Irregular Army

by Matt Kennard

  There was a lot of talk about baby-boomers being a burden on the health-care and pension systems during the War on Terror, but many were now fighting America’s wars and when the financial crisis hit in 2008 it created a new army of unemployed oldies. Not surprisingly all branches of the military met recruitment targets in 2008 and Pentagon officials publicly attributed the military’s new popularity to the layoffs that hit America’s biggest companies, pushing the national unemployment rate above 7 percent soon after. In the aftermath of the crisis, many older people lost their jobs, livelihoods, and self-respect in the middle of their lives—stuck supporting a family on unemployment insurance (if they were lucky). The newly open military became an obvious place to go. Basic military pay for the first four months of active duty was just over $15,500 a year, but more when benefits were included.114 This was quite an attractive pay deal for those slung on the unemployment heap. “It’s a guaranteed job, as long as you go to work every day,” boasted Captain Jared Auchey, company commander of the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, who estimated that one in ten of the enlistments are over thirty-five. “There are no layoffs in the Army,” he added, not mentioning there are other ways to be “laid off” on the battlefield.115 Staff Sergeant Arron Barnes spouted the familiar military line that older recruits tended to bring technical skills and maturity. Then he revealed the real reason for their desire to join: desperation. “They contribute at a higher level because they have no other place to go,” he said. “This is their life.” A new generation of desperate people whose lives had been torn apart by a financial crisis that was not their fault was now turning to the one place that promised redemption. Profiled by the New York Times, Specialist John D. Butts, thirty-eight, was emblematic of the recession-recruit:

  An aspiring writer who was a house painter outside Philadelphia for two decades, he lost his steady paycheck last November after the housing market crashed. A part-time job at Blockbuster did not pay his rent, and when his landlord threatened to evict him, his girlfriend (now his wife) and her three teenage children, he decided radical action was required. He called an Army recruiter he had met recently and signed up for a three-year stint. Despite years as a dedicated beer drinker and smoker, Specialist Butts made it through basic here at Fort Sill and is now training with an artillery unit that may head to South Korea this year. A tour in Afghanistan could be in the cards, he says.

  It was the same place Private Gaffney had been sent to die.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Outsiders

  GREEN CARD SOLDIERS

  The only for sure way of gaining citizenship through military service in the United States armed services is to die.

  Marco Amador, filmmaker, 20101

  In late March 2003, the month the invasion of Iraq got underway, America received news of its first battlefield casualties. It was a stark wake-up call for the country and brought home the tragic human costs of war. “The violence of the war against Iraq made its way to small towns . . . when residents learned that one of the first military victims was someone they knew,” wrote the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time.2 The soldiers fell while carrying out one of the early objectives of the invasion plan—to secure the port city Umm Qasr in the south of Iraq. In older times a sleepy fishing village, it had been turned into a military port after the Iraqi Revolution of 1958 because of its strategic proximity to Iran and Kuwait. US Marines advanced from Kuwait as the invasion got underway, taking the port surprisingly quickly. But they then had to spend days securing it against what a British commander called “heavy resistance.” “We were told Umm Qasr wasn’t too bad, then we get reports of dug-in Iraqi infantry, it was hair-raising,” said one platoon sergeant, Marc Montez.3 One of the soldiers in his platoon who was trying to hold back Iraqi resistance was Lance Corporal José Antonio Gutierrez, First Marine Division, who had arrived in Kuwait just two months before aboard the USS Rushmore. In a major firefight on March 21, he became America’s first casualty in the war, shot fatally in the chest by a fellow soldier, in a so-called “friendly fire” incident.

  Except Lance Corporal Gutierrez wasn’t an American casualty at all—the twenty-four-year-old was, in fact, Guatemalan, an orphan who had travelled 2,000 miles and crossed two borders illegally for his crack at the American dream. In death, there was no one in small-town America to mourn him, and his dream of becoming a US citizen was realized only posthumously. He had given his life for a country that was not even his own, a sacrifice made even more poignant considering the tragic history of US military involvement in his native country—which had destroyed his own family. Gutierrez was born in the small Guatemalan village of Escuintla at the height of the country’s brutal civil war, which had raged from 1960 to the middle of the 1990s, and for which the US government and military establishment were in large part responsible. Before 1944, the Guatemalan elite composed 2 percent of the population but had control of more than 60 percent of the land, according to historian Walter LaFeber.4 “The poorest 50 percent of the population owned only 3 percent of the land but depended on [it] for their food,” while half the population were indigenous and earned less than $100 a year while being subjected to brutal and harsh discrimination by the ruling elite.5 The country’s corrupt dictatorship was overthrown in 1944 by a student-led middle-class revolt and in 1951 the progressive social democrat Jacobo Arbenz Guzman came to power in democratic elections. He planned and enacted a huge redistribution program that gave land back to the previously disenfranchised poor and Indian population. In doing so, he particularly upset the United Fruit Company, a US-based multinational company that controlled a large proportion of the region’s fruit production and transport.

