by Christine E. Black, Global Research:
Dying throes of U.S. militarism, with post-covid trauma and malaise, display themselves in Fayetteville, North Carolina this December as I travel there on a Friday for a Saturday meeting.
Fort Bragg is there, which is one of the largest military bases in the world. My meeting is with a group I volunteer with that counsels military members and veterans, takes calls from those who need help, and directs them to services.
In the past few years, the U.S. military has failed to meet its recruitment goals, according to U.S. news outlets. International outlets, like Al Jazeera, also report on the shortages. Young people’s poor mental and physical health, learning losses, and lack of confidence in the U.S. government and the military have all been blamed for lagging recruitment. The recent Covid period worsened all these problems.
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Current service members suffer heart problems after receiving mandated Covid shots, and over 8000 service members were discharged for declining the shots, with members losing benefits and promotion opportunities. War rages in Israel and Palestine, and U.S. warships recently fired on drones that attacked commercial ships in the Red Sea. The military has sent thousands of U.S. troops to the Middle East while attacks on soldiers in Iraq and Syria increase.
Because my father was career military, my family lived at Ft. Bragg when I was a child, and my father left from there for his first deployment to the Vietnam War. The base was recently renamed Fort Liberty. Gleaming chains stores line the main road into town – I Hop, Panera, Ross, every imaginable fast-food place, and some I have never heard of like Cinnaholic, all brightly lit and crowded. Consumerism and consumption look like signs of prosperity, but here, now, they seem to have reached an unsustainable critical mass.
Signs of despair and struggle are everywhere along with a sweet vulnerability also circulating among common people as though we tremble at the edge of the world, the edge of doom when being kind to each other, making some kind of connection seems more important than ever.
“Is it nice enough?” I ask the lady at the counter when I check into the Comfort Inn on Friday night. “I’m tired after a long drive.”
“It is,” she answers tenderly. When I ask her where a good place to eat is, she asks me what I like and when I tell her a few choices, she walks out the door of the hotel beside me, with extraordinary politeness, to point out Mission BBQ a few store fronts down, close enough for me to walk.
Cars, muscular trucks, and gleaming motorcyles roar through the main drag that is eight-lanes wide. Occasionally, a driver accelerates an engine with a ferocious sound and burst of speed. You can almost smell the testosterone. I often wonder: does the U.S. public really understand what we ask military people, mostly men, to do when we train them for wars and send them to wars? What do people think actually happens there? Military patches, photos, tools, and mementos fill the walls of the Mission BBQ restaurant where I eat.
A large print of the U.S. Army’s Soldier’s Creed hangs prominently in the main dining room. Prints of soldiers returning from war, kissing girls, are displayed in the women’s bathroom.
The girl bussing tables asks me what I am reading. She tells me she likes to read, that she read a lot when she lived in England, growing up in a military family.
“Joan Didion,” I tell her and show her the cover of the book of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I read it in my twenties and am re-reading it now. My copy is yellowed and brittle. She thanks me, says she’ll check it out. The restaurant is full of young men, amazingly fit, plus a few young families. At the table next to me is a huge, beautiful man with tattoos all over his arms and neck. It looks like he is with his wife, mother, and toddler son.
On my walk back to the hotel, I see a smoke shop and am curious as I have never been in one before. Students in public schools where I have taught sneak vape pipes in bathrooms and get in trouble when detectors identify them. When I was in high school, we smoked cigarettes outside and some sneaked marijuana, but I didn’t like it. I wanted to see what the shop was like. They are everywhere now – neon and bright, full of colorful, varied products, rows of boxes and bottles, lines of vials and packages, candles, incense and fragrance oils. I puzzled how populations in the U.S. were so easily subdued by government Covid lockdowns in 2020 and beyond. Maybe shops like this one – and video games — were part of the answer. People stayed home, smoked, drank (liquor stores were never closed), played MMOGs, waited for Amazon boxes to appear on their porches.
I tell him I am a teacher, plus a writer and put on my reporter’s role, ask questions of the 23-year-old young man working there. He kindly answers. The store sells CBD or nicotine for vape pipes and a special kind of strong tobacco for the hookah pipes, also sold there.
In many states, marijuana is fully legal now. A steady stream of customers arrives, buying rolling papers for marijuana, another buying a vape pipe, which are rechargeable in all kinds of styles. The shop also sells disposal pipes to ingest psychedelic mushrooms. The young shop worker grew up in military family, he says, and recounted the many places he had lived. He joined the military at 17, was in for four years, stationed a few places, including Fort Bragg, and then got out. He’s now divorced at 23.
