he said it for a reason to appeal to those in his base who are sick of war and no longer trust corporations or traditional politicians to rein in the war machine.
One of the most interesting political collaborations of the past few years was when the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) teamed up with VoteVets, which describes itself as a home for progressive veterans and their supporters. The two groups worked together to repeal the authorization of military force, or AUMF, passed by Congress after the 9/11 attacks, a document that has been used ever since as a public rationale for numerous wars all over the globe. Dan Caldwell, the head of CVA at the time, explained how the two groups had come to work together in an interview on C-SPAN that included Will Fischer, then the director of government relations for VoteVets:
I honestly did go into the interview expecting a combative conversation but when we started talking about foreign policy, it was clear there were some areas of alignment especially on war powers. The wheels started turning in my head, and we came together and decided to pursue some of these shared goals.
Perhaps most important right now, Major General Paul Eaton, who (among his many other assignments) served as commanding general in charge of reestablishing the Iraqi Security Forces in 2003-2004, has joined with other veterans to roundly criticize Trumps deployment of troops to U.S. cities. As he put it, This [deployment of troops to U.S. cities] is the politicization of the armed forces. It casts the military in a terrible light.
Of course, there are also what might be thought of as warriors for war in this country, veterans who believe the U.S. isn't spending enough on its military or relying on force (or the threat of force) often enough. For example, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Alabama), a prominent voice on national security in the Republican Party, is all in on pushing for yet more Pentagon spending, the development of ever more and different kinds of nuclear weapons, and a quicker trigger for using force (including a possible war with Iran). Then there's General Mike Minihan who, in January 2023, wrote a memo predicting that the U.S. would be at war with China within two years. That was hardly an official U.S. position. He was, in fact, publicly contradicting the stance of his commander-in-chief and yet he was never held accountable for that rogue statement of his.
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