By Walter Smolarek
August 09, 2021"Information
Clearing House" - Michael Davis
was 11 years old when the war in Afghanistan
started, 19 years old when he enlisted in
the U.S. military and 21 years old when he
arrived in Afghanistan’s Wardak province as
part of a combat engineering unit tasked
with finding improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
“I came from a really small town in central
Washington from a working-class background.
I had nowhere to go; [I] messed around in
school too much and didn’t have a college
future,” Davis explained. “I didn’t want to
be stuck working on [a] farm. I joined [the
military] in 2009, right in the middle of
the housing collapse.”
Davis’ experience is typical of what
critics of U.S. foreign policy refer to as
the “economic draft.” He explained, “I have
a lot of friends who are broken in the sense
that they drink too much or their bodies
[have been left broken from excruciating
work]. Sometimes on the farm you work 15
hours a day, and there’s no overtime…
Opiates were definitely a part of [what
people turned to] in Franklin County where I
grew up. You work hard and go home and you
hurt, so you drink or do whatever.” Davis
recalled, “My dad was in the military before
me, and to his credit, my dad told me,
‘don’t do it’—and he’s a super conservative
individual. But my thought process was, ‘my
life isn’t going anywhere, and the military
is a way out.’”
Military recruiters are well aware of
this dilemma facing so many young people. “I
was sent to a troubled youth school when I
was 17,” said Davis. “It was super
right-wing and religious. [In school,] I
initially talked to a Marine recruiter who
[spoke with]… people who are on the ‘wrong
track.’”
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Although it would be several years before
Davis began to form anti-war political
convictions, he immediately began to regret
his decision to join the Army. “Being 18 and
going through basic training and seeing all
the people around you who are just beaten
down and broken down, you start to
second-guess it. When you’re 21, you go to
Afghanistan, you get sent to war, and you’re
like, ‘what was I thinking?’ and that’s only
[over] a three-year [time period].”
Arriving in the ‘Forever War’
The job of Davis and his combat
engineering unit teammates was to “go out
before other units, even the infantry, and
we would run the same routes day after day,
week after week. We [would] go out there
[and] walk around in the mountains [and]
through these villages. It was mostly a show
of force and to ‘go find IEDs.’” Davis
arrived in the quieter winter months, but
said that “When springtime came around, it
was like a kick in the teeth. I lost some
really good friends within three months of
being there.”
Animosity between the mostly
working-class enlisted soldiers and their
officers who came from wealthier backgrounds
was palpable. The officers, Davis recalled,
“had the air of, ‘we know better than you.’
There was only one non-enlisted person who
didn’t have a college degree… Anyone above a
lieutenant or a captain made a lot of shitty
decisions. It’s what got a lot of us
[enlisted soldiers] hurt or injured.”
Danny Sjursen, who was a captain
commanding the U.S. Army troops alongside
units of the Afghan army and police around
the same time that Davis was deployed to the
war, noticed a similar phenomenon. Sjursen
said, “I had 100 soldiers, give or take; 95
of them were enlisted. Maybe five had
college degrees. They were slightly more
rural and Southern and from the Mountain
West and [the] Rust Belt. They didn’t speak
the same language as the officers,
especially as they went higher up.”
Sjursen, now the director of the
Eisenhower Media Network, graduated from
the elite
United States Military Academy at West Point,
but against the advice of his instructors,
he developed close relationships with the
enlisted soldiers under his command. “They
[the enlisted soldiers] never saw a purpose
to [the war]… they literally felt like their
biggest enemy wasn’t the Taliban, but it was
ambitious colonels and generals.” Sjursen
further noted, “They are not lefty guys—lots
are basically Trump supporters. But they
would laugh at someone if they said, ‘you
guys did a great job over there.’”
‘Be All You Can Be’
“My outpost was attacked all 365 days”
during a year-long deployment, Sjursen
explained. “One of the things that was most
frustrating was sensing that there wasn’t
going to be any meaningful change based on
the year we spent there,” said Sjursen.
“Three of my soldiers were killed and 32
others wounded in some way. That’s 35
percent casualties, that’s high… and who
knows how many we killed?”
But for more senior officers, the obvious
futility of the conflict took a back seat to
individual career ambitions. Sjursen
remembered that many of the top-ranking
commanders he encountered, “spoke in
platitudes. They were taught to do this. I
didn’t get the sense that they were gung-ho
for the mission. These guys are
professionals.” The war, in a sense, was a
resume-building exercise for ambitious
officers. “If you had a combat command,
that’s a very good thing for your career.
And it helped if it was a very aggressive
one.”
Meanwhile, soldiers like Davis were being
hurt or killed. “I was only there six months
before I myself got hit,” said Davis. “A
road we regularly [went] through had gotten
blown up, so we had to clear the debris. A
bomb blew up, and I broke both my feet and
ankles and was in a wheelchair for six
months.”
While recovering at Walter Reed National
Military Medical Center, Davis turned
against the war. “At Walter Reed, they give
you some support, but it feels like a show.
You’re around a lot of people who are
missing arms and legs, and at that point you
just kind of ask ‘why?’” During his
recovery, he saw a report on BBC showing how
an area of the country he had been deployed
to was ceded to the Taliban. “Why the hell
are we here in the first place?” Davis
recalls thinking in the hospital,
questioning “a system that puts you up on a
pedestal, and as soon as something changes,
they just forget about you.”
Today Davis is an avowed anti-war and
socialist organizer in his home state of
Washington. When asked what he would say to
a young person from his town who is
considering joining the military like he
did, Davis replied, “I would say don’t do
it, of course. But how are you going to tell
that to someone who doesn’t have another
shot at anything else? So it’s really hard
to say that.”
“It’s not ‘Be All You Can Be,’” Davis
argued, referring to the Army’s
favorite recruiting slogan. “It’s ‘watch
people die for no reason.’”
This article was produced by
Globetrotter.