My Friend Tony: He Wasn’t a Soldier, He Was a Quota

My friend Tony has a line about his time spreading “freedom” in Iraq. He says it flat, like he’s talking about the weather.

“We were mostly getting blown up,” he says. “That was our day.”

He says this in the documentary What I Want You to Know. He says it to the camera so civilians like me can hear it. He says it so that you can’t look away.

The film is about moral injury, about what happens to the young “adults” who carry out the orders. About the betrayal that follows them home. Tony’s face in that film is the proof. His story is the evidence. This isn’t abstract. This is what the US did to him; to so many.

He was seventeen when they came.

His Junior year.

The recruiter just showed up at his house, and it still remains unknown as to why. Tony recalls that he was probably a bit drunk and high at the time, but he remembers that they were looking for people just like him.

Not strapping young lads to lead the continued fight for freedom, like he was being told…

They were after the addicts.

The poor.

The abused.

The destitute.

The children with no other choice…

“We were from the gutter”, he says. “Every single one of us in Basic Training, we all came from the gutter.”

A salesman with a military haircut pitched a boy who wanted to be a cop, on becoming a Military Policeman. He promised a $2500 sign-on bonus (which then comes out to quite little after taxes). Tony was promised the chance to “jump out of planes and blow people up.” They promised a 17-year-old that he could go do video game things. Go do Rambo things…

A recruiting office isn’t a hallowed hall of service. It’s a sales floor in a strip mall with cheap desks and fluorescent lights and posters of jets soaring over mountains, selling violence and greedy lies. They sold a dream of the Montgomery GI Bill and a “fulfilling” future, to a kid whose egg hadn’t even yet finished frying. This is your brain on military.

Seventeen. The prefrontal cortex, the part that weighs consequences, manages impulse, grasps long term effects, is still under construction. They weren’t recruiting a man. They were harvesting biological raw material. It was perfect for obedience, perfect for molding, perfectly unfinished. They sold dreams to a kid who hadn’t even finished growing up.

And what does a desperate mom do when her “problematic” 17-year-old son finally sees the light and decides to turn his life around? Why, she happily signs those papers…

Then, the recruiter called again.

The same government that would later demand a diploma, told Tony that they could get him into Boot Camp. Like, now.

The bonus was waiting. The future mattered. Making up for missed credits from his Junior year, didn’t matter. Tony went where he felt he mattered; the only place he thought he had a chance. He went to Basic. He kicked ass. He was now a soldier.

After that, this 17-year-old-man returned for his senior year of high school…

He managed to go to class for two weeks and then just couldn’t last among the children; there were simply bigger things at play. He had been awakened.

But he wasn’t a soldier. He was still a kid filling a quota. Some office at Fort Benning or Quantico had a spreadsheet. It needed another body in the infantry column. His dream of being an MP was the bait. His poverty was the hook. His still forming brain was the target.

They reeled him in. They processed him. They fast-tracked him to Basic which further screwed up his high school credits, and he became Infantry just to keep the lifeline alive. The dream was a prerecorded sentence on a recruiter’s script that was already filled out for him. The quota was real.

The same institution that plucked him from his high school later forced him to get a GED for not fulfilling the part in his contract about graduating high school. To access his own benefits, the benefits he was promised when they took him, he needed a high school equivalency diploma. The system that created the gap then penalized him for it.

They interrupted his life and then blamed him for it being interrupted.

~

Tony, luckily, joined during a time of peace.

9/11 changed that.

Turns out that other countries actually have big problems with the US meddling in their personal affairs like some global Big-Brother, problems enough to fly planes into buildings.

Of course, that was not the narrative at the time.

That message wasn’t received.

In fact, the US was to double down.  

At the announcement of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony knew what was to come. He had trained for this. He was good at this. Time to go make freedom!

They sent him to Iraq in 2003. He started in the Green Zone. He thought they’d be guarding con-ex boxes. Then they moved him to a more hostile sector. The mission, or whatever blurred remnant of mission was left, became about shows of force.

Routine patrols down the same roads, at the same times, to show the enemy the American colors. To prove a point.

We are here.

We are big.

We are not afraid.

Unfortunately, as it always has, US hubris equals casualties.

“Many died because of it”, Tony says.

You drive the same routes, however varied, and you become predictable. You become a target. The patrols weren’t about securing terrain or winning hearts. They were about display. A performance of invincibility for an audience of ghosts who made IEDs in the dark.

They were mostly getting blown up. That was their day.

And the enemy wasn’t even an army. It was kids and old men, as poverty leads to soldiers, Tony soon realized. Poverty equals spies. Poverty equals insurgency.

There were no weapons of mass destruction.

There was just the dust. The heat. The poverty. The sudden fire.

A friend and fellow soldier took his first leave with Tony. They had a single week stateside, and Tony was able to witness his first child being born.

