This is the first in a series of articles from a soldier’s perspective that I am writing for Media Roots.  These articles will provide an inside look at the military, war, the players involved, and my own personal take on it all.  While I’ll try not to overly indulge myself in biographical reverie, I feel it will be important for the reader to know a little about me.

As a young boy I remember visiting the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum and indoctrinating myself with aviation. I was in love with it. There is no clear place in my evolution where I can remember thinking that I really wanted to fly military aircraft, it was just always  there. Smithsonian imagery no doubt played a part. 

I wonder, in every person I meet doing what I do, what that thing was for them when they were young. But here we are now, young military pilots, the best of the best flying army gunships in the night.

My perspective of this experience, and the path leading up to it, has opened myself to questions I might not otherwise have entertained, and forced me to examine core beliefs and basic assumptions within myself. That has been a good thing, a very good thing – hastening thought processes within myself.

This and subsequent articles are my attempt to give the reader a different perspective, my take on what might actually be going on in the world. I don’t mean at any point to be presumptuous, condescending, or inconsiderate. In fact, I truly believe that your right to your personal beliefs and the freedom to express those beliefs is why I’m here. But do you really know what your beliefs are? Are they really your beliefs? What is in YOUR mind?

The war I want is a war of the minds – a mental jousting match followed by respect and a better understanding and openness to original ideas. My father taught me to begin with the assumption that you are, in fact brainwashed.  In other words, take everything you think you know and question it mightily, peeling the layers back.  Therefore, my opening question shall be: Who will wake up and step up to participate?  Will you truly exercise this innate human faculty? 

I am a warrior.  I swore to ‘defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.’  My job is to kill, lose fellow soldiers, and to continue functioning exceptionally well physically and mentally, in spite of all that.  However, in doing this, I have come to believe there is no just war, only just defense.  That means that if I am defending my life, or the life of my nation, I am innocent.  Have you asked yourself if your country is conducting a war of defense?  Do you have the information required to decide if you support what your young country men and women are tasked to do? 

As an officer, and proud member of my unit in the United States Army, I fly gunship helicopters. Yes, the kind so many of you have seen shooting people to pieces – literally.  I am not here to openly question my chain of command.  That remains within the chain, just as your family’s business remains internal, or should at least. 

My purpose in writing is to invigorate the cause of freedom as the Constitution of the United States of America intended, a document and concept to which I am sworn and bound to defend and uphold.  I implore you to drop what you think you know about it and read it. Develop a fresh understanding of its purpose. Why was it written the way it was?  Then simply compare that doctrine to the actions of your current representation and system of laws. I want you to understand that freedom of expression is the first and most important one to consider, especially during  times of war.

I spent thirteen months flying over enemy in Iraq. I was a creature of the night – a young man who stares at people through a powerful infrared camera for six to ten hours a night, followed by head-bobbing a helicopter back to base as the sun was rising. Redbull was my friend. I helped give ground commanders the leverage they needed, tools that ensured the preservation of lives, not only of young American soldiers, but of innocent civilians as well. 

Before I became a military aviator, I was a totally different person. I experienced a typical middle class upbringing. Before twelve, family was everything, Christmas was magic, and my neighborhood was candy land.  JV and Varsity years pulled my attention to girls, grades, sports, and working random jobs to fill my gas tank, drink alcohol, and pay even more attention to girls. I was the typical middle class male, basically trying to have a good time and not kill myself while preparing for higher education.

My folks had limited financial means to support me in college.  Fortunately, I was able to deal with this burden without their help.  Clearly, the middle class is under financial attack when it comes to tuition. If you’re wealthy, obviously paying for school isn’t an issue in the first place but universities don’t pay their bills off the affluent few.  If you’re poor, you’ll get the financial assistance you need.  If you’re middle class, you’ll likely be crushed with six-figure debt per child.  In any event, I decided to finance my college education with running my own professional business.  It worked and it also set me apart from all the other students.

I figured out early on that college was a sham. The classes were kind of bullshit. I could do a lot at home, without any aid. Many students didn’t give a shit. Many professors didn’t either. No one knew why they were there.  If you spoke about any social issue in a way that was inconsistent with the crowd (and faculty), you were in trouble. Better to be outwardly politically correct no matter what you actually think. I mistakenly thought it was an environment that welcomed debate, flexing the grey matter, but in practice that wasn’t really true.  As I made money, connections, and experienced firsthand how the business world actually worked, I began looking at my schooling in a different and more cautious light.

I became by degree an engineer.  The co-op portion of my program put me into real-world industrial environments where often my stark “book-based” learning process came up short of the practical world’s real problems of an applied technology, business concerns and how one engineer might fit in and provide value.  School had not prepared me for the thought processes required for dealing with the reality of industry. One of the most valued engineers at the mill I worked at had no degree. He kept trying to retire but management needed his skills so badly they just kept offering him more money until he’d say okay to another few years. He was truly a legacy. While the co-op aspect of the program intended to give an appreciation of all of this, I was nonetheless amazed at  the level of indifference real business and industry had towards academia.

Ultimately, people are hired based on their true ability and skill.  All around me I see people putting their faith in a diluted form of education to which we now must subscribe to in order to be considered for any well-paying job. Kids pay a hundred thousand dollars and up only to end up slowly paying off outrageous debt working at Home Depot, Best Buy, TGI Fridays, or in their field using relatively little of what they studied with no creativity.  I began to see the whole system as an over-priced shake down of the middle class.  Why do I bring this up?

Our culture really believes in that diploma. So do the soldiers. Many young soldiers joined the military for college money. We are so entrenched with the idea that we need to shell out large sums of money in order to learn skill sets to survive and prosper in the economy that we will actually risk getting blown up to get that money!?  Ridiculous!

Despite my growing awareness of a system that seemed to punish the middle class, regulate speech through PC pressure, and propogate a cultural myth in which an expensive 4-year college experience was more important than anything else, I was still wistfully dreamed about being a military aviator.

9/11 did nothing to increase or decrease my desire to fly.  The desire just was.  I remember saying I wanted to do something for my country in response to the tragedy but was only a small part of me. I wanted the glory.  I wanted to do this thing I thought was heroic.  I sold my business, and when I was finally within weeks of leaving for flight school, my father told me that I was entering into something  dangerous, and that this decision could mean that in just a matter of a few years, I could very easily be dead.  He was right in the case of two friends.  And equally important, he said  I would likely take the lives of others.  He asked me if I really understood what that meant and if I thought the cause was just.

I was angry at him.  He was ex-Army, and his father had fought in WW2 and survived – with lasting physical and mental effects. But we took pride in his service. His older brother flew two tours in Nam and was highly decorated.  His uncle flew Air Force One under President Ford.  How could my father expound upon our family’s participation in the US military and then question my motives?  How could he allow me to watch every war movie ever made, and then not understand why I wanted to join?

I simply remarked back that I could die on the highway tomorrow, and that I wanted to do something for my country.  If 18 year olds were going to be risking their lives and dying, than I should help.  He basically backed me down until I admitted that I was joining more for the glory of being a military pilot, than for any of the altruistic reasons I was touting.  He was right and I was pissed, but I joined anyways. 

Not to spite him, but because I was so excited… to become an Army aviator!

Yossarian.

Photo by flickr user US Army