Veteran Matt Explores The Real Human Price Of Military Intervention In The Middle East

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Matt, you said something that is absolutely profound, brother.  When you say it’s been a full decade since that first wave of young men were sent into Iraq and told to go kill, and then sent into Afghanistan, which did ask for it in a limited capacity but not the protracted endeavor we were engaged in.  They were sent into Iraq and Afghanistan and were asked to kill and told: Don’t worry about killing. You’re doing God’s work.  You’re doing your country’s work.  You’re fighting for freedom.  You’re good to the core.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Matt is in Texas first up today.  How are you?

Caller Matt:  How’s it going, Mike?

Mike:  Good.

Caller Matt:  I know it’s kind of off topic for what’s been discussed before, but I think you summed it up pretty good earlier on the show when you said the past is littered with dead bodies.

Mike:  It seems not to matter, doesn’t it?  We won’t get on roller coasters because they kill people, but we’ll go on adventures bombing the entire world back into the stone ages and are guaranteed to leave dead bodies in our wake.

Caller Matt:  Yes, sir.  I was eleven when 9/11 happened.  I was 12 when Saddam Hussein started selling Iraqi oil in Euros.  I was 13 when I decided it was my patriotic duty to join the Army and go fight those evil Arabs.  I deployed twice with the 38 Cav to Iraq.  Five years later, three of my friends died in combat.  One was murdered about a month after my first deployment by gang initiation.  One killed himself a month after my second deployment after guilt.  Now 22 veterans a day are committing suicide.  I myself, I walked up and looked the devil in the eye and decided I couldn’t do it myself.

Mike:  Let me ask you a question, Matt.  And by the way, thank you for your sacrifice and service.  Did you hear what Professor Hauerwas, when Noah Berlatsky asked him the question: What do you mean by this war as religion?  Did you hear Hauerwas’s answer?  I read it earlier in the program.

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Caller Matt:  I’ll be honest, I’ve been kind of in and out.  My signal is pretty spotty out here in the desert.

Mike:  Your cell signal or your radio?

Caller Matt:  I’ve been on the phone on hold.

Mike:  Let me repeat it.

Mike Church Show Transcript – The State Is A Religion And War Is Its God

[reading]

The suggestion in the book is that war serves as the great liturgical event for Americans, where we sacrifice the youth of the present generation to show that the sacrifices of the youth of the past generations were worthy. So war becomes the great ritual moral renewal of the American society.

Just think of all the language about sacrifice that is constantly used about the service people. And I have nothing but the highest regard for those who conscientiously participate. And I think that we don’t respond to what we ask them to do, that is, give up their normal unwillingness to kill, and the moral wound that leaves them with, I think we don’t give them the opportunity to know how to express that. And that really drives them into a kind of secrecy that’s very destructive.

So I want to say the American difference is that we are a country that literally morally lives by war and the sacrifices war asks to assure ourselves to our right to our status.

[end reading]

Caller Matt:  I couldn’t have summed it up better.

Mike:  Me neither.

Caller Matt:  I’m going to use some provocative words.  To every chicken hawk listening out there that wants to go into Syria, I just want to tell you, everyone that wants to shake a soldier’s hand and say “Good job,” mark my words, we go into another country, it’s been over a decade now.  A whole new generation of good, honest, hardworking American kids are going to be killing themselves ten years from now.

Mike:  Matt, you’re breaking my heart, brother.  I don’t know what to say other than to say this must not happen.  If there is an instance in which there is a call to actually perform defense when there has been a non-contestable attack upon Americans and American citizens — I’m also just a little bit pissed off and tired of hearing about “national interests.”  What the hell is a national interest?  There is nothing on Earth that you couldn’t rationalize using some sort of cockeyed reasoning.  I guess you’ve be using irrational reasoning in most instances.

Mike Church Show Transcript – Secretary Of State Kerry Explains How U.S. Trains Humanitarian Terrorists

There’s nothing about national interest in the discussions at the time of the Articles of Confederation being amended, as I played from Patrick Henry and his speech in my movie Spirit of ’76.  There’s nothing in there about national interest.  The only national interest was we don’t want to be attacked again by the Brits, and if we are, we need to have a way to organize and better fund and better organize our army, which allegedly was the purpose of the Constitution.  Of course, we know today that went off the rails and that’s not the purpose of it anymore, although it does seem that the Constitution is used more and more every single day to justify the warfare state and to see to it that that genie is never put back into the proverbial bottle.

Matt, you said something that is absolutely profound, brother.  When you say it’s been a full decade since that first wave of young men were sent into Iraq and told to go kill, and then sent into Afghanistan, which did ask for it in a limited capacity but not the protracted endeavor we were engaged in.  They were sent into Iraq and Afghanistan and were asked to kill and told: Don’t worry about killing. You’re doing God’s work.  You’re doing your country’s work.  You’re fighting for freedom.  You’re good to the core.

