In March of 2014, I was in the O’Hare airport, waiting for a flight down to San Antonio. The only real reason that those details are important is because I was enroute to A school from bootcamp, so I was wearing my dress blues. That’s this thing that the military does where they won’t let you wear civilian clothes until you’ve graduated to certain rank within the social hierarchy. The way I worded that makes it sound all angsty, like I’m trying to make some biting commentary about how the military does brainwashing, but I’m not, it’s the military, that’s how they do things.

            But, anyways, wearing a uniform in an airport, or especially on a plane, is a bad idea, so, this was the only time I ever did it.

            I was standing in line at a kiosk and I picked up a copy of “Marcus Lutrell’s” Lone Survivor. The gentleman in front of me stepped up to the counter and said “Let me buy that kids book” with a big smile on his face. He wasn’t grandstanding or anything. If I remember right, it was only him and I and the cashier in the place. It seemed to me that he just felt moved by the situation, I guess, and he wanted to show some appreciation. And I was cool with it, because this was the first time I’d interacted with a real person, not a Recruit Division Commander or another recruit, in two months. I didn’t really realize at the time that I was kind of fulfilling something for this man. I was symbolic to him in a way that anybody in a uniform is. In that moment, I was the troops. And now, here he was, supporting the troops. And again, I appreciate the guy buying it for me. I never read it, and I probably never will, but I still appreciate it, you know?

            2014 was kind of in the middle of what I like to call “The Golden Age of War on Terror Propaganda Films.” You have The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Lone Survivor; and as hard of a retroactive watch as any, American Sniper.

            But, flash forward about ten years and it’s all been proven as lies. Marcus Lutrell has said on camera that he didn’t write Lone Survivor. It’s hard to tell exactly what version of that story is the truth, because he changes it every couple of years. Chris Kyle has been caught in a couple of lies, not the least of which is lying about how many silver stars he had. He also said that he was shooting looters during Hurricane Katrina, and we’re all hoping that was a lie, too. Likewise, Tim Kennedy was just caught lying about a bunch of shit after having published a book about how badass he was in Afghanistan and using his status as a veteran to help promote his MMA career.

And, there’s that good old fashioned cognitive dissonance. Those little moments where you’re aware of you, the symbol. And then you really start to think about the ways that you were brainwashed to believe wholeheartedly the uniquely dumb brand of patriotism of post 9/11 America. And there’s this intersection, there. So, what does that make me in this system that I used to navigate so much better when I didn’t understand that it was there?

And that kind of leads me into my next point, which is that yes, four years ago, that Trump-voting man would have shed a tear watching the video of you coming home from a deployment and surprising your kid at school. But you can be damn sure that when you find yourself between that person and the next fucking thing that the pipeline says is being stolen from them, you’re not going to have time to show them that you’re a good American. When the wheels get set in motion, all uniforms look the same to the people looking up at them.

When you get out, the rules change. Things stop meaning the same things, especially if you do it like I did, and you join straight out of a fucking cornfield at eighteen gotdamn years old, and the diversity of military culture and witnessing firsthand this thing that you’ve been raised by small town America to revere, culturally, above basically anything else starts to fuck with your worldviews a little early, leaving you all nice and unsteady for the horrifying crash outs that you’ll face when you go back home and you realize you don’t really fit in there anymore, because in some way you feel that the town has betrayed you. You just can’t get excited about the same things that you and your old friends used to. Your friends sense that and it’s hard for you guys to connect any more. You’re a guy who’s always a little too early or a little too late, and that’s a hard hurdle to get over, man, let me tell you.

You get out and the rules change because you’re not a part of the system anymore. You’re just another one of the people under it. Your voice gets smaller. And smaller. And then you just stop talking all together. Because now it clicked. You understand exactly how you got here, and you know exactly why it fucks with you, and there’s really no way to fit those two things into the American mindset. Propaganda is wrong. You were propagandized. This is wrong. It’s all wrong.

            And, hey, look at that. No more fun at parties.

            So, yeah, really. What are we trying to do about veterans’ suicide? Anybody? Does anyone care? Or is it just a good way to sell tee shirts?

            The armed forces are as much a part of Republican identity politics as cops are, but just in a different way. Veterans are a part of the in-group as long as they stay somewhere that the rest of the in-group can’t engage with, like overseas or saluting a flag in a campaign commercial. When the republicans allow veterans to be people, rather than a demographic, they’re only okay if they don’t yell at Bush for lying about Iraq.

            A lot of military members are practically primed from birth to fall for propaganda and, as long as we’re saying the right things, we’re a great tool for propaganda, too. Chris Kyle, Marcus Lutrell, Tim Kennedy, Jocko Willink, Matt Best et al., whether they intend it or not, are propagandists. For example, Lone Survivor was propaganda with the very specific purpose of convincing the American people that they needed to shut up and let the military kill civilians when they need too. It’s war, dog. Sometimes you just have to straight up murder a couple of goat herders, because our lives matter more than those that don’t speak English.

            When you join the military, they pound into you the idea that you’re just the uniform. Any action you take reflects on the entirety of the military. Then, when the nation has a point to make with you, all the sudden you get to be real boy again. “Well, what would you do in that situation? Are you seriously going to say that you wouldn’t kill someone if it meant you and your friends got to go home?”

            But, say you have a different story. You have a less acceptable humanity. See: Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

Whoops.

You don’t just stop getting used when you take the uniform off for the last time. Our place in society is inherently political, even if you just want everyone to leave you alone. You’re in use for the rest of your life from the moment you sign on that dotted line and join the conversation about who our enemies, foreign and domestic, truly are, which is something that I think all veterans should take a moment to think about. Because, white republican voters might find it easy to ignore minorities and immigrants and gay and trans people, but they can’t ignore us. They invented us. We’re the unfortunate byproduct of a system that goes to great lengths to shine a sentimental light on itself. The system that they created. We’re in this fight for as long as they want to keep going.