Robert Bales in August, 2011.

I spent yesterday morning listening to my local NPR station, which was broadcasting a discussion amongst a panel of military veterans who had returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The six panelists were male and female, black, white and Latino, and spanned a few generations. I had one of those clichéd “driveway moments” that NPR loves to raise money from — when you sit in your car in your driveway because you can’t stop listening — even though I don’t even have a driveway. They said all sorts of extraordinary things (and I am paraphrasing here because I wasn’t taking notes at the time):

“To put it bluntly, I killed people. That was my job in the Army.”

“I did not fight for the politics or the big picture; I fought for the guy on either side of me.”

“I’m glad I went in. I got to experience different things.”

As I listened, I realized that I have no close friends who are recent veterans.

I know people in Iraq Veterans Against the War, and I like them, but they are not close friends; we show up at the same meetings and events rather than hang out together on weekends. My friends have traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Christian Peacemaker Teams and other groups. Unlike many Americans, I know the names of some Afghan and Iraqi civilians. But I have only second-hand relationships with people currently or recently in the military — a guy I went to high school with who is my friend on Facebook is in the Army, my sister-in-law’s friend’s ex-husband was in the Navy, my husband’s cousin whom I have never met was in the Army. That kind of thing. But how can I be compassionate and constructive when I know so little about what the lives of men and women in uniform are like? How can I be nonviolent?

In this militarylessness, I am not alone. In fact, I am the majority. (Finally, I’m in some majority in this world!) According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, just one half of one percent of American adults has served in active duty at any given time — 15 million of the 240 million Americans over the age of 18. That is startling. What is also startling is that if you are in the military, it is likely that your parents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins are also in the military, and so are your friends.

Admiral Mike Mullen told Time magazine, “We come from fewer and fewer places — we’ve BRAC-ed our way out of significant portions of the country.” The retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was referring to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission process that has shuttered hundreds of military posts across wide swaths of the nation, meaning that most members of the military come from and return home to fewer but concentrated areas. There is a disconnect between the civilian and military spheres.

Why is this important? Because into that disconnect steps judgment, condemnation, assumption and ambivalence. And now is not the time for any of those sentiments.

Troops from Iraq are returning to the United States — haunted, disabled, addicted, proud, grown-up, transformed. But troops in Afghanistan are facing a new phase of that protracted battle in the wake of Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales’ massacre of 17 civilians in Kandahar on March 11. We still don’t know the whole story. In fact, the number just changed from 16 to 17 dead, with no explanation given by military investigators. Now it is nine children and eight adults who were killed.

Six of the children were part of one family, including four sisters — Masooma (9), Farida (6), Nabiya (4) and Palwasha (2) — and their brothers — Faizullah (12) and Ismatullah (13). Their mother, Bibi Zohra, and grandmother, Shah Tarina, were also killed. Mohamed Wazir — father of the six children, husband and son to the two women — mourns them all. He told The Wall Street Journal that he is haunted by guilt, “It hurts me a lot when I remember occasions when I shouted at my sons because I asked them to do something and they ignored it… I feel so very sorry now.” His brother Akhtar Mohammed (20), his brother’s new bride, Bibi Nazia (18), and a nephew, Essa Mohammed (15), were also among the dead.

Will we ever know what went through Robert Bales’ mind as he shot and killed nine children and set bodies on fire? Will we ever know if he was alone or if he acted with others?

We do know that he is married to a woman named Karilyn and that they have two children, Quincy and Bobby. We know she kept a blog about the ups and downs of being a military wife and that soon after Bales was identified and accused, she issued a statement. It is worth reading in full:

What happened on the night of March 11 in Kandahar Province was a terrible and heartbreaking tragedy.

My family including my and Bob’s extended families are all profoundly sad. We extend our condolences to all the people of the Panjawai District, our hearts go out to all of them, especially to the parents, brothers, sisters and grandparents of the children who perished.

I know that all good people around the world, regardless of nationality, religion or political values, join me in grieving that such a terrible thing could happen.

Our family has little information beyond what we read and see in the media. What has been reported is completely out of character of the man I know and admire. Please respect me when I say I cannot shed any light on what happened that night, so please do not ask.

I too want to know what happened. I want to know how this could be.

