by Laura Slattery
How do US soldiers and citizens of our society find themselves unwitting actors or reluctant bystanders in our current wars? Does nonviolence hold some of the solutions to our present predicament? From having worked for Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service for four years, and after having served as an army officer and participated in several School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) nonviolent protest actions at Ft Benning, Georgia, I offer these observations for reflection.
I begin with a story from the witness at the SOA protest. A platoon of Military Police had presumably been assigned the task of "clearing the gate." They came around 4 pm and in about ten minutes destroyed the memorial - the shrine - that we had spent all day creating at the gate. The soldiers, as they "cleared the gate," tore down the crosses, used their boots to trample Romero’s poster, and threw everything in a dumpster. They then jumped up and down in the dumpster on the banners, photos, crosses, memorials of those who have been tortured and killed in Latin America to make more room. They threw down, heaped up, and trashed everything that had been placed on that fence, save one item, which they carefully removed before the carnage began – a decorated dress green Army uniform that LTC (ret) Buzz Sherwood had hung on the fence. They removed that. That would not be thrown in the dumpster along with the Latin Americans, whose lives were trampled once again; not as important as a US Army Uniform. Did anyone realize the irony of saving the uniform and destroying the crosses? Did anyone realize what the soldiers were, by their actions, revering? Did they themselves realize it - or were they just "Doing their job?"
This is how I saw what they did with my current "nonviolent trainer, social justice advocate" eyes. I tried to see it from their eyes as well. Innocence was lost that afternoon in those ten minutes. How many of those soldiers signed up to trample crosses? The majority were probably Christians. But they had a job to do – a simple task, perhaps "to clear the fence so that traffic may once again resume." But those young adults didn’t sign up for that. They signed up to serve their country, to do what they probably understood as defending democracy and fighting for freedom. But what have we, what has our government, asked them to do? To trample and trash crosses. What has our government asked them to do in Iraq? In Latin America?
Innocence died that afternoon, as it surely does when they get glimpses of what "just doing my job" or what "just following orders" entails. I think Fr. John Dear’s recent experience is pertinent here. Reservist soldiers, who had just been called up to go to Iraq were out at morning Physical Training, jogging down the streets of his small New Mexico town. The US Reservists chanted "Kill, kill, kill" and "Swing your guns from left to right; We can kill those guys all night." They stopped right in front of the rectory and shouted these invectives directly at his home. When John Dear came out of his house and spoke to them, telling them they do not have to kill and that God, in fact, does not want them to kill, they stared at him for a moment, then started to laugh. How much innocence died that morning?
Disassociation and Unquestioning Trust
How could our soldiers, US soldiers, act like this – destroying crosses, shouting desensitizing murderous slogans? How could the US Army deny the populace its First Amendment Right to Freedom of Speech, blaring patriotic music for seven hours drowning out a Guatemalan woman testimony about losing five children in the war, Pete Seeger’s music, and all the other SOAW speakers? How could I have acted similarly when I was in the military – the cadences we sang at West Point were far worse than these. For those who would think that the transgressions of the US Military are a thing of the past, something that just happened at Mai Lai, I would ask them to take a closer look.
It is instructive to look at how militaries can act in such ways (while still being honored by the majority of citizens) and to see either the roots of their attitudes and actions in civil society, or their effects on civil society. Two particularly devastating attitudes that contribute to our soldiers’ actions, I believe, are those of disassociation and unquestioning trust. Soldiers disassociate from what they actually do and say, preferring to perceive themselves as they are told to perceive themselves – as heroes, defenders of democracy. Our nation does the same often acting as a giant imperialist power, yet viewing itself as the moral leader of the world. Soldiers disconnect. This is what I did when I was in the Army. I did things that I thought were not so ethical, but rationalized it away as not being so important. That is why the soldiers laughed at John Dear, I believe. They were not listening to what they were saying, and therefore were not taking themselves seriously and so wondered how he could be taking them seriously. Yet, whether they are taking themselves seriously or not, the damage is done, the desensitization has begun. I doubt any of us at the Academy believed it right to chant "Napalm sticks to kids, huh!" and yet the majority of us did so. I wonder how many of us would even remember that we shouted such things. Disassociation is rampant in our society as well. We get overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems and so just focus on things that we can control. We turn our hearts off. We seem to have some unwritten code that tells us that if someone is not acting appropriately, sanely, in accordance with our concept of normalcy, they are to be avoided and we disassociate ourselves from them. This may be what is occurring at our protests against the war and why many find it difficult to join the dissent, though they agree with the message.
