Writing in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, U.S. military veteran Roy Scranton admitted that he’s come to realize that his time in Iraq with his fellow servicemen and women had morphed him into “the faceless storm trooper” while “the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.”
While no one will ever question Scranton’s service to his country, the fact that anyone would compare American soldiers to storm troopers fighting under the guise of Darth Vader and the Emperor (which George Lucas compared to the Bush adminsitration) against Islamic terrorists being the Rebel Alliance would cause any reasonable person to scratch their head.
Scranton began his piece by recalling an Independence Day spent in Baghdad that included a showing of the original Star Wars trilogy. He noted that while there was plenty of action on-screen, it “couldn’t compete with the light show playing out across Baghdad, and watching a film about the warriors of an ancient religion rising up from the desert to fight a faceless empire seemed, under the circumstances, perverse.”
At this point, his far-left, apologist analogy kicked into high gear as he lamented that Operation Iraqi Freedom was the holding of Baghdad “under an increasingly senseless occupation” amidst memorials to those “who had died in the Iran-Iraq War.”
Scranton explained that he had been born a year before A New Hope came out and so it had implanted him “a worldview, an idea of justice and the desire to wield a light saber, all entangling as I grew older with the Bicentennial celebrating the American Revolution, another story of scrappy rebels fighting a mighty empire.”
Alas, he ruled that the leftist filmmaker George Lucas had created a “mythic story so central to our sense of ourselves as a nation” only “[t]wo years after the fall of Saigon and America’s withdrawal in defeat from a dishonorable war.”
It was here that Scranton launched into how America’s built on violence and causing others pain for our benefit:
Looking out over Baghdad on the Fourth of July, I saw the truth that story obscured and inverted: I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.
Did it really take going to Baghdad to learn this? Hadn’t I read about the campaigns against the Cherokee, Nez Percé and Sioux, the long war against Philippine independence, and the horrors of Vietnam? My grandfather served on a Swift boat in the Mekong Delta at the end of his military service, though he never talked about it; hadn’t trying to fill in his silence taught me about free-fire zones, My Lai and hospitals full of napalmed orphans? The bloody track of American history, from slavery to genocide to empire, is plain for all to see. But reckoning with the violence itself was the appeal: I thought I could confront our dark side, just like Luke Skywalker, and come away enlightened.
Veterans and pundits often talk about the military-civilian gap. So few Americans serve, they say, that most of the nation doesn’t have any sense of what that service means. This is superficially true. The military is a professional subculture with its own rituals, traditions and jargon. There’s a military-civilian gap just as there’s a police-civilian gap, an oil rigger-civilian gap, a barista-civilian gap. But that’s not what these vets and pundits mean.
Blasting he and those he’s served with as merely “agent[s] of American state power” possessing a “fantasy of American heroism,” Scranton continued complaining that then-President George W. Bush had coerced so many into making “the myth of violence...more powerful than the truth of war.”
Scranton’s conclusion started when he chastised Americans to “ask ourselves what we’re really celebrating with our bottle rockets and sparklers” as “American violence continues to rain down on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen” and “as we continue to support violent regimes in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere by buying oil that we then burn and dump into the atmosphere, precipitously heating the planet.”
“Instead of honoring our troops, whose chief virtues are obedience and aggressiveness, we could honor our great dissenters and conscientious objectors. And instead of blowing things up, maybe we could try building something,” he suggested.
In a piece fitting for The New York Times, Scranton’s rant against American exceptionalism and the 21st century military ended with another nod to his horrendous Star Wars analogy:
It’s our choice. We make our myths. We show by our actions what our holy days mean. Forty years after the American Bicentennial, 13 years after I stood on a rooftop in Baghdad, and 10 years after getting out of the Army, I won’t be out under the fire, cheering our explosions. I won’t be watching “Star Wars” either. My America isn’t an empire or a rebellion, but an ideal; it’s not a conquest, nor a liberation, but a commitment.