I have no indication that my family’s own safety is at risk, but I appreciate the efforts that have been undertaken to protect us. I hope there will soon be no reason for protection of families, whether here or in Kandahar Province, or anywhere, because the pain inevitably inflicted in war should never be an excuse to inflict yet more pain. The cycle must be broken. We must find peace.

I know the media has a right to pursue and report news. As you do your jobs, I plead with you to respect the trauma that I and my extended family are experiencing. Please allow us some peace and time as we try to make sense of something that makes no sense at all.

All I can do now is emphasize my sadness and my condolences to the families in Panjawai for their terrible loss. The victims and their families are all in my prayers, as is my husband who I love very much.

I am really grateful for that statement — for her compassion, empathy and courage. I came across a blog which compiled a number of responses to Mrs. Bales’ statement and earlier writings, and this leapt out at me: “The one thought that keeps coming back to me is there but for the grace of God… This could have been anybody’s spouse.”

That is a heavy thing to say. Anyone in the military could have snapped, could have killed nine children and almost as many unarmed, pajama-ed adults. What this nation — what this war machine — demands of men like Robert Bales and women like Karilyn Bales is too much, it is wrong, it is criminal, it must end. Acknowledging that, and working for the end of the wars, will not return Mohammed Wazir’s family to his open arms. But it does begin to bridge the divide.

Brock McIntosh (left) and Jacob George, via Military Families Speak Out.

Last night at NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, on the south side of Washington Square Park, Jacob George and Brock McIntosh spoke on behalf of Iraq Veterans Against the War about their experiences in Afghanistan, both as US Army soldiers and, most recently, as members of a Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation.

They said a lot of good stuff. But one part that especially stuck out for your Waging Nonviolence correspondent was how McIntosh responded to a question about the prospects for nonviolence education both in the US military itself and among Afghans. He’s uncommonly optimistic about the latter, and he’s in a good position to know. Currently a conscientious objector in the National Guard, he has been spending the past year or so attending the best nonviolence trainings he can find, as well as making contacts among Afghans interested in fostering a culture of powerful nonviolence in their country.

Download [4:34, 2.1MB]

Note, among much else, his mention of the impact of recent WNV contributor Maria Stephan‘s book Civilian Jihad.

You can also watch the whole event, complete with Jacob George’s banjo performance, here:

A libertarian counter-recruitment poster.

The habits one learns in tough economic times can last for a lifetime. Those of us who grew up with family members who lived through the Great Depression know to clean up our plates—starvation still feels to them like more of a threat than obesity. As people struggle today to make ends meet, they’re forming habits that, in turn, will come to be deeply entrenched. And it seems like one of them, especially for the most vulnerable, is going to war.

I’ve written already about how the recession has been dangerously good for the arms business. In Religion Dispatches today, veteran activist and minister Peter Laarman points out how good it has also been for military recruitment:

Earlier this month the Pentagon crowed that it had just completed its best recruiting year in three and a half decades. The announcement made no secret of the fact that a devastatingly bad job market is just terrific news for military recruiters waving hefty signing bonuses. The question of conscience: How do we feel about taking advantage of the economic vulnerability of the majority of American youth in order to make them still more vulnerable: i.e., vulnerable to suicide bombers, IEDs, mortar rounds, and even “friendly fire”?

And, of course, those less vulnerable to the collapse can go on with their lives unperturbed.

Today, obviously, our privileged young people do not have to worry about a military draft: there is absolutely no chance that they will be compelled to serve. But what is far worse than Vietnam-era draft evasion by the young and well-connected is the complete insulation from the consequences of bad policy enjoyed by today’s jeunesse doree. Not only do they not have to go to the burning deserts of Iraq or to the chilly forbidding heights of Afghanistan: they don’t even have to know anything about the lives of those who are going. The idea that they might experience any Fallows-like guilt or have any second thoughts about their degree of insulation is simply not an issue today.

There appears to be no coincidence that, just as General McChrystal calls for a massive additional deployment, the ranks are swelling. Would his dangerous proposal be even thinkable a few years ago, when people still had better opportunities available to them than soldiering?

When we go to war, when we elect to send more troops, questions need to be raised about what injustices permit us to do so. No other country, after all, seems to have the luxury to send tens of thousands of soldiers to a country on the other side of the world to fight a war with no firmly-stated goal and very little hope of success. But when there’s such an incredible disparity between rich and poor as in the United States, it’s not so much skin off the backs of the powerful.