Another reason our soldiers can act in the ways described above is because they have a deep need and/or desire to trust in the government and in authority. The ‘Don’t ask; Don’t tell’ ethic fits the military culture. When a friend of mine got called up to go to Iraq, she said that if the government needed her, she would go, trusting that those in power had weighed all the information and intelligence and had made the best decision for the nation. This was my thinking ten years ago when I volunteered to go to the First Gulf War. But it is no longer my thinking. I want to believe in my government, to support it; I want to believe that everything will be all right, that we are the "good guys" in the fight against "evil." But my experience of living in Latin America and my researching of some of the atrocities that our government has sponsored or even orchestrated, won’t allow me to do so. More and more I find myself questioning what the US is doing training all these soldiers from countries all over the world. In Unmatched Power, Unmet Principles, Amnesty International states that we are training over 100,000 soldiers and police in 150 countries yearly. That is about ¾ of the countries in the world that we are training in how better to "close with and destroy the enemy?" Why are we, the oldest democracy in the world, the experts in the "art of war?" And why are we exporting that expertise to the rest of the world. The unquestioning, uncritical attitude toward our government and authorities is not only prevalent in our militaries, but in our society as well.
Experimentation with Nonviolence
This strong cultural more of trusting in the government and authority combined with our human tendency to disassociate from things unpleasant, make us a reluctant people at times. Our society is reluctant to get involved, to speak out, to align itself with "the opposers of current policy." If we can address these two attitudes we can challenge the current war mongering that is occurring in our country, and, in our name. The practice of nonviolence does just that. It challenges the ‘trust authority’ attitude because it requires its practitioners to always seek truth. It acknowledges that the most truth one person, including ourselves, can have at any given time is partial. It acknowledges that our opponent has part of the truth. The goal of nonviolence is not to win, but to gain greater understanding of the truth, and then to have all sides act on that more encompassing truth. Another, perhaps less daunting way of putting "truth seeking" into everyday, useable language is to say that nonviolence requires its practitioners to "get curious." The SOAW Movement has been so successful because it got curious. Relentlessly so. What was, what is, the US Army teaching Latin American militaries? Who killed Oscar Romero, the Churchwomen? Where were they trained? What were they trained in? And, why are US taxpayers paying for it?!? Other successful movements were so because they got curious. Amnesty International got curious – what would a society look like if we used everyday citizens to try to hold governments responsible for the way they treated their citizens? Greenpeace got curious – why were all the whales being killed and what could ordinary citizens do about it? We need to get curious. Relentlessly curious!
We get tired of being curious, though, especially when we discover some information and try to share it with others only to find out that others do not want to hear that which we have found. It can be very disheartening. And so nonviolence requires of us, courage. Courage not to disassociate and not to judge. We must stay connected, with ourselves internally (with our heart), with others who are like-minded, with others who are reluctant, and with those with whom we are in conflict. The more we connect, the more others will connect. We need to understand the reluctance of our people (again, the getting curious part) so that we do not judge them and despair that we are the only ones who care; so we can help them overcome their reluctance. We need to be truly nonviolent warriors, "relentlessly persistent" as they say in Brazil. It requires of us nonviolence at the deepest of levels. And it begins I believe, with getting curious.
This piece was first published in The Wolf, the Pace e Bene newsletter.