  For the then incumbent in the White House, President Dwight Eisenhower, this was confirmation that Guatemala was close to teaming up with the Soviets. He soon ordered the CIA to train Guatemalan exiles to get rid of Arbenz and Guatemalan democracy. Though not at this stage actually affiliated to the USSR, “the frightened Guatemalan government gratefully accepted a shipload of armaments from the Soviet bloc.” Eisenhower needed no other pretext and ordered the CIA-backed exiles from their bases in Honduras and Nicaragua to start attacking Guatemala. This was supported by American-operated planes that dropped dynamite onto Guatemala City, its capital. Arbenz had no choice but to flee and the exiled leader, General Carlos Castillo Armas, took control. The remnants of the reform movement were put before a firing squad and the pre-revolution order was reinstated, clearing the way for decades of brutality and oppression. Philip C. Roettinger, a US Marine colonel who was instrumental in liquidating Guatamalan democracy, wrote in 1986 that his actions “turned out to be a terrible mistake . . . Our ‘success’ led to 31 years of repressive military rule and the deaths of more than 100,000 Guatemalans.”6 It was actually a lot more. In February 1999 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established to investigate the atrocities during the civil war squarely blamed the genocide of the Indian population on the right-wing military dictatorship, which was supported by the US. American military advisers and the CIA had also helped design the “scorched earth” campaign in which 440 villages disappeared from map. When the killing finally abated in the 1990s, 200,000 people had been killed or disappeared. “The United States must not repeat that mistake,” President Bill Clinton said simply in the aftermath.7 A few years later, in the attack on Iraq, they would repeat it, and Gutierrez would pay for the “mistake” a second time.

  In the late 1970s amid countless hideous massacres of the Indian population in the countryside, Gutierrez’s Mayan parents had been forced to flee to Guatemala City which was being flooded with people seeking a safe haven. Their son, José, was the embodiment of this broken and abused society: when both his parents died, he was forced to live by his wits on the streets, one of 300,000 street kids that shame the country to this day. At eight or nine, and undernourished, he was saved by Casa Alianza, a UK charity that takes in street kids. He was lucky: many of his friends on the streets would di
e before they reached their teens. But inside he was “bleeding with loneliness and sadness,” said Patrick Atkinson, the director of the orphanage. When he arrived at Casa, he was still looking for his mother who had died. No one had told him that when people die they don’t come back, and as he got older his yearning for a family led him to search desperately for his sister. “He was always talking about his sister but couldn’t find her, he didn’t know where to look,” said his mentor at Casa. Eventually, with the help of a social worker, he tracked her down; but José dreamed of a bigger family and of becoming an architect so he could build a house for himself that no one could throw him out of. These dreams couldn’t, he gradually recognized, be achieved in Guatemala. At fourteen, he told his friends there was nothing left for him in the country and he wanted to leave. They tried to dissuade him from the perilous journey north to the US that so often ends in death or prison for thousands of Latinos. But early one morning, he caught the bus to the Mexican border and waited until dawn to wade through a river into Mexico before catching a freight train north, the start of a journey that would take him 2,000 miles and put him between the wheels of fourteen different trains. Along the way he worked on food plantations to stay alive. At the US–Mexico border it took three attempts to get over, but he was smart and pretended to be Mexican, avoiding deportation back to Guatemala. In the back of his mind was his beloved sister, Engracia, who had promised to follow him north if he was successful. On arrival in the US, he was soon picked up by immigration authorities who let him stay after he told them he was sixteen and applied for asylum. He was put with foster parents, themselves Latin American immigrants, but still made sure to send $20 or $30 back to his sister from small jobs he did while he went to high school and community college.8

