Leave the Military

You're at risk of being told to betray your own values.

(Photo: Getty)

Do not join the United States military. Don’t join the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Marines, or National Guard. If you are in contact with young people who are considering joining the military, counsel them not to do it. If you are in a position to steer people away from military recruiters, do so.

If you are in the military, get out of it as soon as possible. When your enlistment period is up, leave. If there is a safe and lawful way for you to leave early, do that. Do not accept any offered inducements to stay in the military longer than you are legally required to. It isn’t worth it.

If you are in the military and you don’t think that you can leave in the near future, take some time to sit and think seriously about what your personal ethical limits are. What sort of action would constitute a red line that you would not cross? What would it take for you to disobey an order? What are the sort of things that would make you feel ashamed, if you were to do them? What kind of actions would you look back on with regret? What are the circumstances in which you would tell your commanding officer that you are not going to do something, because it is wrong? If there are any orders that you would like to think that you would not carry out, decide now what they are, and decide what you might say and do in response to being given such orders. These important decisions are better made in advance, rather than in the heat of the moment.

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In their oath of enlistment, soldiers vow that “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” It is easy to see the inherent tension in this vow. Though you are expected to act according to the Constitution, in practice, you are expected to follow the orders that flow from the President. What happens if the President is acting unconstitutionally? What happens if the President gives orders that require you to violate human rights? What happens if the President decides to use the military to help cement his own power as a dictator? It is unrealistic to expect enlisted soldiers to—when given an order—become Constitutional attorneys who personally litigate the constitutionality of those orders. In reality, by the time an order reaches a soldier, it is fully expected that the soldier will carry the order out. If you are the soldier, and the President decides to act unconstitutionally, it is very likely that you will become the agent that carries out that unconstitutional act (or, potentially, atrocity). Every moment that you are in the military, you are placing yourself at risk of being ordered to become one of history’s villains.

As an institution, the military likes to put forward the idea that you can join and have a career in it, and that that career amounts to a laudable service to the public, regardless of the specifics of who the Commander-in-Chief is or what the policies are that you are tasked with carrying out. This belief is beneficial for long-term military recruiting, but as a moral argument, it is obviously false. The mere act of being a soldier is not necessarily worthy of praise. Were the soldiers who murdered all of the Native Americans in the West to make way for white settlers worthy of praise? Were the Nazi soldiers who were members of the Einsatzgruppen death squads, whose job it was to commit racist murders across Europe, worthy of praise? Clearly, it matters what orders the soldiers are carrying out. Being a member of the military is not an inherently moral act. A war of aggression, a war of outright oppression, a war waged by the strong to extort and take advantage of the weak—those who are tasked with carrying out these immoral acts do not magically become ethical because they put on a uniform. A reasonable American who volunteered for the military during WW2 might well have decided not to volunteer during Vietnam. All wars are not created equally. This is common sense.

The political leaders who decide the policies that the military will carry out are the ones who carry the most responsibility, the most moral blame, for all of the consequences of those policies. The members of the military who carry out the orders bear another sort of responsibility—but we also understand that soldiers are often their own sort of victim of bad political decisions and bad orders. People join the military for all sorts of reasons, other than a staunch belief in the Commander-in-Chief: To get money for college; to see the world; because it is one of the few stable job opportunities offered to them; out of a sense of patriotism or adventure; to follow in the footsteps of their parents, who they admire. Indeed, the military cultivates a belief that all of these are good motivations to join. The military markets itself as a stable job, as a wise place from which to go on to college and a good civilian career, as a place where you can feel that you are nobly serving your country, as a place where you can heroically defend your fellow Americans from the dangers of the world. At times, in certain circumstances, these reasons have rung true. Yet it is also quite possible for well-meaning people to join the military for any one of these reasons, and then find themselves in the position of being turned into foot soldiers of oppression by bad political leaders. That harms the oppressed, but it also delivers a psychic and moral harm to the soldiers who find that their purpose is much darker than they had hoped.

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The best way to avoid this nightmare is to not be a member of the military. You and I may disagree about many issues: about which past actions of the US military have been good or bad, moral or immoral; or even about the degree to which the US military is inherently moral or immoral. Those are important debates to have, but they are not why I am writing this piece today. I am writing this piece today for the simple reason that we are, right now, living under an extremely unstable, vindictive, and dictatorial Commander-in-Chief of the US military who is likely to order the military to do things that will be judged by history to be unconstitutional and immoral. And even if you are a soldier who has supported America’s wars of the past few decades, there is now a distinct possibility, verging on a likelihood, that within the next few years, the US military will be used as a tool to directly oppress Americans at home. For anyone who is of an age to be a member of the US military today, there has never been a higher risk that you will be placed in a situation in which you will be ordered to do things that will make you a villain.

Not a villain by my standards. Not a villain by the standards of leftists or anti-imperialists who you, as a member of the military, might profoundly disagree with. A villain by your own standards—by the standards of someone who joined the military as a genuine act of patriotism and public service. Many members of today’s military are motivated by a belief in the necessity of protecting Americans from the world’s threats. Today, the greatest threat to America’s future as a free and democratic society is the Commander-in-Chief of the US military. The threat is inside the house. It is time to get out.

This has little to do with whether you identify as a Democrat or a Republican, whether you are macho or not, whether you drive a pickup truck or a Prius or come from the city or the country or any of the other shallow symbolic ways that we divide ourselves culturally. This is about preserving America as a place where any of us can be any of those things. This is about preserving America as a place where you, a proud member of the military, and me, some left winger in New York City, can debate right and wrong and then both live happily ever after. The Constitution of the country is at risk right now. Our system of democracy, flawed as it is, is at risk of getting much worse. Our right to live freely, always aspirational, is at risk of being harshly restricted in ways that we like to imagine only happen in other, lesser countries. And when all of the Americans that you are sworn to protect go out into the streets and protest and resist the assaults on our constitution, the Commander-in-Chief of the military is going to use the tools at his disposal to try to crush them. Do not allow yourself to be one of those tools.

Bad things are going to happen but there is still time for you to decide which side you will be standing on when they do.

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• Related reading: Seeing Things for What They Are; A Television Show Called the USA; Nationalism Is Poison; The Sin Eraser; Quit Your Evil Job.

• Last week I had a long discussion with Jordan Zakarin about the ongoing political assault on workers and the dire state of the labor movement. You can watch that here. I wrote a book called “The Hammer” about how the labor movement can be the tool that pulls America out of its current predicament. You can order it here, or wherever books are sold. It’s good! If you want to organize your workplace and join a union yourself, contact EWOC. There are going to be big protests all over the place on May Day. Learn more here.

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