They laughed. They saw life again. They tried to forget.

Then they went back and he was killed two weeks later. One of Tony’s best friends was killed, and he reports that the local citizens played a major role in the death.

After that, Tony couldn’t risk trusting any Iraqi.

Children with smiles. Smiles and intel. Smiles and the enemy and the guns.

The WMD-mission completely evaporated. The grand strategy dissolved into sand. The only objective left was survival mode. Get everyone home possible. Just get them home.

Tony brought men home. Not enough. Never enough.

They did come home, but they all came home broken.

Tony’s body now carries an autoimmune disease from the conditions of being blown up. From the burn pits. From the who-knows-what.

He has twenty-three claims of injury on his record.

His mind carries the unimaginable remainder.

The film captures the weight of it in his eyes. The moral injury. The betrayal. The tiredness.

But, Tony has yet to have been “treated” by the Veterans Administration in twenty years. Not once. He has an autoimmune disease and a full list of injuries, and he has yet to have been actually treated.

When he tries, the system is mechanical, not clinical. You are a file. You are a number. You are a cost. Anything but human.

They admit, yes, we did this to you. The records show you were there. The records show the exposure. But you’re not bad enough yet. Your pain isn’t severe enough to merit care. Here’s a giant box of Band-Aids for your twenty-three and PTSD. Fuck off.  

His next available appointment with his doctor is in eight months.

He has been waiting twenty years… He can wait eight more months… Again…

His family understandably also has PTSD. All of them. At one point, they were wrongly told that he was dead.

He talks about the disconnect, the same one documented in the film. Soldiers see themselves as normal, to start. But then they are asked to see and do things that are very abnormal.

They’re preyed upon as children. They’re lied to. They’re placed in mind-destroying situations that take decades to repair, if possible at all.

Then they come home. They turn in their gear. The military says goodbye. Good luck. The trauma you received in combat is your problem now.

The film ends. The aftermath does not.

He was seventeen when they recruited him. His brain, a biological work in progress, was the perfect substrate for their war-machine. Their colonialism. A mind not yet settled. An identity not yet solid. A kid from the gutter with nothing to lose and everything a salesman could promise. They target that. They count on it.

When Tony thinks about the glamorization of war, he sees it every day in movies, in games, in speeches. It’s not reality. The reality is that poor people are the ones who end up dying in these wars. Very few of those with means, actually choose to fight. (Bone-Spurs)

He talks about the complete lack of care given by the US government. He talks about the endless scavengers that descend after service. The offers that are too good to be true. Predatory lenders. For profit colleges. Vultures who smell the GI Bill. He had to fight them off. Others are not so headstrong. Others get eaten clean. This could be regulated…

Much like once you fall through the cracks at the VA, he says, that’s it. You’re done. Self-advocacy is the only lifeline. And many of the guys he served with, the guys in the film, the guys with the same hollowed-out look in their eyes, don’t have the energy for that fight.

They used up all their fight over there.

Tony told me all of this. He told me about the shows of force that got his friends killed. He told me about the recruiter’s manipulative promises. He told me about the people they made him kill. About the friends and the bonds that still have no replacement. He told me about the twenty years of waiting for care. The film captured his testimony, but he offered me the marrow of it all.

And then, Tony told me why.

After all of it, he told me why he sat in front of that camera for What I Want You to Know.

War was a trigger to be better, he says. Putting all the pieces together years later, he sees a use for his pain. He considers the life-long price worth it to share his story. He finds it worth being a teacher of that experience. In being an open and knowing ear and mouth for those who definitely need it. In holding a doctorate of experience for the next kid from the gutter who is targeted by the sales pitch.

If Tony’s story, in that film or in this article, finds its way to one of those powerful people who thinks a show of force is a strategy, then it was worth it. If it finds one seventeen-year-old who hears the pitch and thinks twice about joining, then it was worth it.

They took a boy from the gutter. They sold him a lie to fill a lethal quota. They exploited the unfinished biology of his brain. They pulled him from school. They put him in a uniform and fed him into a grinder of their own making. They broke his body and mutilated his spirit. Then they discarded him. When he grasps for the help that they promised, they give him Band-Aids.

My friend Tony was not a soldier. He was a quota. His story in What I Want You To Know is not an anecdote. It is the blueprint of millions. It’s the system working exactly as designed. They are still designing and redesigning it. They are still filling out their spreadsheets by color. They are still showing up at the houses of seventeen-year-old kids whose brains are unformed… who simply just want to be something more.

They are still counting them, not as sons and daughters, but as numbers.

And the numbers, eventually, get blown up.

That is their day.

That is their service… 

For unearned hubris and lies.

What I Want You to Know can be found here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whatiwantyoutoknow

And more info here: https://www.whatiwantyoutoknow-film.com/

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