  After being taken in by a number of foster families, in September 2002 he enlisted. “I remember when he came in . . . I had to interview them, find out a little about them,” his platoon sergeant said later. “One question on there is ‘Why did you join the Marine Corps?’ And I distinctly remember his [answer], because I read it a couple of times and it said that, the reason he joined the Marine Corps was to give something back to the US, to give something back to the country that took him in basically. And that struck me pretty hard, like wow you know he’s not joining for any other reason than to give back to the US, to the country.” José’s decision actually had much more to do with the desperation brought on by the end of high school and with it the foster child program. He was on his own—again. At the same time, his grades weren’t sufficient to get him a scholarship to study architecture, his lifelong dream. He was enticed by the prospect of citizenship and the benefits offered by military service. “He wanted education, to be an architect, to write a book,” said his social worker. “He said, ‘I feel like I’m running out of time and I want to do it all, so if I get my education paid for by the government I can do a lot of things.’” The military was offering all sorts of inducements at this point, so he enlisted as a rifleman in the First Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, California. He had got the family he had always yearned for (in the form of the military), but less than a year later he was dead—apparently consumed with love for the US. Well, such was the story the military wanted to put out, and the media was happy to oblige in repeating the fairytale of the “patriotic foreigner.” “Fallen Marine wanted to give back to adopted country”9 ran the headline on CNN when he died. It was a lie. As a proud Latino, José didn’t even want to learn English. “He was proud of being from Guatemala and he said he never wanted to be an American,” said his social worker in the US. “José wasn’t being himself. He was playing a role in order to reach his goal,” added his mentor. But he was useful to the military in death. “The story that was told by the US embassy, by the US military, was a classic war propaganda story,” said a close friend. “Once again using and exploiting [José] for their own ends. And you read this boy came to the States illegally at 14, wants to be an American, wants to be a Marine. You know what? False. Completely untrue. Why would they lie like that when the boy’s story is so powerful for who he is?” José’s dreams of becoming an architect and getting an education had actually never included military service. “He hadn’t planned to do it,” said his foster brother in the US. “He never intended to go into the marines. That’s the last thing that would have occurred to him. What he wanted was to become an architect or professional soccer player. That’s what he always talked about. I once told him I wanted to join the marines. He said, ‘You’re crazy. Don’t do that. They’re nuts.’ It wasn’t his thing. But after he graduated from high school he couldn’t see any future for himself. He did it out of sheer desperation. What else could he have done?” He wrote to his sister frequently while deployed. One letter began: “Dear sister, things are different here, everything has to be done fast and be decided right away. In Guatemala I had no discipline and much less respect but now my life is based on discipline and respect. Life is so different, friendships get lost, people don’t remember each other, they live to work, time goes by, my life has changed, but for you I’ll always be the boy you knew as a child and met again as an adult, the one who can laugh and cry, who has known bad times and is trying to forget them. Write to me, send me a picture, a few lines at least, love you, don’t forget that, pray for me and that we’ll see each other again soon, stay out of trouble. José Gutierrez.”

  In death his coffin was draped in the Stars and Stripes, but his friends at Casa Alianza wanted to bury him at their Ciudad Vieja cemetery, which is where all the street kids killed by the police and security services are laid to rest. The US embassy told his sister that they already had a plot sorted in a more high-end cemetery and she didn’t demur. “He’s laying where he doesn’t belong, he wasn’t part of that reality, a cemetery with mausoleums as big as houses, houses that he never knew on the streets,” said his mentor. “He’s lying there all alone, cut off from us.” It was the final insult.

  Although José’s story is singular and attracted a lot of media attention because he was the first soldier to die in Iraq, the War on Terror would see many other foreign nationals perish while serving a country which was not their own. As the Pentagon scoured the domestic population for recruits, it struck home that America—the land of immigrants—could look elsewhere. Its allies continued to use foreign fighters to swell their ranks, from the British Gurkhas to the French Foreign Legion, while the private military contractors populating the frontlines were enlisting recruits from all over the world. So why not the US military? Immigrants with permanent status, or “Green Cards,” had been able to sign up for the military for decades, but the number enticed to do so shot up during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as the carrot of citizenship was held out in front of their noses. The rules stipulated that only immigrants legally in the US (i.e. with a residency visa) for two years were eligible to sign up. However, while in 2001 the number of immigrants who became US citizens while in the military was just 750, by 2005 that figure had jumped by 500 percent to 4,600.10 The changing demographics of the US population added to the pressure. The foreign-born population of the US was the largest in the history of the country, up to 11.7 percent of the population in 2003, a significant increase from the 9.3 percent registered in 1995.11 These people were often younger, and more vulnerable. “Immigrants will fuel much of the growth in America’s youth population,” said a report by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a federally funded research and development center for the navy and the Marine Corps. About a third of the world’s population was under fifteen, with the vast majority living in developing countries. “Because many will have difficulty finding work in their native countries, large numbers of young adults emigrate—either alone or with families—with many choosing the United States as their destination. Of the 16 million foreign-born people who came to the United States between 1990 and 2002, almost a quarter were under age 21.” It was the perfect pool of new recruits and the CNA recommended mining the legal immigra
nt community more heavily. “One overlooked source of military manpower is immigrants and their families,” it noted. “In fact,” the organization concluded, “much of the growth in the recruitment-eligible population will come from immigration.” It was the new American Dream.