I received an “Undesirable  Discharge” from the U.S. Army because I trusted my gut instinct & kept going AWOL after being a “good soldier” for six months. And no, I was anything but politically aware back then. I didn’t follow the news, so I didn’t really know much about what was happening in the Vietnam war. My guess is that because rebellion & revolution was in the air in the 1960s & early 70s, I was predisposed to distrust the U.S. Army & the federal government.

Moreover, I didn’t enlist in the army because I wanted to but because I was in the lottery & knew that they’d draft me soon if I didn’t join one of the branches. I chose the army because it required the least amount of time, two years. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about the college deferment option, or I definitely would’ve taken that route.

Anyway, it didn’t take me long to develop a strong hate for the whole experience. Now I know that some guys thrive in the military experience & love the whole, structured experience. But for me, I hated the authoritarianism, the fact that our “superiors” could scream in our faces, etc. I can’t tell you how many of my “superiors” made me so angry that I had to struggle not to punch their lights out.

And the irony was that after taking a battery of tests in the first week of my “Basic Training,” me and about four or five other guys from my company kept being pulled-out & taken to these meetings with some high-ranking officers. I was confused about the rankings with the “scrambled eggs” on the bill of their hats, the stripes on their arms, the medals on their chests, etc. but I knew they were pretty high-ranking officers.

Why I was in this little group was a mystery to me. The only thing I could figure was that I had been an avid reader all my life & they told me that I was reading at the 11^th grade, sixth month level when I was in the sixth grade. Well, talk about high-pressure salesmanship, they basically promised us the moon i.e., they told us that we could go into whatever M.O.S. (Military Occupational Specialty) that we wanted to & that they’d station us wherever we wanted to be stationed around the world.

There’s one thing you learn very quickly in the army, don’t believe anything they promise you, especially the recruiters who will tell you anything to get you to sign that contract. While their attempts to seduce me into re-upping (extend my contract to four or six more years & go to Officer Candidate School) I kept respectfully turning down their sales pitches. I was tempted to tell them that I didn’t even want to be a squad leader (ten guys).

I was disgusted from the first week as I observed many petty, little spirits & egos who loved fucking with the brand-new guys the moment they stepped off the bus like we’d done just a week earlier. Furthermore, some guys had trouble making it through the obstacle course or dealing with the daily PT (physical training). Not to brag but I had always been active as a teenager i.e., wrestling, bike riding, swimming, climbing trees, gymnastics, etc. so the physical aspects of my basic training weren’t shit.

My greatest challenge was the psychological games they run on you. Drill sergeants screaming insults & orders in my face, just a few inches from my nose. I saw their game, break down our identities as individuals & brainwash us into good little soldiers who would walk off a cliff if they ordered us to. I also had to contend with one little G.I. Joe wannabe who frequently flipped me shit because I wasn’t gung-ho like him. I didn’t spit-shine my belt buckles or my boots. I didn’t make the super tight, hospital corners when making my bed up in the mornings. I did the bare minimum necessary to keep our platoon (about 40 guys) sergeant off my ass.

After a few weeks of this scrawny, little Mexican guy who probably weighed about 120 lbs. if that, fucking with me, I invited him to step into the head (bathroom) one night. I made sure we were alone & I didn’t raise my voice, but I looked him straight in the eye & told him, look, you play G.I. Joe all you want to, but you get off my ass or we can settle it right here & now. He didn’t fuck with me anymore after that.

That’s enough of all that so let me fast forward to the point where I took that fateful & scary first step of rebellion. After completing basic training, I was transferred to Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. They were going to train me to be a combat field medic but on the first night we were there & filling out a bunch of paperwork, they said, “we need some clerk typists, who wants to be a clerk typist?” I raised my hand; the guy asked me if I could type & I said yes. (I had one class on how to type when I was in middle school & I think I received a D?

Well, three days later they made me a clerk typist & I found it very amusing. Remember what I said about not trusting their promises? When I first spoke with the army recruiter & he read through a long list of possible jobs, I chose clerk typist because it sounded like an easy job. The recruiter said, “sorry, if you want to be a clerk typist, you’ll need to add on another year.” I said forget it because again, the only reason I chose the army was because it had the least amount of time, two years.

And lo & behold, six months later I was a clerk typist. I didn’t have to go through the usual A.I.T. (Advanced Individual Training), I delivered paperwork between officers, filled out Article 15s, etc., I had my own room, got to go to the head of the chow line whenever I was hungry, could go into town practically whenever I wanted to, etc. In other words, I had it made.

