Ben Brody’s Photo Blog

The reup man is making his rounds, trying to keep the first-term enlistees like me in the Army by whatever means necessary.  People are leaving at an astounding rate.  The $20,000 bonuses are keeping some people in, but what they’re often finding is that no one joins the Army, at a private’s base pay of $15,612 a year, for the money.

I joined the Army as a photojournalist when it was clear that the United States was about to invade Iraq on the basis of questionable intelligence. The hyper-nationalistic atmosphere at the time fascinated me. It made our people crazy, willing to believe anything, as it has repeatedly throughout history. Compounding the problem, “We’re number one!” was the extent of the average American’s understanding of foreign policy. Hey, it’s how we’re raised to think.

I wanted to bear witness to the coming Iraq war in what I felt was the most honorable and least presumptuous way possible – through military service.

Four and a half years later, I’ve served at every level in the 3rd Infantry Division – from an infantry squad in Sadr City to division operations staff at Victory South. In this time, I feel I have gained some valuable insight into the nature of war, the people of Iraq, and our own national character.

But the more time I spend in Iraq, watching the country fall to pieces, become a quagmire in which we only become more hopelessly entangled, it leads me back to one of my original questions I had upon joining the Army: Why Iraq?

I didn’t believe it was about cheap oil, freedom, security or revenge. Watching firsthand where our money and our blood is spent in this strange land, I believe now that it’s more about the industrial infrastructure of the defense industry than anything else.The only people who realistically stood to gain anything at the outset of the war were in the defense industry. And they’ve made out like bandits. Who else has gained? Certainly not Joe McSix-pack or Ahmed al-Six-pack.

Stalking through the city, armed and armored like a tank on two legs, buried under thousands of dollars worth of name-brand gear, I feel more like an enforcer of free-market imperialism than a bringer of freedom or an extinguisher of terrorism.  And every funding bill that puts more of that cutting-edge gear on my back makes the industry that sent us to war bigger and hungrier.  And I feel that if I reenlist, it marks me as complicit in a scheme to both defraud the American citizenry and destroy the Arab world.  I intend to be back in Iraq again, but I won’t be carrying a rifle or following a politician’s insane orders.