Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars

by Andrew J. Bacevich (Editor), Daniel A. Sjursen (Editor)

Overview

American veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan offer invaluable firsthand perspectives on what made America’s post-9/11 wars so costly and disastrous.

Twenty years of America’s Global War on Terror produced little tangible success while exacting enormous harm. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States sustained tens of thousands of casualties, expended trillions of dollars, and inflicted massive suffering on the very populations that we sought to “liberate.” Now the inclination to forget it all and move on is palpable. But there is much to be learned from the immense debacle. And those who served and fought in these wars are best positioned to teach us.

Paths of Dissent collects fifteen original essays from American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan—hailing from a wide range of services, ranks, and walks of life—who have come out in opposition to these conflicts. Selected for their candor and eloquence by fellow veterans Andrew Bacevich and Daniel Sjursen, these soldiers vividly describe both their motivations for serving and the disillusionment that made them speak out against the system. Their testimony is crucial for understanding just how the world’s self-proclaimed greatest military power went so badly astray.

Contributors: Gil Barndollar • Dan Berschinski • Joy Damiani • Daniel L. Davis • Jason Dempsey • Erik Edstrom • Vincent Emanuele • Gian Gentile • Matthew P. Hoh • Jonathan W. Hutto, Sr. • Buddhika Jayamaha • Roy Scranton • Kevin Tillman • Elliott Woods • Paul Yingling

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250870179
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/02/2022
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Andrew Bacevich grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton, served in the army, became a university historian, and currently serves as the president and founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of a dozen books, among them The Limits of Power, Washington Rules, Age of Illusions, and, most recently, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.

Daniel A. Sjursen is a retired US Army officer, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and director of the Eisenhower Media Network. Along with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henriksen, he cohosts the podcast Fortress on a Hill. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, among other publications. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point. Sjursen is the author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reflections on Military Dissent

Andrew Bacevich

As American as It Gets

Erik Edstrom

How I Got My Humanity Back from the Army

Joy Damiani

A Fresh Purpose

Dan Berschinski

Going Public with the Truth

Daniel L. Davis

What Good Is Dissent?

Roy Scranton

When Grunts Complain

Buddhika Jayamaha

The Accountability-Avoidance Two-Step

Jason Dempsey

From the Rust Belt to Mesopotamia

Vincent Emanuele

Candor and Intolerance

Paul Yingling

A Sailor’s Story

Jonathan W. Hutto Sr.

Reclaiming My Morality

Matthew P. Hoh

Truth, Lies, and Propaganda

Kevin Tillman

What I Learned in Baghdad

Gian Gentile

My Good War

Gil Barndollar

From Soldier to Witness

Elliott Woods

Conclusion: The Price of Free Pizza

Andrew Bacevich

Acknowledgments

About the Contributors

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

Historian Bacevich (After the Apocalypse) and retired army officer Sjursen gather in this grim and often gripping essay collection U.S. soldiers’ indictments against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Contributors include Erik Edstrom, who attended West Point out of “a conflated mix of economic necessity and idealistic do-goodery” and eventually came to believe that the “war on terror” was “illegal, immoral, self-perpetuating, and counterproductive.” Joy Damiani enlisted at age 19 and spent two years in her division’s public affairs offices in Georgia, “making PR look like news and an unwinnable war look like a victory,” before being sent to Baghdad, where she was rarely permitted to leave the base for her reporting and never allowed to use the word failure in print. Elsewhere, Dan Berchinski describes losing both his legs to an IED in Afghanistan, and Kevin Tillman details how the Bush administration lied about his brother Pat Tillman’s death from friendly fire. Full of potent criticism and anguished admissions of guilt—“We shot at noncombatants. We tortured prisoners. We blew up civilian structures. We ran over, mutilated and took pictures of dead Iraqis. Frankly we did whatever the fuck we wanted”—this is a visceral takedown of America’s forever wars. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Paths of Dissent is superb, full of enraging and courageous writing at its best. This collection of sharp, thoughtful, painfully honest and intellectually probing essays from a wide range of American veterans offers absolutely critical perspectives on what we have done as a nation over the past two decades, and what we as individuals and as citizens need to do in response.”

—Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

“Through eloquent and candid essays by Americans veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, Paths of Dissent reminds everyone of the power and the patriotism of genuine military dissent. Andrew Bacevich and Daniel Sjursen have done us all a service by lifting up the voices of those who served—and revealing the principled commitment that drives these veterans to challenge a system urgently in need of reconstruction.”

—Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation

“Enlightening... Any citizen who wants to better understand our country's current military entrapments will want to read this book.”

—BookPage (starred review)

“The contributors are excellent writers… An excellent, timely collection offering analysis of two decades of war and a broad swath of ideas and possible solutions to problems the military is largely incapable of fixing without outside attention.”

—Booklist

“Gripping… Full of potent criticism and anguished admissions of guilt, this is a visceral takedown of America’s forever wars.”

—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2022-04-26
Veterans from far-flung conflicts decry the American way of war.

The writers whom Bacevich and Sjursen assemble all take a sharp-eyed view of combat. “My childhood delusions of saving the galaxy like Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, or Lando Calrissian were met with the stark reality of being a mere storm trooper for the US empire.” So writes one veteran of Afghanistan in a classic trope of childhood-inspired enthusiasm for war soured by reality. He has particular authority, for the writer is Kevin Tillman, brother of NFL star Pat Tillman, both of whom became Army Rangers after 9/11. Pat died, a victim of friendly fire, worried that their mission was being hijacked by those who would turn the American soldier into “a glorified state-sponsored terrorist.” That’s just how it played out. As Gil Barndollar writes, when his unit requested the code name Hessian (denied), it was with a knowing nod to history, while most of their time was spent killing “dirt farmers,” as a Navy SEAL said bitterly. According to Iraq veteran Roy Scranton, whereas war can unite a nation (“A dead soldier makes the imagined community of the nation real”), it can also divide it, especially if that war is waged for cynical reasons or on the basis of lies. There you have Iraq, a war that the dedicatee of this edited volume, the late Maj. Ian Fishback, helped expose as corrupt. In a powerful introduction, Bacevich writes about his fears for the long-lasting effects of those wars, as the “flagrant malpractice by those at the top [has] inflicted untold damage on the troops we ostensibly esteem, on populations US policymakers vowed to liberate, and ultimately on our own democracy. The adverse effects of war are by no means confined to the immediate arena in which fighting occurs.”

Anti-war activism from the deepest of patriotic roots, advocated by those who have paid a heavy price in order to speak.

Kirkus Reviews