For a while, I found myself working in the same job as that first night when we got off the bus from the airport, filled out all the paperwork, & were assigned to where we were to bunk & the guy had asked who wants to be a clerk typist. I worked with maybe three or four other guys & we sat on our asses for long periods of time waiting for the next busload of guys to arrive.

Naturally, we often talked about our hometowns & etc. and we felt homesick. And I began to think, why am I here? Is this going to be my life for the next year and a half? So, thoughts of going AWOL started percolating in my brain & one night, I went for it. Unfortunately, my face must’ve had guilty written all over it because a couple of M.P.s at the airport busted me & took me back to the base.

My company commander thought I was just a little mixed-up, so I was supposed to be fined half a month’s pay & had to mop floors a couple of nights. Well, I met an older guy who had been trying to get out of the army for a while & he told me, “Bottom-line Rob, the army doesn’t give a shit that you’re unhappy & want out. You have to show them that you’re more trouble than you’re worth. So, keep going AWOL but turn yourself in just before 30 days is up so they can’t classify you a deserter.”

He had also told me that as long as I kept going AWOL, they couldn’t ship me out because I’d be tied-up in court martial proceedings. I figured, well, I’ve started this so I may as well follow through, but it was one of the scariest periods of my life up to that point. I was defying the U.S. Army & I didn’t know for sure what they’d do to me. Send me to military prison for five years? Were they right when they told us we’d ruin the rest of our lives, etc.? I couldn’t go to my mom’s house because she definitely wouldn’t have approved.

She was proud of me when I enlisted and now, I was no better than those “dirty hippies.” The hardest thing was swallowing my pride & having to ask “friends,” if I could crash on their couches, sleep in their garages, etc. I felt so low at one point that I briefly entertained the thought of suicide & the very thought of it scared the shit out of me.

On my second AWOL escape, I thought, well they busted me at the San Antonio airport last time, so I’ll outsmart them & I took a bus to El Paso & caught a flight to L.A. from there. It was a close one though, because while in line at the El Paso airport, I was talking to a guy who was AWOL too but just before we were to board the plane, the F.B.I. asked for his I.D. and busted him.

There were moments of humor to all this though, the army in its usual incompetence was supposed to be docking my pay but they’d screw-up & give me my full pay and I’d say to myself, okay you stupid shits, I’m outta here and I’d be off to L.A. yet again. My mom must’ve learned from my sisters or brother that I was AWOL and hanging around the neighborhood & I found myself living under her roof again.

I’d gone AWOL three or four times at this point, I believe? But the army didn’t seem to be taking me seriously, so I decided to stay gone & was AWOL for close to two & a half months I believe? Then early one morning there was a knock at the door, I saw one guy in a suit, walk down one side of our house while the other guy was knocking on the front door & I panicked & started to climb out a window but the one agent had picked a strategic location so he could watch two sides of the house simultaneously.

They were F.B.I. and they arrested me, but they were cool in that they didn’t handcuff me. They took me to some tiny, military jail in San Pedro & I was transferred back to the stockade at Ft. Ord where I’d done my basic training. I did 11 days in the stockade and the Fort’s commander was fed-up at having to deal with all of us AWOL assholes & they put a piece of paper in front of me saying that if I waived my right to the G.I. Bill, I’d be discharged with an “Undesirable.” I jumped at the opportunity & had to hitchhike all the way to L.A. flat broke, but I was free at last!

Of course, none of this had anything to do with the war itself, I only knew when I was there in Texas, that half of us were going to be shipped to Vietnam & the other half would be going to Germany. I freely admit that if I knew for sure that I’d be transferred to Germany, I would’ve stayed in, but I wasn’t about to risk my life and maybe be shipped to Vietnam.

It wasn’t until years later & after I’d become interested in politics that I learned about the totally fabricated i.e., grand lie, Gulf of Tonkin “incident.” How long were we in Vietnam? I believe it was approximately ten years & we had 56,000 Americans killed in that phony war. I don’t know how many poor souls were maimed by losing an arm, a leg, etc. to say nothing of the mental & emotional Hell that many of them still suffer from to this day. And don’t forget about Agent Orange which our government denied for years.

Moreover, we’re not supposed to mention or care about the fact that we may have killed as many as two million Vietnamese people. But for the past 45 years or better, I have been obsessed about learning the dirty secrets & lies behind our endless stream of wars. I have conservatively spent at least 50,000 hours learning about our shameful past, present, & the spooky future before us.

