I'm one of the lucky ones. Leaving the madness of U.S. Army life with a modest pension and all of my limbs intact feels like a genuine escape. Both the Army and I knew it was time for me to go. I'd tired of carrying water for empire and they'd grown weary of dealing with my dissent and with footing the bill for my PTSD treatment.
I entered West Point in July 2001, a bygone era of relative peace, the moment, you might say, before the 9/11 storm broke. I leave an Army that remains, remarkably, engaged in global war, patrolling an increasingly militarized world.
In a sense, my early retirement is an ignominious end to a once-promising career. Make no mistake, I wanted out. I'd relocated 11 times in 18 years, often to war zones, and I simply didn't have another deployment in me. Still, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't admit that I mourn the loss of my career, of the identity inherent in soldiering, of the experience of adulation from a grateful (if ill-informed) society.
I recognize that there's a paradox at work here: The Army and the global war on terror made me who I am. Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in particular turned a budding neocon into an unabashed progressive, an insecure aspiring dealer in violence into a pacifist, or as near to that as a former military man can get. What the Army helped me become is someone whom, in the end, I don't mind gazing at in the mirror each morning.
Should I thank the Army then? Maybe so. It's hard, though, to thank a war machine that dealt death to so many for making me who I am. And no matter how much I tell myself I was different, the truth is I was complicit in it all.
I wonder whether something resembling an apology, rather than a statement of pride in who I've become, is the more appropriate valediction. Some peers, even friends, may call me a heretic — a disgruntled former major airing dirty laundry — but I plan to keep explaining that we are engaged in Orwellian forever wars that professional foot soldiers make possible while the rest of the country goes to work, tweets, shops and sleeps (in every sense of the word).
I am not sorry to leave behind the absurdity I witnessed.
Farewell to the generals who knew tactics but couldn't for the life of them think strategically. Who were unwilling or unable to advise policymakers about missions that could never be accomplished. Who shamelessly traded in their multi-starred uniforms for six- and seven-figure gigs on the boards of corporations that feed the unquenchable appetite of the military-industrial beast.