U.S. Army Tweet Backfires On Memorial Day

For Memorial Day I visited the family cemetery and removed the flags placed on my father's and brother's graves at the behest of the VFA (Veterans of Foreign Wars) in Skowhegan. I've asked them to stop doing this, but the cemetery manager says he has to do what the VFA says.

My brother never enlisted, but he bears a similar name to a Civil War vet ancestor of ours who died by his own hand. My father, who was in the Army in Korea post-combat, passed on what his WWI vet father taught him: "Don't believe them when they say the next war is a good one. There is no such thing." (My father enlisted after his father died of his war injuries, before I was born.) My little granddaughter wanted the flag because she loves the stars and stripes design.

It is marketing like this that keeps the Pentagon death cult churning out wars and victims.

But marketing can only take you so far into denying reality. Two of my favorite thinkers blogged about a now infamously ill-advised tweet by the U.S. Army last week, "How has serving impacted you?" The number of responses was only at 5,300+ when Bruce Gagnon, himself an Air Force veteran, weighed in with "Army: It's not a job, it's an adventure..."

• “My daughter was raped while in the army,” said one responder. “They took her to the hospital where an all male staff tried to convince her to give the guy a break because it would ruin his life. She persisted. Wouldn’t back down. Did a tour in Iraq. Now suffers from PTSD.”

• “I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years,” said another.

• “Someone I loved joined right out of high school even though I begged him not to. Few months after his deployment ended, we reconnected. One night, he told me he loved me and then shot himself in the head. If you’re gonna prey on kids for imperialism, at least treat their PTSD.”

By now various authors have compiled some of the 10,ooo responses. Caitlin Johnstone all the way down in Australia posted "The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut Wrenching."

“My dad was drafted into war and was exposed to agent orange. I was born w multiple physical/neurological disabilities that are linked back to that chemical. And my dad became an alcoholic with ptsd and a side of bipolar disorder.” 

~ 

“i met this guy named christian who served in iraq. he was cool, had his own place with a pole in the living room. always had lit parties. my best friend at the time started dating him so we spent a weekend at his crib. after a party, 6am, he took out his laptop. he started showing us some pics of his time in the army. pics with a bunch of dudes. smiling, laughing. it was cool. i was drunk and didn’t care. he started showing us pics of some little kids. after a while, his eyes went completely fucking dark. i was like man, dude’s high af. he very calmly explained to us that all of those kids were dead ‘but that’s what war was. dead kids and nothing to show for it but a military discount’. christian killed himself 2 months later.”

George Marlowe writing for World Socialist Web Site, "Memorial Day 2019: US Army tweet prompts outpouring of antiwar sentiment," pointed out what I've been thinking since I saw the original thread on Twitter: "This outpouring of rage on Twitter highlights the latent but deep going antiwar sentiment in the American population[emphasis mine] that finds no expression in the current political system or the corporate media. "  

How can we antiwar activists do a better job of leveraging this?

I would love to hear your thoughts in comments.