So, it came as no surprise to me after we’d invaded Afghanistan then Iraq, it was all a pack of lies yet again to sucker the public into going along with all the death & destruction. And what about the cost of these wars? I heard an estimate recently that we spent something like $20 trillion over the course of our twenty years in Afghanistan.

What did we accomplish in these wars? Did we gain some great geopolitically strategic advantage? How are the citizens of those countries doing after we withdrew? If memory serves, China was our greatest fear & threat and was why we had to invade Vietnam & interfere in its civil war. Remember the rationale, we had to avoid/prevent the “Domino Effect,” of all the nations in that part of the world from becoming Communist. Yet not long after we withdrew from Vietnam, Nixon & Kissinger were applauding themselves for their great breakthrough in developing “Détente” with Communist China who soon became one of our biggest trading partners.

How’s Iraq after our “liberation?” We bombed their infrastructure back to the Stone Age. But remember, we’re the creators of Democracy around the globe. Yep! The Middle East is now a hornet’s nest & a viper’s nest of terrorists. Of course, it wasn’t before we came in and “liberated” it and opened the floodgates of pent-up hostilities that go back centuries between the Sunnis & the Shiites. But that’s American foreign policy & wisdom in a nutshell i.e., establish those self-fulfilling prophecies then step back as the carnage unfolds & declare, “See, we told you.”

This is what the war planners dub, “Making the World Safe for Democracy.” What a sick, perverted sense of humor those evil bastards have! At least they used to be more honest when it was called, “The War Department.” Talk about Orwell’s “Doublespeak.”

The spark that ignited or inspired me to write this piece came from a movie I rewatched a couple of months ago, Shock and Awe directed by Rob Reiner. This movie was based on the true story of the Knight Ridder news organization & clearly showed how the mainstream media has betrayed the American public & served the interests of the 1% who own them.

Another great movie based on the truth about the totally fabricated campaign pushed by the George W. Bush White House that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, was Fair Game . The Bush White House deliberately revealed the identity of a top C.I.A. agent, Valerie Plame, in an effort to silence her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, who had a very stellar & courageous reputation for his work in the Middle East.

Getting back to Shock and Awe, the snippet of information that absolutely blew my mind came from an intelligence analyst who met clandestinely with the editor of Knight-Ridder, John Walcott, and when asked about why the Bush administration had let Osama bin Laden slip away at Tora Bora, he replied, “if they kill or capture bin Laden, the support for the war goes right down the shitter.”

Let that percolate in your mind for a few minutes. In other words, in order to keep the war fever burning in the public’s mind, they needed a bogeyman, a person who represented the evil unleashed against America on 9/11. So, even though Bush & Cheney actually had their eyes fixed on invading Iraq for control of its oil fields, bin Laden was a useful scapegoat who would guarantee the flow of the billions of our tax dollars into the Pentagon, to keep the illegal & immoral war against Iraq going. The administration put on a full-court press so-to-speak in terms of cherry-picking & outright lying about Saddam Hussein to manufacture a justification for invading & occupying Iraq.

The movie briefly mentioned an organization called P.N.A.C. (Project for the New American Century) but they didn’t tell us a whole lot about it. It wasn’t a secret organization & it basically was their blueprint for dominating the world in the coming 21^st century. It was established in 1997 and three of its members were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, & Paul Wolfowitz, the three key architects of the plan to invade Iraq in the Bush administration.

In fact, the organization called for regime change in Iraq in its statement of principles back in 1997. Many Americans probably aren’t even aware of the fact that for many years, the U.S. loved Saddam Hussein & gave him many weapons of mass destruction even as he murdered & gassed his own people, especially the poor Kurdish population of Iraq.

“[PNAC’s] ideology was summarized in a major position paper, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, in 2000. This document advocated a global Pax Americana unrestrained by international law …”^[55]   — Wikipedia

Some of P.N.A.C.’s members lamented before the events of 9/11 that what was needed was another Pearl Harbor, “a catastrophic and catalyzing event.” So, in effect, 9/11 was a gift from heaven as far as these warmongers were concerned. Now they could implement their plans for world domination by America. Keep in mind that they had the several hundred pages Patriot Act already written & again were just looking for an excuse to pass it into law. I’m not going to wander into an Alex Jones conspiracy land nightmare scenario but it’s worth bearing these things in mind.

