2020 Protests: Feels Familiar

In addition to watching the multiple and varied sources reporting news over the past week, I’ve been listening to police scanners and reading message boards of the various local areas where protests are going on, and it felt familiar - very familiar- and I was wondering why.  Why does it look/feel so familiar to see these body armored/ uniformed people walking on line firing over/into/at crowds (including people that are clearly identified as journalist/news reporters), hitting people with their vehicles/other gear, screaming at people, shooting people on their porches or at the businesses (granted mostly tear gas pellets/canisters).  Then, it clicked, it brings me back to my Counter-terrorism/ Counterinsurgency time in the Marine Corps.  I can’t speak for anyone else’s experiences overseas, however, what I have been seeing/hearing, here in the United States, overlaps in ways that I am very uncomfortable with.  Without going into any details, I will say that I did see people get run off the road when convoys drove straight down the middle of the road, even if people were in the way and had to jump/fall/get pushed out of the way.  I saw the destruction of people’s homes and property.  I heard people called savages and scoffed or mocked.   We carried weapons around groups of unarmed people that we were ready to shoot or detain, if we felt threatened.  I know that we did a lot of necessary things, and a lot of things I am proud of, but some of it also feels shameful to reflect on.  We did it because we were "protecting peace and democracy among the inferior and uncivilized".  Later in my Marine Corps I thought to myself and even asked other people, “Can you imagine if another country was doing that here in America? There's no way we'd ever see a foreign military walking on line with weapons up at alert, pointing at men, women, and children.  Every citizen would be up in arms fighting to the last breath.”  Welp, now I'm looking at the U.S. President calling for American police AND military to do that in American cities, towns, and neighborhoods - All in response to protest that started over the brutality of militarized/minded policing.  Like when I was a kid and we'd get in trouble and respond, "Well it all started when he hit me back!"  

I do understand that looting and vandalism has been a factor.  I am not excusing or condoning that behavior and I am also very empathetic to the struggle between being told I am being sent somewhere to protect a larger community against “a small number of bad actors” and showing up and feeling the pressure of having to discern between community and combatant.  Having said that, I am not condoning or excusing excessive force or brutality.  I also empathize with the experience of being profiled, stigmatized, and outright discriminated against.  Having been in both sets of shoes/boots, I am very aware that there are a series of complex and multilayered elements involved, however, I started out writing this response directly relating to my thoughts on the use of military forces in U.S. cities and neighborhoods.  I am not trying to make any claim as to knowing what “the answer” is, but as someone that has been on both sides of the gun barrel, I’m asking for us to consider how very precarious the tipping point for violence can be, in either direction.  I think one of the things that people don’t realize when saying “a show of force” in the context of the military, is that it is a disingenuous, if not completely dishonest description of the function of that action.  I feel like that term is something that politicians say to people that haven’t been or are not currently personally accountable to the experience of actually using force against another human being.  To me, the term ‘force’ really just means ‘potential to cause death’.  In my nine years in the Marine Corps, I never once participated in training where the purpose was to prepare to be a ‘show of force’.   There were rules of engagement that involved varying degrees of escalation in force, however, our training was carried out with the expectation that we would be required to utilize that highest escalation of force.  

Outside of being sent somewhere on an explicit/ designated humanitarian aid mission, the expectation of death, or bodily harm, is inherent in the military.  Wherever the government placed our boots and said, “Go to work”, they also placed an expectation of death/ violence in that same space.  Any ‘show of force’ was a byproduct of our being there to do our job - not the other way around.  I don’t think any of us thought, “we’re going over there to show people our guns because that will facilitate a change in ideology”.  ‘Keeping the peace’ was only true in the sense that our job was to kill the people, as designated by the government/rules of engagement, that weren’t ‘peaceful’.  Sometimes it is unavoidable, sometimes it’s even necessary, but we have to be accountable to the reality that the deployment of military forces is a military action.  We don’t send people with guns and armored vehicles because we want ‘the other side’ to know we’re ready to listen - and that is what is being asked for by these protests, to be listened to with sincerity.  If we’re being honest about that, then I think we should also be asking - is that our threshold for military operations being carried out in American cities and neighborhoods?