Caller Matt:  So many people want to justify and talk about all three of those wars and the entire Arab Spring and our involvement in the Middle East period.  I’m sick and tired of hearing about this moral obligation to save everybody.  I can’t help but wonder, like you said — we’re never going to run out of moral obligations if that’s the thing we’re going to go on.  If you’ve got a moral obligation, it’s to stop fighting.  I was part of operations where we nabbed one guy and created 15, 20 anti-American freedom fighters.  I sympathize with most Iraqis.  Granted, there are some scummy people out there, but there are some scummy people here in America, too.

The vast majority of people that went to fight us, that I shot at, that shot at me, those guys lost their job at the cigarette factory because we blew it up because Saddam Hussein was bad.  They lost their job at the power plant.  They lost electricity.  They lost their utilities.  Their septic was running out into the street into a ditch that ran into the river that pumped the water ten feet downstream and back into their house to drink.  They had nothing.  That’s why they were fighting us, because some guy from Al-Qaeda said: I’ll give you 50 bucks if you blow up this IED and take a video of it.  That’s why they’re fighting us.  We create 99 percent of the people that hate us in the Middle East.

Mike:  I think as Andy McCarthy pointed out yesterday, the Middle East has become radicalized and we’re assisting the radicalization by toppling the dictators that try to hold it in check.  You can’t have it both ways.  [mocking] “Yeah, but we oppose dictators.”  Well, you oppose jihadists, especially when they fly planes into buildings even more.  I want to go back to the statement you made about, let’s just say this invasion happens in October.  Even though they say [mocking] “No escalation here,” you don’t know that, dude.  You know what this is?  This is the John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte, Dianne Feinstein, Barack Obama and all the rest of them, the great global internationalist wet dream of finding a way.  There has to be a way that we can invade and take over Iran.  There’s got to be a way we can get into Iran.

Mike Church Show Transcript – We Don’t Need No Stinking Evidence, It’s War Time, Baby!

Just the unlimited capacity for the American mind to process, the United States being officially 234 years old, and we’re going to forever alter and control the affairs of what used to be called Persia, which is what Iran basically is today.  I realize the borders are a little different.  So we’re going to go in and upend the home of Aladdin.  [mocking] “Mike, Aladdin was from Arabia.”  Wherever.  We’re going to go and take down the kingdom of Xerxes.  That was Xerxes II.  We’re going to go fix Persia.  It’s only been around for about three millennia, but we’re going to go repair it.  Hell, we used to worship the fact that we could buy Persian rugs.  Now we want to carpet bomb Persia.  That’s how sick this is.  [mocking] “Yeah, but Mike, they’re gonna get a nuke and wipe Israel out.”  Again, mutually-assured destruction.  If you believed in it for the Soviets, then believe in it for the Israelis.  If a missile is coming towards Israel and if they think there’s a nuclear head on it, another one is going to come from Israel and there’s not going to be very much left in that area that we call the Middle East.

I want to go back and reiterate one more time, when this invasion happens and when the great protracted war that’s going to lead to a conflict with Syria occurs, which so many of you desperately want, you are now going to assist in bringing the next generation — it’s been ten years since that last wave of young men was told to go into Iraq and Afghanistan and kill, and the had to deal with the consequences of what they did.  Ten years later you’re going to take another generation of young men and tell them to go into Syria.  While you’re there, look, Iran is over there.  Go in there and kill.  Just kill everything.  Everything is kill, kill, kill, death, death, death, bomb, bomb, bomb.  What in the hell is going on?  Hell is a good word.  He is winning, isn’t He?  What the hell is going on here?

Caller Matt:  If I could throw up one last thing for consideration on that note.

Mike:  Sure.

Caller Matt:  I don’t remember the name of the soldier, and I feel bad that it slips me, but there was a suicide note that made it around alternative media circles about a month ago.  When I read it, it broke my heart.  I’m having trouble keeping it together right now.  It really summed it up perfectly.  It was a gentleman who basically detailed the trauma that he had gone through, the things he was encouraged to do, how he felt there was no way out.  He ended it by saying: There are 22 veterans a day killing themselves now.  The only way that that tide will be stemmed is when there are none of us left and we’ve all found our graves.  If we continue this perpetual war, his words will not come true because another generation will follow and another after that.  That 22 a day will keep going up.

Mike:  It’s sad.  We love you, brother.  Don’t despair, please.

Caller Matt:  Oh, I won’t.

Mike:  Thanks for the call.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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