Note though that the Patriot Act violated several aspects of our Bill of Rights and was a direct assault on the U.S. Constitution, you know, that document our government was founded upon & which presidents as well as police officers & military personnel must swear to defend & uphold.

Of course, Donald Trump, many politicians in the GOP as well as the MAGA morons chose to wipe their asses with our Constitution especially on January 6^th when they sought to overthrow our government.

Let’s review the consequences of America’s foreign policy since the end of WWII. Twenty years in Afghanistan & some analysts say $20 trillion dollars later, and was clearly unnecessary not to mention, immoral. Several scholars said we should’ve gone after bin Laden like a criminal case with a small police-type group of people who spoke the language, knew the customs & traditions, etc. but then the American warlords wouldn’t have the excuse for wasting billions of dollars. (See the movie Zero Dark Thirty)

In hindsight, it’s now obvious that Iraq was the target even before 9/11 (see P.N.A.C.) game plan in 1997 but they needed to appear to care about 9/11 & Afghanistan at least gave them the flimsy excuse that it was used as a training ground for Al Qaeda. But much more logically, why didn’t we say or do anything about Saudi Arabia because 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia & bin Laden himself is from Saudi Arabia & he was related to the royal family & derived his wealth from them?

How can any American feel patriotic let alone trust or believe this government when it calls us to war? Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. etc. etc. https://californiaman.substack.com/p/list-of-us-wars-and-interventions  

Those in power are guilty of pure, naked aggression with only one goal, wealth & power. They let our infrastructure (roads, bridges, highways, etc.) crumble, they let/cause our citizens to become homeless, let the American public die needlessly in a pandemic (see Trump’s deliberate undermining of COVID treatment), they allow Wall St. steal our pensions, and the GOP along with help from some Democrats like Biden are open to making cuts to, even eliminating Social Security & Medicare.

They allow scum like Trump & FOX “news,” to sow the seeds of fear, hate, & racism to keep us divided, but by all means, don’t make the 1% pay their fair share of taxes. Note that under Eisenhower, the wealthy were in the 90% tax bracket but today, it’s around 20% & most of them actually pay around 10% or less. Of course, many of the elite effectively pay zero with their tax dodges & tax havens. And many, if not most of the richest corporations pay not only nothing in taxes, but some also even get tax rebates in the millions. Yet they use our infrastructure to conduct their business, are protected by our police & military, and we, the 99% have to pay for the infrastructure, etc.

Our military rapes, pillages, & plunders most of the world for its natural resources & cheap labor and we call it “Bringing Democracy & Freedom.” (See Major General Smedley F. Butler who several business tycoons tried to enlist to lead a coup against FDR because they hated his New Deal policies) Why did the 1% allow such an obvious grifter like Trump to become president? Behind the scenes of all the presidential campaigns & the national, political spectacle that goes on ad nauseam, the 1% decide who will be elected.

With America’s long list of wars & police actions since the end of WWII, our indiscriminate Drone warfare & etc., are you still at a loss to explain/understand why so many terrorists want to kill Americans? This isn’t a defense or excuse of terrorism but is my attempt to shine a light on its causes.

Another good movie is Fair Game with Sean Penn. It shows just how far “our” government will go to silence our whistleblowers.

In conclusion, an excellent example of how corrupt & politicized our military has become over the decades & which reflects the rot at the core of our political system is the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968. Colin Powell was sent by the Pentagon to “investigate,” and his report basically said that the slaughter of over 500 Vietnamese peasants was a rare event & the blame was placed squarely on Lt. William Calley.

I’m not excusing Calley’s actions, but this was a typical occurrence, not a rare event & many soldiers have backed this up including John Kerry, I believe, in his testimony before Congress shortly after his return from duty in Vietnam ended. My point is that because Powell proved dependable to the Pentagon, his rise to the top position in the military, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was all but secured.

And the Bush administration used Powell to sell the invasion of Iraq to the world at the United Nations. Powell had far more credibility than anyone else in Bush’s cabinet & even though he knew the evidence they’d cobbled together to justify attacking Iraq was bogus, Powell did his masters’ bidding.

Yeah, I’m the “undesirable” one!

— Rob DeLoss, January 16, 2023

P.S.  The key point to keep in mind regarding all of this is the point that the 1% who own the Defense industry corporations will keep the wars coming until the entire planet blows up in a nuclear conflagration or the world economy completely implodes.